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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Story of Your Life, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Language
Free Will
Time
Otherness, Prejudice, and Communication
Parenthood
Summary
Analysis
The narrator (who is later revealed to be Dr. Louise Banks) tells her unborn child (later revealed to be a daughter) that she and her child’s father (the narrator’s husband) have just come back from a date. The narrator and her husband are in their thirties and have been married for two years. They’re slow-dancing on the front porch of their house when the narrator’s husband asks her whether she wants to have a baby. The narrator wants to tell her unborn child “the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.”
Right from the beginning of the story, readers can sense something strange about the narrator’s relationship to time. She seems to be narrating the story to her unborn child and to know with absolute certainty that the child is about to be conceived, though she gives no explanation as to how she could know this future event. The sense of the narrator’s uncanny relationship to time is compounded when she states that her unborn child will “never get [the] chance” to have children. That the narrator can speak with factual resignation about her own child’s permanent childlessness also hints that her strange relationship to time has affected her parental instincts in some way.
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The narrator (Dr. Louise Banks) remembers how her daughter, at age 12, will complain that the narrator only had a child to force them to do chores. She also remembers that this incident will occur “in the house on Belmont Street,” which she will sell “shortly after [her child’s] departure.” By that time, the narrator and someone named Nelson will have moved into a farmhouse, and the child’s father will be living with “what’s-her-name,” a different woman.
Here the narrator clarifies her strange relationship to time, stating clearly that she is remembering future events, though she does not yet explain how such a thing could be possible. Notably, the narrator is not having vague premonitions of the future: she knows concrete details such as how her child will behave at age 12 and the name of the street where they will be living. Again, the narrator uses a dry, factual tone to relate her breakup from her child’s father and to hint at an ominous “departure” for her child, leading the reader to wonder about her emotional state and her relationship to her child.
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Finally, the narrator (Dr. Louise Banks) remembers how the story of her daughter’s conception really began: with aliens visiting Earth, landing their ships in meadows. Tabloids spread rumors about these visits, while the government said very little. Then, the narrator got a phone call requesting a meeting.
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In a flashback, the narrator, whose name is now revealed to be Dr. Louise Banks, meets a man in a military uniform named Colonel Weber and a scholarly-looking physicist named Dr. Gary Donnelly at her office. Colonel Weber plays Louise a recording of alien speech, which sounds to her like a wet dog shaking itself dry. He refuses to tell her anything about when or how the recording was made. He asks her whether she can tell anything about the aliens’ “linguistic properties,” and she tells him that human ears and throats may not be adequate for hearing or speaking the alien language, in which case translators will need a “sound spectrograph.” She also tells him that to determine whether she needs a sound spectrograph, she will need to meet the aliens.
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Colonel Weber refuses to let Louise meet the aliens, but she insists that “someone with training in field linguistics” will simply have to talk to them or learning the aliens’ language will not be possible. Colonel Weber notes that she’s implying the aliens cannot learn human language without speaking directly to humans either. He then asks whether Louise could learn the aliens’ language while withholding knowledge of human language from them. She says they would probably learn some English from her, “but it wouldn’t have to be much if they’re willing to teach.” Colonel Weber says he’ll contact her later, ending the meeting.
Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise says that the phone call to arrange that meeting was the second-most significant one in her life. The most significant one will come from Mountain Rescue. Though estranged from her child’s father at this point, he’ll accompany Louise to the morgue, where she will identify her daughter’s dead body. “You’ll be twenty-five then,” she tells her daughter.
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In a flashback, Louise drives to a farm where the army has built a camp surrounding one of the alien devices that the humans have dubbed “looking glasses.” The looking glasses act like video communication screens linking humans to the aliens in orbit around Earth. The looking glasses have descended to various spots on Earth. A linguist and a physicist are appointed to each looking glass; Louise and Dr. Gary Donnelly have been assigned to this one. They meet in the parking lot and approach the tent that’s covering the looking glass. Military cameras will be recording everything Louise and Gary do, and Louise will have to send the military daily reports estimating “how much English [she] thought the aliens could understand.”
