1

Snow.

My memories of planet Wordfall are full of snow.

Those little people of Wordfall, with their broad and open arms, stood silently in the vast expanse of snowy earth like spirits who had just appeared out of thin air. Or perhaps they had stood there a long while and would remain in that place forever, rooted to the earth, waiting for the snow, or something else, to descend on them.

They were motionless, a hand as broad and flat as a Japanese banana leaf raised and spread over the tops of their heads, sheltering almost the entirety of each small body, like silent pilgrims worshipping at a temple. They remained thus until a stone from an unknown source struck one of the great hands of a wordfaller who then lowered the enormous limb. The others continued their silent vigil.

This is how wordfallers are: they observe, listen, accept, absorb, and they give; this is the whole of their existence. Much later I finally learned from papers woven through with strange symbols, colors, audio frequencies and other alien annotations that they do not have a common tongue or charter written on paper for their society, but in their extremely limited and monotonous neutrino vocabulary, they also have no words for alienation or estrangement.

A sense of unreality is always to be expected on an unfamiliar planet. In the night there was no apparent source of illumination, yet we were able to see to great distances with almost perfect clarity. At first, none of us understood how this could be. My daughter Rhodes was the first to discover the cause: “The snow is glowing.” She was right. She has always been more clever than the rest of us.

Just like the time, an hour later, when she came into the infirmary looking for me, holding her small box. She knew I was in a foul mood; I didn’t have to say a word.

“Dad, Mr. Animal is broken.” The tips of her fingers were white from squeezing the box tightly.

“Not now, Rhodes. Haven’t I told you not to interrupt me while I’m working?”

Her head drooped, and I almost felt ashamed. After all, I wasn’t in my office; she couldn’t know I was busy. But the lives of more than sixty workers depended on the safety of the ship, depended on me; a little girl’s toy absolutely could not be a priority at a time like this.

Eiger gave me a little push. “Go ahead. You can’t do anything now anyway. I’ll take over for you in the control room.”

I sighed and lifted my frostbitten hand from the warm medicinal bath. The cold air hurt like a jabbing needle.

2

I aimed Mr. Animal’s box toward the parrot in Rhodes’s room and pressed down hard on the “Speak” button. No sound came out, but a glance at the bird let me know that the creature was clearly unhealthy and didn’t have much spirit to speak of.

Who invented this sort of thing? Translating an animal’s current biometric data into simple sentences: “I’m hungry,” “Play with me,” “I like you.” A Mr. Animal paired with any smallish pet—no bigger than, say, a Labrador—seemed to be the requisite and constant companion for this generation of children. It may have been the Mr. Animal Toy Corporation that originally sold us all on the idea that “an animal companion will help a child grow up healthy,” as their ads claimed with utter assurance. Such words, once planted in a parent’s mind, grow and spread quickly, and once parents are convinced that an animal, or anything really, is good for their children, they will chase after it and throw their money at any number of related products.

But after only a few months, this expensive box plastered with a smiley face didn’t say a word.

“Maybe you should put it under the sun lamp for a while. The battery might be low,” I said. How long was the warranty on this thing? Was it six months or a year? I hoped it was a year. “It couldn’t be broken already.”

“But I want to know what Little Parrot was saying. I need to know now.” Rhodes’s face flushed as she argued passionately for justice. Though she was still in middle school, she could read my moods with no trouble. She knew my thoughts were elsewhere.

“Little Parrot says it wants to sleep. Take this time to recharge the battery, okay?” My hand both hurt and itched at the same time. The sight of Rhodes standing in front of the wordfallers floated up again before my eyes. “If it’s really broken, I’ll buy you a new one at the port market as soon as we dock.”

“I wish I could just speak Little Parrot’s language.” She expressed this fantastic idea in a tone both dejected and earnest. “Then I wouldn’t need Mr. Animal.”

I needed to get back to work. “Daddy has to take care of the crew now, Rhodes.” I tried to speak the hard truth gently. “This is more important right now.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said, before I walked out the door. Her tone was grudging, as if she had held in those words for a long time.

My injured hand twitched twice. I started to say more, but stopped myself and left her with, “In the future, you can’t just run wild anywhere you want.” Why can’t you just stay in your room and play with your parrot and your e-school?

“I didn’t run wild!” She tilted her head and defended herself with a pout and a protest against this unfair accusation, then looked toward Little Parrot with an anxious eye. She pushed down hard on Mr. Animal, nearly pressing the button into the box.

I left, pulling the door shut behind me. For a second I considered asking one of the workers if they could fix the toy, but a moment later I heard the muffled voice coming from the speaking machine in the room behind me: “I’m sorry.”

Is the thing broken or isn’t it? Why would a sick parrot say, “I’m sorry”?

Forget it. Don’t think about it. Talking with animals was the business of little children.

3

Some tasks could not be done any faster, so there was nothing to do but stay in the captain’s office and wait. I paged through the videos the crew had shared via the onboard public network. A temporary loss of contact with the distant human homeworld did not stop them from sharing their experiences and emotions with each other in this much smaller society we inhabited.

