Rachel smiled and slid the knife in: “A bureaucracy would do better?”

“Administration is not—”

Zuminski said in a flat and certain tone, “We’re talking reproduction, the whole basis of life, here. And Fraq’s budding is tech-augmented, therefore medicine. What’s a manager do that would… let us think of the right term here—confer value? Beyond what we do? Such as… find it.”

Hassan said sternly, “In this case, I think it’s obvious.”

Rachel could not help but laugh. “I do, too, but I bet we have different answers.”

The laughter startled both men, and even Fraq. They paused, thinking. She saw that breaking up what was headed for a deep, angry dispute had been the right thing to do—even if she hadn’t actually thought of it consciously.

Hassan paled. “That’s what we deal with, really. Exobiology.”

Around the table came a sense of stale gray pointless process. She cut in briskly with, “We’re getting off track here. I want clarity, not concealment.”

Zuminski nodded, turned to Fraq, and reopened with, “Why did you break away from us down there?”

“To explore,” came through the translator.

“To find that artifact?”

“Yes, but more. You helped me to know the Mat, to—” He broke into Ythri singing.

Xiaoling whispered, “To… it’s an intersection of ‘merge’ and ‘experience’ and ‘engage’—with your planetary system.”

“Um. The artifact—what is it?”

“Ours.”

This made eyes widen around the table. Rachel asked, “How old?”

“We are unsure. Our own history is long and at times poorly documented. Earlier societies left that… sentry.”

The translator shrugged, adding, “Something like ‘watcher’ but more… includes ‘speaker,’ too.”

“Your species brought it here through the… Maze?” Zuminski asked. The Maze concept required some cross-talk between Fraq and the translator. They used it as a synonym for the wormhole. Fraq had slipped and used the term once, an easy inference.

Fraq seemed startled that they knew this, but covered quickly, face going blank. “Apparently. The history is blurred. You see the… Maze… as complex. Our kind see it as an archaeological intricacy.”

Rachel said, “Uh, why?”

“We have lost knowledge of it. What its destinations are. How it works. All that we lost in the Collapse.”

Fraq had not spoken of this ancient, dark era in his species’ history for some time. Rachel ached to ask more about it, but they had a goal here.

“What did you tell the artifact?” Zuminski asked.

“That my kind has returned.”

Zuminski said, “It—the Mat—knew you?”

“After a while, yes. It said that its memories are dispersed around this entire planet, in its cellular deposits of long life. Thus so, recovering them takes time. But it recalled when my kind, in its Great Age, came to learn from the… Mat.”

Rachel looked at Xiaoling and said, “Mat is our name. What did he call it?”

“Old One.”

Rachel turned to the alien, who sat still but for the glittering eyes that darted around the table. “How old is the Old One?”

Fraq blinked in his slow, gravid way and spoke the singing-gravel-speak the translator could render, after consulting her software analyzer. This was a slow process, but it gave them all time to think. “Nearly as old as your star.”