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Later, when we were alone, I asked her what it had been like.
'It wasn't like a voice,' she said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. 'I know I said it was, but that was the best I could come up with. It was something different. If a voice is raised lettering, something that stands out, this was the opposite. Like a word pushed into silence, the way you can make a word into clay. Silence shouldn't be able to do that.' She paused - I knew she was trying to do her best to put into language something not easily explicable in anything but its own alien terms. 'There was a mind behind that word. A monkey mind, someone like you and me, in a bone room somewhere, plugged into an alien skull. But do you remember what Cazaray said about carrier signals - that all we're doing is imprinting our own messages on something else? There was another mind underneath the transmission. Something dead, cold and very, very alien. And yet still thinking, or still trying to think.'
'There's no thought going on,' I said. 'No neural material. Cazaray said it!'
'He lied.' She gave a yawn and a shrug at the same time. 'Or he doesn't really understand it, or he doesn't think we'd understand it. But there is something there, and I got a little glimpse of it, just for one fierce moment. I lied as well.'
'About the word?'
'No. About wanting to go back and listen again. I didn't, Fura. It was as if someone opened a cold window at the bottom of my skull, in a room I didn't know about, and it let something in, and whatever it is is still whistling around in the basement of my brain.'
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