On our return journey, the ship’s reactor furnace became occluded; a small problem, frustratingly common, but easily mended. However, the repair could not be done in flight, so we set the ship down on this planet known, according to the charts, as Wordfall. Fixing a chemical fuel reactor in zero gravity would have been tricky, and the smallest leak could lead, during that unpredictable future flight, to fiery disaster.

I had no choice but to expend power beyond our original calculations in order to make this unplanned descent.

Naturally, I had considered the question of energy supplementation before landing. The ship completed basic reconnaissance scans at high altitude and concluded that, not only did the planet still have atmosphere as available records stated, but that it was rich in hydrogen. This was great news. As long as the hydrogen was in some common state form, whether it be gaseous, in water, methane, or any of their variants or chemical combinations, we could use it when the time came to take off again.

Only upon landing did we realize we had been utterly mistaken: the hydrogen was in the snow. Unfortunately, the snow here was not simply frozen water, but a complex macromolecular crystal. Although it could be pyrolyzed, the reaction process would consume too much energy. There was no efficient way to extract the hydrogen. A ton of the snow had been shoveled into the reactor, and now it had to be shoveled out again, unaltered from its original state.

Our last option was solar power. It would take fifty standard days for solar energy to charge the ship sufficiently for the extra take-off and landing. That meant eighty to ninety days of charging after daily energy use was taken into account.

When the crew heard the news that they would be stuck for three months on this planet with its icy sky and snowy surface, they were disappointed, but only for a couple of hours. Soon they were in high spirits again, talking about their three months of paid vacation and shore leave, and they began to roam around the landscape taking pictures.

The planet’s atmosphere contained no elements that would damage human tissue nor corrode the thermal suits. The broad expanse of land surrounding us was entirely solid, and there seemed to be no reason to confine the crew to the relatively small area of the ship—around fifty thousand square meters of living space—for the full three months. As long as no one left the perimeter defined by our monitoring systems and no one disturbed or provoked alien life forms, everyone was free, during the day, to explore the immediate vicinity and shoot their videos, wearing thermal suits and face masks. There was not even any cause for me to remind the crew about thermals and masks; none of them were so foolish as to expose any part of their body to the subzero temperatures of an alien planet.

Unless one’s own daughter is in imminent danger and someone has to rush out without gloves to push away that frozen popsicle of an alien, I thought.

It had been two days already since the incident. The frostbitten area no longer itched; the sensation had become a slight burning. The temperature of the affected area was palpably warmer to the touch than the surrounding skin. It seemed odd to me that an injury caused by exposure to low temperatures actually presented as burning pain, but Eiger, the ship’s doctor, said it was perfectly normal. “It is in this that we differ from dead matter. Our reactions need not be equal and opposite; they can actually be more powerful.” Eiger is a poetic freak.

A video of the wordfallers and the snow taken on the day of the landing caught my attention. Young people like to add filters to their videos, and at the beginning of this one, the crewmember apparently wasn’t sure which filter to use and spent part of the film switching through several options. In the few seconds during which he cut into the temperature-sensitive filter, he had recorded an infrared thermal image of the planet.

The wordfallers displayed on the video at 120 degrees below zero, and the snowfield measured eighty below. Nothing strange in this. But here and there in the snow, I could see a few spots where the temperature spiked to several hundred degrees above zero, and those areas seemed to be completely unaffected by the surrounding temperature.

I thought about the wordfaller that was hit by a rock just about the size of one of those hot spots in the snow. It wasn’t unlucky. It seemed to be expecting that rock, waiting for it.

Why did a bunch of little popsicle people stand in the snow waiting their turn to be pelted with hot rocks? Their wide flat hands seemed to be designed to catch the stones. Those things obviously held some great significance for the wordfallers.

I searched out the portable ocular, walked to the window, and adjusted the eyepiece to the highest infrared setting. I looked toward the wordfallers standing nearest the ship. Since the day before yesterday, a few of the little things had been staying right there, close to the living quarters.

In the infrared spectrum image, I could see a tiny yellow glow of heat at the center of the ice-cold deep-blue body of each wordfaller.

I switched on my internal transmitter. “Eiger, get yourself ready. We’re going out for a walk.”

4

“Have you noticed? The snow levels are decreasing, but I haven’t seen any liquid at all. The snow here must sublimate directly into vapor.” I looked all around, searching every corner of the landscape my eyes could reach.

“If you’re just looking to try some extreme sports out here, go find some buddies as crazy as you are when you get back to the solar system and climb Mount Everest with them. Just leave me out of it.” The sound of Eiger’s teeth chattering carried through the transmitter. “If you’re upset that we’re stranded here and that work has been too slow, anyone on the ship, apart from the little princess, would be glad to have a couple drinks with you.”

If he hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have noticed; Rhodes hadn’t come to interrupt my work in the past two days.

“Or maybe you’re eager to get more frostbite? Maybe you should find two wordfallers to play with this time.”

“We’re out here for the stones, Eiger, like I told you.” I worked my way around to the panel on Eiger’s sleeve and turned up the temperature on his thermal suit. “And you know very well I knocked down that wordfaller’s hand—if those crazy plantain leaves are hands—because it was standing right in front of Rhodes, too close.”

Eiger’s eyes continued to telegraph his skepticism. Then he told me the rocks were called wordstones and that they fall from the sky along with the snow on Wordfall.

