It took two hours for them to deploy the big waste bag, then more to get the awkward plastic liner pinned up and protocols followed. Hard work in a suit that couldn’t get its heating right—cold feet, hot head. Rachel felt drained on the backhoe ride back. At least it was exercise against grav not as cruel as Earthside.

Humans were litterbugs. The habitat had gear and refuse around it in a tattered skirt. The wind blew the pennant atop the tower out into a straight rectangle, an ironic salute above the garbage field.

In her scholarly Librarian mode, on the Aldrin, she had looked up the origin of the word travel. Many thought it came from the French word travail, which meant “work.” Just so, she thought, just so.

Inside, suit shucked, she headed for the mess hall—and found Hassan and Stefano waiting for her.

Hassan leaned forward over coffee, his broad face split by a shiny smile. “So, you see, we thought to solicit further your views on the meaning of the flooding.”

Rachel blinked. “I’m new here. Not entitled to a theory.”

“We want fresh insights,” the man Stefano said slowly, eyeing her and Hassan. “You have much training in the SETI messages”—he waved a hand, as if encompassing all that field—“and this is a vastly more difficult issue, of course. But something may resonate, eh?” He gave her a chilly smile. She marveled at its mechanical insincerity.

“I wonder if the Mat may be using direct demonstration all the time?” Rachel said, talking directly to Hassan.

“To… show us something relevant to what it wishes to say?” Hassan sipped coffee and tipped his chin down, as if urging her forward. “Perhaps it demonstrated something it fears? Or likes? Wants?”

She knew this was empty speculation, but something in Hassan’s veiled look told her she was following a trail he liked. What did he want from this? She had learned to anticipate Prefect Stiles’s “avenues of thought,” as the man himself had described them. Most leaders tried to coax their own ideas out of underlings, rather than impose them from above—a deft technique.

“Seems unlikely to me,” Stefano said flatly. “I’ve watched the videos. Hard to tell much from suit cams, but it seems a simple reflexive response. Perhaps to something in the alien’s symbol-set?”

Rachel caught Hassan’s reaction, a quick twitch of his lower lip. Plainly the men did not like each other. After all, they were natural antagonists—Stefano wanted to police Hassan’s explorations. Rachel somehow sided with Hassan, without any actual reason to do so. She always led with her own intuition. In which case, what is he thinking? Rachel reflected. To move the discussion, she said, “We don’t know how fast the Mat can think, do we? Could it—however it processes information—answer within minutes?”

“Yes,” Hassan said firmly. “Plenty of research shows that. We don’t quite know how it does it—these are thinking plants, after all—but it does. Chem synapses, vapors that conduct electricals, even root systems.” A pause. Pursed lips, anxious eyes. “There is a further fact, just noticed by our sensors.”