Na'ima's eyes traced a seemingly endless visual path between the image on the screen and her books. Each book had been published in the hurried days after those first penultimate shots reached Earth. She gave an exasperated sigh and brushed her a hand through her tightly curled black hair for the thousandth time.
“No one ever told us this would be easy.” Kwassi patted her shoulder. He was half a head taller then her with a gentle smile, strong arms, and a receding hairline. They'd been friends for a few years, even dated awhile back. But dating co-workers just never seemed to work out in her profession. There were just too many late nights like this, banging on her head to try and tease out some meaning.
“Kwassi, I just don't get the whole trimary thing. But there's no possible way they could have a language this simple and build such grand creations.”
He stared at her again with his kind eyes. “Well sure, there are plenty of people who think that. The question is...what does it translate into?”
Like dozens of other linguists around the world, their team at the University of Accra were going over the images from that plaque with a fine-tooth comb. Most people had theorized in the early days that the writing was a trimary, a language based on three symbols much like the binary code used by early computers. The problem was that binary represented other words in English, Spanish, or Chinese. Whereas this code was, to pardon the pun, totally alien.
Na'ima gave out another exasperated sigh. “They haven't come up with any other examples, have they?”
“Na-di girl, you know they would send us the feed straight from the rover if they could. All we got is the plaque and that snippet from the castle.”
The castle had been so-named because it was the only remains which were non-rectangular. Instead of an exact quadrilateral, the lines terminated at four perfectly equal triangles. By now there was little doubt that the shapes were the remains of buildings worn away over the millenia so that only a dozen centimeters or so could be seen above the surface. It was believed that whoever these aliens were, they couldn't have been very large because the shapes ranged from those as large as an average room, to a half dozen meters across at most. The predominant theories were that the MIBs were less then half a meter tall, based on the size of the writing.
“So what do you think about the talk of sending people out there to explore in real time?” She gave Kwassi a look that said she needed a change of subject to rest her weary brain.
“Well I wish we could see it, but sadly they wont be able to send people out there for well over a century. We'll just have to be satisfied with this junk.” He waved half-heartedly at the monitor.
“What'ya mean?”
“Girl? You do' know 'bout the orbit? That place is almost a comet, goes out to over seven billion kilometers and takes another 100 of our years to go back inside the orbit of Neptune.” His look was almost insultingly superior and she was tempted to get mad, if she didn't know him better.
“Of course I know that, you digrosso, but the Taiwanese have the Ion engine now. They can send somethin out to Neptune in a couple weeks. Shouldn't be that hard to reach Pluto even if it IS at it's Apogee.”
“Yeah, but maybe you forgot that Pluto's atmosphere freezes to the surface when it gets out that far.
Everything we're lookin at here,” he waved triumphantly at the books and computer screen, “is burried under three meters of frozen nitrogen and methane. Honestly girl, for an exo-linguist I thought those teachers of yours back in Camaroon would give you a real education.”
She threw an etching pen at him and he dodged it easily. The game was an old one between them and offered just the kind of mental break that Na'ima had been looking for. She got up and threw half-hearted punches at his shoulder. They wrestled for awhile and she finished it off by giving him a hug.
“Wha's that for?” he asked with mild surprise.
“For being just the friend I need in dis.”
As she glanced at the screen over Kwassi's shoulder, something teased her brain and she slowly edged around him to look closer at the screen.
There it was. Staring at her in plain sight. “I can't believe it! I just can't.”
Kwassi moved to look over her shoulder. “Wha's that Na'di?”
“It's been staring us in the face this whold damn time. How could we all have been so stupid?” she rapped her knuckles against her head.
“Girl. Will you tell me wha' got you so rilled up already?”
Now she was the one to speak with an air of superiority. “Kwassi look at the lines. Not the shapes..... the LINES!” They're not the same!”
“Well I'll be.” He barely whispered as he looked closer.
“The shapes themselves might be a trimary, but the small lines within are slightly different. They must mean something to those...MIBs.”