“I hope not.” She thought a moment and said, “To echo something you said—if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist. Maybe that’s what we are. We might’ve been idealists something like Stefano once. But we see where it leads.”

“To?” He gave her a small smile, eyes dancing.

“Narrowness.”

“Stefano can’t see that the Mat is not some endangered species, like the thousands that died on Earth. It’s a worldwide creature. Ancient. It’s everywhere—we’ve seen communications between vents and caverns on opposite sides of the planet. We still don’t know how deep it goes.”

“And… our antler-clashes?”

He chuckled. “Put aside, for now. I am partial to… charming women.”

“Most men in a bar would have said ‘to beautiful women.’ ”

“A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.”

She laughed and took another sip. This had been a long day and they had a descent ahead. Best to be… careful.

She relaxed and thought. “We’re going so soon? Why?”

“The Mat deserves a reply. Is only polite, after all.”

“A reply to the flooding?”

“And it may wish to respond to the alien’s message.”

She nodded. “Yes. Fraq is very… odd.”

“You know him. Your Library has kept him wrapped up, so we know little.”

She had gotten such oblique inquiries before, but Zuminski seemed different from the usual inquiring-minds-want-to-know types. She said slowly, “How strange Fraq is comes out in, well, odd ways. He stays by himself a lot, when not with fellow flock members. It seems a property of their species, not social babblers like us. You know about the death-defying things he’s done—”

“And that you have done with him.”

“Yes, but they weren’t my idea. One time I asked about how he felt that others had died while doing these stunts—particularly the orbitfall and flying up Everest. He shook off the question, though Xiaoling kept after him. So finally I asked straight out if he thought he would be held accountable in some afterlife.”

“Alien religion?”

“That’s the point—I don’t know. Fraq said, exact quote—‘One world at a time.’ And no more.”

“I wish I knew what these aliens intended.”

She was worn out on that issue. Instead, she wondered about replying to the Mat. How? “Say… how long can the Mat hold a thought?”

He shrugged, slugged down some beer. “I would say, perhaps a thousand years. Maybe more.”

She laughed. “How can we know that?”

“It apparently remembered the alien’s kind, its species—yes?”

“True, so a million years, maybe more. And it’s sure been around a very long time—” She stopped in midsentence and licked her lips, then continued slowly, “The Mat isn’t like anything we can envision. Humans, Fraq, other SETI intelligences—we all know that we’ll personally die. The Mat doesn’t.”

He looked startled. “I had not thought that. Perhaps it does not know that it can endanger us, then?”

She nodded, seeing how his mind worked. “So it might not have appreciated how the flooding startled us. Maybe we were supposed to be… complimented?”