Summary

Pages 129 – 134 (Contemplation) In a narrative style that becomes more contemplative than narrative (that is: in a style reflective of her experience in thinking in Heptapod B), Dr. Banks describes coming to understand that while human beings tended to look at experiences sequentially, and as meaning emerging from that chronological sequence, the heptapods looked at experiences almost from outside time, that “… one had to know the initial and final states to meet [a] goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated” (130).

(Narrative present) Dr. Banks, addressing her daughter, refers to a conversation when her daughter was three, and she (Dr. Banks) found herself speaking in the same way as her mother, something she had long promised herself she would never do.

(Contemplation) Dr. Banks muses on what it might mean, or involve, to know the future. She imagines a woman...