Ping went her suit warning. “Say, we’re down to about a third air,” she called on general comm. “Turn back, we’ve got enough.”

Murmurs, protests—she snapped that off with a curt word, then killed the links. Best aspect of the kinda-military discipline here is, they take orders.

Zuminski nodded to her, silent. She gave Fraq some hand signals, including the usual zipped-lip gesture. This was not the time to do a Q&A with an alien. Enough strangeness for now….

So she chimed in with the team’s chorus of grumbles and they soon marched away, retracing their route to the ruptured, enormous soft petals. She knew her device would self-actuate within an hour, and convey a run through a coded sequence she had gotten from her buddies back at the Library. It was a simple attempt to give the alien device a hail, plus some questions. And, who knew?—maybe that artifact could convey it to the Mat, as well. She would put very little past the strange intelligence that surrounded them now, as they threaded their way through the bowels of a life-form that was in many ways still beyond their comprehension.

They came slowly up from the Martian depths, Rachel’s mind working hard in the team silence. Mostly, pointlessly. Furiously, yes.

A day down the vent in a cramped suit reeking faintly of old sweat—despite the new, improved self-cleaning liners and ’freshers—had left her with aching muscles. Not so much from all the grunt work, but a suit by its nature never let you get the best leverage. The designers had never fixed the basic problem—most of the suit’s weight hung on the shoulders. She had tried to build hers up into hard slabs of muscle, but after days of work outside, they always wailed. And untended, they got other muscle groups to join in the concert. She ran the shower long and hot, relishing the glorious steam.

2.

For most Librarian work, the best rule was Ass in the chair.

Even on the deep-down wild frontier, Mars.

Rachel pondered. Usually the people around her had the same work habits. Everyone involved with the SETI Library or on Mars had a fierce, autodidactic, gnarly idiosyncrasy—indeed, maybe that was the entrance ticket to the Librarian Life. On Mars, they were no doubt rehashing the recent descent while calorie loading. Not her.

Back in her cramped cabin, swathed in a comfy puffy bathrobe, she let herself ease into the analysis. Earlier, she had compared notes on interworld email with the SETI mathists. Some of her colleagues there were hard-core types who could visualize four-dimensional surfaces in a non-Euclidean geometry, just to make sense of some messages. Apparently, this demanded inordinate quantities of caffeine.

She was happy to leave them to it.

At her request, already they had traced the Mat images that Fraq had called forth from earlier cunning snaps—for reasons he would not state. Then they’d linked those images to old SETI messages that held holographs, asking if any resembled these objects. Some did. Her buddies back on Luna had found cross-references to other SETI messages, after days of steady crypto-sorting. Those had similar symbol-strings and “weaves”—jargon for interconnected slabs of data that seemed to be intelligible only in a holographic way. Though called Librarians, those mathists didn’t just keep track of books, texts, and the like. They linked symbol groups in different linear parts of the message, by imposing an appropriate deep math mapping. Then they did nonlinear, mind-wrenching parallels. It was all quite complex and wonderful, going far beyond her math competence. For this, she was grateful. Then she tried to explain it to Zuminski. Big mistake.