Margeret Bonanno - Probe

Uhura stopped, closed her eyes tightly for a moment, pulled in a breath. "You're right," she said, a smile appearing as she opened her eyes.

Ahead of them, they saw Maestra Espinoza and Dajan gesturing to them, directing them to their destination.

Two melodies flowed simultaneously from the single augmented keyboard, inspired by each of the two simplest aspects of the Probe's language. Both were produced and blended flawlessly by Jandra's unerring fingers, while the language's other aspects-those at least that the computer had succeeded in isolatingwere suggested by the orchestra under Audrea Benar's precise baton.

Penalt won't dare to show his face after this performance. Riley decided after less than five minutes, let alone put his own composition on display.

Uhura, who appreciated the difficulty of the performance as well as the eerie beauty of the melodies, could only marvel wordlessly.

Even Spock was impressed by Jandra's sheer physical dexterity.

It was left to Kirk, he of the tin ear, to realize near the end that the composers had, perhaps inadvertently, reversed the order of the Probe's first two messages, giving the composition a symbolic significance no one had yet noted: We will talk. There is no danger.

The proper order, he thought as the performance ended and the applause began; the logical order, at least for the Federation and the Empire. With Hiran and himself, with Jandra and Dajan and Benar, the talk had begun. Someday, with luck and intelligence on both sides, the talk would spread. And the danger would, someday, go away.

He stood and added the sound of his own hands to the thunderous applause that filled not only the hall but several of the hearts within it.

Somewhere on the far side of the galaxy, the entity paused and extended its crystal sensor. It had passed this way many times before, but it had never before paused, for other than navigational reasons, to check its predictions against reality. There were of course none here that Spoke the True Language, nor were there ocean-dwelling primitives who might someday become the equals of its creators.

But there were mites galore, its crystalline memory told it, and a mite that called itself Spock had made it aware that mites, too, had a place in the rightful scheme of things and might even have something interesting to say, whether in the True Language or some other. But they must be approached cautiously, the Spock mite had said, although that was something the entity had obviously already known. And you must take care not to Speak too loudly or their fragile, spacegoing bubbles will

cease to function and they will think you mean them harm.

Across nearly half a parsec, it reached out to the pale, gray-green world fifth out from a star not unlike that which had once shone down on the world of its creators.

Carefully, it set the molecules of the world's atmosphere to vibrating while it listened for a reply. It would take time, as it had with the ocean-dwelling primitives of a thousand worlds, but someday soon, the mites would understand the entity's new greeting:

Would you like to talk?