The longest ten days of her life passed before she saw the Erikson again.
There were what looked like thick needles sticking out of her home. It was like he had gotten sick and sprouted them.
They had been told that all the invaders had been dealt with, even though it didn't look like it from the outside.
It was hard for her to think about anything other than Roger anyway.
After a much harder dock than she could ever remember, she was out of her seat and at the ventral lock.
She was in his arms. She didn't remember how she got there and she didn't care.
Roger kissed her. Still holding her tight, he turned to the locals and, said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am Councilor Roger Wright Powell, one of the leaders of this ship."
He looked at Kat and said, "And more importantly, I am Kat's is my wife." He paused and smiled softly at Kat. "There is nothing I can ever do that will ever repay you for what you did. But I would like to try. Know that you are welcome here. We understand what you did and what it cost. I will show you to your quarters; they're not much but will have to do until we get the boarding craft out and the damage repaired."
As they led the locals down the lock and downship, Kat realized how different Roger was. There was no more, or at least very little, shyness. He had grown. He really was a leader.
They would have a hard year or two ahead getting back to the grid, but she had Roger and everything else would work itself out.
---
Almost all work had stopped for the day. The boarding craft had been removed but the patches still had to be made before they could start the drive up again.
They hadn't even begun testing and replacement of the damaged superconductors.
Everyone who could fit was in the viewing area of the council chamber. The days of routine closed councils were done. Roger was with the rest of the council along with Ardon, who had unofficially been given a seat on the council as a representative of the locals.
Myra stood and addressed the camera, which was being broadcast to everyone on board. "As you all have undoubtedly heard, an alien, truly alien, artifact was brought here from the home world of the locals. While it will take years to get a detailed analysis, we do have some findings now."
"First, Mr. Ardon, could you tell us what you know about them?"
Ardon said, "I am sorry to say I don't really know much about it. Our people were not as curious as yours. They have been with us for as long as any of us knows. They're perfect dodecahedrons and are impossible to even scratch. There are thousands or millions of them all over the planet.
"Their existence was one of the reasons we were not shocked to see you. We have known that aliens existed for as long as we can remember. Until you handled them, we never were able to get them to react to anything. For the most part, we just ignored them."
Myra said, "Thank you, Mr. Ardon." Ardon 'sat down', not that anyone really had to sit down in zero-G, but it made things simpler if people sat down when not speaking.
"This," she said as the transmitted image changed to a picture of the galaxy, slowly rotating with a dozen stars blinking on a spiral arm.
"This is the last display in the sequence that played when it was touched by both Sing and our own Bruce Sturgeon. It shows this whenever a local and an earthling touch it.
"There could be dozens of human home worlds, maybe more. At this scale, Sol and Helvetios are the same dot.
"Chief Programmer Thurll, you have the floor."
An older man stepped forward and spoke, "Thank you. We still do not know how the hologram is projected; however, the interesting part is what it projects before it shows the galactic map. It's a program, a very complex one that contains instructions on how to read it. Fully decoding it will take significant time, but we know several important things already.
"First, it requires many universal constants. Such as Pi and the mass of several subatomic particles. Even with those known, it will take the quantum computer to decode. In our estimation it's a test. If you're not advanced enough to decode it, you're not worthy of the information."
Looking at the map, Roger saw the purple part of the galaxy. They still had no idea what that meant.
---
10,000 years ago
"Third-parent, do you really believe the plan will work?"
RyNokU-87 looked over the plane of the planet. They had finished transplanting the altered lifeforms across the planet. The biosphere had been made ready. All they had to do was disperse the message modules throughout the planet and offload the sentients.
RyNokU-87's third-parent took his time to transmit, "It does not matter what I think. It matters what we know. This galaxy that has given us birth, will not endure. It is even possible that more than the galaxy is at risk. Many of the stars we see now are gone already, taken by the creatures of under-matter. Even the dark spaces between are being made hostile to us.
"We do not understand how this is done, how it can be done.
"There was a time, thousands of years ago, when our technology improved. When our understanding of the universe became greater with every generation. But that time has passed. We will never be more than we are now. They, however, have the potential to be greater than us and in time to understand things we never will."
"But surely, we could just teach them, rather than trusting in them to find the answers themselves. We could be waiting tens of thousands of cycles before they are able to go to orbit, let alone understand under-matter," RyNokU-87 said.
"Maybe. Others are teaching their groups, but I do not believe that will work. If they learn everything from us, they will lose those things that are special about them. If we teach them to think like us, we will have accomplished nothing.
"No. Seeding them across the void is best. On each world, they are different, altered. All we need is for one version to succeed. When a world can travel faster than the beam of a star, and has the understanding of under-matter that goes with it, we will make contact. Then we will be able to teach them all we know. Hopefully, they will understand what we cannot."
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