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Louise and Gary enter the tent and see what looks like a large “semicircular mirror.” As they cart in their research equipment, the looking glass becomes gradually transparent. An image of a room appears in the glass, and a “radially symmetric” alien with seven arms and seven eyes enters the room. Because of their seven arms, Gary calls the aliens “heptapods.” Louise gawks as the alien moves without turning, since it has eyes on every side of its body. Another alien subsequently enters as well. Louise is experienced with linguistic fieldwork, but it’s always been a “bilingual procedure”—this procedure will be a “monolingual” one.
Louise and Gary approach the looking glass, and the aliens do too. Louise points to herself and Gary and says the word “human.” She then asks the aliens what they are. After Louise has tried to communicate this way several times, one of the heptapods makes a “fluttering sound.” Then it indicates the other heptapod with one of its arms and makes the same noise. Louise checks her computer and sees “two virtually identical spectrographs representing the fluttering sounds.” She plays back a recording of the fluttering sound while pointing at the heptapod. The heptapod makes another sound that seems to include the first fluttering it made. Louise repeats the same process—pointing, questioning, recording, and replaying—with what she believes to be a piece of furniture in the heptapods’ room.
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On the computer, Louise labels the sound recordings for the words she believes she has isolated: “‘heptapod’ for [flutter1], ‘yes’ for [flutter2], and ‘chair’ for [flutter3].” She adds the heading “Language: Heptapod A.” When Gary asks her why she has named the language “A,” she replies that she wants to differentiate the language they are currently learning from other possible heptapod languages.
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Louise tries to reproduce the heptapod’s word for “heptapod” with her own voice, but the aliens don’t react. She and Gary conclude that they will have to use recordings of the heptapods, and not direct speech, to communicate with the heptapods in their own language.
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In an aside, Louise tells a story about Captain Cook’s sailors trying to communicate with Aboriginal Australians. According to the story, a sailor pointed to a kangaroo and asked an indigenous person what it was. The indigenous person said “Kanguru,” which gave the animal its name in English, although the indigenous person was in fact asking, “What did you say?” This story is probably fictitious, but Louise tells it to her students every year. She knows that the story her undergraduates will really want to hear is the one about the heptapods, which is why many of them will sign up for her class. She’ll show her students the videotapes of her talking to the heptapods in the tent.
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Louise’s favorite source of “language-learning anecdotes” is children. Narrating to her unborn daughter, she recalls when her daughter, at five years old, will ask whether she can be “honored,” that is, “made of honor.” Her daughter will have misunderstood one of her kindergarten classmates talking about how she was her older sister’s maid of honor.
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In a flashback, Louise and Gary visit Colonel Weber in the army camp’s operations center. Louise asks Colonel Weber for a digital camera and a large video screen so that she can display written words to the heptapods. She believes that seeing the heptapods’ language written down will make it easier to learn. Colonel Weber cautions her that they shouldn’t show the heptapods too much human technology, but Louise persists.
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Colonel Weber asks Gary for his thoughts, and Gary backs Louise up. He’s curious whether the heptapods will be able to read words on the humans’ video screens, since the looking glass technology is completely different. Colonel Weber agrees to let them use additional equipment.
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Narrating to her daughter, Louise describes an evening when she’ll wait for her date, Nelson, to pick her up. Louise’s 16-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend Roxie will wait with her. Louise will ask them not to provide commentary on Nelson when he arrives. But Louise’s daughter will instruct Roxie to ask her about the weather, planning to respond with coded commentary on Nelson.
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When Nelson does arrive, Roxie will ask about the weather, and Louise’s daughter will say that “it’s going to be really hot.” Nelson will say that he thought the weather was going to be cool, but Louise’s daughter will assure him that she can sense otherwise. As they walk to the car, Nelson will ask Louise what was going on, and she’ll call it a “private joke.”
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In a flashback, Louise and Gary set up the additional equipment Colonel Weber has granted them and begin projecting written words in English to the heptapods as they speak them. The heptapods set up their own writing equipment and do the same. Louise determines that the heptapods use logographic writing rather than alphabetic, which disappoints her. She points to the heptapods’ various body parts, and they give her the words for each one. She also asks the heptapods for their names, but as she cannot pronounce them, she begins to call the two aliens Flapper and Raspberry.
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Louise asks Gary to perform various actions so that she can elicit the words for various verbs from the heptapods. The heptapods do the same, one acting out verbs, the other speaking and writing words. Louise notices that in the written form of the heptapods’ language, they write “a single logogram instead of two separate ones” for the word “heptapod” and the verb the heptapod subject is performing.
