Nyota Uhura went to her quarters and sat on the edge of her bunk and did not turn on the light.
After a while she got up and went to the shelf above the desk, where she kept the things that were hers, because in a life spent inside a metal box the things that are yours become important, and there are never very many of them.
A photograph of her mother. A lyre. And a small carved wooden bird from a market on Argelius, which she had bought on shore leave in 2266, in the rain, laughing, with a man who had insisted on haggling for it in a language he did not speak and had gotten cheated and been delighted about it.
She picked it up.
It was still there. The bird was still on the shelf where she had put it, and she could still feel the grain of it under her thumb, and there was still the small chip in the tail where she had dropped it in a corridor in 2267 and sworn in Swahili and been overheard.
She could remember the sentence exactly.
Lieutenant, that man just sold me a chicken, and I want you to know that I have never been happier.
She could remember the rain, and the awning, and the smell of the market, which had been fish and rope and something sweet. She could remember laughing so hard she had put her hand on his arm.
She could not remember his voice.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the bunk and the bird in her hands and tried, deliberately, the way she would work a corrupted signal, to recover it. She could not. She had the words. She had the rhythm, and the exact place where the joke turned. She could have transcribed it into any of thirty-seven languages.
There was nothing behind it. There was no sound.
Nyota Uhura, who had pulled human voices out of ion storms and subspace static and the wreckage of dying ships, who had once identified a distress call by the shape of its grief, sat on the floor of her quarters with a piece of carved wood in her hands and understood that she had lost the one signal that had ever mattered to her.
And she cried, for the first time in six years, for about ten minutes, with the lights off.
Then she got up, washed her face, and got out a padd.
And she wrote:
ENTRY 1. He bought a wooden bird on Argelius and he was cheated and he was delighted about it and he said, Lieutenant, that man just sold me a chicken and I want you to know that I have never been happier.
She looked at it.
I cannot hear him say it anymore. I am writing it down before I lose the words too.
She saved it.
She sat in the dark for a while. Then she wrote:
ENTRY 2.