Fraq nodded again, feathers fluttering among color displays. Rachel saw he was trying to get through on the body channels beyond speech. His whole body calmed, loosened, seemed to welcome this moment. “It has been so for a very long time, for us.”

Rachel could not imagine a cultural heritage that had seeped down through a thousand millennia. Human society was about two hundred millennia old. Even then there were variant species—Denisovans, Neanderthals, more. Trial balloons of biology. Civilization, about ten millennia old. So Fraq came from a species that had at least ten times the entire human experience. Still…

“So you are a deviant, a risk taker. No one else of your kind, your flock, would volunteer to go through the Maze.”

Fraq allowed himself a narrow smile. “You now fathom me.”

“I hope we can help each other,” she said.

Zuminski said slowly, “You were interested in stunts, like the orbitfall, Everest—sure. You’re ten standard deviations out on the social scale of deviant behavior for your species, yes?”

Fraq’s ridged eyebrows fluttered. “Do not follow terms.”

Zuminski pressed on. “But coming here to a place you must have found in your archaeology, a solar system that your kind explored when we were little better than chimps—there had to be a point.”

“There was.”

Rachel saw it. “Mars. Here.”

Fraq nodded again, a skill he was mastering, echoing the human. “We cannot take your two inner worlds. They are hostile places we cannot correct, though the second one might be, in a long time.”

Hassan suddenly said, “You say ‘take’? How could you ‘take’?”

Fraq had not expected this: he froze.

Long silence.

“We do have resources,” Fraq said finally, through the translator. But Xiaoling shook her head. She added, “That’s not a threat. Really.”

Hassan said in a voice thin and confused, “I think we have to take a break, take time to analyze—”

“Quiet,” Rachel said. “This is how we learn. Finally.”

“What resources?” Zuminski asked.

“I have shown the way. We can now flock and flood through the Mouth.” Another silence. Aliens pouring through a wormhole and falling from the outer solar system, down from the outer icy realm, inward—Rachel did not want to see how the Earthside media would portray that.

Time to get back to essentials.

Rachel asked, almost shyly, “Why did you talk to us now? Not before?”

As Fraq thought, his skin rippled. “You have my… child.”

“We found it. That’s all.”

“You must understand. Must. To hold children, among my kind—it means your opponent can cut you off. Not let your line descend.” Fraq’s stony face crinkled, then froze. “When there are few of you and you live in a place you were not made for… the next generation, that is everything.”

Rachel thought about the many bottlenecks humanity had passed through—genetic squeezes of drought, predation, hardship—all forcing selection upward. There had been an era more than a hundred thousand years back when humanity shrank to fewer than a million, in southern Africa; that she knew. Fraq’s kind had gone through something far worse, while still retaining their civilization. Making habitats in deep space. And building legends. To remember the squeeze…