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Louise tries to elicit some subject-verb-object sentences from the heptapods by making Gary eat an apple and some bread while asking the heptapods to describe it. In response, Raspberry eats some alien food while Flapper speaks and writes a description. Louise notices that the different logograms for the heptapod, the food, and the action are written “as if they had been melted together” into a single word.
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Louise, frustrated, explains to Gary that the heptapods’ written language does not separate words. Instead, they write sentences by “joining the logograms for the constituent words,” which they do by “rotating and modifying” the logograms. This fact will make writing the heptapods’ language much more difficult for humans. Gary thinks it’s interesting that the heptapods can read a word no matter how it’s rotated, which he thinks is probably because their bodies are the same on all sides.
The heptapods continue to teach Louise and Gary their language. Louise meets via video conference with the researchers stationed at different looking glasses, who are learning from other heptapods. The researchers’ video screens seem “primitive” compared to the looking glasses, which creates the surreal sense that Louise’s colleagues are even farther away from her than the aliens are. The researchers aren’t ready to ask the heptapods about the physics of their technology yet, so they stick to discussing language. The heptapods at all of the different looking glasses use the same language, so the researchers can compare notes.
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The heptapods’ writing is particularly confusing because it’s nonlinear and the words look like graphic designs. This language seems too primitive given the heptapods’ sophisticated technology. Louise lands on three possible conclusions: the heptapods are hiding their real writing system, they’re using a different species’ technology, or their nonlinear system really is “true writing.”
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise remembers when her daughter, then a junior in high school, will tell Louise about how drunk she got at a party the night before. When Louise looks disapproving, her daughter will claim that Louise “did the exact same things” as a high schooler. Although Louise did not, in fact, do those things as a high schooler, she’ll avoid telling her daughter that. Instead, she’ll caution her daughter to never drink and drive. She’ll also ponder how different her daughter is from her, “not a clone” of her mother—Louise couldn’t have made her daughter by herself.
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In a flashback, Louise sees Gary at the camp around the looking glass and runs to tell him what she has realized: the heptapods use a “semasiographic writing system.” She gives the example of the phrase “NOT ALLOWED” written in English and a circle with a line through it—both mean the same thing, but only the former is “a representation of speech.” The printed words are glottographic, while the symbol is semasiographic. Louise shows Gary how, in the heptapod language, a word’s meaning depends on its inflection and its logogram’s orientation relative to other logograms. Essentially, the heptapods’ written system has a visual grammar that’s completely distinct from their spoken language’s grammar.
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Gary asks Louise whether humans have any such writing systems, and Louise tells him the only human equivalents are “specialized” systems such as those for writing “mathematical equations.” Because the written language is entirely different from the spoken language, Louise dubs the written language “Heptapod B.”
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Gary asks Louise why the heptapods would have two entirely different languages for speaking and writing. She speculates that the answer to that question would reveal a lot about the heptapods. Gary notes that, given the differences between the two languages, Heptapod B will not actually help the researchers decode Heptapod A. Louise agrees but resolves to learn both. She also notes that learning Heptapod B will help in understanding the aliens’ mathematics. Gary expresses impatience at the slowness of the research, and Louise smiles and says, “patience is a virtue.”
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise says that when her daughter is six, they will plan to go with the daughter’s father to a conference in Hawaii. Louise’s daughter, impatient, will pack her toys well in advance and ask to put some in Louise’s luggage. Louise will tell her that she doesn’t need to pack so many toys, as she will enjoy Hawaii without them. Louise’s daughter will complain about waiting for the trip, and Louise will respond, “Sometimes it’s good to wait […] The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.”
In a flashback, Louise proposes the term “semagram” to describe words in Heptapod B, since “logogram” would imply that the written words represent spoken words. She notes that Heptapod B contains no punctuation or clear syntax; instead, the heptapods combine semagrams into what are essentially large, intricate drawings. Louise compares the “biggest sentences” in Heptapod B to “psychedelic posters,” calling them “hypnotic.”
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise describes a photograph of her daughter from her college graduation, wearing sunglasses and posed sassily. Having Nelson, the daughter’s father, and “what’s-her-name” at the graduation ceremony will be distracting, but that won’t matter much. Louise will feel astonished that her daughter, whom she remembers as a young girl playing dress-up, is now a college graduate. The daughter will go to work as a financial analyst after graduation. Louise won’t understand her daughter’s ambitions regarding money, but her own mother didn’t understand Louise’s ambitions either. Louise concludes, “You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for.”
