Jaidev was the engineer in charge, busy continuing his exploration of the various panels. He took Gabriel’s remark seriously. “Of course not. The Temple system constructed it. And if you look closely, you’ll realize it looks nothing like a dialysis machine. But it does seem to be making you better, correct?”

“Feels good, I’ll say that.” Gabriel had had only a handful of encounters with such machines, so he had no real idea of what older or foreign models might look like. And in truth, most of this one was hidden inside the “cabinets.”

Nevertheless, with every few heartbeats, or more likely, every few cubic centimeters of cleansed blood, Gabriel could feel his strength returning. “With all the things the group needs, this really wasn’t a priority—”

“In one sense,” said one of Jaidev’s colleagues, “this was a good test, to see if we could progress beyond the replication of food, water, and basic tools to more complex items.”

“I’m glad you did.”

Jaidev shook his head as he continued to uncover various screens on the panel, and screens within them. He reminded Gabriel of a teenage boy scope-locked on a video game. “First, you’re going to need this again. Second, we could reprogram the machine into something entirely different.” The engineer rapped his knuckle on the countertop. “Everything apparently starts as plasm. And with the proper commands, it can be reshaped into extremely complex devices.”

“I wonder what goodies you can make that we don’t know about,” Gabriel said, suddenly seeing possibilities. “Okay, it’s 3-D printing to the nth degree. I just don’t really understand it—”

Jaidev smiled. “When we first got here, we found walls, surfaces, blank panels. We simply started touching them to see what would happen. We got light. We got…these command panels.”

The second engineer chimed in with enthusiasm. “They don’t have words, but they have symbols and figures.”

“The Architects seem to organize data and functions from the top down…from simple to less simple to complex.”

“It’s quite a leap from a Crock-Pot to even a coffeemaker.”

“Remember,” Jaidev said, “this habitat was designed to adapt to whatever beings enter it. Something is scanning us for body mass, temperature, chemical composition, then rearranging everything, from soil to air to plants and structures, to match those needs. So the system is preloaded for human beings. It was really just waiting for us to—”

“—to start touching things.”

“Still,” Gabriel said. He obviously had the evidence sticking into his arm, but he was curious as to how passionate, and informed, Jaidev was on this subject. He was, after all, the human race’s only expert on Keanu design and fabrication.

The other, older engineer—Daksha was his name—was, if possible, even more enthusiastic. “Look, Dr. Jones, we had no ability to design a dialysis machine. We simply entered commands in the medical area of the panels…essentially telling the system, do things that people here need. The system recognized your problem and adapted. We have other devices here now, too, and we don’t really know what they’re for, or for whom!”

“Sounds like ESP,” Gabriel said.

“We don’t understand what part of the electromagnetic spectrum they’re using,” Jaidev said.

“—Or even if it’s electromagnetic.”

“I think we’ve already seen that the Architects have access to…information in states that we do not.” He smiled. “But, truly, it was almost like typing two letters on your computer, and having it finish the word for you.”

Scratch that disdain for ESP or telepathy.

“Remind me, I have something to show you,” Nayar said, the moment their feet hit the ramp.

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure yet, but—”

They were already emerging on the second floor, where they found Jaidev and Daksha as busy as fry cooks in a fast-food joint. They were checking on various assistants who came down from the floor above carrying containers and what looked to Gabriel like pesticide sprayers. Weapons for use against the Reivers.

Then they sent them below.

“How’s it coming along?” Gabriel said, one of those fatuous-but-necessary phrases people in his job had to use.

“We’ll know soon,” Jaidev said. “Meanwhile, let me show you this.”

He motioned Nayar and Gabriel to a panel. “We’ve located some kind of system status repository. It appears we have access to a multidimensional map of Keanu and its interior showing various tunnels and passages and what appears to be a transport system…” As Jaidev spoke and touched, Gabriel watched the screens. Yes, the roundish thing that was Keanu…honeycombed with cylindrical structures radiating from a cylindrical central core. There were eight of them, and Gabriel didn’t need Bynum or Jaidev to tell them these were the habitats.

Toward the bottom of that core, a spherical chamber…all of them connected by a network of lines and links that reminded Gabriel of a 3-D spiderweb.

Off to one side, near the surface of Keanu, was another chamber…smaller than the habitats or that core, oddly shaped, its purpose even less clear than that of the other structures.

Being tactile engineers, of course, Jaidev and Daksha kept changing the screens. The global map was replaced by close-in images, individual tunnels, different habitats (what had to be the human one flashed by), other hollow places.

Then an exterior showing Keanu moving in a cloud of some kind of particles or gas, like a multi-lobed comet. The cloud was so pervasive and tenuous, it was difficult to determine where it ended and empty space began.

“Is there an exterior that shows Earth?” Gabriel said. How far had they come in a week? How fast was Keanu going? How much acceleration? They likely weren’t as far as the orbit of Mars—

“We assume so,” Daksha said. “But we haven’t found the space-tracking area yet.”

“Anything is better than what we had,” Gabriel said. “Means we don’t have to depend on Brent Bynum.”

“I don’t know,” Jaidev said. “It was Bynum who pointed us to this area, including the medical section.”

Which was the main reason Gabriel kept his mouth shut when Bynum began to be annoying: He owed the man his life.

“Speaking of the Reivers,” Nayar said, “Bynum helped us understand some of the information the database has on these things.” He nodded to Jaidev.

“It’s almost as if they are the perfect evolutionary response to the conditions of the universe,” Jaidev said, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. “They can be micro- or macrobeings. They assemble into aggregates that allow them to scale up to any mass required. And all because they are pure processors, taking in energy, using it.”

“They are essentially information,” Daksha said.

Just then Xavier Toutant rushed up the ramp. He was out of breath and his face was sweaty, as if he’d just made a long run.

“We tried all the poisons,” he said. “Both chemicals. We tried fire.”

“Slow down,” Nayar said.

“Some of the stuff just rolled off them. We were the only ones getting poisoned!”

“What do you mean?” Jaidev said. He took the news personally. Like a good general, Gabriel thought.

“It was like pouring gasoline on a fire…. There were more bugs afterward than when we started!”

Nayar was holding up his hand. “Nothing has worked, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s impossible!” Jaidev said. He headed for the ramp, as if determined to check out this ridiculous story for himself.

Nayar said, “If he says our weapons failed, they failed! The intelligent option is to find better ones.”

“And quickly,” Gabriel added. He smiled. “How do you kill…what did you say the Reivers were? ‘Pure information’? How do you kill that?”

“With different information,” Jaidev said, almost grumbling. But Daksha touched him on the arm, as if to say, Let’s think about this.