Nigel smiled.

Too casually she interested herself in the details of geography. He watched her in the growing silence of the cabin as she tucked a strand of her polished black hair back, forming a new layer in the polished cap that was secured at the nape of her neck. With an elegant touch of her middle finger she pushed the pencil deep into the bun of strands, distracted. At this absentminded gesture Nigel’s heart leaped into a high new place.

He arched a speculative eyebrow at Mr. Ichino, who sat with hands folded on the table.

“You can talk to me about it, too,” Nigel said with a warm amusement.

Mr. Ichino said uncertainly, “Ah…I…”

“What happened, I mean.”

“I heard nothing in the news.”

“Infinitesimal chance you would.”

“The NSF hasn’t decided how to handle it,” Nikka said. She folded the map and tucked it away.

“I’ve made it quite precisely clear that they can rumi-nate on handling data, but they can’t handle me,” Nigel said. He put one boot on the table’s bench and leaned on it, arm resting on his raised knee.

“Perhaps because it is so unclear,” Mr. Ichino said delicately.

“True enough.” Nigel smiled. “How did it…”

“Feel?”

“Yes. I suppose that is what I wish to know.”

“At first there was a, a sensation of going away.”

“To something new.”

“In a sense.”

“But now you are back.”

“No. I never have come back.”

“Then you …” Mr. Ichino stopped, puzzled.

“What I knew is scrambled. Or thought I knew.” “And …” Mr. Ichino struggled with some inner inhibition. “… what did you come away with that”—he added hurriedly—“that you can tell us?”

“Oh. You mean facts?” He wiped his hands on his rough trousers and stood erect, leaning backward, peering at the roofbeams and the vaulted space of the cabin above them, at the shadows there. “Delicious facts.”

“Tell him about the aliens,” Nikka said. She had been sitting perfectly still at the table and he saw in her absolute lack of motion a tension she would have to grow through, a private set of concerns he saw now as totally transparent but, for her, entirely necessary, a web of concern for him that, cast wide, enfolded more than she needed to and more than she understood. But that, too, would evaporate with time and leave her bare, the old Nikka, the brisk and urbane, her conversations a smart rattle of wry insights, insider’s jargon, an occasional epigram. The slim and springy Nikka, as he sometimes remembered her, standing in muted phosphor light, hipshot, the cradle of her abdomen tilted, jaunty.

“The aliens,” Nigel said, as if to refresh himself, return himself to this linear world.

“You’ve targeted their origin, I gather,” Mr. Ichino said, prompting, and Nigel wondered at the choice of words. Targeted? That word? For things gone and dead and vacant? He remembered Evers and that fellow, Lewis, with their phrases like combat mission and their ultimately absurd sense of the reality of things, the trunk of departing missiles, the oddly soundless crump as the orange blossom was born, behind the poor puzzled fleeing Snark.

Targeted?

Alien. So alien.

“I found their home star,” he said.

“By figuring out their coordinate system?”

“Yes.”

“How did they find us?”

“A survey craft, I suppose. Automated. They were casting about at random.”

“They couldn’t find anything in the radio spectrum? The same as with us?”

“Yes—it checks with what the Snark said.”

“There were no other—organic races?—alive at the time.”

“Not with technology. So these fellows set out to find what they could—maybe to colonize, who knows? But it didn’t work—and stumbled on us.”

“Created the Bigfoot.”

“No. Made use of him. But that didn’t work very well, either, I gather.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. But Bigfoot was a forerunner, anyway.” “Of what?”

“Of us,” Nigel said, surprised. “We’re the point, you see.”

“The… programming?”

“Ah.” Nigel chuckled, leaned over and put his arm around Nikka. “I see you’ve been talking to my little friend, here. Programming—it misses the whole thing.”

“Why did they do it?” Mr. Ichino narrowed his eyes, as though at a loss.

“The—what did Snark say?—the universe of essences. Organic life can have it, machines can’t. The aliens came to be sure we got it, in time for the—well, the Aquila thing. Whatever’s moving toward us.”

“They knew about it then!” Mr. Ichino rapped a knuckle on the hardwood finish. “When you sent me that star chart I wondered if you’d gone off entirely.”

Nigel gave him a crinkling of the eyes, a merry smile. “How are you sure I haven’t?”

To the look of momentary consternation on Mr. Ichino’s face Nigel gave a barking laugh. “No, no, old friend—I haven’t. What has happened to me I can’t quite say.”

“You seem different.”

“I am different.”

“And the Marginis wreck—they came to give us this? For defense?”

“I don’t know,” Nigel said. “You mustn’t think I understand everything. They came for contact, knowing about Aquila. Knowing all organic life is fragile. But hoping there was some kinship, yes.”

“And something stopped them.”

“Themselves, I expect.” Nigel sighed, shifted his feet, stood with hands in hip pockets. “War. Wasco had weapons. There was probably some conflict within them that eventually caused all that. Why bring nuclear death from the stars?”

“A defense against Aquila?”

“Maybe. Or against some other faction of themselves.”

“We can find that out, perhaps.”

“Can we? I wonder. And anyway—who cares? The causes are dead—we have only the results.”

“The results?”

Mr. Ichino frowned and Nikka lifted her head in interest. The chill of the room had dulled as the diffuse glow of the sun sent shafts of light through the two southern windows. Nigel relaxed. He now needed to be out of this place, beyond this unsatisfying round of explanations, so he tried to compress it.

“It’s really a lot of learned tricks, you know, our past. We learned pair bonding, social mechanisms. Then big game hunting. When that ran out—all planets are finite— there was agriculture. From that came technology, computers, an information rate to match our storage rate. But the world isn’t just that—there’s where the computer civilizations run aground. They’re right, really—we are unstable. Because there’s a tension in us that comes out of how we evolved. Computers don’t evolve, they’re developed. Planned—to be certain, safe, secure. That’s the way they stay, if they survive the suicides of their organic forefathers. But the thing in Aquila is a computer society that opted for the preemptive strike—to stop organic forms before they can spread among the stars, find the domesticated computer worlds, and inevitably destroy them.”

Nigel paused. The cabin held an airless expectancy. “Then we …” Mr. Ichino began.

“We have to become better than we are,” Nigel said. “But, hell, that’s really not it. We can have more power than that blundering bunch of robots in Aquila. By entering into …” Nigel laughed, shrugging. “You’ll see it, you will. The universe of essences. The place where subjects and objects dissolve.”

“The New Sons …” Nikka began. “They talk about…”

Nigel raised his hands, chuckled. “They’re the flip side of an old record—fear of death plus the accumulation of things.”

He turned and looked at the yawning fireplace. “We need more wood,” he said.

As he feels in his pocket for his gloves he finds a coin. Elated, he tosses it up, carving the air. He catches it between his fingers adroitly and lifts it, a brassy circle. The coin, held to the yellowing sun, eclipses it. Perspective defies the innate order. The handiwork of man blinds even this awesome furnace that hangs in the sky.