Second, to show that the Ythrian hunting carnivore life was hard, aloof, clannish.

That was all their way of telling her about themselves. And now I sense them. Intuit them. I know them beyond language.

The Ythris learned through experience, not from libraries. They had now to think of this Ark as a repository of lost history, not as an enemy.

She peered through the glassy bubble suit, reading his shifting feather patterns. “I’m sorry, but you should know more biology. Try experiments! Don’t bring in invasive forms until you understand them. Look”—she gestured wide at the bounty surrounding them—“they’re offering, not invading.”

Fraq’s stiff face slowly eased. Feathers rustled. “I was charged with bringing destruction. My kind regrets that you knew more, and deadened our explosives.”

“We know more about war, unfortunately. Look, that’s over. Question is, what next?”

“You must destroy this.”

“Hey, I’m a Librarian! Don’t destroy, study! Learn!”

“It is a danger too vast to say.” He frowned darkly. “This is a matter of bloodpride.”

“We’ll learn from your mistake. No Furian life gets into Earth’s biosphere. Or those of Mars and Luna.”

“I will… consider it.” More feather riffles, hard to read.

“You’ve already seen how we’ll do it,” Rachel said suddenly, the idea fresh-born and irresistible. “This ship is live now. Let’s redirect it. Send it to Luna, use the Bolo to bring some of its contents down. Carefully take bits of the Furian life into a huge new void, specially dug. Create an alien biosphere isolated by a hundred kilometers of rock.”

Fraq blinked. She could see his Ythrian male rigidity ease a bit, muscles soften, breathing slow. She had been studying his body language and now somehow knew how to work with it. Female intuition… a universal? The endless parallels of evolution seemed to imply it. Convergent evolution of psychology.

She could do this. No Prefect need get in the way, either. Just her and this beautiful alien.

She smiled. Wordless, the two of them hung in the luminous center of ancient legacy, a Library of Life for an entire world now gone forever. They could do it.

Her heart beat faster. She watched his strong wings flex with new energy as the idea took hold. Y’know, he does look like a strange, feathery, majestic, great guy….

8.

She ambled along, headed down through the Prince Pyotr Kropotkin tube. The piped-in surface view along the left wall was interesting—ore plows throwing up plumes that towered over the gray dust, making gorgeous refracting rainbows in the sunlight. She had just left another Ythri event and needed a break from the subtle pressures of being with the bird-flock. The Ythri believed in understanding others by sharing experiences—mostly ones with lots of exercise.

This experience had been a first for them all—black ice skating. They’d made their way down onto the Weissensee, the long, slender lake deep within the Lunar crust. It had formed in the volcanic era, billions of years back, and slowly accumulated water. In the dark, the headlamps of the shivering skaters cast a spiritual glow onto the charcoal ice. They had been warned not to remove their goggles, lest their eyeballs frost over as they sped. Fraq and others of the flock had suitable tailored suits, plus feathers for insulation—since the conditions, by any reasonable standard, were brutal. Still, the skaters were in heaven.