But she had needed to feel it. She knew full well this encounter lived only in thick bricks of data, info-dense and rigid. The lived experience was real, just turned into zeroes and ones, bringing across light-years their stuttering enlightenments to the SETI Library. Still, it mattered as an abrupt lesson in how hard interstellar exploration through sailcraft was, and how sudden the deaths of such smart robotic adventurers.

When she climbed from the pod she ached all over, stretched, wheezed. Yet she had done no true exercise, except in her mind.

She was late for her appointment, because she had checked her feed. The Prefect had connected her to the science cohort of the insiders dealing with the Ythri. She was grateful that the bureaucrat feeds were blocked—that info-hurricane was surely howling. The news was good. Earthsider engineers were building for the alien Ythri a habitable bubble on the Lunar surface and were adjusting biometrics, air, the myriad mysteries of strange biology.

She listened to a recording of the Ythri speaking to each other—a sound blizzard. Their words were much shorter than human words, just a fraction of a second—chirps and tweets. Their wider frequency range meant that all the phonemes in a word could be stacked on top of each other and pronounced simultaneously. Every word, no matter how long, was spoken in the time it took humans to pronounce a single syllable. All this she got in a concise summary.

As a student she had studied the language of killer whale pods, the first such fathomed, a lead to how aliens might speak. Animals had their own unique dialects. Earth was rife with the exchange of information, but not grammar or syntax. Ythri had a complex, birdy language. She thought, Deciphering that will be a challenge; but then she heard a high, stringy voice—in Anglish! The Ythri had learned it somehow, could vocalize it well. With a few throaty trills, the Ythri gave an ornate greeting in a somewhat British accent, very old-style.

She read forward in the feed, seeing the texts fly by in her right eye. The bioanalysts found the Ythri had a syrinx, which let them speak where the trachea forks into the lungs. They could change the tension of the membranes and the bronchial openings deep in their throats. That shaped Anglish words with more than one sound at a time, giving a trilling lilt to them. Some Earthly birds had that, with muscles on the left and right branches modulating vibrations independently. Ythri were coy about how they had come here, though, and their ship orbiting Luna was off-limits to humans.

Rachel shut down the feed and felt a strumming thrill. Real aliens!

She let this sweep over her, looking up through the crystal dome at good ol’ Earth, a multicolored crescent marble in the Lunar sky.

All but the last few centuries of human history had played out there. Throughout long eras, men and women had filled in the dark unknowns with imagination. So expeditions had crossed oceans and high vacuum until new lands came into view—in just a few thousand years. Go back that far and you would see Sumerian ziggurats whose star maps cartooned the sky with imagined constellations and traced destinies through star-based prognostications. Now here, suddenly, were smart birds that felt something like that grand perspective, visiting.