He’s running the descents because that’s where the action is. Not behind a desk.

A further search turned up Zuminski’s credentials. A doctorate in exobio from Orbital Caltech, some deep-space operations work early in his career, three dozen research papers. He had then made several expeditions into the yawning underlayers of Deep Mars, where steam vents of sulfuric acid made exploration very dangerous—yet the Mat was there as well. Somehow the man had arranged to run things here, without getting pulled away from the fieldwork and getting trapped in layers of paper-shuffling bureaucracy. That belied a cunning and resolve she had not encountered before, with the possible exception of the Prefects at the Library.

I had no idea…. So his working-class guy act had been a convincing performance—or else he’d actually started out that way, and risen by sheer ability. Either way, time to be cautious. The greatest advantage you could give an opponent was to underestimate him.

And here he came. Having covered the official part, Zuminski let the discussion shift to the senior biologist. Hassan was a short, intense man with penetrating blue eyes and sandy hair. He stepped them through the suit cameras’ record of “the flooding,” as they had decided to call it. Rachel learned nothing more, beyond the white-eyed surprise and outright fear in the faces of some Descent Team members. Apparently, the last decade had seen very little real communication from the Marsmat, and the team had lapsed into a routine. The flooding was new, and the plain implication everybody drew was that Fraq was the cause.

Next, Hassan opened with some speculations. His broad face wrinkled with concern, eyes dancing. Plainly this was his favorite area—the unknown. After a century of study, attention had focused on the biology of the Marsmat, because there had been little progress in actually communicating with it. A life-form of obvious though slow intelligence was hard to know.

“Perhaps with the help of the SETI Library team,” Hassan said in his soft, melodious voice, “we can make progress in our search for communication avenues. We have largely followed analog pathways, while SETI necessarily uses digital ones, since the artificial microwave transmissions we have received use the apparently universal scheme of zeros and ones to convey information.”

Rachel smiled. He didn’t seem to notice that his own language implied human plans and images—avenues, pathways, analog versus digital. The Mat had none of those properties.

Hassan went on, looking around the room, “With the help of our first emissary from a distant civilization”—a nod to Fraq, who sat rigidly, mouth flat, lips compressed, eyes narrow—“we can learn much from the reaction the Marsmat has to his ancient symbology.”

Rachel said, “It reacted by flooding the chamber. What did that mean?”

Hassan sat back, covering a momentary frown. Rachel thought she could see him thinking, Who is this woman? Then he said with a smile, “I cannot imagine.”

Rachel could play it smart here, defer and delay, but that was no longer her humble Librarian style. This wasn’t about codes anymore. “Mars was once warm and wet. When did Fraq’s species come here before?”