According to the Scrolls, that was one path to salvation. Many, like Jop, believed in it.

Sara tried to see hope, even if word came back of flames and dust in the night. At any time, hundreds of books were outside Biblos, on loan to far-flung communities.

But few texts in Sara’s specialty ever left their dusty shelves. Hilbert. Somerfeld. Witten and Tang. Eliahu — names of great minds she knew intimately across centuries and parsecs. The intimacy of pure, near-perfect thoughts. They’ll burn. The sole copies. Lately her research had swung to other areas — the chaotic ebb and flow of language — but still she called mathematics home. The voices in those books had always seemed soul-alive. Now she feared learning they were gone.

Then abruptly, another notion occurred to her, completely unexpected, glancing off her grief at a startling angle.

If Galactics really have come, what do a few thousand paper volumes really matter? Sure, they’ll judge us for our ancestors’ crime. Nothing can prevent that. But meanwhile, aboard their ships…

It occurred to Sara that she might get a chance to visit a completely different kind of library. One towering over the Biblos cache, the way the noon sun outblazed a candle. What an opportunity! Even if we’re all soon prisoners of the galactic Lords of Migration, destined for some prison world, they can hardly deny us a chance to read!

In accounts of olden days she had read about “accessing” computer databases, swimming in knowledge like a warm sea, letting it fill your mind, your pores. Swooping through clouds of wisdom.

I could find out if my work is original! Or if it’s been done ten million times, during a billion years of Galactic culture.

The thought seemed at once both arrogant and humbling. Her fear of the great starships was undiminished. Her prayer remained that it was all a mistake, or a meteor, or some illusion.

But a rebel corner of her roiling mind felt something new-a wakened hunger.

If only…

Her thought broke against an interruption. Suddenly, high overhead, a boy stuck his head through a slit window. Hanging upside down, he cried — “No fires!”

He was joined by others, at different openings, all shouting the same thing. Chimps joined in, shrieking excitement across the crowded meeting hall.

“No fires — and the roof-of-stone still stands!”

Old Henrik stood, then spoke two words to the elders before departing with his son. Amid the flustered babble of the throng, Sara read the exploser’s expression of resolve and the decisive message of his lips.

“We wait.”

Our caravan of races marched toward where the alien ship was last seen — a blazing cylinder — descending beyond a low hill. Along the way, Vubben continued chanting from the Scroll of Danger.

Voices cried out ahead. Crowds jostled along a ridgetop, hissing and murmuring. We must nudge past men and hoon to win our way through.

Whereupon, did we not gaze across a nest? A new clearing lined with shattered trees, still smoking from whatever ray had cut them down.

And poised amid this devastation — shimmering from its heat of entry — lay the cause.

Nearby, human and urrish crafters argued in the strange dialect of the engineering caste, disputing whether this nub or that blister might be weaponry or sensors. But which of us on Jijo has the expertise to guess? Our ships long ago went down to join this planet’s melting crust. Even the most recent arrivals, humans, are many generations removed from starfarers. No living member of the Commons ever saw anything like this.

It was a ship of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies. That much the techies could tell.

Yet where was the rayed spiral? The symbol required to be carried on the forward flank of every sanctioned ship of space?

Our worried lore — masters explain — the spiral is no mere symbol. Silently, it rides. Impartially, it records. Objectively, it bears witness to everything seen and done, wherever the vessel may fly.

We peered and sought, but in the ordained place there lay only a burnished shine. It had been rubbed away, smoother than a qheuenish larva.

That was when confusion gave way to understanding. Realization of what this ship represented.

Not the great Institutes, as we first thought.

Nor the righteous, mighty, legalistic star-clans — or the mysterious Zang.

Not even exiles like ourselves.

None of those, but outlaws. Felons of an order worse than our own ancestors.

Villains.

Villains had come to Jijo.

All right, so i’m not as quick as some. I’ll never think as fast as Huck, who can run verbal circles around me.

It’s just as well, I guess. I could’ve grown up in this little hoon port thinking I was such a clever fellow — as witty and gloss as my literary nicknamesake — just ’cause I can read any Anglic book and fancy myself a writer. Good thing I had this little g’Kek genius living in the khuta next door, to remind me that an above-average hoon is still a hoon. Dull as a brick.

Anyway, there I was, squatting between two of my best friends while they fussed over what we should do with the coming summer, and it never occurred to me that both Huck and Pincer were ring-coring me at more than one level.

Pincer only spent a few duras trying to tell us about his latest “monsters” — grayish shapes he thought he glimpsed through the murk, while bored, tending his hive’s lobster pens. He’s pulled that one on us so many times, we wouldn’t listen if he brought us a molar from Moby Dick, with a peg leg jammed like a toothpick on one end. Sighing from all five vents at once, he gave up babbling about his latest sighting, and switched over to defending his Project Nautilus.

Pincer was upset to learn that Huck wanted to abandon the scheme. Legs lifted on opposite sides of his hard shell, hissing like tubes on a calliope.

“Look, we already agreed-deed. We just gotta finish the bathy, or else what’ve we been working-king on for a year now-ow!”

“You did most of the carpentry and testing,” I pointed out. “Huck and I mostly drew up plans for—”

“Exactly!” Huck interrupted, two eyes bobbing for emphasis. “Sure, we helped with designs and small parts. That was fun. But I never signed on to actually ride the dam’ thing to the bottom of the sea.”

Pincer’s blue cupola lifted all the way up, and his slit-of-eyes seemed to spin. “But you said it was interesting-ing! You called the idea uttergloss-loss!”

“True,” Huck agreed. “In theory, it’s totally puff. But there’s one problem, friend. It’s also jeekee dangerous.”

Pincer rocked back, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “You… never said anything about that before.”

I turned to look at Huck. I don’t think I ever heard her speak that word till then. Dangerous. In all our adventures growing up, she always seemed the one ready to take a chance, sometimes daring the rest of us with cutting taunts, the way only a g’Kek can on those rare occasions when they put away politeness and try to be nasty. With Huck an orphan, and Ur-ronn and Pincer coming from low-kay races, no one was going to miss them much if they died. So it normally fell on me to be the voice of caution — a role I hated.