“I wasn’t thinking of us as gods,” Ha interrupted. “I was thinking of us as demons, as monsters, as evil spirits to be placated. But whatever it is—it doesn’t matter. What matters for us, right now, is that it’s a distortion. It almost couldn’t be worse for what we are trying to do. If they see us as gods or demons or anything abstract, otherworldly—whatever it is, whatever position they have assigned us in their cosmology—it means we are even further away from communicating with them. It adds layers of distortion to our communication. There are so many problems we would need to solve to just understand them. And now this complicating factor. Over and above the problems of worldview, of their physical structure and the metaphors it would create, of the enormous differences in everything. So the altar doesn’t feel like a revelation, or a discovery. Not to me. To me, it feels like the end. It will be impossible, I think, for them to understand us. They will see everything we say to them through the lens of whatever beliefs they have about us—religious beliefs—and those beliefs will be yet another barrier to our communication, warping whatever it is we say to them.”

“The intricacy of it…,” Evrim said, “it’s a massive discovery. It is the kind of thing scientists will be studying for decades. For whole careers. For lifetimes.”

“I don’t want to study them!” Ha was on her feet. She felt the frustration flowing through her—the way it had when she was a child. The way it had here, on Con Dao, when she realized she would never have the love she wanted. That she could be less than unloved—she could be irrelevant. Could be no one at all to the person she cared about.

Watching him chat with the other boys, watching him look out the window at the green warp of sea, watching him read. His indifference to her. His face, turned away.

“I don’t want to study them,” she repeated, bringing her voice under control. “Don’t you see? I want to speak to them. I want to know them. That’s what matters. We have to know them. We have to speak to them. That is the only way we will save them. But we are running out of time. And this altar isn’t a step forward. It is a step backward. At the worst possible moment.”

This is all I have ever wanted, she did not say, and it is being taken from me.

There was a short burst of gunfire outside.

Now Evrim stood as well, despite the warnings from Altantsetseg to stay on the floor. They looked toward the sound. At the ballistic blinds on the windows. As if—if they just looked hard enough—they could see through them.