Judging by the nods, the question swirled in every head.

She was a beautiful woman, Asian in the old ways, born on the ancient Earth in times that no one else could remember. Quee Lee lifted her gaze as if finding something of interest in the ceiling, and she said to nobody in particular, “All of us are human.”

Washen and Pamir conspicuously said nothing.

The Master rose to her feet in a slow, powerful motion that ended with a deep sigh and a shake of the head. Snowy white hair framed the rounded face. The face acquired a less honest disgust, as if some deep voice were reminding her that these were new times, and she needed to bow to the newborn conventions.

“It was our decision,” she reported. “For good solid reasons, the three of us decided to send only a single species.”

Nobody spoke.

While the Master rose, Washen had sat back down again. Now she looked at the others, saying with the crisp voice of an order, “Ask it.”

They hesitated.

“We told you,” she continued. “Three hundred and six messages, to date. Which means that there’s still one communication that we haven’t quite managed to tell you about.”

Again, she said, “Ask it.”

“Okay,” Perri said. “Where did this last message come from?”

Washen hesitated.

It was the Master Captain’s right and honor to announce, “The message came directly from the Inkwell. Of course.”

Silence descended.

Then she added, “What we have received is a brief greeting, plus a chart giving us the safest course to one of the nearest warm worlds—”

“Who are they?” Perri interrupted.

The breach in etiquette went unmentioned. Quietly, the Master warned, “We don’t know anything that is certain. Not about what lives inside the ink, we don’t. But the face that it showed us, and the body … well, she looked rather like a human person … as odd or ordinary as that sounds …”

Nine

Whoever the Builders had been and whatever their high purpose, they possessed a considerable fondness for rivers. The ship’s rock-and-hyperfiber crust was laced with intricate long caverns and winding tunnels perfectly suited for the simple purpose of letting methane or ammonia, silicones or liquid water flow free across their floors, pooling now and again to create the lakes and little seas, then pouring over some brink or lip before continuing on their poetic journey. The first explorers found abundant stores of ready ice, muscular reactors to supply heat, and banks of environmental controls to salt and sweeten the molten treasures. Pumps and attached conduits waited at the bottom of every deep hole, having no obvious purpose but to lift those rivers high again. On occasion, two or more caverns joined together, entirely different chemistries mixing, life-forms from opposite ends of the galaxy suddenly sharing the same narrow channel. One great room welcomed a dozen major rivers, plus at least thirty lesser streams. It was a round room beneath a high-domed ceiling of mirrored hyperfiber, the nearly flat floor made of gravel and river mud and great expanses of tired water. At eighty kilometers in diameter, the room was vast enough to feel worldly, particularly at its center. The dying rivers gradually spread out and merged, becoming a single flow bearing down on a simple hyperfiber throat—a seemingly bottomless pit set at the precise center of the room, one fat kilometer wide and leading into a maze of pumps and busy filters. Engineers had constructed a series of platforms around the hole, and billions of passengers and crew had taken the time to stand on one of those vantage points, watching an ocean’s worth of water plunge into a blackness, screaming as it fell, the thunder loud enough to kill a human’s ears, leaving him or her deaf for as long as an hour after each little visit.

Washen went away happy and deaf. Her only company on the platform had been a school of gillbabies who barely noticed the spectacle below. Far more remarkable was the sight of the First Chair, and one after another, in ways less than subtle, they had conspired to make sonar images of themselves standing beside her famous sound-wake.

Washen left her admirers, a little cap-car swiftly carrying her upstream. Low patches of soggy ground and tangled marshland emerged from the slowing, shallowing waters. Individual rivers defined themselves, each of the large flows shackled by banks of dried mud and determined tufts of vegetation. Every wood had its color, its distinct and illuminating shape. Life from dozens of worlds lived together in this great room. Every day, one or two rivers would flood, spilling out into their neighbors’ channels. Dry places would be swept bare, new seeds germinating from the raw mud. A novel current would cut a hundred new holes, then fill the old holes with suffocating silts, while odd fish and things not at all like fish would colonize the fresh deep water. In the entire galaxy, there was probably no little place with so many species pushed so close together. Every day, the local ecology shifted ten times, and little species went extinct, and new species were brought down on rivers that could be ten thousand kilometers long, and in the quiet backwaters, by means natural and otherwise, new and entirely novel species would slip into existence.

Upon one of the taller, more stable banks, where a spine of bluish trees stood above an earthly green tangle of corn, someone had constructed a tiny cabin. Even though she knew its approximate location, Washen could not see the cabin on her first pass. She smiled without smiling—a tight, uncomfortable grin betraying a long-building unease—then she turned, coming back again and setting down on the most distant available slip of brown goo and Timothy grass.

Washen sat inside her cap-car, one hand holding the other. When her ears began to heal—when she could hear the squawks and opera songs of birds—she climbed out, stretched for a moment, and began to walk. After a little while, she could hear her boots making the mud squish and the soft rumbling of the falls, twenty kilometers from this nameless place and dampened by antinoise baffles, yet still, astonishingly loud. Then she heard the closer waters moving over flat banks of warm muck. A great long reef of titanium shells lay on her right, and to the left, in a different kind of water, a whale-sized fish lay in the chocolate shallows, basking in the illusory sun.

The cabin was tiny and artfully placed. Washen didn’t notice it until she saw the woman sitting in the open door. A tiny and apparently frail creature, by all signs, she seemed to be sleeping. Her chair was some kind of puffer fish, inflated before death and probably not too uncomfortable to sit on, and her clothes were simple and rugged, dyed the same silvery blue of the sky to help her hide from the fish that she hunted for food.

As close to silent as possible, Washen crept forward.

Like a portrait painted in some impoverished age, the sleeping woman sat motionless. Washen thought of a peasant girl, half-starved and possibly dying of some ancient blight. With every step, the creature looked less human. She was so small and emaciated, and her skin had a thinness that Washen had never seen in another person. Stare hard at her face, and the skull seemed to emerge. And it was only the thinnest sketch of a skull, tiny teeth, and big eye sockets—human always, but in a thousand subtle ways, wrong.

Again, Washen took a step.

The woman did not stir. She didn’t even seem to inhale, which meant that she had been holding her breath, waiting to speak. The thin, wide, and wise mouth parted slightly, and the words leaked out before the eyelids finally rose.

“Is it time?” she asked. “Already?”

“Yes, Mere,” said Washen, her own voice sounding a little bit sorry in ears rebuilt just moments ago.