The Ythris had previously gone through their own troubles—long eras of decline caused by resource losses. One such was as Earth had suffered in the fossil fuel overshoot, amid a terrible era of warming air and biting acid oceans. These similar events had hobbled mankind and the Ythri alike.

Far back in their history, in their founding tragedy, they had experienced some sort of biological catastrophe that had nearly driven the Ythri to extinction. More recently, in their first industrial age, the Ythri had suffered metals loss, since vital rare earths and ores were scanty in their planetary crust. Recovering, they had resolved to harvest fresh supplies from their own asteroid belt. As had humans.

After all those millennia of suffering had come the slow Ythri revival. Through the long centuries of poverty they’d lost much of their historical legacy. Cities burned or collapsed in hardship, and with them their libraries. Especially they did not know any longer where the wormhole mouth was in their sky. But now they did have a hard-won, simple interplanetary civilization. When the jetting solar plasma marked the way, they could fly to where the virulent plasma glow told them the ancient wormhole mouth was. Their greatest lost heritage still orbited unused at the edges of their solar system, deep in the cold vaults of time.

“This is our destiny, a bloodpride age-old,” Fraq said solemnly. “We learned much of the wormhole network past, as well, in stacked addings.”

Now they could pursue an ancient goal—finding the Ark of Meaning launched by a primeval civilization, the Furians. The earlier Ythri culture had heard of it in the dying messages sent out in microwave—an attempt to pass on the genetic roots of life around a forlorn world now gone forever, devoured by the expansion of its sun into its red-giant phase. That planet had fried, then been swallowed up in its last vast agony, by the plasma halo that wrapped it in a glowing funeral shroud.

“They launched many ships,” Fraq said. “Your system was blessed to receive one, long before your kind evolved.”

“So one is here?” Rachel asked, interrupting Fraq’s long tale. The Prefect frowned, stayed silent at her impoliteness.

“Bloodpride demands it,” Fraq said. “Our foremothers said to find the Ark was a Prime Need for life itself—to save a legacy of another evolution.”

“Then it’s like our SETI Library,” Rachel said. “Continuity with the long past. To understand what could be in our future.”

“You do not naturally fly,” Fraq said. “But you ken the deep, long truths.”

“Perhaps we can share where this Ark might be?” the Prefect said.

“If you take us there, assuredly,” Fraq said. “Our ship cannot manage such a large seeking hunting vessel.”

“Why?” the Prefect asked.

“We fear it.”

3.

Decades had passed, she knew, since this stone-faced Prefect had worked with the cryofiles. Rachel had spent years fathoming the shadowy labyrinths of those data-forests.

The SETI Library held all transmissions received from the Galactic Complex. That host of innumerable societies had largely flourished long before humanity was born on the dusty plains of Africa. Within those multidimensional databases, Rachel customarily spent her days. After the initial Ythri arrival, she had immersed herself in the Library. The SETI files were a bewildering, largely impenetrable resource. The grandest possible intellectual scrap heap, she sometimes thought. But it could yield priceless ore.