"Hi, hon. We're ready to take our first whack at communicating with the dark-matter creatures."

"I'm on my way. Close." He smiled at Azmi and Hek.

"Sometimes, you know, my staff is almost too efficient."

Keith rode up to the bridge and took his seat in the center of the back row. The holographic bubble was filled not with the normal space view but rather with red circles against a pale white background, a plot of the locations of the dark-matter spheres.

"Okay," said Rissa. "We're going to try communicating with the dark-matter beings using radio and visual signals.

We've deployed a special probe that will do the actual signaling. It's located about eight light-seconds off the starboard side of the ship; I'm going to operate it by comm laser. Of course, the dark-matter beings may already have detected our presence, but, then again, they may not have.

And just in case the dark-matter beings turn out to be the Slammers, or something equally nasty, it seems prudent to have their attention drawn to an expendable probe rather than Starplex itself."

"'Dark-matter beings,'" repeated Keith. "That's a bit of a mouthful, no? Surely we can come up with a better name for them."

"How about 'darkies'?" said Rhombus, helpfully.

Keith cringed. "That's not a good idea." He thought for a second, then looked up, grinning. "What about MACHO men?"

Jag rolled all four eyes and made a disgusted bark.

"How does 'darmats' sound?" asked Thor.

Rissa nodded. "Darmats it is." She addressed everyone in the room.

"Well, as you all know, Hek has been cataloging the signal groups he's picked up from the darmats. On the assumption that each group is a word, we've identified the single most commonly used one. For the first message, I'm going to send a looping repeat of that word. We assume it's innocuous — the darmat equivalent of 'the,' or some such.

Granted, the repetition will convey no meaningful information, but with luck the darmats will recognize it as an attempt to communicate." She turned to Keith. "Permission to proceed, Director?"

Keith smiled. "Be my guest."

Rissa touched a control. "Transmitting now."

Lights flashed on Rhombus's web. "Well, that certainly did something," he said. "The conversation level has increased dramatically. All of them talking at once."

Rissa nodded. "We're hoping they'll triangulate on the probe as the source."

"I'd say they've figured it out," said Thor, a moment later, pointing at the display. Five of the world-sized creatures had begun to move toward the probe.

"Now the tricky part begins," said Rissa. "We've got their attention, but can we communicate with them?"

Keith knew that if anyone could pull it off, it would be his wife, who had been part of the team that had first communicated with the Ibs.

That effort had started with a simple exchange of nouns — this pattern of lights meant "table," that one meant "ground," and so on. Even then, there had been difficulties. The Ib body was so different from the bipedal human design that for many concepts they had no terms: stand up, run, sit down, chair, clothing, male, female. And because they'd always lived under cloud cover, for countless other ideas — day, night, month, year, constellation — there were no common Ibese words.

Meanwhile, the Ibs had been trying to convey concepts that were central to their lives: biological gestalt, all-encompassing vision, and the many metaphorical meanings for roll ahead and roll back.

But that exercise had been a piece of cake compared with communicating with world-sized beings. Indeed, the Ibs had had no trouble understanding that particular metaphor — enjoyable, nonnutritive food being equated with ease — just as humans had no difficulty with the Ibese expression for the same sentiment, "downward slope."

Communicating with aliens as big as Jupiter who might or might not be intelligent, might or might not be able to see, might or might not understand any principle of physics or mathematics, could prove impossible.

"The babble on all two hundred frequencies is continuing," said Rhombus.

Rissa nodded. "But no way to tell if it's chatter amongst the spheres, or responses aimed at us." She touched another button. "I'm going to try again with a loop of a different, almost-as-common darmat word."

This time, the radio cacophony was halted by one darmat who was apparently shushing the others. And then that darmat repeated a simple, three-word sentence over and over again. "Time to play a hunch," said Rissa.

"How so?" asked Keith.

"Well, the first question we would ask in a circumstance such as this would be 'Who are you?" Hek and I had PHANTOM sample all the darmat words, and devise a signal that followed the apparent rules for valid word construction but had not, as far as we've been able to detect, been used by the darmats. We hope they'll take this signal to be Starplex's name."

Rissa broadcast the made-up word several times — and, at last, the first breakthrough: the same sphere that had shushed the others repeated the term back at the probe.

"The rain in Spain," said Rissa, grinning, "falls mainly on the plain."

"A thousand pardons," said Rhombus. "My translator must be broken."

Rissa was still grinning. "It's not broken. It's just [hat I think she's got it — I think we've made contact."

Keith gestured at the display. "Which one is talking to US?"

Ropes danced on Rhombus's console. 'hat one," he said as a blue halo appeared around one of the red circles. He operated his console some more. "Here, let me give you a better picture. Now that we've got the green star for light, I can get good views of the individual darmats."

The red circle disappeared, replaced with a gray-on-black rendering of the sphere.

"Can you increase the contrast?" asked Keith.

"A pleasure to do so." The parts of the sphere that had been gray or smoky now showed in a much wider range of intensities, all the way through to pure white.

Keith regarded it. With the enhanced contrast, a pair of vertical white convection lines were visible going from pole to pole, flaring out at the equator. "A cat's eye," he said.

Rissa nodded. "It does look like one, doesn't it?" She touched some controls. "Okay, Cat's Eye, let's see how intelligent you are." A horizontal black bar appeared floating in the holo bubble, about a meter long and fifteen centimeters tall. "That bar represents a series of fusion lamps on the probe," said Rissa. "The lamps have been turned off since the probe was deployed. Now, watch." She tapped a key on her console. The black bar turned electric pink for three seconds, went black again for three seconds, turned pink twice in rapid succession, blacked out for another three seconds, then blinked on three times.

"When the bar is pink, I've got all the fusion lamps on," said Rissa.

"The probe is also broadcasting white radio noise when the lights are on, and silence when they're off. I've set the bridge speakers to the frequency used by Cat's Eye."

The speakers were silent, but Keith could see indicators blinking on Rhombus's panel, showing chatter on some of the other frequencies.

Rissa waited about half a minute, then touched a key. The whole sequence — one blink, two blinks, three blinks — repeated itself.

This time there was an immediate response: three darmat words, which PHANTOM translated over the speakers as three distinctive patterns of bleeps and bloops.

"Well," said Lianne, "if we're lucky, that's darmat talk for one, two, three."

"Unless," said Tho;, "it's darmat for 'what the hell — ?"" Rissa smiled, and pushed the same key. The probe winked out one, two, three again, and Cat's Eye responded with the same three words. "Okay," said Rissa.

"Now for the real test." She pressed another key, and everyone watched as the indicator bar winked in reverse sequence: three, two, one.