Lamont regarded the vacuum-laden young man for a long moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked,” he noted, “what your role in the colony is.”
Lamont winced. As feared, the broadcast of the strange signal had been ship-wide, extending even to the colonist deck. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “It came from that tower. It’s one of thousands, maybe millions of signals coming from it.”
Abner’s close-set eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the needle-like construction through the window. “What for?” He asked.
Lamont shrugged. “We don’t know. Most of them appear to be linguistic in nature. Phobos thinks that they may be eulogies.”
The colonist took a few steps to the side, vacuumed up a few chicken droppings, and scratched his chin. “He thinks that it’s some kind of mausoleum?”
“Hopefully more of a monument,” Lamont grimaced. “At any rate, it’s only a theory. We haven’t cracked the language.”
“Language or languages?” Abner asked.
“Who knows?” Lamont shrugged.
“Well, heck,” Abner chuckled. “You ain’t going to decipher a language if you can’t be sure that it’s been isolated. Otherwise, your data will be all muddied, even from dialects. I’ll bet you could write a computer program to compare the frequency of consonants, for example, to set probabilities for distinct language groups.”
Lamont regarded the vacuum-laden young man for a long moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked,” he noted, “what your role in the colony is.”
“Agricultural science, mostly,” Abner replied before nudging a chicken aside with his foot to clean up after it. “A lot of chemistry, with some math and computer science mixed in. I’m apprenticing under John Mays.”
The newspaperman chided himself mentally. Whether or not it was evident, he had approached the conversation as if he was speaking to a teenaged janitor. No matter how often he reminded himself not to judge the colonists by their rough exteriors, he was just as guilty of falling into that trap as any other occupant of the decks below.
“Mr. Townsend, can I ask you a question?” Abner asked.
“Of course,” Lamont replied, blinking back into the moment.
“Miss Beckett has been spending some time in your neck of the woods of late,” Abner observed.
Lamont winced again. “Look, about that…” He began.
“Has she mentioned me at all?” Abner asked, looking away shyly. “Y’know, in passing?”
Lamont felt his cheeks warm. “Why, sure,” He said, his mind racing. “She’s mentioned you.”
“Really?” Abner exclaimed, looking at him eagerly. “What—what did she say?”
“She said…” Lamont considered carefully, recalling the conversation in which Constance had objected to being boxed in by the colony’s expectations. “She said you’re nice,” He concluded.
“Nice,” Abner said thoughtfully. He activated his vacuum for a moment, then said the word again as if he’d bitten into a sour fruit. “Nice.”
“Given the way she describes some people,” Lamont suggested, loosening his collar, “It’s not so bad.”