Summary

Pages 141 – 145 (Past) Dr. Banks begins a conversation with the heptapods, narration revealing that this is the latest of several “exchanges” of the sort proposed in the previous section. Some of these, narration also reveals, have resulted in the heptapods simply returning information they had received, but others have resulted in receipt of scientific information and, at one point, the revelation that the heptapods had found the humans more like themselves than any other species they had encountered. There has been no potentially military or life-altering scientific revelations, something about which Dr. Banks is glad: she “didn’t want to see what our governments might do with it” (142). Shortly after the exchange begins, the heptapod’s screen goes blank. Weber orders Dr. Banks and a fellow linguist (Burghart who, Banks comments, is as fluent in Heptapod B as she is) to restart the conversation. “Everything...