“Such as you?”

Guardedly: “At times. Not now. Not here. Maybe never again.” Then a broad, blazing smile that struck into her heart.

The alarm reminded them: the descent, 0700 muster. Groans, showers (some fun, slippery bodies mingling), but… She staggered out into his living room.

Alas, it was a tribute to another era. He had spent his mass limit on stuff from the old country. Heavy wood furniture, slathered with something like mohair. Lamps dripping with balls and tassels beneath pink or amber shades. Drapes on the walls over a widescreen view of outside. Even the walls deadened sound. If bears had decorator caves, she thought, they would look like this.

But then they had a hearty breakfast in the mess, calorie loading. Rachel waved away coffee, though she longed for it. Peeing in her suit still put her off.

Suiting up. Outside, eyes scrunched down against the glare of Martian dawn. Into the trawler. Robotlike, Rachel went through the motions, beset by emotions. Xiaoling was bravely holding up with a bright, wobbly smile, despite her banged-up head. She stayed close to Fraq, who showed no reactions. The alien seemed rather robotic, too, focused and refusing any talk with a shake of his head or a shrug.

Sitting next to Zuminski in the trawler, she gestured to her comm link and punched in his signets. He clicked in, and they were e-isolated from the others. “So?” he asked.

“So this.” She sent an encoded symbol-set. “I’ve got this in a transducer loader.”

Zuminski looked at his side screen and frowned. “This is…”

“I ran a search, using the SETI Library team—a bunch of great mathists. They ran a multistage test on those symbol-strings Fraq showed the Mat. Took a while.”

“I’ll bet. You guys got, what?—thousands of SETI signals, some fragments, some—”

“Right. Chaos. But the mathists turned up an echo—not exact, but close—of a really ancient, indecipherable symbol-string in SETI Message 2103C.”

“From those ‘lighthouse alerts’ you guys found?”

“Yes—short pulses at high flux, then nothing. Turns out, it’s plenty cheaper to send short pulses than steady signals. Civilizations don’t want to spend a fortune, trying to get the attention of distant life-sites—I mean, really far away, thousands of light-years. So they light up the microwave sky in little spurts. The spurts usually have some short, underlying messages—simple codes—pointing to nearby frequencies. Look there, and we find a low-power, dense signal. Usually at ten gigahertz or so.”

“So—?” Zuminski said. The trouble with suits was reading face signals, she thought.

“What’s Fraq’s motive here?”

Zuminski said, “Fraq says he—wants to go back down, present more of symbol-string.”

“He has his own agenda. The message he communicated to the Mat tells us he’s related somehow to that ancient SETI code—which we don’t understand.”

“He’s taken a while to get to Mars, after those stunts of his—falling through the whole atmosphere, what an idea!—how did you think of it? So the risk-takings were entertainment for him, or somehow preparation for something else, yes?”