Phoebe Oliver said, "Divided by Stars. God, I used to love that show. What was the opening line again? 'The Vardeshi have a saying ...'"

I said, "'A story has a thousand beginnings, but only one ending.'"

Phoebe slapped the glass patio table. "That's it. I knew it had something to do with beginnings."

"What was his name-the blond one?" Aria Lewiston asked. "Sirrus? So hot."

"Sirran," Phoebe corrected her.

Reflexively I glanced at Tenley Fuller, who could be counted upon to skewer any hint of fangirl ardor with withering contempt. She didn't seem to be listening. She was looking at her phone. Her drink, I saw, was virtually untouched.

"They probably don't even say that," Aria said.

Surprised, I said, "No, they do."

Dr. Sawyer paused in the act of topping off my drink to fix me with an intent look. Suddenly self-conscious, I went on, "I thought everyone knew that. It's in the first contact footage."

Phoebe shook her head. "I haven't watched those videos in years. I always liked the fake stuff better anyway."

It was one in a seemingly endless string of perfect afternoons, clear and cool, steeped in the late-autumn sunshine of northern California. I was a year into graduate school and discovering too late that it wasn't what I'd expected: less cerebral, more about gossiping and currying favor with professors. Particularly those with good publication records. Such as Dr. Sawyer, the English expatriate and celebrated linguist on whose patio I was currently sitting, drinking margaritas and talking second language acquisition theory with a handful of favored classmates. Or at least we had been talking theory, right up until a few minutes ago, when the first drink took hold and the conversation drifted sideways on an eddy of nostalgia.

Dr. Sawyer tilted the dregs of the pitcher into his own glass and rose. "Back in a moment."

When he was gone, Tenley angled her phone toward Aria. "Look at this."

"Is that-"

"Sitting at the bar at the Dirty Dog. He literally just bought her a drink."

I looked too. I recognized the woman in the photo at once. It was Mackenzie Fay, one of our classmates, draping herself triumphantly over a blond man who looked vaguely familiar. It took me a moment to place him as an aging B-list actor, safely mainstream. I'd never really understood his appeal, but from the gasps around the table, it was clear that the others did.

Tenley said, "It's only a twenty-minute drive. He might still be there." She stood up and reached for her keys. The others followed, as they tended to do. And just like that, in the impersonal West Coast way which never failed to catch me off guard, they went off in pursuit of something better. Tenley paused on her way down the patio steps. "You coming?" she asked me indifferently.

Annoyed, maybe, at being so clearly relegated to an afterthought, I shook my head. "I'll stay."

Dr. Sawyer, returning a little later with a full pitcher of margaritas, looked only briefly surprised to find me sitting alone at his table. He set the pitcher down and seated himself again. For a few minutes we shared a companionable silence. He traced an idle pattern in the condensation on his glass. He offered me an espresso; I declined. I wondered if he was about to ask me to leave. Through the screen door I could faintly hear his wife, Seline, clinking glassware in the kitchen.

"Avery," he said at last. "Since you're still here. I've got something that might be of interest to you. Wait here while I find it."

I pushed my drink aside and waited. At length he returned with his computer, an older model. He clicked around for a few moments, looking for a file. I surreptitiously checked my phone. No new messages. It was too soon, in any case; Tenley and the others hadn't even arrived at the bar yet.

"Here it is." Dr. Sawyer turned the screen toward me. "Listen to this."

I listened while he played a file, audio only, a few seconds in length. It was a recording of a language. The quality wasn't ideal, but I knew at once that I'd never heard it before. It was clipped, staccato, yet somehow elegant. I liked it. "Again?" I said when it was done.

He played it a second time. I looked from him to the screen and back again: the avuncular white-bearded face over the shabby Hawaiian shirt. There was an intensity to his gaze that I'd never seen there. Finally I said, "It's tonal. But that's all I know. I don't know where it's from."

"Farther than you think," he said simply.

