Because there was only one way to go he quickly found the lounge where Dr. Herat and the admiral sat at a large teak table. Rather, the admiral sat; Herat was pacing, a look of intense excitement on his face.

"Bequith! There you are. Sit, man, sit."

"What's this all about, sir?" There were two other men and two women seated with the admiral. The lights were low and a public inscape window near the far wall showed a blurry gray something surrounded by streaked stars.

"We were just showing Dr. Herat some pictures of the artifact," said the woman to Michael's left. She smiled at him and gestured to the window.

"Why is it named Jentry's Envy?" asked Dr. Herat.

"The owner named it that. We don't know why," said the woman. Michael retrieved her name from inscape: Linda Ophir, Ph.D.

"Owner?" Herat looked down his nose at her. It was an intimidating professorial gesture that would stand him in good stead if and when he returned to teaching.

"The artifact has been claimed by a certain…" She paused, accessing something in inscape, " 'Bud' Cassels. A halo worlder."

Michael felt a bit at a loss as to what was happening; but he looked up at the inscape window as he sat and nearly missed the chair. Kimpurusha had traded with the halo worlds until the early days of his childhood. Michael had faint memories of a time before the FTL ships regularly stopped at Manifest— a time when the stars had been infinitely far away and when his heroes had been the brave cycler captains.

"Does this fellow have any idea what he's doing?" Herat was outraged. "Only the state can own rights to an alien artifact!"

"Here in the R.E., yes," said the admiral. "The halo's different. In any case, this is not only an alien artifact, it's a working starship. And you can claim salvage rights to a ship, even here."

"That's ridiculous. And if it's a working alien starship, where's its real crew?"

"The Envy appears to have been abandoned. In any case, we have to clear all our activities with this Mr. Cassels," said Ophir. "It's something you'll have to get used to. At least until we can buy it or expropriate it."

Intrigued, Michael made a private copy of the inscape window and blew it up. What he saw was a blurry gray cube, streaks of stars behind it. There were several tabs above the window so he flipped through them. The next picture showed nothing but a perfectly round hole in the starscape— a black, spherical object? The next showed two gray cylinders. He recognized the final image; that round, bluish glow with the black circle and bright white dot in the center had to be a ramjet sail, viewed from an unguessable distance away.

"What are these," he asked, "or have you gone through this already?"

"No, we were just getting to that part, Dr. Bequith." He dismissed the private window, just as Ophir was tiling the public ones so that everyone could see the grainy images.

"Whoever they are, they've designed this cycler remarkably like our own," she said. "Humans tend to build cyclers to consist of a number of habitats, separated by tens or hundreds of kilometers, as here. That's part of the normal redundant safety design; if a habitat were to be hit by anything substantial travelling at half light-speed or more, it would simply vanish in a puff of atoms, so you distribute your cargo and passengers among a number of separate containers. But see with this cycler, yes there are a number of habitats, but they appear to be of wildly differing designs."

"Different species?" asked Dr. Herat. He stood, head cocked, staring at the window.

"Cassels reported he and his men opened several of the habitats and they were definitely designed for different life-forms."

"The implications…"

"Are enormous. But we've saved the best for last." Ophir swept away the tiled images and replaced them with a single picture. This was another shot of the black sphere, but in this one some light source had illuminated what looked like faint writing, drawn in thin red lines on the side of the sphere. The characters were geometric, spikey, and woven together in a way that made Michael's eye hurt to follow them. The shapes were instantly recognizable.

Dr. Herat sat down. "That's impossible," he said, very quietly.

"I see you recognize it," drawled Dr. Ophir. "Few people would."

"What do you think that is, Dr. Herat?" asked Crisler.

"That language," he said, waving his hand at it. "It hasn't been used in the galaxy in two billion years. That used to be the script of a species that dominated the whole galaxy when the only life on Earth was bacteria. We know the Chicxulub were obsessed with them; we see reproductions of ancient texts in Chicxulub records— never translated, though. Maybe some modern race has managed to translate it?"

"What were they called?" asked the admiral.

Herat shrugged. Ophir said, "The usual problem— they have a thousand names. The Chicxulub called them the 'lamp bearers' or something like that."

"We call them the Lasa." Herat waved away the question. "We know they existed and that they were everywhere, but almost nothing else. The Chicxulub made a particular point of obliterating all evidence of them. Nobody's sure why, since they predate the Chicxulub by almost two billion years."

"If these really are habitats for multiple species, that might explain why," said Ophir. "A galaxy-spanning civilization encompassing many species— that's the Chicxulub's worst nightmare."

"And now somebody's taken up the torch again? — So to speak?" Herat bounced in his seat like a boy.

"Then why haven't we met them?" asked the admiral. "Why haven't they signalled us? If they're multispecies, surely one of them would have developed the FTL drive. So why aren't they here? You don't mean to tell us, Dr. Herat, that your institute's careful and meticulous search of the galaxy over the past twenty years has missed a civilization that at the same time was searching for you?"

Ophir shook her head. "Above all, why should they send a cycler to contact us? An empty one at that. Unless the contact was accidental, even unwanted."

Michael felt he had to make the point: "From what you're saying, they didn't contact us, they contacted the halo worlds."

"Technically, yes," someone else said. "This Cassels fellow and his crew picked up the Jentry's Envy as it passed a halo world called Erythrion. They rode it into cometary space near Chandaka and then begged beam power to disembark. The cycler's on its way back into interstellar space and Cassels's crew are at Chandaka now."

"That's our next stop," said the admiral. "We will interview Cassels before going on to the cycler itself."

"Um… I assume we have Cassels's permission to do that?" asked Michael.

"Absolutely," said the admiral, a bit too forcefully.

"Beyond what we've just told you, we know almost nothing," said Ophir. "The cycler must have a point of origin within sixty light-years of Chandaka; once we determine its age and isotopic constitution we should be able to close in on its origin. We'll be visiting all the stars in that volume; meanwhile, we need to put a research team on the cycler itself. That is where you come in, Dr. Herat."

"Of course," said Herat. He didn't take his eyes off the image of the cycler. "Of course."

"Nobody can think of a reason why a multispecies civilization would use cyclers when FTL travel was available," said the admiral. "But it's possible that one or more of their homeworlds are substellar in size. So they could only use cyclers to leave their homeworld. Obviously there can't be four or five spacefaring species within sixty light-years of Chandaka, though! There's only twice that in the whole galaxy."

"Yes…" Herat frowned. "The more I think about it the less it makes sense. Something's wrong with this picture."