Summary

Pages 106 – 114 (Past) Dr. Banks describes how cooperative the heptapods were, teaching humans their language “without requiring us to teach them any more English” (106). She describes how Colonel Weber and his colleagues considered the implications of that situation while she and other linguists, working at other looking glasses around the world, compared notes. She reveals that the heptapods were all using the same language no matter where their looking glasses were; how difficult it was for all the linguists to figure out their sentence structure; and the various possibilities for how their written language was constructed.

(Narrative present) Dr. Banks recalls a conversation with her daughter who, at that time, was in her late teens. Her daughter insists that Dr. Banks was exactly the same kind of partier that she (the daughter) is, but Dr. Banks comments in narration that she was not. “What I...