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In a flashback, the linguists working with the heptapods try to help human mathematicians and physicists communicate with the heptapods about the aliens’ math and physics. The heptapods have difficulty understanding anything more difficult than “basic arithmetic” in human math and “anything remotely abstract” in physics.
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Meanwhile, the linguists working with the heptapods discover that Heptapod A, the aliens’ spoken language, has “free word order.” Heptapod B, the written language, can express grammatical relationships according to variations in the drawing of semagrams, or symbols’ physical relationships to one another. Despite the progress the linguists are making in learning Heptapod A and Heptapod B, they cannot get the heptapods to say anything more informative about why they are visiting Earth than that they want “to see.” The heptapods could be scientists or tourists. The State Department cautions the researchers not to reveal too much about humanity, which is easy because the heptapods don’t ask questions.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise describes a time when her daughter is 13 and Louise will take her to the mall. Louise’s daughter will ask for Louise’s credit card so that she can shop alone, but Louise will refuse. Her daughter will ask instead that Louise walk at a distance from her, so that her friends won’t know she’s shopping with her mother. When Louise protests, her daughter will say she doesn’t want to be seen with her mother. Louise will refuse to go along with her daughter’s plan, at which point her daughter will throw a tantrum. Louise muses that her daughter used to like shopping with her; it will be difficult to keep up with her ever-changing phases.
In a flashback, Louise sits at her desk examining a sentence of Heptapod B she has tried to write. Gary enters and tells her that the researchers in Illinois have had a breakthrough communicating with the heptapods about physics and begins explaining to her what it is. First, he draws her a diagram of light moving from a point A in the air to a point B in water; the line the light takes changes as it hits the water. Then Gary tells her that despite the change in direction, the light has taken “the fastest possible route” between point A and point B.
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Louise asks for an explanation. Gary adds to his diagram, drawing a line from point A to point B, and tells her that this second line is shorter in distance but would take longer for light to traverse, because “light travels more slowly in water than it does in air, and a greater percentage of this path is underwater.” Then he draws a third line from point A to B, where the path is longer but less of it is underwater, and notes that this path also takes more time. He concludes, “the route that the light ray takes is always the fastest possible one. That’s Fermat’s Principle of Least Time.”
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This principle is the first advanced physics communication that the heptapods have understood. Louise asks why the linguists aiding the physicists in communicating with the heptapods weren’t briefed on Fermat’s Principle of Least Time, and Gary explains that the principle requires advanced calculus, so the physicists didn’t guess that it would be the first breakthrough.
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Louise asks, “You think the heptapods’ idea of what’s simple doesn’t match ours?” Gary says yes, and he speculates that heptapods may have different ideas than humans do about what is complex in math. Louise asks him whether the breakthrough with Fermat’s Principle of Least Time will be helpful in other areas. He says yes, because the principle belongs to a category of physical principles he calls variational principles. Fermat’s Principle is incomplete: sometimes “light follows a path that takes more time than any of the other possibilities. It’s more accurate to say that light always follows an extreme path, either one that minimizes the time taken or one that maximizes it.”
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Because Fermat’s Principle of Least Time is mathematically similar to other variational principles, Gary explains that this breakthrough could help humans understand heptapod math. Then, unexpectedly, he asks Louise to dinner, and she says yes.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise remembers that when her daughter first learns to walk, Louise will feel the pain of her daughter’s falls “like it’s [her] own.” She also remembers the joy she’ll feel when her daughter laughs, which will make her feel “like a fountain, or a wellspring.”
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In a flashback, the human mathematicians and physicists working with the heptapods begin to understand heptapod math and physics. They discover that physics concepts the humans consider advanced are fundamental to the heptapods. Louise ponders what it means that what is advanced to humans is simple to the heptapods, and vice versa.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise says that the daughter’s eyes will be blue like her father’s, not brown like Louise’s. She narrates a time when her daughter, then 15, will complain about her father’s questions regarding her boyfriends. Louise will tell her daughter that it’s natural for her father to react this way to her dating. Louise’s daughter will ask how long her maturation will bother her father, and Louise will counter that her (Louise’s) maturation still bothers her own father.
