“I’ll take your, uh, word for it. So what did this smart thing say?”

That we must go away. Not approach them.

“And this ‘them’ is… who?”

It says it is the entire planet. An integration of the intelligent species and… the biosphere, is the closest I can come to it in a human word.

“A living world. Say, some system that somehow lets the oceans, lands, and animals talk to the people? That’s… well, impossible. I’m having trouble here.”

So am I. I do not have a living body, so it is difficult for me to think of this other than abstractly. Like a human conversing with a forest?

“My body talks to me and mostly when I notice, it’s bad news, stomachaches or sore muscles. I hear plenty, mostly when something’s gone wrong. Hard to see what a planet might say. ‘Don’t throw that into me?’ And how do you hear it, say while walking on the beach?”

I suppose you are being too practical. As evolution has shaped you.

Rachel scanned up ahead, assisted by pattern-recog software on the screens—but still, no ringhole…. “I’m a practical kind of gal. Put our lack of imagination aside, then. What does it mean, we should just go away?”

Apparently it has had some bad experiences with others who came through the ringhole.

“Like who?”

Something that had ideas about recruiting them for something. A quest for God or some odd idea.

“Not humans?”

No, they have not seen the likes of us before. You humans. Or even something like me.

“Then how’d the original wormhole get anchored near our sun?”

A method of “disposal” I do not comprehend. The message that planet sent implies in its noun-assemblies that the Mouths are a Maze, to use your Librarian terms.

Fraq said, “We also had deduced such. But then, we went through a simple entrance, a sphere, in our home system. And popped out of a similar sphere, in your solar system. But too near your star, it was, and then that sphere spun away—”

Apparently they of this world can whip a wormhole through space by using angular momentum, applied at its near end—that is, from here. So they got rid of the God seekers and then drove the far wormhole mouth out of their visitors’ neighborhood. They flung it away and it came to rest near our star.

“Even weirder. But those words, ‘got rid of’—what’s that mean?”

I thought it polite not to ask.

“So world minds have protocols, you figure? We should find out—”

I thought our goal was to get back home.

“So it is, and curiosity killed the cat.” Rachel chuckled, despite the tension. “Maybe it’s a Schrödinger cat, at that. So—how do we get out of here?”

Follow its agents, it said.

“The kite life? They don’t seem so friendly.”

I believe they were reconnoitering us.

“Fair enough, though those bots cost me plenty. A small price for a ticket home, though.”

Rachel gestured at her wall screens, where the many space-borne shapes were catching up to them. Each might be a different species, she guessed, deployed by that crescent planet with two moons. What intricate biologies could be at work here, wedding worlds to the spaces around them? How could anything go up against that? Certainly not Silver Metal Lugger’s puny lasers—which, she discovered with a quick check, the kites had now disabled anyhow.