The skimmer began to slow, seats reversed, and the passengers yanked into the deep foam. The gees weren’t difficult for Pamir, but his companion had only the ancient protein-spawning repair genes. Her back and legs were bruised, and without autodoc help, the purple blotches would remain visible and sore for days.

The landscape slowed to a crawl, and at a seemingly random spot, the ship quit moving beneath them.

“We walk,” he announced.

She donned her lifesuit without complaint or questions.

“It’s not far,” he promised.

But she hadn’t asked, and she didn’t seem to care now.

They were parked on a narrow path set in the midst of an enormous, silent, and utterly motionless forest. Shields and exploding bits of grit colored the sky. Vast dishes stood on both sides of them, rising high on elegant columns of diamond and optical cables. Hexagon-shaped dishes touched one another. No light fell beneath the telescopes, and the brutal cold only worsened in the smothering darkness.

“Follow my marker,” Pamir instructed.

The tall emissary walked stiffly, her eyes fixed on a tiny red light riding on the crest of his helmet.

“Keep close,” he advised.

But she didn’t have the strength to match the man’s pace. Age and the fresh bruises pulled her back, forcing her to call out, “I can’t see you now.”

“Stop walking,” Pamir advised.

She stopped and waited silently. Her breathing was a little quick, and her human heart raced to a normal degree. But as soon as her body recovered from its exertions, breath and the heart rate slowed again. Her own suit had several lights, but she didn’t use them. She seemed utterly at ease in the blackness. Nothing could be visible to her eyes, and she was happy enough to smile.

In the distance, the red beacon blinked back into view.

Pamir said, “Come on now.”

She held the line, every step accomplished with a blind faith that the hull was smooth and trustworthy. Only when she reached the beacon did she realize that it was higher than before, and the lifesuit beneath was as large her own. She hesitated. For an instant, her old-fashioned water-and-fat mind felt a perfectly ordinary confusion that was detected by an array of subcutaneous sensors.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The giant lifesuit turned slowly. A light came on inside the helmet, the golden face peering out through the faceplate, not quite smiling as the Master Captain said, “I need to ask you something, darling. Come with me.”

The emissary hesitated, then obeyed.

Sometime during the last few days, a fleck of ice had managed to fall through the lasers and shields, striking the hull with a flash and enough force to obliterate a hundred hectares of mirrors. The crater was shallow and white-gray, the hyperfiber able to realign its structure enough to recover most of its strength. Repair crews of robots and fef had been sent elsewhere. What were the odds that a second object would slip through the defenses and explode here? The odds were tiny, but no tinier than any other target zone, of course. What the Master wanted was open ground. What the psychobiologists found appealing was the dose of drama that came with this unexpected meeting. Put the emissary through humane amounts of abuse and worry, then throw her into a situation she could never have anticipated.

In the middle of the round clearing, black chairs had been set up.

Washen met the Master at the fringe, using the public channel to say, “Welcome, madam. And welcome to you, emissary.”

The creature gave a little nod.

“When did we talk last?” Washen inquired. “At the Master’s banquet, was it?”

“Yes.”

“I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay with us.”

A feeling of puzzlement ran through the emissary’s mind. But she had the poise to say, “I have enjoyed everything that I have seen.”

Her years had been spent inside a large apartment decorated with security enough for a prison cell. Except for a few carefully orchestrated trips, she had seen nothing, and not once, even in passing, had she asked for more freedom.

“What question may I answer?” the emissary wished to know.

Pointing with a long arm, the Master Captain said, “This way, please. If you would.”

The chairs were arranged in a widely spaced ring. When the emissary walked into the middle, the Submasters took their seats. Pamir was visible again, sitting on the Master’s left side. And Conrad filled the next chair, his single eye staring at the emissary as if he had never seen her before.

Washen was on the Master’s right. “Look up now,” she coaxed.

The sky was a splotch of deep indigo turning crimson at its margins.

“Of course we’re a little bit blind,” Washen confessed. “There’s a lot of noise and busy light to look past, and that keeps us from using these mirrors to their full potential. But still, we can piece together a few things.”

The sky changed. What lay beyond the shields burst into view, shifting from radio to the infrared range and back. The Satin Sack was a vast bubble of noise and tiny puddles of heat, elaborate structures and intricate details revealed suddenly. Ionized gas and ice looked like twisting threads, leading inevitably to clusters of warm water. One of the clusters was magnified, thousands of points appearing beside a standard scale. The points were packed into a neat sphere barely one light-hour in diameter. Each was the size of a small moon, and with a reasoned tone, Washen said, “They’re children, of a kind. Buds, we’ve dubbed them.”

A quiet but intense voice said, “I would not know.”

“I believe you,” Washen said.

The image shifted again. Directly ahead of the ship lay the hole, the promised passageway, as cold and as empty as the rest of Sack was busy and bright.

“Our course,” Washen muttered.

The emissary gave a little nod.

“Still open and ready for us, it seems.”

“Seems?”

“To the limits of our eyes, it looks open. Yes.”

The emissary’s heart beat harder, and her breath sped up until it was audible—a nervous quick breathing that slurred her next words.

“I do not know … what you want …”

“Some weeks ago,” Washen explained, “we noticed a new phenomenon. Something odd or ordinary, but definitely an event that had to have been planned in advance.”

“Yes?”

“These threads here, these rivers of water and minerals … they seem to have been feeding the young polyponds, letting them acquire mass and raw materials.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Together, the rivers started to expand. You can’t see it yet, not with this resolution. But it’s obvious enough. The electromagnetic shackles have been relaxed. The ions are running away from each other, spreading out in all directions.”

The aging face nodded, nothing to say.

“Maybe the children have grown enough,” Washen allowed. “Maybe that’s as simple as any explanation needs to be.”

The view shifted suddenly, dramatically. Everyone stared at one of the nursery clusters, except this cluster lay near the bottom of the Satin Sack. Two light-years distance, and the infrared signature was extraordinarily bright. Inside a narrow zone, each of the moon-sized children appeared as hot as plasma, portions of their watery bulk surging into space on a fountain that was not only hot but fiercely radioactive too.

“The engines are crude but effective,” Washen relented. “Reaction-mass affairs powered by laser arrays driven by fusion reactors—systems we know something about.”

Silence.

“The most distant children are moving now,” she continued. “Of course, if they wish to come visit us … to come see the Great Ship at a closer vantage point … well, they would have to get an early leap on things. Which seems like a reasonable story to tell.”

“Yes, it does seem reasonable,” the emissary agreed.

“Except every child seems to be thinking the same way. The Sack is four light-years tall, and all of the buds on its margins are expending fabulous amounts of energy and their scarce water for no clear purpose other than to move toward us. They’ll have to destroy more than half of their mass just to make a close approach. And does that seem at all reasonable to you?”