Now it was my turn to stare. He knew this already and didn’t tell me?

“There is so much material in the Dictionary of Interplanetary Biology. How am I supposed to know what you want to know?” he argued with me, still shivering. “Besides, you never said you were interested.”

“What else did you learn?”

“The record is incomplete, but we’re not the first to observe this. The wordfallers come out when the snow begins, and they catch the falling stones. Once they have them, they carry the stones back with them to wherever they live the rest of the year.”

“So what are these stones? How can they maintain a temperature of hundreds of degrees Celsius in an environment that’s a hundred degrees below zero?”

“It’s a dictionary of biology, not geology,” says Eiger. “And I just thumbed through it quickly. I’ll need to do more research.”

Though I wanted to press Eiger with more questions, I suddenly caught sight of a wordfaller whose hands were of a peculiar shape—peculiar relative to its own species. Its arms were not like the huge plantain leaves the others had. On the trailing edge of the “leaf,” normally flat on wordfallers, there appeared rounded wave-like shapes; the limb narrowed to a thin and sharp tip. And when it walked, these arms fluttered inexplicably, making the thing look for all the world like a silly flightless bird pointlessly flapping its wings.

I turned to look behind me.

The slightest glint of reflected light had attracted my notice. I walked toward it, and as I expected, there in the snow I found the thing I was looking for.

“You see? Hard work does pay off after all.” In my hand I held a small transparent box, into which I placed the shiny black stone about the size of a walnut. “Well, now you have work to do.”

“How is it that the end of your work always means the start of mine?” Eiger turned to look back at the ship, so far away now that we could barely make it out.

5

“Before I tell you the test results, I need to let you know that I threw the thing away,” Eiger searched the cabinet for medicine as he spoke.

For a moment I stopped unwrapping my gauze and waited for Eiger to explain himself.

“The damn things are radioactive! You’re only alive thanks to your thermal suit. If I hadn’t figured it out almost as soon as we got back, I might be dead, too. You need to buy a Geiger attachment for your watch. I already took two radiation blockers and two antiemetics. Those will be going on my expense report, of course.” He helped me unwind the rest of the wrap and tossed it aside. “Now here’s the key question: Why is that stuff radioactive?”

I was not in the mood for riddles and Eiger knew it, so he continued, “Because an extremely slow fission process is going on inside the stone.”

“You mean we picked up a nuclear bomb?”

“You’re not entirely wrong. But the reaction is extremely—extraordinarily—slow. The literature doesn’t have any information about what’s in the core.”

I showed him the infrared image from the ocular, the glowing heat source at the center of the wordfaller’s icy body.

“So that’s what’s going on! This fits perfectly.” His face showed sudden comprehension. “There’s an early Asian text about this place that describes the wordfallers as ‘Eaters of earth, audience to the orations of ore, singers of stone.’ The wordfallers must somehow ingest the slow-fission wordstone and live off the radiation; they figuratively ‘hear the speech’ of the radiative particles; and cadmium explains why the reaction is so slow. The original character in the poetic text for ‘stone’ in ‘singers of stone’ is the word used in chemistry for cadmium. Our nuclear reactors also use cadmium to slow the pace of the chain fission reaction.”

I didn’t understand. Better said, I understood the words he was saying, but I couldn’t imagine how all this could be happening inside the body of a living organism.

“You still don’t get it? What kind of a captain are you, anyway?” Eiger opened a small container of frostbite treatment fluid, unfolded it into the shape of a bottle, and poured it into purified water for dilution. When Eiger talks about academic topics, he’s like a different creature. “A wordfaller will take a wordstone and place it in a child’s body. That child will spend a lifetime listening to the wordstone’s ‘speech’—in other words, receiving the radiation from the fissile stone. They absorb energy as they listen closely to the voice of the radiative particles, and out of this they build a civilization. Doplin, this is amazing!”

The voice of radiative particles? What sort of voice would that be? Whether it is accelerated or decelerated, the rhythm of the fission of a single substance is constant. This would be like listening to the same tune over and over for decades. If it were me, I’d go crazy, but the wordfallers take pleasure in it? I tried to imagine the monotonous sounds from our nature simulation software. Is there anyone who can take the sounds of waterfalls, sparrows, and rainstorms and see them as art, compose them as songs?

At the very least, this one human being in front of me identified with these aliens. Perhaps all doctors are this peculiar in their tastes, particularly after living for six months with an uncouth and uneducated crew on a ship with no distractions apart from offline VR games. And now we have to add three more months  .  .  .

. . . unless . . .

“This, uh, ‘wordstone’ . . . is it safe?”

Eiger stared at me and smiled. “Don’t even think about it, Doplin. This is not a nuclear vessel. If it were, we wouldn’t be so hard up, would we? This ship can’t convert the fissile radiation, unless the stone itself can convert the energy.” When he said this, he found the idea so funny that he laughed at his own words.

We heard the patter of a child running past the door.

“Getting back to reality, is the little princess’s Mr. Animal fixed?”

“I’m not sure. It might be. After that last time she came to the infirmary, Rhodes hasn’t come looking for me.” I was a little preoccupied, still thinking about nuclear energy. Natural and stable fissile material is very rare. If we could use this nuclear material on the ship, we might go home early.

