The Visitor at the Unlit Window

Tavi Iles was cleaning the observation window when something outside cleaned a small circle in the dark.

She stopped with the cloth pressed flat against the glass. Beyond Orison Station's outer pane, a pale oval hung among the stars. It had not been there when she began. A smaller shape rested beneath it, jointed and enclosed, with no face she could recognise.

Tavi lowered the cloth.

The shape raised one of its narrow limbs.

She was thirty-one and had spent eight years learning which unusual sights belonged in a maintenance report. This one seemed to require more than a photograph and a reference number.

She called the control room.

"There's something at the observation window."

"Can you describe it?"

"Not without getting ahead of myself."

The controller asked her to step back. She did. Nobody opened a door, and no dock received a command to connect. The station remained sealed, with the unknown object holding beyond its ordinary exclusion distance. The oval was a projected image reaching closer than the craft itself; that became clear when a navigation camera found the small vessel farther out.

Inside the oval, three dark bars appeared against a pale field.

Tavi looked at her cloth, then at the glass.

"I think," she said, "it wants us to look."

She was careful to make the sentence a guess.

Dr Mara Venn arrived carrying two notebooks, neither of which contained a language for the occasion. Commander Sera Holt followed with the station's watch officer and a mug she had forgotten to put down.

Mara was forty-six. She had spent much of her career studying how people misunderstood one another while believing that they shared a language. She examined the bars without announcing what species, mood or mathematics they represented.

"Have they changed?" she asked.

"No."

"Have we sent anything?"

"Only me looking surprised."

"Probably unavoidable."

They moved the maintenance trolley and brought in a display panel. Tavi was told she could leave. She stayed by the door, holding the cloth in a way that made her look as though she might still be needed for something ordinary.

The commander confirmed that the vessel had not approached the docking corridor. A scheduled cargo tug was due later in the station day. Its human crew received a normal traffic update and agreed to hold at a different approach point. There was no countdown to disaster, only work that now had another reason to be done carefully.

Mara put three pale tiles on the panel.

Outside, the projected bars disappeared. Two short strokes took their place.

"Two," the watch officer said.

"Two strokes," Mara corrected. "We don't yet know that it's an answer."

Tavi was glad somebody had said it. She was also glad it had not needed to be her.

They tried four tiles. The visitor returned three strokes. Two tiles brought one stroke. One tile brought an empty field.

The sequence was striking enough to become a theory before anyone had finished listing the alternatives.

Perhaps it was subtraction. Perhaps a warning. Perhaps the empty field meant that the visitor had lost interest. Mara wrote all three suggestions down, then added several less satisfying ones.

"We may not be presenting what we think we're presenting," she said.

They changed the colour, spacing and arrangement of the tiles. When they lined them up in a row, the response remained one less. When they scattered them, the visitor returned a pattern they could not match to anything.

The room grew warmer with people. Someone brought a second camera. Someone suggested a larger panel. The commander asked for fewer bodies instead.

Tavi took the trolley into the corridor. On its side was a strip of dark rubber with pale divisions, an old repair she had intended to replace. In the window's reflection, the divisions showed clearly. The rubber itself disappeared into the dark.

She went back inside.

"Could we turn down the room lights?"

The watch officer looked at the ceiling.

"We can give it a brighter display."

"I meant the room. We're showing it our faces over the top of everything."

Mara turned toward the glass. She could see her own notebook reflected in the visitor's pale oval.

"Yes," she said. "Let's change one thing."

They dimmed the lights. The panel remained visible, the room behind it quiet and dark. Tavi stepped away from the window so that her own reflection would not be the thing under examination.

The visitor's smaller shape moved closer to its projection equipment, still far from the station itself. They could not tell whether the adjustment meant relief, attention or merely a better angle.

Mara displayed three pale tiles again.

Two strokes appeared outside. This time, each was placed between the positions of the human tiles.

Tavi leaned forward before she could stop herself.

"The spaces."

Mara did not immediately agree. She put small dark dots between the tiles.

The visitor repeated those positions, marking two gaps. When she moved one tile farther away, the corresponding mark widened. When she joined two tiles, that gap disappeared from the response.

"It's matching the intervals," Mara said. "At least in this task."

The words at least did not spoil the discovery. They made it something the room could actually keep.

They had not learned that an unknown species counted badly, or that it could not see solid objects. They had found that this visitor's attention, in this exchange, was on what lay between their marks.

The watch officer rubbed his forehead.

"I owe the universe an apology for my arithmetic lesson."

"Keep it short," the commander said. "We're not sure where to send it."

Tavi laughed. Outside, the two marks remained.

Progress made them eager. Eagerness made the next half-hour almost useless.

They filled the panel with diagrams: the station, the vessel, two circles, arrows, a sequence of shapes that seemed obvious to everyone who already knew what it meant. The visitor returned a dark band and held it there.

"Stop?" someone suggested.

"Or begin again," Mara said. "Or something else."

The commander stopped the human display anyway. That did not require a translation. They could choose to pause without claiming that the visitor had ordered it.

Tavi sat on the floor beside the trolley. Her knees ached from standing, and the unfinished window had a clean arc with a smear at its edge. She had never imagined first contact would involve being embarrassed by her own cleaning.

Mara sat in a chair nearby and closed one notebook.

"What would you send?" she asked.

"Less."

"That's an amount, not a message."

"So were our three tiles."

Mara smiled, tiredly. "Fair."

They returned to the simple pattern and waited after it. The visitor matched the gap. They matched it back and waited again. Gradually the exchange acquired a rhythm that did not require anyone to know whether silence meant agreement.

Tavi put the cloth on the trolley. For the first time since the call, she had both hands free.