And with those words something clicked into place. I stared at him, doing a rapid mental calculation. Twenty-five years ago he had been in the prime of his career, a professor in the white-hot field of exploratory linguistics at NYU. In New York. Where a certain very newsworthy encounter had taken place.

"Can you play it again?" I said cautiously.

He obliged. Into the silence that followed, staring at his laptop screen, at a file that was indeed more than twenty-five years old, I said, "It's them."

He nodded.

I still couldn't take it in. "The Vardeshi."

"As we call them," he said. "It's a rough approximation. They're polite enough to let it stand. But I would expect no less of them. In person they're tremendously courteous."

I said weakly, "I think I'm going to need that espresso."

The initial encounter between humans and Vardeshi had indeed been universally publicized, as had every incremental step leading up to those first titanic alien footfalls on Earth soil. In 1993, the year of my birth, a long-range satellite picked up an audio transmission originating from outside our solar system. The quality was poor, but the English was impeccable and the message unequivocal: we had been discovered.

"We call ourselves the Vardeshi," said the iconic voice with its light, unplaceable accent. "We are a race of peaceful explorers. You are the first fellow sentients we have encountered among the stars. We have been looking for a long time."

The speaker asked our permission for a small group of Vardeshi representatives to travel to the edge of the Sol system in order to conduct radio communication in real time. The governments of Earth debated for a few weeks before coming to a nearly unanimous resolution in favor of the proposal. From there, events moved with remarkable swiftness. Only a few months elapsed between the receipt of that first transmission and the touchdown of the first Vardeshi ship on a hastily assembled landing platform outside of the UN headquarters in New York City.

The five Vardeshi representatives who stepped out of their spacecraft and into the glare of our flashbulbs looked like humans who had accidentally wandered out of an anime convention in full costume. They had two arms and two legs apiece, properly distributed. They appeared to have two genders. They were a few inches shorter than us, and a fraction slimmer. Their eyes were set a bit wider, their foreheads a bit higher, their ten fingers (and presumably ten toes) elegantly long. Still, any one of them alone could have passed for one of us. It was only in the aggregate that their strangeness became apparent.

They wore simple, practical gray and gold jumpsuits. Their hair ranged in length from a close crop to an elbow-length mane, and in color from brilliant white through dull gray to inky black. Their eyes were gray or blue or black. Their skin was pale, with blue undertones, and it was presumed that their blood was blue as well. Each of them sported an intricate decoration like a tattoo, black overlaid with gold, on the back of his or her right hand. They carried themselves proudly, but their manner was gentle, reserved, almost courtly. Some people found them off-putting, claiming that their resemblance to us placed them squarely in a non-technological uncanny valley. Others-many others-found them very beautiful. And there were those who insisted that the likeness was too good, that they were actually human, and that the whole thing was a smoothly orchestrated hoax.

I didn't think so. I had grown up with the stories and the songs and the shows. My knowledge of them was largely fictional, but I had watched the first-contact footage a thousand times, just like everyone else I knew. It didn't look like a hoax to me. It looked like a handful of tentative, patient, immensely polite tourists visiting a third-world country despite rampant warnings about pickpockets and bad water. If you watched closely, a childhood friend asserted, you could actually see the moment-an exchange of glances almost too brief for the cameras to capture-when they decided they'd made a horrific mistake. A few minutes later, they rose collectively, shook the hands of the diplomats Earth had assembled to meet them, and walked back into their ship. And left.

I had no idea what had prompted their decision. Neither did the governments of Earth, or if they did, they weren't reporting it. By all human accounts the meeting had gone perfectly, a textbook first contact, a diplomat's fantasy. Evidently the Vardeshi had seen something different. Within a few minutes of their vessel's liftoff they sent another audio transmission. It stated with unimpeachable courtesy, but also with conviction, that there would be no more such visits, at least not on any timeline of which a fragmented Earth could conceive.

