The eloquence Fraq had summoned had been thought through well, she knew. It won the day for the strange smart bird, in media terms at least. But there was too much unsaid. Her task—that of the entire human species, she suspected—was to find out the underlying motives of the Ythri.

She got away from all this by reading some A. E. Housman and Swinburne, finding some comfort in the moody fatalists and their waltzing with Weltschmerz. After a tasty veggie dinner—the standard here, except for some Chicken Little artimeat that showed up in stews, the only place people liked it—she needed to relax and think.

Zuminski came in later from the bar. “Whole hab is talking about the bud.”

“And us?”

He grinned. “As usual.”

“We don’t have to leak anything on the gossip circuit, y’know.”

He shrugged. “Open society here, not concentration camp. Bound to get to Earthside soon. Make big noises.”

Rachel frowned. “I don’t understand Hassan. Really don’t.”

“Scratch scientist, find fanatic.”

“He’s afraid. Maybe he thinks Fraq and his flock are the first of many, coming in with better technology and an agenda.”

Zuminski sat on the double bed they had cobbled together. He put a hand on her ankle, as if to rest it. She felt a simmering tingle rush up into her. “Hassan could be right. Stefano, too, about Marsforming. But only way to find out is to go forward.”

“Precaution is—”

Zuminski waved this away. “Thinking like Earthside, you are. They love their Precautionary Principle.”

She said sensibly, “After what humans have done to Earth? After what Fraq tells us, that his species destroyed their world, had to move off to live on moons and comets and big cylinder—”

“You know what means?”

“The Precautionary Principle? Sure, it—”

“Never do anything for the first time.”

She had to laugh. Out here on the frontier, talking to intelligent slime molds and a mysterious, stony-faced humanoid alien, it was absurd to stick to what you knew.

She was trying to frame a reply when his mouth covered hers.

It was always a source of quiet reassurance to her that at night, sleeping together, especially when forming spoons, she and Zuminski were each blocking the other from some small fraction of the background radiation that lanced down from the skies here. Human shields against the unrelenting danger of the universe beyond Earth.

Yet she woke, questions burning in her.

The time delay for Earth conversations made for slow thinking. But emails accumulated, calling out to her as she stared into the sleeptime dark. So she got up, thumbed on the computer (voice command would have awoken Zuminski), and saw the incomings. Plenty of them.

The Library had done more on the “reply-symbol group” she had collected from the Sphinx far below. It was amazing how much implication they could harvest from the simple coding that used lights on a three-port display. She had taken a crack at the sequence herself, using the embedded intelligence. It was part of her computational ability carried from Earth in a “familiar”—the custom AI for her sole use. It got pressed upon her by a Prefect at the Library, separated from her usual inboards. That result, preliminary and still misshapen, she had sent Earthside.