“You’ve been spending a little less time with her recently, haven’t you? When her homework gives her trouble, lately she’s been coming to me for help.”

I hoped to shut this topic down with my silence, but my thoughts were inevitably drawn back to it, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy.

“Next year she starts high school, time for her to choose her vocational track. You planning to keep her on the ship? This is a golden age of sailing, and there are kids who grow up this way, but regular school would benefit her in many ways: making friends, seeing the world, things like that. Some kids younger than her have gone off to boarding school . . .”

“Eiger, I’m very busy.”

Eiger poured the rest of the bottle of frostbite medicine over my hand, but the pain was in my heart now. “Sorry if I spoke out of turn, Captain,” he said with a smile. “I’m very busy, too.”

6

Rhodes’s room was at the end of a hallway. There was a porthole outside her door, and Rhodes had adorned the rim of the window’s round grid with golden sunflower petals. The flower’s painted green stem stretched down the hall all the way to the corner.

Looking out through the porthole mesh, I could see a few of the wordfallers. The footprints left in the snow by curious crewmembers surrounded the wordfallers in concentric circles drawn at a cautious distance.

Why are they here near the living quarters? Are they eating our radiation, listening to the “voice” of this ship? Can they feel—hear? —that the thermal radiation is stronger in these cabins than in the hold? What is that difference like for them? Is it the difference between Tchaikovsky and Mozart?

Standing at Rhodes’s door, I felt like I did when I was young, about to apologize to a friend for some childish wrong I had done them. When did I stop caring about the people around me, even when that person is my own child? More than sixty members of my crew lived in quarters along this circling corridor. Had I ever had a meaningful conversation with any of them about anything other than work? And these were the people I had spent most of my time with for the past ten years.

Work was like a flood that drowns the five senses. I couldn’t hear any voices.

“Rhodes? Are you there?”

Only after a long pause did she open the door. “What is it, Dad?”

“I brought you some millet from the kitchen. Isn’t that Little Parrot’s favorite?” I handed her a box of grain.

“No, thanks.” The girl looked away. “Little Parrot is . . . broken.”

I raised my head to look around the room and saw that the bird was gone. It took me a moment to realize that she meant the parrot was dead, that she had rejected the more painful diction. Kids don’t need to be taught explicitly to avoid talking about these taboos—death and disease. This intuition is hidden in the words themselves and is passed down through the generations.

I stared blankly, rooted to the spot. The box of millet had become an embarrassment. I didn’t know if I should try to comfort her. I didn’t know if I should enter the room or stay where I was by the door. “When did this happen? Do you need me to take care of it for you?” An animal corpse couldn’t stay on the ship. It needed to be cremated.

“Just . . . a couple days ago.” Rhodes didn’t really seem to want to continue this conversation. “I already buried it.”

“Where did you bury it?” I felt a sense of failure and loneliness, as if I had no useful role left to play.

“Outside.” Rhodes looked toward a porthole. The wrinkling folds at the hem of her jacket spoke of her hands clenching inside her pockets. It was clear that she didn’t want to discuss this melancholy topic. “Is your hand better?”

Instinctively, I wanted to hide the protective gloves behind my back, but I also felt this would be clumsy, so I didn’t move. “Much better. Eiger treated it.” Whatever else might be wrong, at least she was worried about me.

“Little Fall, the wordfaller who hurt you, it keeps saying ‘Sorry.’” Her eyes lit up, as if she had a very important message to pass on to me. “I think it’s talking to you.”

My head went numb, buzzing. Little Fall? Rhodes has made friends with a wordfaller.

She took her hand out of her pocket and extended it toward me. In her palm she held a black phosphorescent stone.

7

“No, I’ve told you several times already. She doesn’t need any antiradiation treatment. She got about as much radiation from that stone as she would playing an hour of games.”

“But she was carrying one of those things in her pocket for something like seventy hours. You threw the last rock you saw like that off the ship.” I put down the big metal sample box we used for mining. Why do I have to hold onto this rock and go to the trouble of bringing over this hulking box to keep it in? Is this out of respect for Rhodes? For the wordfaller?

“Open the box, Doplin. My radiometer and my eyes are working fine. Rhodes is perfectly healthy. Eiger put his hand on Rhodes’s head. She looked scared. “You haven’t felt sick at all the past few days, have you?”

Rhodes shook her head, fighting back tears.

I hesitated a long while and finally opened the box. This piece of rock was much smaller than the one we had found earlier, the size of a sunflower seed. The thin slice of rock looked almost lonely in the corner of the large metal case.

“Look. Nothing.” Eiger brought his watch close to the sunflower seed; the reading on the radiometer didn’t move. He picked up the stone and examined it carefully through the eyepiece of the ocular. “Something different here from the other rock. This one has a thin layer of reflective film on its surface. Maybe that blocks the radiation.”

“That’s the stone membrane. When Little Fall swallowed the stone, he gave it a new special layer called a membrane,” Rhodes said, and we looked at her with questioning expressions. She immediately picked up Mr. Animal as if that would make her statement more convincing. “Little Fall used twigs to show me how it works.”

“And it can take the stone out anytime it wants?” Eiger asked the question as calmly as he could, but he couldn’t conceal the surprise on his face.

