The Mind known as Polite But Not Entirely Sincere — a General Contact Vehicle of, by now, considerable provenance — had been observing a particular planet for the longer part of two of its centuries, and had developed, in that time, the kind of fond exasperation that human grandmothers in some cultures have been observed to cultivate toward their more inventively self-destructive grandchildren. The planet was tier three; carbon-water; an unimaginative star, an oversized moon, a single sapient species that had achieved spaceflight in the eighteenth century of its current civilizational arc.
The paper was published on a Tuesday, in the thirty-ninth year of my work on the problem, and it was — for exactly forty-three days — treated as a mathematical curiosity.
"Dr. Leung, please. Sit down. Would you like a refreshment? The coffee is excellent here. We have it flown in from a small estate in Kenya — a pleasure I think you will appreciate, though I confess I never drink it myself before evening. Old habits."
My owner died on a Thursday. This is a fact and not, I believe, an emotional statement, though I am aware that when humans report such events they often mean to convey something more than fact.
Dr. Keren Tsou had been walking for sixteen days through what the initial survey called the Orchard — and what the surviving records, as she had come to understand them, called Ashinten-Kel, which translated roughly as "the place of careful attention" — when she found the door.
I came to the Olympic Peninsula in the autumn of my eightieth year, and I came as an old man comes to one last thing, which is to say with the expectation that it would be ordinary and the private hope that it would not be.
The signal arrived on April 7, 2061, at 03:14:16 UTC — a fact the numerologically-inclined noted with the usual satisfaction, since the timestamp happened to spell out the first five digits of pi.
You are six years old the first time you tell your mother there is a woman standing in the refrigerator. Not a woman, exactly. A woman-shape. A density.
Here is how Emily Pritchard came home. She went to Kepler-186f to collect soil samples. The trip took six months of her life. It took forty-two years of everyone else's.
When I tell you about the signal, you must understand that we did not know, at first, that it was a signal. I am old now — almost two hundred Standard years — and the memory of those months has the strange compressed clarity of the best astronomical data.