Lee was still somewhat leery of Julian and Alison. Government spooks, after all, though decidedly de-fanged by circumstance. Except that Julian Sabreur was very much not the brooding action man he obviously wanted to be, and Alison Matchell seemed as weird as Mal in her own way. Dr. Khan had become an inadvertent bridge between the two groups because Julian knew her from way back and seemed to like her, rather despite himself, Lee suspected.

And then there were the other two passengers. The fact that Julian plainly didn’t like Daniel Rove or his man, Lucas, was another point in his favour.

The rat translator was also coming. It had finally tried to reproduce its name, coming out with something like “Ertil.”

There were at least a score of Nissa ready to embark. Stig and Auruthmer would be playing human-keepers, she gathered. The others would be on one or more of the other living vessels taxiing ponderously above them.

“Makes you wonder what they’ve seen, doesn’t it?” Mal said. Her eyes were starry, and perhaps she was imagining their freedom to travel, to just be. Lee squeezed her hand tighter, to remind her of the human entanglements she might leave behind. From what Auruthmer had said, there was no real trilobite society. They were, each of them, an island. This gathering must be unprecedented within the last hundred million years. “You think they’ve been to all the other timelines?”

“They have not.” It was Auruthmer herself who spoke, with sharper ears than expected. “We’ve been climbing the other branches of the worlds for generations, most especially yours. The Wayfarers have walked amongst the stars of their own timeline and seen vistas none of us can possibly imagine. Yet they never guessed that theirs was just one universe of many; only when their sense organs began to detect the symptoms of the collapse did they become aware. And because we travel more than any and leave our fingerprints many places, they become aware of us. Since then, they have taken our little science and applied their great leverage to it, to enable us to get to the heart of the problem.” She gave her intense smile. At her back, Stig shuffled and stared fiercely at his feet.

“Here,” Auruthmer said, but instead of imparting more wisdom she was just pointing up—and it was something the Nissa didn’t do, Lee realized. They had a dozen ways of indicating something other than picking it out with the jut of a finger. Probably there was a whole complex subtext there, completely lost on a Western European.