“You’re speaking in riddles,” Park couldn’t help but snap. “And I don’t know if I’m inclined to believe you. First they told me we came to this planet to do research for a colony. Then they said it was really about the Fold. Now I’m finding out we supposedly came because you called us?”

“The truth is multifaceted, we’ve come to learn,” Taban said, with a tone that implied it ought to be stroking a beard, or tucking its hands into wide monastic sleeves. “All of those things can be true.”

“But are they?”

“We’re sorry. We don’t know.”

There was a little pause as the two of them looked at each other, gauging, assessing. Finally Taban said: “Let’s start over. We’d like to be friends.”

Yes, she decided—it was still very much like an android, a fairly unassuming one at that: there was that odd childishness, the simple manner. But it also wasn’t an android. Not completely. It confused her. Taban was capable of using expressions other androids didn’t understand, of carrying a conversation in a pleasant and understanding tone. Of embodying something very close to a human personality. But she also couldn’t get any real read from it—it lacked a face, after all—and there was something . . . performative about the gestures it made, the things it did and said. As if it were putting on a show for her benefit. But why? Was it simply aware of just how mad it really was, and was trying to compensate for it, cover it up?

But even madness had a topology to read, she thought.

“All right,” Park said warily, sitting perfectly still. She gripped the edge of the desk as if it might float away from her. “Let’s be friends.”

Taban nodded, and its plunger finally dropped away from the glass.

“How did you survive on Eos for so long? If you were really trapped here for the last year, why didn’t you break down?”

“It was the unity rain,” Taban said. “It saved us.”

“The unity rain.” She took another steadying breath. It comes and goes like a storm, Jimex had said. “Everyone’s been talking about it, but I’m still not clear on what it is. Can you explain?”

Taban crouched, arranging its legs as if to make itself comfortable. “The unity rain comes from the anomaly that you call the Fold,” it said finally, gazing at her. “What do you know about the Fold?”

“It’s some sort of gravitational phenomenon,” Park said slowly, racking her brain. “Wick—our commander—he told me that . . . space behaves strangely there. Some force causes light to curve back on itself, the dimensions seem to—collapse together. Things get folded or bent or reorganized in strange ways. Space becomes fractal—or something. That’s all I know.”

As she said it out loud, something spasmed in her brain, a sudden twinge of realization that Park was careful not to look at; she had to focus closely on what Taban was saying.