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In a flashback, Louise video conferences with Cisneros, a linguist working with the looking glass in Massachusetts. Cisneros wonders whether the heptapods write the semagrams in a “particular order” while drawing one of their sentences. To find out, Louise requests that Flapper and Raspberry show her how they write sentences instead of just showing her the completed semagram. After they comply, she reviews the tape. She picks out a portion of the semagram that describes the heptapods’ planet’s moons, chemical composition, and topography. When spoken, it translates literally to “inequality-of-size rocky- orbiter rocky-orbiters related-as-primary- to-secondary.”
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Louise finds that the first line Flapper drew travels across several different semagrams in the completed sentence, which suggests that Flapper knew “how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.” The other strokes are also interconnected—removing one would change the whole sentence.
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In an aside, Louise recounts a joke by a female comedian about why she’s hesitant to have children. In the joke, the comedian asks a friend who is a mother what would happen if she had children and, later, the children blame her for everything. The friend replies, “What do you mean, if?” This is Louise’s favorite joke.
In a flashback, Gary and Louise are eating dinner together at a Chinese restaurant that they’ve started going to regularly. She asks him about his Heptapod B practice. When he fails to respond, she accuses him of having given up. He admits that he has. When Louise points out that learning Heptapod B would help him communicate with the heptapods about physics, he counters that since the physicists’ “breakthrough” with Fermat’s Principle of Least Time, he can “get by with just a few phrases.” Louise admits that she is no longer trying to learn heptapod math, and she and Gary declare themselves even.
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Louise tells Gary that Fermat’s Principle of Least Time still feels strange to her. Gary tells her it’s because whereas we usually think about physics principles “in terms of cause and effect,” Fermat’s Principle of Least Time “describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms,” the goal being either to minimize or maximize the time it takes to travel a path between two points. Louise takes out a pen, draws a diagram of a ray of light, and asks how the light fulfills its goal. Gary tells her that the light would have to calculate how long each possible path would take. Louise notes that to calculate the possible paths, the light “has to know just where its destination is” before it begins its journey. Gary agrees. Louise realizes what Fermat’s Principle of Least Time reminds her of.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise recalls that her daughter, at 14, will ask for help on her homework. Specifically, Louise’s daughter will ask her mother what special term for a “win-win” situation her father used previously, so that she can use it in a report. Louise won’t be able to remember and will suggest that her daughter call her father. Reading her daughter’s face, Louise will note that she and her father have been fighting recently. Her daughter will ask Louise to make the call instead, but Louise will refuse. Her daughter will blame her father and Louise’s divorce for her inability to get the help she wants. Louise will repeat that she can’t remember the special term, and her daughter will storm off.
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In a flashback, Louise learns over time to write Heptapod B. She becomes able to write complete sentences without planning them out in advance, despite the complex interconnections of the semagrams. She notices that learning Heptapod B is influencing her thinking. Usually, her thoughts involve “speaking in an internal voice.” She notes that her internal voice usually speaks English but doesn’t always; for example, between high school and college, she entered a Russian immersion program during which her internal voice spoke Russian. She muses that she’s always found curious the “idea of thinking in a linguistic yet non-phonological mode.” She uses as an example a friend of hers who thinks in American Sign Language, a “manually coded” language.
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Due to her practice in Heptapod B, Louise is now seeing her thoughts as written semagrams. She notes that rather than progressing linearly, her thoughts in Heptapod B “appear fully formed, articulating complex ideas all at once.” Despite this, Louise does not perceive herself to be thinking more quickly. Instead, she finds herself in a “meditative state” thinking about how argument, reason, and thought are nonlinear.
Louise and Gary attend a lecture by a man named Hossner, an employee of the U.S. State Department, who is speaking to the researchers about U.S.-heptapod relations. Gary finds the man tedious. Hossner argues that while the heptapods do not seem to want to conquer Earth, the researchers still need to determine the heptapods’ motives for visiting. That way, humans can offer the heptapods what they want, whether it’s to evangelize, research, or extract resources, in exchange for whatever humans may want from the aliens. Hossner takes care to note that the humans and heptapods could find themselves in a win-win situation. Gary says sarcastically, “You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game? […] Oh my gosh.”
