Two days later a team of Fed guys led him out of the hospital and into a big black van. They had preempted local law, of course, so McKenna barely got to see his supervisor or the Mobile Chief of Police, who was there mostly for a photo op anyway.
In the van a figure in front turned and gave him a smile without an ounce of friendliness in it. Mr. Marine.
“Where’s Dark Glasses?” McKenna asked but Mr. Marine looked puzzled and then turned away and watched the road. Nobody said anything until they got to Dauphin Island.
They took him up a ramp and down a corridor and then through some sloping walkways and odd globular rooms and finally to a little cell with pale glow coming from the walls. It smelled dank and salty and they left him there.
A door he hadn’t known was there slid open in the far wall. A man all in white stepped in carrying a big, awkward laptop and behind him shuffled a Centauri.
McKenna didn’t know how he knew it, but this was the same Centauri he had seen getting onto the Busted Flush. It looked at him with the famous slitted eyes and he caught a strange scent that wrinkled his nose.
The man in white sat down in one of two folding chairs he had brought and gestured for McKenna to sit in the other. The Centauri did not sit. It carefully put a small device on the floor, a bulb and nozzle. Then it stood beside the man and put its flipper-hands on the large keyboard of the laptop. McKenna had heard about these devices shaped to the Centauri movements.
“It will reply to questions,” the man in white said. “Then it types a reply. This computer will translate on-screen.”
“It can’t pronounce our words, right?” McKenna had read that.
“It has audio pickups that transduce our speech into its own sounds. But it can’t speak our words, no. This is the best we’ve been able to get so far.” The man seemed nervous.
The Centauri held up one flipper-hand and with the device sprayed itself, carefully covering its entire skin. Or at least it seemed more like skin now, and not the reptile armor McKenna had first thought it might be.
“It’s getting itself wetted down,” the man said. “This is a dry room, easier for us to take.”
“The wet rooms have—”
“Ceiling sprays, yeah. They gotta stay moist ’cause they’re amphibians. That’s why they didn’t like California. It’s too dry, even at the beach.”
The Centauri was finished with its spraying. McKenna thought furiously and began. “So, uh, why were you going out on the shrimp boat?” Its jointed flippers were covered in a mesh hide. They moved in circular passes over pads on the keyboard. The man had to lift the awkward computer a bit to the alien, who was shorter than an average man. On the screen appeared:
<<Feed our young.>>
“Is that what attacked me?”
<<Yes. Friend died.>>
“Your young are feeding?”
<<Must. Soon come to land.>>
“Why don’t we know of this?”
<<Reproducing private for you also.>>
He could not look away from those eyes. The scaly skin covered its entire head. The crusty deep green did not stop at the big spherical eyes, but enclosed nearly all of it, leaving only the pupil open in a clamshell slit. He gazed into the unreadable glittering black depths of it. The eyes swiveled to follow him as he fidgeted. McKenna couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I, I can’t read your expression. Like Star Trek and that stuff, we expect aliens to be like humans, really.”
The alien wrote:
<<I know of your vision programs. The Trek drama we studied. To discern how you would think of us.>>
“You don’t have our facial expressions.”
<<We have our own.>>
“Of course. So I can’t tell if you care whether your young killed two men on fishing boats.”
<<They were close to water. Young. Hungry. Your kind stay away is best.>>
“We don’t know! Our government has not told us. Why?”
The man holding the computer opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. The alien wrote:
<<Change is hard for both our kinds. Ideas should come slowly to be understood.>>
“People are okay with your visit. They might not like your seeding our oceans and moving in. Plus killing us.”
This time it took a while to answer:
<<Those you call dead live on now in the dark heaven.>>
McKenna blinked. “Is that a religious idea?”
<<No. It arises from our skystorians.>>
“Uh, sky?…”
The computer guy said, “Mistranslation. I saw that one with the astro guys last week. The software combines two concepts, see. Sky—means astronomy, ’cause their world is always cloudy, so the night sky is above that—and history. Closest word is cosmology, astronomy of the past.”
McKenna looked at the alien’s flat, unreadable gaze. “So it’s… science.”
<<Your term for this bedrock of the universe is the dark energy. I modify these words to show the nature of your dark energy. It forces open the universe.>>
McKenna could not see where this was going. He had read some pop science about something called dark energy, sure. It supposedly was making the whole universe expand faster and faster. “So what’s it… this dark heaven… do?”
<<It is the… substrate. Entangled information propagates as waves in it. Organized minds of high level emit probability waves in packets of great complexity. These persist long after the original emitter is dead.>>
McKenna blinked. “You mean we… our minds… send out their…”
<<Their presence, that is a better term. Minds emit presence. This persists as waves in the dark heaven that is everywhere in the universe. All minds join it.>>
“This sounds like religion.”
<<Your distinction between fears for your fate and the larger category of science is not one we share. This required long study by us to understand since you are a far younger life-form. You have not yet had the time and experience to study the universe for long.>>
McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”
<<Our emotions do not fit in your categories, either. We sorrow, yes. While also knowing that the loss is only a transition, as when our young come to shore. One gives up one form for another. Beyond the dark heaven perhaps there is something more but we do not know. Probably that is a question beyond our categories. We have limits just as do you, though not so great. You are young. There is time.>>
“Around here murder is a crime.”
<<We are not from here.>>
“Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”
<<Our young do not murder. They hunt and eat and grow. Again, a category difference between our kinds.>>
“Being dead matters to us.”
<<Our young that you attacked. By your own terms you murdered them.>>
The Centauri blinked slowly at McKenna with its clamshell opening in the leathery, round eyes. Then it stooped to get its sprayer. From its wheezing spout moisture swirled around all of them.
The giddy swirl of this was getting to him. “I, I don’t know where to go with this. Your young have committed a crime.”
<<The coming together between stars of intelligence has a cost. We all pay it.>>
McKenna stood up. The damp scent of the alien swarmed around him. “Some more than others.”