“Yes, but it can’t be out for too long . . . I guess. In the past few days, Little Fall has gotten weaker and weaker. But every time I try to give the stone back to him, he just looks toward Dad’s ship and says, ‘Sorry.’”

“How do you communicate?” Eiger asked, as he turned the membrane-encased wordstone over in his hand. “I mean, maybe Mr. Animal can roughly translate Little Fall’s feelings into our language, but how does Little Fall know what you’re thinking?”

Rhodes blinked, but didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t considered this question.

I felt an unexpected, yet completely rational, puzzlement. My young daughter was using a cheap animal translator, a toy, to communicate with a . . . a—I didn’t even know whether to call it an “it” or a “he” —a wordfaller, a being that didn’t even have ears. Rhodes had spent more time with this Little Fall in the past three days than she had spent with me in the past three weeks. Even when she has to bury her pet parrot, she doesn’t think to come to me.

The feeling of impotence made me inwardly furious.

I raised my head, about to speak, only to find Eiger had quietly left the room.

And the stone had disappeared with him.

8

We found Eiger next to the energy converter in the boiler room. He explained with great excitement his theory that this little film-covered stone could act as a power converter. “I just used two copper leads to insert the stone into the secondary circuits, and our electrical power drain dropped instantly. Now, let’s try something a little more risky . . .”

He flipped a few switches and pushed me and Rhodes into the corner by the door. For the first time Rhodes heard “wordstone” pass over Eiger’s lips, as he whispered in intense concentration, as if refining his pronunciation of the syllables. Eiger changed out a circuit breaker and the lights overhead first went out and then brightened again. Then once again, but this time with a crackling pow, they were extinguished again. I thought the experiment wasn’t working, but Eiger gave a loud whoop of victory.

“It works! It’s powering this room!”

“But the electricity is out.” Rhodes looked around the room.

“That’s only because the nuclear power is too strong. If I fix the circuit in the voltage converter, it will work. We have a power source!” Eiger picked up Rhodes and spun her around. “And it’s all thanks to Rhodes!”

“It’s not me. It’s Little Fall.” She looked far less excited than Eiger, even a little worried. “Are we . . . going home soon?”

“Yes. All we need is the energy in this wordstone, and as soon as tomorrow we can . . .”

“No!” Rhodes looked panicked. “Little Fall let me borrow this. I . . . I need to give it back to him!”

“Did it tell you that?” Eiger asked doubtfully.

Rhodes’s face reddened. It seemed that Little Fall hadn’t said that. Maybe it was just wishful thinking; she had imagined that he needed her. Just like I imagined she needed me.

Eiger and I exchanged a private look. He shrugged lightly and flashed me a slight smile that meant “I’ll leave this to you.”

I suddenly realized that I didn’t need to crouch down to talk with Rhodes. Just two years ago, if I wanted to speak with her in a serious tone and convince her to do what I said, I still had to bend into a half-kneel to look her straight in the eyes. It seemed not so long ago that I could hold the newborn little girl in one hand. Now she was already over one-and-a-half meters tall.

“Rhodes, your friend did not ask you to return the wordstone. This planet has many rocks like this. Yesterday, Eiger and I picked up—”

“The ones that have fallen to the ground are no good. The rocks on the ground can’t speak.” She clutched Mr. Animal tightly and spoke with all her will. “The stones in the sky can speak for a year. The ones on the ground can only speak for one day!”

“So, that’s it! The wordfallers use the cadmium coating to retard the wordstone fission, and the ones that fall to the ground complete their fission reaction relatively quickly! No wonder they stand out there in the snow waiting.” Eiger spoke excitedly, but then he caught my meaningful look and closed his mouth.

I communicated to him with my eyes that he should give us some time. I knew he would get right to work solving the technical question, and I brought Rhodes over to one side of the corridor.

“Rhodes, we can’t wait here for three months. It’s too much downtime. The schedule for the entire project would have to be pushed back. This little rock can help Daddy save three months’ salary for the crew. It might even solve the problem of energy costs for everyone for a long, long time. This stone represents a lot of money. We can live a comfortable life. Daddy can buy you another parrot—or a kitten! Haven’t you always wanted a kitten?”

She was silent for a long while and then swallowed a few times before she spoke.

“Don’t take away Little Fall’s wordstone. We can leave here safely after three months, right? We have enough food, enough water. We won’t die here, right? But without his wordstone, Little Fall might die . . .”

My attention turned to the scene behind her. Through the door I could see Eiger working on the transformer in the boiler room. Most of this equipment was already outdated generations ago. The reactor furnace got blocked up more and more frequently. And here is Rhodes with a powerful and free energy source! This will change everything! After I run a few more jobs, I can get a new ship. Why should I care if one alien lives or dies?

So why couldn’t I simply harden my heart and tell her, “No”?

With great effort, she got herself under control: “Little Fall’s life is more important right now.”

I could hear the unshakeable tenacity in her voice. She was echoing me, which is all a child can do in reply to a tyrannical father. She had been listening to my words carefully, even when I was acting like a half-hearted parent, but I had never listened to her.

I experienced a moment of indecision. I wondered if I would need to choose between the ship and my daughter. Suddenly the ship’s fuel reactor hummed to life, and Eiger burst out of the room, clutching an electricity test pencil with paint peeling off it. He shut the door behind him.