When her daughter is 14, Louise will recall the special term for a win-win situation that her daughter’s father used and that her daughter wanted to use in her report: a “non-zero-sum game.” Her daughter will thank her. Louise will note that she must have learned something from her daughter’s father after all. Her daughter will hug Louise.
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In a flashback to Hossner’s lecture, Gary calls Louise’s name. She apologizes for her distraction and asks him what he said. He asks Louise what she thinks of Hossner, and Louise replies that she would rather not think about him. Gary counters, “I’ve tried that myself: ignoring the government, seeing if it would go away. It hasn’t.” Hossner asks the researchers whether they’ve been able to determine why the heptapods came to Earth or what they want. Louise mutters sarcastically that the researchers never thought of that.
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Hossner takes questions. A linguist named Burghart working on a looking glass in Fort Worth tells Hossner that the heptapods have already said they came to Earth to observe. Hossner refuses to believe that that could be the truth. Gary asks Louise to wake him up if Hossner says anything interesting, and Louise replies that she was about to make the same request of Gary.
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Louise thinks about the difference between human and heptapod physics and the difference between human and heptapod viewpoints more broadly. She concludes that humans like to think of things in terms of cause and effect and “at a moment in time,” whereas the heptapods like to think of things in terms of goals and “over a period of time.” To inhabit the heptapods’ goal-oriented mindset, you need to know your endpoint before you begin. She muses that she is beginning to comprehend the heptapod viewpoint.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise recalls her daughter, at age three, asking why. Louise will tell her daughter that it’s her bedtime. Her daughter will point out that she isn’t sleepy and try to select a video to watch instead. Louise will tell her daughter that even though she isn’t sleepy, it’s bedtime. When her daughter asks why again, Louise will reply, “Because I’m the mom and I said so.” As she hauls her protesting daughter to bed, Louise will conclude that despite her high-minded intentions to do otherwise, she’s acting just like her own mother.
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Louise wonders whether you can know the future. She notes that most people conclude it may be scientifically possible but still reject the possibility because of its implications for free will. To explain the relationship between knowing the future and free will, Louise imagines a woman reading something she calls the Book of Ages, a hypothetical book including the story of everything that has happened and will happen. The woman reads her immediate future, which involves winning a large bet on horseracing. To thwart the prediction, the woman decides not to place the bet.
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Most people believe that the woman’s decision not to bet results in a paradox, because the Book of Ages is supposed to be infallible, and yet the woman reading it has the free will to act contrary to what she reads about her future. Ergo, perfect knowledge of the future cannot coexist with free will. Most people believe free will exists because they have experienced exercising their own free will. Louise, however, is beginning to wonder whether knowing the future would give the woman who read the Book of Ages “a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would.”
In a flashback, Louise enters Gary’s office and asks him to dinner. He suggests they go to his house and offers to cook. When Louise asks him whether he can cook, he tells her he can make a single recipe, but it’s tasty. She agrees.
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On the way to Gary’s house, they stop at a market to buy ingredients. In the market, Louise sees a wooden salad bowl. She remembers that when her unborn daughter is three, the daughter will knock the salad bowl off the counter. Although Louise will try to catch hold of the bowl, it will fall on her daughter’s head and require a visit to the emergency room. In the market, Louise takes the bowl and thinks, “The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead, it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.” She tells Gary she could use the bowl. He notes that it’s a good thing they stopped at the market, and Louise agrees.
Louise meditates on the sentence “The rabbit is ready to eat.” She notes that, depending on context, it might mean either that a rabbit has been successfully cooked or that it’s a pet rabbit’s dinner time. Then she meditates on a ray of light changing directions as it moves from air to water. Humans see the change of direction in terms of cause and effect: the move from air to water causes the light to change directions. Heptapods see the change of directions in terms of goal-oriented behavior: the ray of light is taking the shortest possible path from point A to point B. Louise compares the laws of physics to a sentence that can be interpreted in two different, legitimate ways. Humans interpret the laws linearly and in terms of cause and effect, and heptapods interpret them simultaneously and in terms of goals.
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Louise describes a recurring dream about her daughter’s death. In the dream, Louise is rock-climbing and carrying her toddler-aged daughter in a backpack. Her daughter climbs out of the backpack, and though Louise screams at her to stop, the daughter continues climbing and eventually falls. After the daughter falls, the dream shifts to the morgue, where Louise is identifying her 25-year-old daughter’s body.
