2.

The wormhole’s position was still the big secret. Based on fragments from sundry Messages, some thought aliens had come through wormholes, a network that was legend but that many Librarians doubted actually existed. If any aliens had come through a solar system wormhole, they had carefully blurred their tracks. The civilizations that communicated with microwaves or lancing laser beams or maybe wormholes did not give away secrets, especially where the wormhole mouths might be. The SETI Library was under enormous pressure to find its location. The Ythri had deftly disguised their deceleration plume and evaded any discussion of that. Negotiation seemed the only path.

So when the Ythri had demanded a ritual flight before negotiations, the Library sought out Rachel. She had flown often in the smaller voids fusion-dug deep in the Lunar volcanic masses; few Librarians—mostly lazy types—had ever even tied on the arm wings, so…

She breathed a sigh of relief as they mag-elevatored up some dozens of kilometers and then settled in the diplomacy room of the SETI Library. Fraq got his flock in order in a long arc around the table, but only after the humans sat. The just-printed chairs gave ample space for their wings. Fraq took a position at the center of their arc, pointedly sitting opposite Rachel, not the Prefect. Rachel suppressed a smile. How pleasant, to see a perplexed Prefect.

“Ah, um.” Masoul frowned, then got right to the point. “What do you seek?”

Fraq said, “Bloodpride requires we undertake this ancient task. Thanks to your submitting to concordance ritual, we can now tell true. You are dirt-huggers but worthy of station, thus can help us with our search.”

“We fly in sympathy,” the Prefect answered. Rachel saw that the Prefect had learned this ritual from the translator team. Mutual gestures were essential in social intelligences. But with these carnivore aliens, the hard decisions came from the top. Fraq seemed to be in charge, but it was hard to tell.

She wondered if her being female mattered. Maybe not. So she said while the Prefect conferred with the translators, “What are you looking for?”

“The legacy ark,” Fraq said immediately with no diplomatic phrases. His big sharp eyes focused intently and moved swiftly to watch all the faces in the room—like an eagle high in the wind, she thought. “It came here before your species emerged. Many millions of your orbital cycles before.”

“We are used to such time scales at the SETI Library.”

“We have beamed you before, but got no response,” Fraq said.

“Only lately have we come to prosperity,” a Prefect underling ventured. “But we may know of your signals. Much we have received in the past we did not then comprehend.”

“Permit us to unfold our history, then.”

The tale emerged under close questioning. The Ythri had images as well, sweeping in a subtly strange majesty.

The Ythris said they knew of an earlier alien civilization that had used a wormhole to the Sol region, after eons of neglect. Those experiments had sent mass down through the wormhole network, and one had passed momentarily through the center of a star. Wormhole exits could sink into stars, yet survive. This one had passed a fiery mass from the star into other wormhole routes, for the system was complexly interwoven. The flaring plasma came out at the exit near Fraq’s world. The avians had seen it—the telltale crimson burst of violent plasma lighting their sky, tracing out the mouth’s position. A revelation. So they’d built a spacefaring capability to reach it, considerably far out in their own system, in the range of Pluto’s distance from Earth. That had taken centuries.