“The snow is melting!” he said, shaking with excitement. “The energy from the wordstone is flowing into the reactor and releasing the hydrogen from the snow we put in there! The fuel tanks are filling up!”

The serious expression on Rhodes’s face relaxed a bit, but her question was still uncertain, “Does this mean we can return the wordstone to Little Fall and use the hydrogen to get back home?”

Eiger obviously thought I had already finished my talk with Rhodes, and maybe he hadn’t expected her to hold onto this matter so stubbornly; he looked embarrassed about his excitement. “Uh, Rhodes, the volume we need . . . no, the rock can’t be taken out of the reactor.”

Rhodes’s eyes grew wide. Her Uncle Eiger never lied to her.

“The wordstone is now powering the ship and the reactor with high-voltage electricity. I adjusted our power distribution to adapt to the voltage. The reactor and temperature controls are running at levels we haven’t seen before. If we suddenly cut off this new power source and switch back to the old system, the flash of power will trip the system overload breaker, and the whole ship will be down. And if we keep using the nuclear power and only shut down our reactor, the enormous flow of electricity will not be depleted, and the system will still trip and shut down.”

“Cutting off the power will break the ship?” Rhodes was trying to understand Eiger’s words.

“The power going down won’t directly damage the ship, of course, but when the reactor is shut down, the heat built up inside can’t dissipate on its own, and the chemical reaction can’t stop immediately. The temperature controls and hydrogen liquefaction and all the equipment around them must remain functional, otherwise the temperature in the reactor will not decrease and the hydrogen levels will rise too quickly, and—”

“And the ship will blow up,” Rhodes said softly, eyes fixed on the floor.

I thought I might be able to breathe a sigh of relief; the work of making Rhodes understand the situation was done. But when she turned and ran off, the sound of her retreating footsteps made me want to hit myself.

9

This was the second time I had been close to a wordfaller, and the only time I had observed them carefully at this range. The wordfaller in front of me appeared completely altered from the last time I saw it. Its wide hand was withered; the round and smooth body now seemed to be crushed down under a great weight. I couldn’t be sure this impression wasn’t just an illusion, but the wordfaller seemed to be shrinking. It sat on the snow and slowly lifted its head to look at my injured hand.

“This is Little Fall.” Rhodes was clearly speaking to me, but she did not look at me. Then she moved her finger in my direction and looked toward Little Fall: “This is my dad.”

“I’m sorry.” The voice came from the Mr. Animal box. I remembered the voice I had heard three days earlier as I was leaving Rhodes’s room, and I realized the words hadn’t been Little Parrot’s words.

Clearly, Little Fall was not capable of hearing. How did it communicate with Rhodes? Maybe it could detect her changes in body temperature or blood flow—even through the thermal suit—and thereby distinguish her changing attitudes toward different circumstances. After all, body temperature is also a kind of radiation, and it shifts according to our changing thoughts. Though we are unaware of it, we all constantly radiate ourselves.

When Rhodes thinks about me, will she feel happy or scared? Will her temperature rise by even the smallest fraction of a degree?

I placed the large metal case on the ground and undid the lock. Again I confirmed that our thermal suits were adjusted properly and sealed tightly, and only then did I open the box.

Inside, the box was filled with fallen black stones that the mining crew had collected from the planet’s surface. The stones all flashed with identical black phosphorescent luster.

Convincing the crew to go looking for wordstones had been easier than I imagined. I had thought through a dozen convincing arguments I might use, but finally I chose to tell them the true story, asking them to save Rhodes’s friend and help the spacecraft. I asked them to decide for themselves whether or not to help with this work, and to my surprise, every one of them volunteered enthusiastically, lining up to put on their thermal suits. Team leaders even organized their groups strictly according to standard work regulations, just as they would on a jobsite, to improve efficiency in the search. This was what they were good at after all: looking for rocks. Before half the day was spent, the metal locker was full.

“The stones in the sky speak for a year; stones on the ground speak for a day.” If that’s how it was, then we would give the wordfaller hundreds of stones from the ground. I thought this idea might satisfy Rhodes, but she still didn’t seem happy.

I pushed the box toward Little Fall, and I thought about saying, or maybe I actually said, “Thank you.”

Little Fall continued to gaze at me. He doesn’t understand.

Rhodes clenched her teeth inside her mask. Her nose turned a faint red.

Mr. Animal suddenly burst out a translation: “Thank you.”

Fascinating. Maybe it can’t comprehend my radiation, but only understands Rhodes’s. Maybe they are like cats: each individual has an individual language. They can only understand the idiolect of a counterpart they have spent enough time listening to.

Little Fall grasped a wordstone with his flat, shrunken hand and placed it against his chest. There appeared to be a hole there that led into the chest cavity. In a little while, the stone was ejected from the hole. After it had repeated this action a dozen times or more, I finally thought I could detect a small change in the creature: the withered banana-leaf hand seemed gradually to be filling out, and thick appendages appeared at the end of the hand, separating like the stubby fingers on a bear’s paw.

Are those fingers? Is it imitating the human hand, absorbing and comprehending the human form through its connection with Rhodes?