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In a flashback, Gary asks Louise whether she’s okay. They’re in bed together, and Louise has just woken Gary by sitting up suddenly. Louise tells him that she was just disoriented because she briefly didn’t remember where she was. Gary replies that they can sleep at her place the next time. Louise kisses him and tells him that his place is fine. They go to sleep.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise remembers that when her daughter is three, she and Louise will be climbing stairs together. Louise will hold her daughter’s hand tightly. Her daughter will wriggle out of Louise’s grip and insist she can climb by herself. Louise will remember her recurring nightmare about her daughter falling to her death. Recalling all the times similar incidents occurred during her daughter’s childhood, Louise wonders whether her own protectiveness will cause her daughter’s lifelong desire to climb, which will ultimately lead to her fatal accident.
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In a flashback, Louise writes an enormous sentence in Heptapod B and then examines it. She realizes that the heptapods write the way they do because their “simultaneous mode of consciousness” is better suited to writing that can be perceived in a single instant. The heptapods prefer writing to speech because speech is linear, not simultaneous. Louise also realizes that Heptapod A’s peculiar grammar is a result of the heptapods’ straining against “the confines of sequential speech.”
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Gary enters Louise’s office and tells her that Colonel Weber is coming. Louise recalls that she is supposed to be acting as a translator between Colonel Weber, Flapper, and Raspberry soon. Then Gary closes the door and kisses Louise. She asks him whether he’s trying to make her feel better, and he replies that he’s trying to make himself feel better. She jokingly accuses him of joining the heptapod research team to get with her. He says, “Ah, you see right through me,” to which she replies, “You better believe it.”
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise remembers how she will breastfeed her daughter when her daughter is a month old. She notes: “The word ‘infant’ is derived from the Latin for ‘unable to speak,’ but you’ll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: ‘I suffer.’” Louise will appreciate how her infant daughter is able to communicate either her pain or her joy perfectly. She’ll also note that her daughter will seem not to remember the possibility of unhappiness when she is happy or the possibility of happiness when she is unhappy: “NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense. In many ways, it’s an enviable state.”
Louise muses that while the heptapods don’t have what humans would call free will, they’re nevertheless willingly acting to bring about the futures they know are going to occur. She compares free will to a “famous optical illusion” of a drawing that looks either like a young woman or an old one depending on one’s perspective. Though the idea of free will is a legitimate way to interpret events from a human viewpoint, it vanishes from the heptapod viewpoint. Louise also notes that her facility with Heptapod B has removed her free will: she can only do what she already remembers doing. This loss of free will also prevents her from telling anyone about her ability to remember the future.
In a flashback, Louise watches a videotape in which the linguist Burghart is translating a conversation between some heptapods and a human diplomat. The diplomat is trying to explain human altruism to the heptapods. Louise thinks that an outside observer might wonder why the heptapods bother to participate in the conversation if they already know what is going to happen. Louise answers this imaginary outside observer by pointing out that for some kinds of speaking, such as promises and wedding ceremonies, it doesn’t matter whether people already know what is going to be said—it still has to be said, or “the ceremony didn’t count.” She concludes that all kinds of speaking are, for heptapods, like promises or wedding ceremonies: “instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize.”
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Louise remembers that she will read the story of Goldilocks and the three bears to her daughter. Louise will change different part of the story, and her daughter will insist that she stick to what is written down. Louise will ask her daughter why she wants to hear the story if she already knows what is going to happen. Her daughter will reply, “Cause I wanna hear it!”
In a flashback, Louise is talking with Gary and Colonel Weber in Colonel Weber’s office. She explains to Colonel Weber that the heptapods are going to give the humans something, and the humans are going to give the heptapods something, but the heptapods will not say what they are giving in advance of the transaction. Colonel Weber asks whether the transaction counts as gift-giving, and Louise says that the humans shouldn’t assume so. As she already knows what she and Colonel Weber are going to say, she feels as though she is “performing in a play.”
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Colonel Weber asks whether humans can ask for something specific. Louise tells him that the heptapods won’t ask for something specific from the humans, but the humans can ask for something, though the heptapods still won’t say what they’re giving in advance of the transaction. He asks whether requesting something specific will make it more likely that the humans get what they want. Louise says she doesn’t know but thinks it’s unlikely. Finally, he asks whether the value of the gift the humans give the heptapods will affect the value of the gift the heptapods give the humans. Louise says no: “the value of the exchanged items is irrelevant.” Gary comments that he wishes his relatives took that attitude to gift-giving.
