“We knew we wouldn’t see much,” Quee Lee offered.

The main engines continued to labor, their smooth braking blaze indistinguishable from a high-terran gravity.

“But think what we are seeing,” Perri added.

That brought a sober long silence.

With a secure nexus, Pamir told the AI to squirt updates back to the Great Ship, and buried within that roar would be a second, much condensed version of the same transmission—for an audience that was much closer, and hopefully, still completely invisible.

“Repeat every three minutes,” he ordered. “Once in orbit, every ninety seconds.”

If anything went wrong, Washen and Mere would see it happen.

To everyone, he pointed out, “We have jobs to work. Before we can drop into orbit, we should get ourselves ready. For whatever’s going to be.”

Whatever’s going to be.

Pamir meant to sound suspicious, and he probably succeeded a little too well. He saw it in the faces, in the tight lips and downcast eyes. For a moment, he let the warning sink home, then he grinned and offered a different tone, admitting, “Whatever happens, it’s going to be spectacular. No doubts at all.”

THE MAIN ENGINES fired until the ship’s momentum was almost drained away, then, following detailed instructions delivered over the last several weeks, every rocket was buttoned down and put to sleep. The ship’s body rearranged itself again. The hyperfiber armor pulled apart like a blossom. Empty fuel tanks were pushed to one side, valves opened wide to the hard vacuum. Exactly as promised, a simple tug appeared from the blackness—a blunt cold machine spinning thousands of fullerene webs tipped with tiny robots that quickly and expertly connected their web to the armor and the entire ship.

Moments later, the tug set to work, nudging them with a brute authority, inserting them into a high circular orbit around the Blue World.

Afterward, it detached the lines and ate them.

With tiny bursts of secondary rockets, the alien ship came closer. Umbilicals built for this single occasion were deployed. Radar and lasers made elaborate measurements of the streakship, presumably to make certain that every system was compatible. And Pamir’s crew examined the tug with the same thoroughness. How good were its engines? How efficient was its reactor? A chamber was riding inside the tug’s nose. Three different crew members noticed either the emptiness of that space or the heat radiating from it, and at the same instant, they pointed it out to Pamir.

In another moment, he spotted it for himself.

“Opinions?” he muttered.

No one responded.

With a different voice, Pamir said, “Opinions.”

This was an order now.

The AI replied first. As the umbilicals eased in closer, it described what it saw inside the heavily shielded chamber.

“It is a sack of dirty water,” was the expert answer. “No more than two meters long and less than half a meter wide, at the most.”

Two answers offered themselves.

In the Great Ship’s own language, the umbilicals asked permission to link with the empty fuel tanks.

Pamir studied the infrared images again, and, with the barest nod, said, “Permission given.”

Moments later, the streakship began receiving a small ocean of liquid hydrogen, hyperfiber-faced compressors squeezing down on the fluid, producing bricks of metallic hydrogen stabilized with diamond exoskeletons. Even with the best pumps and compressors in the galaxy, the fueling would take fifty hours. Without hydrogen, there was no quick return home. For at least the next two days, they were going to dance in the dark with a thoroughly unique alien.

“Hello?”

Pamir blinked and shook his head.

“Hello?” the voice said once again.

The Blue World was a perfect black orb no bigger than a thumbnail held at arm’s length. The voice came from much closer, and wrapped around it was a thin little laugh and a genuine nervousness.

“Do you hear me?”

“No,” Pamir kidded. “We cannot hear you.”

The voice was riding the telemetry signal from the tug. With a deep sigh, it told its audience, “I’m here.”

“Are you a pond?” Pamir asked, already knowing better.

But the voice laughed, declaring, “Of course I’m a pond. We’re all ponds. Didn’t you realize that?”

The voice was O’Layle’s.

“May I come on board?” asked the long-lost refugee. “Please let me on board, would you please?”

Fourteen

Conjecture. Surmise. Interpret and hypothesize. Thousands of years of experience brought to bear on the moment’s problem. A long life of little successes and glorious failures had produced an intellect peculiarly fitted to an impossible task. Understand. Gaze at the body of evidence, and more importantly, note the cavernous gaps in fact and data. What was truly known? Nothing. But there was never such a creature as nothing. Wasn’t every modern soul taught that basic physics lesson? Absence should never be confused with emptiness. The hardest, purest vacuum bubbled with energies and raw potentials. To piece together the mind of any species, what mattered was the shape of its nothing. The lies it told to strangers and the myths it recited to its own good self.

“Where did you first evolve?”

On numerous occasions, xenobiologists aboard the Great Ship had asked that critical question. With a natural curiosity, they inquired, “Where did you begin? And where was your first home?”

It was only reasonable. Only natural. What species didn’t want to point to its lowly cradle and boast? But if the polyponds knew their origins, they didn’t share the story. Time after time, they answered almost every question, but in that one rootstock realm they remained conspicuously silent.

The Master Captain finally threw up what she thought was an irresistible lure. “If you tell us about your beginnings,” she said in one late broadcast, “then I will tell you everything I know about ours. Our entire recorded history, from dust to stars!”

When a response finally came, it was nothing anticipated.

“All the pasts are genuine,” read the thoroughly translated text. “Do not talk about choosing any one.”

Yet there had to be some place and moment where the polyponds began. Genetics might hold clues, but no samples had been analyzed. And what would their flesh tell us? Perhaps an aquatic beginning, judging by how they lived today. Perhaps they had appeared on some cold world, their ancestors clinging to the occasional hot spring, surviving in some cooperative huddle, the oases scattered across an otherwise icebound landscape. There were plenty of examples in the xenobiologic literature. Snowball worlds tended to concentrate life in the tiniest of patches, and inside one of the richer patches, the various species would manage to unite into an elaborate, purposeful symbiosis. When the climate moderated, they spread rapidly. One oasis excelled, racing across the seas and ice-chewed continents, and in a geologic heartbeat, a Gaian was born—a sophisticated single entity masquerading as a world’s entire biosphere.

There were Gaians in the literature—depending on the most rigorous definitions, less than one hundred examples, or at most, several thousand. And a few of those giant entities had produced starships, eventually seeding distant worlds with their vast daughters.

Perhaps that explained the polyponds’ beginnings: A Gaian world enters a black cloud of gas and wet dust, finding resources enough to make new worlds where it and its million daughters could thrive. But in every other example, the sentient offspring had hoarded their memories about their origins and great parent. They were proud, slow, and decidedly independent souls, and they seemed unable to organize with anyone, including their own equally proud sisters.