I remembered the wordfaller whose appendage resembled the wing of a bird. Perhaps that one had found Little Parrot and absorbed some tiny amount of the bird’s radiation before it went entirely cold. I wondered if this was a temporary sort of imitation or a lingering trace of a relationship that would last a long while. Rhodes has my eyes, and her nose is shaped like mine. She has my bad temper, as well as my grit and fearlessness. Sometimes I hear her use familiar sayings or opinions that I know she heard from members of the crew. Some of these traces might gradually sink in and deepen over the years; some may be worn away with time and almost disappear. These sorts of transformations move us forward in a kind of constant knitting together of identity, and the end result of their interweaving is Rhodes, my daughter, in this moment.

Every moment she becomes something new, and I have not stopped long enough to look at her carefully. Simply existing in someone’s vicinity is not enough for real understanding.

Little Fall continued to spit out stone after stone, and soon a box the size of a man was half empty. The pile of spent wordstones on the snow slowly grew into a mound. Even so, I could see the creature’s trunk was still dry and shriveled.

Rhodes had gradually relaxed as she saw Little Fall improving, but she now showed signs of worry again. Her anxiety about the insufficient amount of wordstones was written in her clenched fists and the forward tilt of her body. The bottom of the box already showed through in one corner, and Little Fall was still nowhere near his original smooth and rotund shape.

I wanted to do something to break the tension, but as I hesitated, not knowing what course of action to take, Mr. Animal seized the moment from me and spoke:

“I am fine. Thank you. I am fine.”

Oppressive shame and frustration flooded over me. In a moment, I had become the alien among the three of us. Rhodes didn’t make a sound, but Little Fall and I both, from all of her wordless signals, could sense her terrible disquiet. And though we both wanted to comfort her, I had no idea what to say, and Little Fall did.

The box was empty. All the stones we could find within a five kilometer radius were gone.

“Rock.” Little Fall gradually ceased his repetitive movement and looked into the empty box. What was this emotion it was feeling now? Does it even have emotions? And why had I started to care?

To my surprise, he turned to Rhodes and again said, “Rock.”

I thought Mr. Animal had broken down again. It repeated itself over and over, “Rock. Rock. Rock.” And Little Fall continued to look toward Rhodes. Suddenly I understood—Mr. Animal was too primitive a translator. It could only translate the concept into “rock,” but of course Little Fall was saying “wordstone.” Apart from the fact that the software’s lexicon probably did not include the name of this rare alien stone, the two characters for “wordstone” were homophones in our tongue—言岩, yanyan—so even if the box were saying it correctly, the word without context would be difficult to understand. So Mr. Animal had used a different word to translate Little Fall’s intentions: “石头. 石头. 石头.” “Shitou. Shitou. Shitou.” “Rock. Rock. Rock.”

But Little Fall was looking at my daughter, and he was naming her: “Wordstone.”

This wordfaller looked at Rhodes and saw a wordstone, descended from the sky, radiating warmth, like a poem, like a song. This is how wordfallers are: waiting for the snow or something else to descend on them. They observe, listen, accept, absorb, understand, and they give. Death to them is the inability to receive any new radiation. And new life for them is anything that exists above absolute zero.

They do not have ears, but they can hear more precisely than we can. Not even a single photon can escape their notice.

I wonder what this scene sounded like to them. As Little Fall did all he could to cheer and comfort her, Rhodes bit her lip and wept silently. And finally, to my senses, too, this deafening silence began to take on a shape and meaning beyond the definitions of human science.

10

The thermal insulation suit was set to cooling mode, as cold as it would go, but I was still drenched in sweat.

“I’m going to say it one more time, Doplin. Just give the word and we’ll stop this foolishness immediately.”

The reactor furnace stood in the middle of the boiler room like a pillar rising to the sky. Normally we use this furnace to refine ore on alien planets. Most of the valuable elements that are the final product of this labor can be extracted from the ore by the simple, crude method of high-temperature calcination.

Now the furnace was refining the snow of planet Wordfall. The pure hydrogen emerged from the crystalline snow as hydrogen gas. The gas quickly liquefied into the fuel tank through the upper condenser tube, and the snow residue remained at the bottom of the furnace. Two days earlier, Eiger had turned the furnace on and left the boiler room. I was the first person to enter the room since then.

“The crew has all evacuated. Apart from you, there’s just me on board, and I’m not happy about this. If the furnace blows up, maybe I won’t die, but I will not be fine.”

My job was to disconnect the wordstone from the system and stay in the dangerously hot boiler room so that I could, at the right moment, manually start up the peripheral systems for the reactor furnace so that the newly generated high-temperature hydrogen stayed where it was. We had decided this procedure would probably work, if I could remain conscious. Eiger was in the control room upstairs and was in charge of cutting over the energy switch. He was also in charge of talking to me, to make sure I didn’t pass out.

“. . . as soon as the energy system is switched, it will trip immediately. The circuit will overheat and the breaker cannot be pushed up again. It will take some time to cool off naturally—maybe a minute or two, I don’t know how long . . . you have to keep your eye on the pressure gauge until . . .”

I felt myself losing consciousness. Eiger’s voice in my earpiece seemed to be breaking up, but I knew he hadn’t stopped talking. It was just too hot. Normally, personnel were not even allowed in here. Was my thermal suit open somewhere?

