"Yeah. Well, the particles from the quagma burst left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through." I remembered how that invisible shower had prickled. The scars laced everything -- the hull, the equipment, even your body. And the tracks weren't random. There was a pattern to them. There was enough left working in here for me to decipher some of the message..."

I felt my skin crawl. "A message. You're telling me there was information content in the scar patterns?"

"Yes," said sWyman casually. I guess he'd had time to get used to the idea. "But what we can't do is tell anyone about it."

I held my breath. "Do you want to tell me?"

"Yeah..."

It was less than a second after the Big Bang.

Already there was life.

They swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

But the quagma was cooling. Their life-sustaining fluid was congealing into cold hadrons. Soon, the very superforce which bound their bodies would disintegrate.

They were thinking beings. Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold. There was nothing they could do about it.

They could not bear to be forgotten.

So they built... an ark. A melon-sized pod of quagma containing all their understanding. And they set up that unmistakable lithium-7 flare, a sign that someone had been here, at the dawn of time.

For trillions of seconds the ark waited. At last cold creatures came to see. And the ark began to tell its story.

I floated there, thinking about it. The scars lacing the pod -- even my body -- held as much of the understanding of the quagma creatures as they could give us. If I could have returned home engineers could have dissected the pod, doctors could have studied the tracery of tracks in my flesh; and the patterns they found could have been unscrambled.

Perhaps we would never decipher it all. Perhaps much of it would be meaningless to us. I didn't know. It didn't matter. For the existence of the ark was itself the quagma datum, the single key fact:

That they had been here.

And so the ark serves its purpose.

sWyman fell silent.

I drifted away from the buckled walls and began to curl up. There was a band of pain across my chest; the air must be fouling.

How long since I'd dropped out of Susy-space? Had my four days gone?

My vision started to break up. I hoped sWyman wouldn't speak again.

Something scraped the outside of the pod.

"Luce?" sWyman whispered. "What was that?"

The scrape went the length of the pod; then came a more solid clang over the mid-section. "I'd say someone's trying to get hold of us."

"Who, damn it?"