Suddenly she saw Fraq not as an emissary, rogue, or invader, but as a refugee. He had fled from a catastrophe she could not truly even imagine. A whole planet, ruined. Abandoned. Though… how had that happened?

All that lay countless years ago, when calamity fell upon them—yet it still lingered strongly in the minds of a species blighted and exiled. Separately evolved minds, close enough to human, that now sought a distant refuge, using the Maze they did not comprehend. Driven by the SETI messages, and the antique promise of a better place. To come here, sending a daredevil first…

Rachel struggled to say, “We will do nothing to endanger your child. Zuminski and I found it by accident. We weren’t searching.”

Fraq nodded slowly, as if getting the feel for this idea. His eyes were unreadable, golden dots. “I appreciate that. It is a bountiful resolution, for I have worried over this for my entire time here. I will assent, then.”

Hassan jutted his chin forward. “To what?”

This took a while. Fraq then said, “To work for a mutual understanding between our kinds.”

Hassan nodded in response. “We can work together.”

Rachel looked at Hassan’s eyes, and didn’t believe him. “Perhaps we should pause for a moment of science.”

Hassan said, “What?”

“We know the Mat has held that artifact—and how many others?—for many millennia. What’s its agenda?”

Hassan’s brow wrinkled. Now that Rachel thought about it, his face looked like a thin sheet of paper that had been wadded up and then carelessly smoothed out. “It wants to live.”

“What else?” she persisted.

Fraq saw her point. “It wants to learn.”

Rachel smiled. “Yes.”

The Mat had a long memory. It would know the deep labyrinth of chambers, caves, conduits, and pores that wove into the Martian interior. It had tried as well as it could to explore its world, and even what lay beyond, floating in the night sky. It knew there was a concrete living beyond, because Fraq’s kind had come calling. Then came the humans.

“What does the Mat think of us?” she said, posing a question she could not answer.

Zuminski said, “It sees us as, in your terms, mayflies.”

Hassan grimaced. “What? Why?”

Zuminski said, eyes steady, “Because we come and go in a mere million years or a fraction of that. It has lived through far more, and knows that we will soon vanish, in its perspective.”

Rachel smiled. So her lover had gotten the point. But what next?

5.

She was up the next morning early, for some restless reason, and chanced to stagger out for coffee, its hypnotic aroma stealing up into her nostrils when she awoke. Zuminski had two of the prime qualities of a prime man: good housekeeping and a big, exotic, ancient coffee machine. Made out of spare booster parts, she saw.

Next, food: the mess hall.

Cup filled, first one inhaled, second in hand, she turned to the big wall screens in the hab mess—to see Hassan slinking away outside, keeping close to the hab wall with no windows. But he was visible from the guest wing and Zuminski’s cabin along a hexagonal spur. Headed for the greenhouse complex. Alarm did more than caffeine could. She got Zuminski out of bed and into a pressure suit in well under a half hour.