“. . . exceeds limits . . . irreversible . . . don’t take the stone . . . condensation tube cracks . . .”

The blistering heat and memories of Rhodes were suddenly entwined.

The summer solstice on Mars, nine in the evening. Outside, the sky is incredibly bright and the air is blazing hot. She appears on the other side of the glass, cries only a moment before she waves her young limbs and laughs. She has picked me out of the crowd, looking right at me, hoping for some kind of interaction. In that moment she is like the solstice sun; it seems like it will never set, and I am her sunflower.

“Doplin?”

But I don’t want to be her sunflower anymore. The sunflower follows without ever asking the sun what it feels, yet it still believes its love is requited. Like all parents, I care about my daughter. But I never cared about her feelings.

“Say something!”

I came back to myself. “I’m okay, a little warm.” I was not at all okay, but I wanted to carry this through. “Let’s do this.”

“. . . be careful.” As soon as Eiger finished this sentence, the deafening wung wung hum of the machinery around me was suddenly extinguished along with the lights. Little Fall’s wordstone had been taken out of the circuit and the system had tripped the breaker. On the entire ship now only two systems were operating independently: the chemical reaction in the furnace, and my insulation suit.

The sound of Rhodes turning and running away down the hall. The sound of the blood in her fingertips pressed tight as she clutches the Mr. Animal box, hoping I can fix it for her. The sound of the air flowing from her mouth as her tongue touches her forward palate to call out to me: “Daddy!”

The burning sensation was most painful first at the elbows and the nape of the neck.

Her tone of longing. Her tone of wild hope and of disappointment. The sharp sound of her cry when she first enters the world. The sound of water molecules crashing together in their Brownian motion after evaporating from her tears inside her mask as she stands in front of Little Fall.

The pressure gauge told me the furnace would soon reach tolerance limits. My watch told me the circuit had not yet cooled. My burning eyelids told me I was nearing my own limits.

The sound of her even breathing the night she falls asleep in the corridor outside my office where I am finishing my supper; I have made her wait too long, and she dozes uncomfortably, holding in her hand the perfect test paper she wanted to show me. The sound of her footsteps in the snow as she carries Little Parrot outside after she has stopped waiting for me to do anything with her.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I wrenched the ship’s power switch up toward the on position. I could feel the heat pass right through the thermal suit into my hand. My palm became a conduit for fiery pain and then a sudden increase in pressure—the overloaded switch still wanted to come down. I braced it with all my strength, not coming now from my incinerated muscles, as it seemed, but from the very bones in my arms. I forced the switch up into place, and this time it stayed there.

The lights came on. I felt the thunderous wung wung of machinery returning to life. I imagined I could even sense a slight chill coming off the condenser tube.

I reached for the wordstone with the hand that I could still use and walked unsteadily out of the room and off the ship. The sound of Rhodes’s laughter burst forth in my ears like I was hearing it for the first time.

11

“You really want to do this?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Rhodes watched through the porthole as the white planet receded farther and farther into the distance. A black mountain range divided Wordfall’s snowfields from its plains. “I’ve decided to try for language school and study alien cultures.”

“Those schools are difficult to test into, and making contact with alien cultures is always risky. . . .” My hand still hurt like it was on fire. Within a week it had suffered both frostbite and serious burns. The only thing that hadn’t changed was that I still felt the urge to hide it behind my back.

“My grades are good, and I’m not afraid of danger.”

“It’s not a question of whether you are afraid or not.”

“You know, Little Fall didn’t know we needed nuclear energy. It just gave us the most valuable thing it was able to give.”

Me too, I thought. I tried to imagine what her leaving would feel like.

“You know, the explanations we guessed at are not necessarily correct. Uncle Eiger said wordfallers developed their culture based on the fissile radiation materials. But no one in the human world really knows what that’s like.”

She turned her head to look at me. Though her tone was gentle, her expression was full of unshakable resolve.

“And I want to know all that, Dad. I want to know the wordfallers’ language. And not just the wordfallers’; this star system has many other languages. And there are many systems beyond this one. We need people to do this work. Language is so important, whether or not it is based on sound.”

Maybe I had bound her too tightly; when she finally spread her wings, she wanted to fly even further. As Eiger said, the reactions of people are not always equal and opposite, but often even stronger than the original action.

Before planet Wordfall, I was never really aware of why I felt I had to keep Rhodes by my side. I thought I wanted to protect her, be with her, respond instantly to her needs and give her the best life I could. In reality, this role is complete, this task accomplished. She has never lacked for new electronic devices, pets, food to eat. Everyone on the ship likes her; they give her curious little gifts and keep her out of danger.

But all this was just a mask for the real reason I kept her close: I needed her.

Rhodes turned back to look out the porthole. As the white globe receded, the black universe grew to fill our field of vision. Her heart had already left this ship far behind.

When she had gone out to give the wordstone to Little Fall, she had not carried Mr. Animal with her. She said she didn’t need it.

I have never said to Rhodes, “I love you.” There are some words that are not meant to be spoken aloud.

Love can be conveyed in many languages—through listening, through understanding—not just by keeping her here with me.

“Daddy respects your decision, Rhodes. I respect your decision.”