For an hour they moved in tandem through a shadowy, clouded world of diffuse light that throbbed with a slow, softly radiant energy. Rachel felt the strangeness of these cloistered caverns settle like a blanket, quieting their chatter.

As they descended through sloping corridors, snottites gleamed in the beams of their headlamps, dangling in moist lances from the ceiling. She steered well clear of the shiny colonies of single-celled extremophilic bacteria—like small stalactites, but with the consistency of mucus. Snottites got their energy from digesting the volcanic sulfur in the warm water dripping down from above. Brush one of those highly acidic rods and their battery acid would cut through suits in moments. A sharp, short ouch—quite fatal.

The Mat used slightly tilted troughs and channels to return fluids to lower levels, so they were following those flow patterns. They trudged along, their ragged, huffing breaths audible over suit comm. Fluids moved upward through vapor transport or simple osmotic pressures, so in a way they were inside an immense living being, like microbes in a bloodstream.

She felt a hushed reverence here. This was life unlike any analogy with Earthly biology, still evolving from forms older than the continents. Still hanging on, indestructible, still dealing in its own strange way with the hardships dealt it, still coming.

They stopped in a large chamber, its walls thick with the Mat. The team deployed the display panel, plugged in power sources, booted up Fraq’s symbol-string. As before, the alien did not explain or share what he had prepared.

The strange moist atmosphere wrapped around them, and then came the signal, and the display. Show time. They watched the script roll across the panel in long, furling symbols that though static seemed to move, flapping like flags. It ran for about a minute. Silence.

Fraq stepped back when the string ended. The alien looked satisfied, and stood watching the walls where the Mat thickened, high in the ceiling. Some of the wet organism hung like draperies in the soft Mat glow. No one moved. A long, anticipatory silence from all of them ended with a flurry of hissing and gurgling that came from the walls.

Zuminski called, “Move uphill. Prepare for any flooding—”

But there was no rush of water. Instead, Rachel shielded her eyes against a sudden, hard glare. The Mat radiance rose, an ivory sheen that blinded her. It pulsed in its fierce ivory glow.

If it floods us now, nobody will be able to keep their bearings.

Chatter on the comm, which she ignored. Panicked voices.

Think. She wondered if the whole idea of the flooding as a signal of the ancient past was an illusion. Maybe the Mat really was malicious.

Ideas rushed through her, and she made herself stand still, using her ears and feet to sense any change. What’s a Librarian doing in this? she thought, as she had when she plunged from orbit. Yet she couldn’t resist the lure of adventure….

The glare ebbed. No water lapped at their heels. Slowly she got her eyesight back. The cavern seemed unchanged. Zuminski ordered them to form a file and retreat, which seemed to her a wise move.