Meryl: Let’s assume there’s no magic superscience involved, all right? (She looks at her notebook.) If they go straight to Wolf 25, they’ll get there around 2104, by the Earth calendar. We won’t be there until eight years later. And they’ll have our “ready or not, here we come” message months before that. Which I was so enthusiastic about.

Can we agree that the probability they won’t be ready for us is almost exactly zero? (General agreement.) And at any rate, if we did surprise them, there’s not much we can do about it. Short of using the ad Astra as a huge kamikaze bomb?

Snowbird: What is that?

Fly-in-Amber: It’s a Japanese word meaning a suicide airplane.

Snowbird: Oh. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’re expecting to die anyhow.

Fly-in-Amber: Most humans won’t do that. Not if they have a chance of living.

Snowbird: But they don’t live that long anyhow.

Namir: I’m glad you brought that up, Snowbird. We ought to consider it.

Elza: I’m not sure I can. We would be murdering a whole planet, besides ourselves.

Meryl: That’s right.

Namir: Which is what they tried to do to us.

Dustin: He wants you to think like a soldier, love, not a doctor.

Moonboy: What if we had to do it to save the human race? What if we got a message like “Fuck you and the planet you came from”?

Paul: We never could save the human race, if they decided to destroy it. We could never catch them. We could only take revenge, after the fact.

Namir: I could do that.

Dustin: You would. Definitely.

Moonboy: I would, too. It’s not as if they were human.

Me: Namir, it would be like Gehenna. There could be innocent races on that planet. For all we know, the one who attacked us was a lone lunatic, who claimed to represent the Others but actually did not.

Namir: With due respect, Carmen, I have been there, and you have not. Genocide is not murder. You can forgive a murder and go on with life. But if we had found a country responsible for Gehenna, we would have had no mercy. We would have leveled it, in retribution. Which is not the same thing as revenge.

(There was a long silence.)