Harley was happy to express his objections through Weldon. It was becoming a familiar method. “In theory, fine. But I’m not convinced it’s alien, or dangerous, or either way, that sticking it under glass is going to make any difference. We don’t know what any of this stuff really is! It’s not as though we were handed the directions when we showed up!” He turned to Nayar. “Vikram, your guys have done a fantastic job unlocking the secrets of the Temple. I think it would be better for all of us if that’s what they kept doing. We’ll get our exospecialists looking at Woggle-Bug here.”

“And where is our exospecialist?” Nayar said in his most quiet voice.

“Expected back any minute.”

Nayar pointed at the bug. “Mr. Drake, have you looked at this creature?”

Mr. Drake? “I saw it in Camilla’s hand—” Harley said, then stopped. Well, no, he hadn’t examined it. The Woggle-Bug, to him, had looked like a cartoon version of an insect, all bright colors and edges. “Okay, I’m looking now.”

Nayar knelt down so his finger touched the glass. “The more closely you observe it, the more strange it seems. It doesn’t seem organic, not as I recognize such things. It’s almost…fractal.” He straightened up. “And it’s bigger.”

“Bigger than what?”

“Bigger than it was when we first put it in the jar,” Jaidev said.

“How can you tell? Did you replicate a ruler, too?” Harley was getting frustrated.

Jaidev pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and was about to give Harley a demonstration, but Nayar stopped him.

“Three of us examined it and three of us came to the same conclusion.”

“Okay, fine,” Harley said. “It’s weird and it’s growing. Where’s the entomologist? Let’s ask him.”

“I’m the entomologist,” Nayar said. “It was my undergraduate field of study before I joined ISRO.”

Harley was not a card player, but he knew when he held a weak hand and should consider folding. “My apologies. What do you suggest we do, once we have the bug properly isolated and under observation?”

“By default, we’re starving it,” Nayar said. “We don’t know what it uses for nourishment, anyway.”

“What if the critter takes being starved as a hostile act?”

“Yeah, like me with the Objects,” Weldon said. One of the Indian engineers laughed, but only for the time it took Nayar to shoot him a cold look.

“Tomorrow we try adding different substances to its environment. Water, for example, to see whether it reacts.”

“That would be fine,” Harley said. He couldn’t imagine what good or bad it would do. But he needed Nayar and his team happy, and if playing Mr. Wizard with an alien bug would help—

“Thank you,” Nayar said. He signaled to Jaidev and the others, and they all headed for the ramp and the upstairs.

Watching them go, Harley noticed Camilla sitting quietly in a corner, apparently having watched the whole exchange.

He rolled toward her. Even though she seemed alert, she looked pale, even sickly to Harley. There were actual shadows under her eyes. Knowing she couldn’t understand him, he smiled and pointed to her arm. “Better? Bueno?”

She seemed to understand, nodding politely. Sasha must have scrounged a Band-Aid from the RV or another source. It covered the wound.

Then he pointed at the bug and the dish. “You can go over there, if you want.”

Hesitantly, she went over to it. With a glance back at Harley, as if for permission, she sat, smoothly assuming a posture that in Harley’s world could be attained only by a yoga instructor, or a rubber-jointed child.

“Shane,” he said to Weldon, “can you get Sasha for me?”

“Have you forgiven me yet?”

Harley almost jumped. He had been so intent on the girl that he hadn’t noticed Sasha sneaking up behind him.

“Shouldn’t I be asking for forgiveness?” he said.

She sat down next to him and took his hand. “No. My father always told me, if you’re ever in a personal argument and it turns out that you are objectively right, apologize at once.” She smiled.

“I accept?”

“Correct response.”

“How’s the baby? Chandra.” He was pleased that he remembered the name.

“Sleeping. One of Chitran’s friends is talking to the engineers about getting some baby food out of the dispenser upstairs.” She lowered her voice. “One of the Texans is on the trail of a cow, whether to milk it or—” She shook her head. “What do you need?”

He told her about the Woggle-Bug and Nayar’s plan. “Since this appears to be an alien life-form, I wanted to know more about where it came from. Could you ask Camilla when or were she got bitten? And how she’s feeling?”

Sasha smiled, then sat down next to Camilla, who had been examining the bug and its habitat with a fervor Harley associated with children and beloved TV cartoons. The girl seemed pleased to see Sasha, hugging her and jabbering in German.

“She says she’s tired and hungry. And she got bitten at the plate.”

“The what?” It turned out, plate was what Camilla called the node where she had duplicated Valya Makarova’s lipstick. Which raised other questions in Harley’s mind. “Yeah, how did she know about this plate? Did she just find it by accident? Are there others?”

More German. Camilla seemed to be answering freely and with enthusiasm. “She just knew to go there. And there are others.”

“How many?”

“She doesn’t know. She just…knows when she’s near one, and she’s passed at least”—she checked with Camilla again—“three others.”

Four duplicating nodes. “What I want to know,” Sasha said to Harley, “is how the plates are different from the dispenser in the Temple.”

Harley’s head began to hurt whenever he considered these matters. “I think Camilla’s magic plates are for straight duplication, places where the habitat concentrates enough raw material, programming, and power to copy something.”

“I wonder if it could copy food? Or a cat?” she said.

“Don’t know.” And don’t care much for the implications.

“The Temple’s dispenser is far more sophisticated. It’s got more power, more raw materials”—so Jaidev theorized; no one had yet found a pipeline for goo—“more processing, more whatever. You can make something from nothing. I’m guessing, at the plate, you can only copy what you bring.”

Sasha patted Camilla on the shoulder and stood up.

“God, can you imagine what it would be like if we had something like this back home?”

“Yeah,” Harley said, “like American manufacturing after container ships opened up China, times a thousand. Total fucking disaster. Assuming a big ship from Earth ever shows up, I’d advise the commander to quarantine this habitat and make sure none of that magic stuff got out for about five hundred years.”

“I don’t understand that! You could end poverty and hunger!”

“Oh, come on, Sasha. We could have ended poverty and hunger any time since World War Two. The technology has existed. It’s the will. All this think-it-make-it would do is destroy manufacturing. The only jobs would be for people who haul the raw materials around and tend the power plant. You really want to impress me? Show me the big nuke or anti-matter core that keeps the lights going in this place. That’s technology Earth could use.”

She pointed a finger right in his face. “You know what’s really stupid?”

He braced. “Tell me.”

“Arguing about this.”

He laughed. She smiled and wagged her finger in a substantially friendlier manner. “But you are a dark man, Harley.”

“You knew that when you hooked up with me.”

“Actually, I didn’t know anything about you before I showed up in Houston.”

“We’re even, then. Wait—” Harley realized that Camilla was singing that little song Xavier had mentioned, the one with “rato.” “She keeps doing that. Any idea—?”

Sasha was shaking her head. “It’s not German. It sounds like ‘rat’ and ‘wall’; those are the only two words I sort of understand.”