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Colonel Weber asks Gary whether he has found out anything additional about heptapod physics. Gary says no: the heptapods will share how they mathematically represent physics concepts that humans represent to them, but nothing more. Colonel Weber seems displeased; he suggests that he’ll talk to the State Department about arranging a “gift-giving ceremony.” Louise tells him she thinks that’s a good idea.
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Louise muses that while Heptapod B has changed the way she thinks, she still doesn’t think entirely like an alien: “My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.” While her memories used to be solely of the past and progress in a linear fashion, she began to remember the entirety of her future up to the point of her death once she became proficient in Heptapod B. Usually, the changes in her consciousness amount simply to remembering the future as well as the past. But occasionally, she “experience[s] past and future all at once; [her] consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time.” She notes that this half-century-long period includes her daughter’s entire life, from birth to death.
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In a flashback, Louise writes out a sentence in Heptapod B suggesting the heptapods begin the gift exchange. Raspberry agrees. This is the second gift exchange Louise has participated in. She, the heptapods, Gary, Colonel Weber, the linguist Burghart, and other researchers are present. The humans present the heptapods with pictures of the Lascaux cave paintings. There have been previous gift exchanges, in which the heptapods merely repeated information about humans that the researchers had already told them. This infuriated the State Department, but the researchers remain hopeful that the heptapods might reveal scientific innovations.
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At this particular exchange, the humans can’t immediately understand what the heptapods are presenting them in return. Gary speculates from the equations involved that it could be “materials technology.” In response, Colonel Weber says, “Maybe we’re finally getting somewhere.” Louise thinks that she would prefer a different kind of gift: “I didn’t want the heptapods to give us new technology, because I didn’t want to see what our governments might do with it.”
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Louise examines Raspberry for any signs of what she already knows is about to happen, but she finds none. Colonel Weber orders Louise and Burghart to set up another gift exchange. Louise and Burghart engage in small talk. Because they both speak Heptapod B and can remember the future, Louise compares their conversation to “the carefully bland exchanges of spies who meet in public, but never break cover.” Louise writes to the heptapod Raspberry requesting another meeting, but Raspberry replies that the heptapods are leaving the looking glasses. Colonel Weber demands to know what’s going on, and Louise explains what Raspberry said. Colonel Weber orders Louise to get clarification from Raspberry, but Raspberry has already left the looking glass.
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The looking glass goes blank. Colonel Weber again demands to know what’s going on. Gary approaches the looking glass, touches it, and suggests that they’ve just witnessed “a demonstration of transmutation at a distance.” Louise hears someone approaching. A soldier runs into the looking-glass tent and hands Colonel Weber a walkie-talkie.
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Narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise recalls how she will see her daughter shortly after her birth in the hospital. Her daughter will look strangely small to her. She will see her daughter kick and remember feeling that kick from the inside while she was pregnant. She will muse that she would be able to recognize her daughter anywhere and repeat the words she will eventually use to identify her daughter at the morgue: “Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.”
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Still narrating to her unborn daughter, Louise recalls how, after the gift exchange with the Lascaux cave paintings, all the heptapods simultaneously left orbit around Earth. Human research into the looking glasses found nothing; after the heptapods left, the looking glasses became merely “sheets of fused silica, completely inert.” The apparently promising information the heptapods shared in the final gift exchange will turn out to be information humans had already discovered. The humans never figured out the reasons behind the heptapods’ visit to Earth, despite some humans’ ability to think in Heptapod B.
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Louise wishes that she better understood Heptapod B, so that she could “immerse herself fully in the necessity of events,” but she acknowledges that her understanding of Heptapod B has stalled with the aliens’ departure. Nevertheless, she notes that meeting the heptapods “changed [her] life,” as it led to meeting her daughter’s father and learning Heptapod B.
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Louise’s mind returns to the present moment, when she is slow-dancing with her unborn daughter’s father on the front porch of their house. She acknowledges to herself that she is going to lose both her daughter’s father and her daughter. She thinks: “From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?” Her unborn daughter’s father asks her whether she wants to have a baby. Louise agrees, and they walk inside hand in hand.
