“You see what I mean,” Lio said, “that it’s so crazy, you wouldn’t have believed me unless I showed it to you in a book.”

He and I, Arsibalt, Tulia, and Barb were all sitting around the big table at Shuf’s Dowment. Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems was sprawled out like an autopsy. We were looking at a double-ended foldout. It had taken us a quarter of an hour just to get the thing unfurled without tearing the ancient leaves: real paper made in a factory. We were looking at a huge, exquisitely detailed diagram of a spaceship. At one end, it sported a proper nose cone, as a rocket should. Everything else about it looked weird. It did not have engines per se. At the aft end, where the nozzle bells of a proper rocket ought to be, there was instead a broad flat disk, looking like a pedestal on which the vessel might be stood upright. Forward of that were several stout columns that ran up to what I assumed was the spaceship proper: the family of rounded pressure vessels sheltered beneath that nose cone.

“Shock absorbers,” Lio said, pointing to the columns, “except bigger.” He drew our attention to a tiny hole in the center of the big disk astern. “This is where it would spit out the atomic bombs, one after another.”

“That’s the part I still can’t get my mind to accept.”

“Have you ever heard of those Deolaters who walk barefoot over hot coals to show that they have supernatural powers?” He looked over toward the hearth. We’d lit a fire there. Not that we needed one. We had a couple of windows cracked open to admit a fresh green-scented breeze that was blowing in over the young clover in the meadow. Sad songs were carried on that air. Most of the avout were so shocked by the six-fold Voco that to make music about it was all that they could do. Those of us in this room had another way to come to terms with our loss, but only because we knew things that the others didn’t. We’d lit the fire as soon as we’d arrived, not to keep warm but as a primitive way to get some comfort. It was what humans had done, long before Cnoüs, long before even language, to claim a bit of space in a dark universe that they did not understand and that was wont to claim their family and friends suddenly and forever. Lio went over to that fire and assaulted a glowing log with a poker until he had knocked off several lumps of glowing charcoal. He raked one of these out onto the stones. It was about the size of a nut, and red hot.

I was already getting nervous.

“Raz,” he said, “would you put this in your pocket and carry it around?”

“I don’t have pockets,” I joked.

No one laughed.

“Sorry,” I said. “No, if I had a pocket I would not put that into it.”

Lio spat into the palm of his left hand, then put the fingertips of his right into the pool of saliva. He then used them to pick up that coal. There were sizzling noises. We cringed. He calmly tossed the coal back into the fire, then slapped his hot fingertips against his thigh a few times. “Slight discomfort. No damage,” he announced. “The noise was spit being vaporized by the heat of the coal. Now imagine that the plate on the back of that ship was coated with something that served the same purpose.”

“The same purpose as spit?” Barb asked.

“Yes. It was vaporized by the plasma from the atomic bombs, and as it expanded into space, it would spank that plate. The shock absorbers would even out the impact and turn it into steady thrust so that the people up at the forward end would feel nice smooth acceleration.”

“It’s just hard to imagine being that close to an atomic bomb going off,” Tulia said. “And not just one, but a whole series of them.”

Her voice sounded pretty raw. All of ours did, except for Barb’s. He’d been perusing the book earlier. “They were special bombs. Really tiny,” he said, making a circle of his arms to show their size. “Designed not to blow out in all directions but to spew a lot of plasma in one direction—toward that ship.”

“I too find it unfathomable,” Arsibalt volunteered, “but I vote we suspend our disbelief and move forward. The evidence is before us, in this”—he gestured toward the book—“and this.” He rested his hand on the sheet that Ala had pinpricked the day before. Then he looked stricken. I think he had seen something on my face, or Tulia’s, or both. For us, this leaf was now like one of the mementoes of bygone Saunts that the avout cherished in reliquaries.

“Perhaps,” Arsibalt said, “it is too early for us to have this discussion. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps it’s too late!” I said. Which earned me a grateful look from Tulia, and seemed to settle it for everyone.

“I’m surprised—pleasantly—you’re here at all, Arsibalt,” I said.

“You are referring to my, ah, apparent skittishness of recent weeks.”

“Your words, not mine,” I said, working to keep a straight face.

He raised his eyebrows. “I do not recall—do you? — any diktat from the hierarchs to the effect that we must not make tiny holes in pieces of foil and allow the light of the sun to fall on paper. Our position is unassailable.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said. “I almost feel a little let down that we are no longer breaking any rules.”

“I know it must be an odd sensation for you, Fraa Erasmas, but you may get used to it after a while.”

Barb didn’t get the joke. We had to explain it. He still didn’t get it.

“So I wonder if—perhaps—one of these ships went missing,” Tulia said.

“Went missing?” Lio repeated.

“Like—its crew mutinied and they headed out for parts unknown. Now, thousands of years later, their descendants have returned.”

“It might not even be their descendants,” Arsibalt pointed out.

“Because of Relativity!” Barb exclaimed.

“That’s right,” I said. “Come to think of it, if the ship could travel at relativistic velocity, they might have gone on a round-trip journey that lasted a few decades to them—but thousands of years to us.”

Everyone loved this hypothesis. We had already made up our minds it must be true. There was only one problem. “None of these ships was ever built,” Lio said.

“What!?”

He looked as if we were about to blame him for it. “It was just a proposal. These are nothing more than conceptual drawings from very late in the Praxic Age.”

“Just before the Terrible Events!” Barb footnoted.

We were all silent for a while. It takes time and effort to tear down and stow away an idea you were that excited about.

“Besides,” Lio went on, “this ship was only for military operations inside the solar system. They had ideas for ones that could go to relativistic velocity, but they would have been much bigger and they’d have looked different.”

“You wouldn’t need a nose cone!” said Barb—which was his idea of hilarious.

“So if we buy the idea that what Ala and I saw—the blue sparker—was a ship in orbit that was using this kind of propulsion system—” I began, nodding at the diagram.

“—Then it must have come from an alien civilization,” Arsibalt said.

“Fraa Jesry believes that advanced life forms must be extremely rare in the universe,” Barb told us.

“He followed the Conjecture of Saunt Mandarast,” Arsibalt said, nodding agreement. “Billions of planets infested with unicellular glop. Almost none with multicellular organisms—to say nothing of civilizations.”

“Let’s speak of him in the present tense—it’s not as though he’s dead!” Tulia pointed out.

“I stand corrected,” said Arsibalt, none too wholeheartedly.

“Barb, when you were talking to Jesry of this, did he have some alternate theory?” Tulia asked.