"We thank you for your welcome," said the original voice in the final transmission we were to receive. "As a people you show remarkable promise, and your world is beautiful beyond our dreaming. Perhaps in the future we will stand beneath your sky again. But for now you are too young, too angry, and too fractured. We cannot share deeply of ourselves with such a volatile race. We will wait for the day when you have conquered the darkness within. Know that we wait for it with eager hearts."

And then silence. Our satellites tracked their ship as it departed from the Sol system. Within an impossibly short time it had passed beyond the detection range of our technology. Humanity was, once again, alone in the dark.

The reactions to our abrupt rejection by the Vardeshi took a variety of forms. A new religion of kindness and tolerance called, inevitably, Vardeshism leapt spontaneously into being and spread like wildfire across the globe. The visitors were hailed as prophets, literal angels of our better nature sent down by God to call us back from the brink of self-annihilation. In immediate response, an American right-wing neo-Christian group began rallying against the aliens, calling them "Var-Devils," a moniker that would have been laughable had it not so decisively proved the Vardeshi correct. The spacefaring industry exploded as companies competed to produce technological marvels that everyone now knew to be achievable: high-speed if not light-speed space travel, long-distance communication that maintained signal quality over immense distances, artificial gravity.

The world's governments rallied together to ready themselves for a potential war, forming a tentative coalition that would eventually become the planet-wide governing body known as the Unified Earth Council. Analysts in underground bunkers worked overtime on the scant data that had been collected on the Vardeshi, trying to reverse engineer an entire people-their anatomy, language, society, politics, and above all military capabilities-from a handful of interactions. While the aliens' conduct toward us had been peaceful, there were many who believed that their brief visit had in fact been a reconnaissance mission, and that they were now arming themselves for an invasion. There could be no doubt of their technological superiority. We had virtually no chance of withstanding an attack, but we prepared as best we could. Invasion drills became commonplace in schools and workplaces. Those people who had already been stocking their basements against an undefined apocalypse redoubled their efforts. Others did a swift reckoning of our resources and those of the Vardeshi and decided to simply enjoy whatever time they had left. If the aliens decided to take Earth from us, they would do it, and there was simply no point in worrying about it.

This particular theory-that the Vardeshi would quickly return to claim our planet with the full strength of their hypothetical fleet-fell out of favor as the years ticked by with absolutely no sign of them.

It was suspected, though never proven, that we sent countless messages into the dark, pleading for another chance. If so, we received no response. The Vardeshi were gone. Their disappearance was as swift and thorough as that of a dream lost upon waking. All our satellites and telescopes, trained outward with a desperate and unprecedented focus, revealed nothing. Not a whisper of an echo. It was like the aftermath of the worst breakup in human history. As a species, we had been ghosted.

Within a few years after the revelation and subsequent disappearance of the enigmatic strangers, daily life on Earth looked much the same as it had before. The Vardeshists, like the devotees of so many other major world religions, settled down to await the return of their messiahs. For most people, the impact of the Vardeshi resonated longest in one facet of life only: the entertainment industry. Virtually as soon as that first audio message was publicized, people were hungry for more, and in the absence of the real thing, they were perfectly willing to settle for fiction. The first wave of television shows, movies, novels, and songs about the Vardeshi proved wildly popular. More soon followed. Many, many fortunes were made by capitalizing on our collective fascination with our cousins from across the stars. The quality of these offerings varied wildly, but it didn't seem to matter. The human appetite for Vardrama was insatiable.

By now, a year into my graduate school career and twenty-five years into their silence, most people-myself included-assumed we'd seen the last of them. It was a bit disappointing, but Earth had undeniably profited from their visit. For one thing, we now knew for certain that we weren't alone: one of the great questions, answered. And our spacefaring industry had developed at an incredible pace. In two and a half decades we had put permanent structures on the Moon, Mars, and Titan, each home to a rotating staff of scientists. We had assembled a collection of functional spacecraft that might be called a fleet and trained personnel to operate them. Our engines were getting faster and our signals clearer by the day. We were still far behind the Vardeshi, laughably far based on the little they had shown us of themselves, but the eyes of humanity had turned collectively outward again. After essentially giving up on our dream of space, we were giving it a second try. That was perhaps their greatest gift to us.

