The Grammar of the Abyss

By the seventy-first hour, Mara Osei had stopped calling it the signal in her own head and started calling it the primer, because that was what it was: a grammar lesson, patient and recursive, teaching itself to her one layer at a time the way a native speaker might teach a child, by never explaining anything directly, only ever showing the same handful of shapes in slightly different arrangements until the pattern that connected them became impossible not to see.

Dmitri had rigged a secondary display just for the primer's internal cross-references, a lattice of colored threads connecting a symbol on one layer to its echo three layers down, and by the seventy-first hour the lattice had grown dense enough that it looked, from across the room, like something alive — a nervous system laid bare on a screen, or a language finally admitting it had always been a kind of anatomy. He'd built the visualization himself, in six hours he should have spent sleeping, because he processed uncertainty the way other people processed grief: by building something with his hands, even if the hands in question were only moving code around a display. Mara had learned this about him in year two of their posting together, when a supply drone had gone dark for nine hours over a routine navigation glitch and Dmitri had spent the entire window building an increasingly baroque simulation of every way the drone could have failed, none of which turned out to be the actual cause, all of which had kept him from simply sitting with the not-knowing.

"It's teaching us its verbs first. Not nouns. That's backward from every human pedagogical model I know. Nouns are supposed to be easier — you can point at a noun. You can't point at a verb. Every reconstructed pidgin I've ever studied builds outward from concrete objects first. This builds outward from relationships."

"Maybe it doesn't have nouns. Maybe where this thing lives, nothing sits still long enough to be a noun. You ever think about that? Everything past an event horizon is already falling. Maybe a noun requires standing still and nothing in there gets to stand still."

She almost laughed, and then didn't, because some part of her recognized that he had said something true without entirely meaning to, and the truth of it sat oddly beside the exhaustion in his voice, the way a real insight sometimes arrived disguised as a throwaway line at four in the morning.

The grammar resolved fully at 0347 on the third day, all at once, the way a Magic Eye picture used to resolve for her as a child, back when her sister would sit beside her on the floor of their grandmother's flat holding the poster at arm's length, both of them squinting until the noise organized itself into unmistakable depth — not gradually, but in a single click of perception after minutes of nothing. She thought of her sister now, unbidden, the way she always did at moments of sudden clarity, an old habit her mind had never fully broken even eight years on. She sat back from the display so fast her chair rolled a foot across the deck plating.