Arcas did not participate in the daily routine as much as they had hoped, often spending his time exploring the landscape by himself. In spite of his background in geology, Margaret did not count on him for anything but necessary communication. The Klikiss robots were providing more outright help to the project.

The most overwhelming job, even after a month of survey, was simply to explore and map out the possibilities. The ruined alien city was so large that merely forming a research plan was a daunting task. Louis wandered through the tunnels and the off-kilter buildings with his recorder, imaging the walls and structures, the pipes, tubing, and long-quiet corroded machinery the Klikiss had left behind.

Early in her studies, Margaret had visited the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde in the North American Southwest on Earth, a fabulous mud-brick metropolis that had survived for many centuries. Rheindic Co’s isolated Klikiss city reminded her of those Native American cliff dwellings. Yet it was also incomprehensibly alien, with architecture based on different aesthetics, walls at the wrong angles, trapezoidal doorways that were not necessarily at floor level.

Now she took scrapings from a wall, finding a corner remarkably free of the numerous markings and ideographs with which the Klikiss covered most surfaces. She wondered if the insectoid race shunned the use of paper or textural recording methods, preferring instead to write their history and mathematics on the permanent walls of their cities.

She’d already run a chemical analysis of samples they had obtained from Klikiss architecture on Corribus and Llaro and Pym, the other Klikiss worlds they had investigated, and she knew the results would be the same here: The aliens created an organic mineral mixture similar to mud, tree pulp, and silica combined with a resinous juice—saliva?—that bound together to form a substance harder and more resilient than steel or concrete, yet absorbent and permanent enough to retain the scribed pictograms, written letters, and mathematical equations.

In camp, Margaret would have all night to ponder the prior records they had compiled. But it was a different experience to be here smelling the dry and dusty air, surrounded by the shadows, and perhaps ghosts, of a long-lost race.

A year ago, in the scarred ruins on Corribus, Margaret had stared at the recorded symbols for days without result. Yet when she’d spent a night inside an empty chamber looking at moonlight shining on the scrawled markings, she finally experienced her breakthrough, recognizing starmap coordinates that correlated with rare neutron stars. The flood of connections from that one realization had led to the Klikiss Torch. Now she needed further insights to achieve another flurry of translations.