Night Shift at the Observatory

The signal was not a warning or a greeting. Translated, it was closer to: sorry to bother you, is this a bad time?

Mireille had been on shift alone for nine hours and had, in that time, eaten a sandwich she regretted. She typed back the only honest answer available to her species: it is always a bad time. Go on.

What followed took four days to arrive and eleven minutes to read. It was, in essence, a description of a garden. Where the light fell. What grew badly there and was kept anyway.

The committee wanted to know about propulsion, about intent, about weapons. Mireille kept returning to a single line near the end, which the translators had argued over and finally rendered as: we assumed you would want to know what it is like here, rather than what we can do.

She wrote the reply herself, at 4 a.m., and started with the weather.