Soon after, Alison introduced him to Auruthmer, a relatively small, dark Cousin woman, her ginger hair cut short. Whilst “relatively small” still made her broad and solid by Julian’s standards, her features seemed subtly more human than her compatriots’. She had narrower cheekbones, and a knob of chin beneath her broad mouth. He wondered if that difference had led her to her field of study, or if it was the result of camouflaging surgery.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sabreur.” To Julian’s surprise, she spoke English with a pronounced American accent. She also made eye contact, albeit slightly too intensely. “So, you’ve decided to journey with us, is that right? A gesture of solidarity and fraternity between two civilizations?” She gave him an entirely human grin. “For context, Mr. Sabreur: I’ve been teaching at the University of California for the last two years, and I did three at Buenos Aires before that. I’d still be in your world, but they called for an interspecies liaison—on account of how we’ll be riding the Wayfarers’ coat-tails together. What can I do for you?”

“I have a favour to ask,” Alison said.

“Not to send a message home, I take it. You appear to already have remarkably free access to the Posticthyan network.”

Alison blinked, off balance. “The…Ice Mind?”

“A good enough name. It likes you. Which is obviously an anthropic generalization. But something about your contact with it has induced it to leave an open channel for you. It doesn’t happen with many, either ours or yours. So using it to sneak messages back to your government seems to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We would have passed your messages on, had you asked. But I understand that you’d rather have the agency.” The contrast to Stig was marked, Julian noted. With Auruthmer, the challenge wasn’t getting words out, but getting a word in edgeways.

“There is one thing you can do, though, if you do want to help,” Alison prompted. She and Julian had discussed this, and decided that right now they had one priority, and it was trying to understand. They weren’t genius scientists like Khan, and they weren’t interdimensional gadabouts like the two girls. Alison herself had access to a remarkable entity without even knowing what it was or whether it had an agenda. If they were to gain any purchase on their circumstances, they needed to understand the big picture.

“Stig kept saying he didn’t understand enough to give us an overview, to tell us how all this happened,” Julian explained, uncomfortably aware the man’s name wasn’t actually Stig. “But we were hoping that you, or someone, could tell us. Please.”