That, and a lot of really great TV. Which had to count for something.

"I don't understand," I said when Dr. Sawyer returned with tiny cups of espresso. "In person? You were there? But you're not in the video . . . Are you?"

He shook his head. "Not in the film released to the public. That one shows the first meeting with the Vardeshi, the highest-profile one, but there were a few other meetings that day. I was asked to sit in on all of them, to provide linguistic expertise, although what I was supposed to have done in the case of a communications breakdown is anyone's guess. I suspect I was only called because the NYU campus was close to the landing site and I could be got in at short notice."

He was being modest, I knew. In 1991 he had collaborated with a software engineer to develop a prototype Spanish-language learning program called TrueFluent. Based on extensive analysis of current Spanish-language media, the program claimed to introduce words and concepts in the most efficient and natural sequence possible, cutting average learning time in half. It was hugely successful: a true revolution in the field of language acquisition. The military contracts alone must have run into the millions. Companion programs for English, Arabic, and a dozen other languages rapidly followed, and Dr. Sawyer might have been justifiably expected to take an early and lavish retirement. Instead, he stayed at NYU for a few more years, then sold his shares in the company to his engineer partner and took a position teaching linguistics at a small, selective graduate school in northern California. In 1993, when the Vardeshi arrived on Earth, he was already that rarest of things: a household name in the field of linguistics. To a United Nations looking at the very real possibility of needing to teach a new language on a planetary scale at extremely short notice, he would have been the obvious choice.

While I was working my way through all that, he sipped his espresso and said reflectively, "To be candid, though, I think there was another reason they brought me in. To make certain the whole thing wasn't a very, very well-executed hoax."

I thought for a moment. "The language. You asked them to speak their own language. To see if they could."

He nodded.

"It seems to me," I said, "that anyone with the technical expertise to fake an entire spacecraft landing on Earth could probably mock up a plausible artificial language."

"Oh, certainly. And I have no doubt there were personnel examining every detail of the landing, and as much of their craft as they allowed us to see. But the language angle would have been an easy one to overlook. After all, they had already demonstrated that they spoke excellent English. There was no real need for them to speak their own tongue in front of us."

"They might have refused out of principle," I said. "Believably, I mean."

"They might have. But they didn't."

"So what did you think?" I asked.

He nodded at the computer. "Why don't you tell me what you think?"

I played the recording again, struck by its musical quality. I had studied Mandarin in college, and the likeness, to my ears at least, was unmistakable. "Do you have any longer samples? Any with multiple speakers?"

He opened another file, this one nearly a minute in length. I played it a few times, then slowed it down to eighty-percent speed to listen again. I started counting on my fingers. "I can hear-what? Seven distinct tones? Eight?"

He smiled slightly. "Nine, actually."

I blew out a dismayed breath. "Wow. There are three different speakers on this one, yes?"

"Correct."

"Their tones all sound effortless. Crystal clear. The vowels are pretty easy . . . The consonants are a little trickier. Actually, some of them sound a little bit like Mandarin. But a human could make them. And did I hear an ingressive? Talking while breathing in?"

His smile deepened. "Yes."

I played it a final time. "I mean . . . Do I think a human could create this recording? Absolutely. Do I think three humans got together and concocted this very technical sample of a fake language and then learned it perfectly? Absolutely not. We talked about conlanging last semester. I know people have built artificial tonal languages for fun, but . . . These guys just sound too good. If you called me in and asked me to construct a fake alien language, I would have gone with something that sounded way more glamorous to a non-linguist and was way easier to speak. I think this is the real deal."

"So do I." He paused. "Do you think you could speak it?"

I played the first recording again. Then I took a stab at repeating it.