“I don’t trust her,” Conrad declared.

Pamir kept silent.

“Or them, for that matter.”

The Second Chair glanced at the black sky.

“Not that they’ve done anything particularly unfriendly.” The Remora walked faster, following the outside edge of a vast and empty dome. “We’re the intruders here. We weren’t invited. And if someone dove through me …”

His voice trailed away.

Then after a long silence, he asked, “What the telescopes see … what do you think it means … ?”

The emissary stopped abruptly, her helmet pivoting, allowing her smiling face to ask, “Is this the skimmer?”

“I don’t know,” Pamir confessed.

“It is your skimmer, yes,” Conrad told her.

Then as she climbed aboard, Pamir told his friend again, “I don’t know. What means what? I haven’t half of a faith in any one notion now.”

OTHER FLAVORS OF energy ran wild on the hull: ambition and creativity, selfishness and bravery, rage and fear and vengeance, plus the occasional dose of generous, unalloyed altruism.

The slick gray landscape accelerated around them. On their left, in the distance and blurred by their speed, was a fef work camp.

The emissary asked about the little aliens.

She was wearing limited nexuses, none reaching into the data reservoirs. Every question had to be audible, and when she listened to answers, her responses were measured and set against all the other questions she had asked and her reactions to everything else that she had ever heard.

Pamir described the fef, in brief.

“Could I meet one someday?” she asked.

Pamir said, “Of course,” and left it there.

Neither wore lifesuits, though two of the elaborate machines stood nearby, ready to wrap themselves around their fragile bodies in case of trouble. Pamir filled a standard uniform, while the emissary was dressed in simple gray trousers and a loose white blouse. She looked very long and strangely pretty. Her face seemed both inquisitive and simple. In most ways, she had kept her appearance unchanged. But in the years since her arrival she had noticeably aged, the long black hair growing whiter and finer, her face softening in countless little ways.

She was O’Layle’s DNA; but immortal lives depended on bioceramic genetics much more durable than any nucleic acid.

She was dying, and according to projections, old age would kill her around the moment when they broke free of the Inkwell.

Less than thirty years from today.

For a moment, and not for the first time, Pamir entertained the image of sleeping with the creature.

He closed his eyes, and for the next few hours he pretended to sleep, and she respected his privacy, allowing him to work through his nexuses before stealing a brief dreamy nap. Then a voice nudged him awake. Sitting up, he saw another bright splotch of light in the distance—a white light punctuated with blinking colors, red and green and violet beacons matching the three most common colors for blood. Port Alpha lay just over the distant horizon. Set on the arbitrary northern pole, no other port was as busy normally; but after the Great Ship entered the nebula, little traffic was required. As a precaution against wandering comets, each of the six ports was kept sealed. And only limited, short-range missions were allowed. The polyponds claimed that even small vessels made it difficult to sweep clear the debris and mark what couldn’t be moved with bright beacons. In terms described either as perfectly polite or distinctly chilly, they repeatedly reminded the captains that they should keep very close to home.

Past the mothballed port stood the first shield generators—blunt cylinders and bland cones bigger than most mountains.

Every moment spent in the open brought a measurable, predictable risk. The skimmer’s armored plates had aligned themselves to blunt the likely impacts. Its engines had accelerated to their limits, the angular velocity great enough to make Pamir’s body feel a kilo or two lighter. Everything close was a blur, and for a little while there was nothing else to see. Then came soundless flashes as lasers lashed out at dust and grit, and the shields grew stronger and deeper, a colorful swift aurora swirling overhead. The skimmer eased toward the left—toward the east—passing wide around a site where ionized wreckage was gathered and sorted, purified and sent off to some useful place.

The polyponds did much the same trick, but on a vast scale.

Pamir tied into a nearby mirror field, using its eyes to gaze at the sky beyond the shimmering aurora. What had appeared black from the ship’s trailing face was nothing. It was a simple darkness, deep but transparent. What was coming—the Satin Sack—was heavier and colder by a factor of ten, blackness heaped on blackness that was buried deep in the bowels of the nebula. Not dense by any human measure, the Sack was a massive feature nonetheless, jammed full of dust and cold gases. Alone, the ship could weather any transit, but its hull would end up battered, the mirror fields ground down to so much bright hot dust. But they weren’t alone; the polyponds were deploying gigantic shields of their own, ionizing then coaxing trillions upon trillions of hazards out of the way.

In certain frequencies, the ship’s course was obvious.

If the Sack was a thick cylinder of black smoke, then it looked as if a strong narrow breath had blown through it, punching a million-kilometer-wide hole clear to the other side.

The emissary watched the blurring terrain. According to every buried sensor, she was exactly as interested as a young human should be, and for someone with narrow understanding of the ship, she was no more or less nervous than what was expected of her.

“What you can do,” Pamir began to say.

She looked at him. Her graying hair was a little dull, but the eyes remained bright and cheery. “Excuse me?”

“It’s amazing,” he said. “What you can accomplish, I mean.”

“I can do nothing,” she insisted.

“Your species, I mean.”

With an emissary’s poise, she nodded, telling him, “Thank you very much.”

“You know,” he continued, “we always believed—I’m talking about the captains—we congratulated ourselves for our robust understanding of aliens. With tens of thousands of species as our experience, it was easy to think that we knew everything. But the polyponds are different. Unexpected, mostly.”

Again, she said, “Thank you.”

“Which makes us wonder: ‘What else is there?’” He knew what he would say, but he let himself pretend a reflective silence. “If we end up flying out of the galaxy, out into deep space … maybe we’ll find other species that we never anticipated …”

Without a shred of embarrassment, she said, “Since I know nothing about such possibilities …”

“You won’t respond. Of course.”

Again, she looked off at the smoothly blurring hull.

“Is this where you were born?”

The emissary played her own game, pretending not to hear him.

Not for the first time, Pamir asked his companion, “Do you know anything about your species’ origins?”

“No,” she replied.

Honestly, said the watchful instruments.

“What about your history?”

With a human shrug, she replied, “I have no interest in such things.”

“When we first met,” he continued, “you mentioned my ship’s cargo. What was it that you said exactly?”

Without a trace of humor, she asked, “Have you forgotten my words?”

Not for a moment.

Then she glanced at Pamir, and she smiled with her mouth and eyes, and while she sat, one knee lifted high into the air, distracting him with a moment’s empty flirtation.

IN THE MIDDLE of the ship’s leading face, perched on the smooth gray bow, was perhaps the largest telescopic array in the galaxy—thousands of kilometers of optical mirrors and radio antennae, remote-sensing lasers and neutrino traps. The construction that began with a crash program, two centuries ago, had continued unabated. Factories built for no other purpose continued shoving out high-grade reflectors and AIs trained to think about the oceans of raw data. An army of robots cultured for the first wave of construction had nothing to do now but repair the occasional impact damage, filling the bulk of their time assembling new mirrors and dishes, then splicing in the baby minds. If nothing slowed their pace, this hemisphere would be covered with telescopes in less than eighteen hundred years, and another eight centuries after that, the trailing face—minus rocket nozzles and Remoran cities—would be equally plastered with great lidless eyes.