If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. "Sounds like life to me."

"Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter." He gave me a scary grin. "Something's got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren't gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered."

Szpindel's findings were front and center at our next get-together.

The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: "Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt's still unsettled."

"Haven't seen any of the herd giving birth," Szpindel remarked. "Any sign of a factory?"

Sarasti shook his head. "Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N."

"These are only the bulldozers," Bates pointed out. "There'll be tenants."

"A lot of 'em, eh?" Szpindel added. "Outnumber us by orders of mag."

James: "But they might not show up for centuries."

Sarasti clicked. "Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?"

It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: "Don't see how."

"Something else does, then. Something already local."

Nobody spoke for a moment. James' topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top.

"Their habitat isn't anything like ours, if they're building a home way out here. That's hopeful."

Michelle. The synesthete.

"Proteins." Sarasti's eyes were unreadable behind the visor. Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us.

"Whoever these beings are, they don't even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There's no reason we shouldn't get along just fine."

"On the other hand," Szpindel said, "Technology implies belligerence."

Michelle snorted softly. "According to a coterie of theoretical historians who've never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong." And in the next instant she was just gone, her affect scattered like leaves in a dust-devil, and Susan James was back in her place saying:

"Why don't we just ask them?"

"Ask?" Bates said.

"There are four hundred thousand machines out there. How do we know they can't talk?"

"We'd have heard.," Szpindel said. "They're drones."

"Can't hurt to ping them, just to make sure."

"There's no reason they should talk even if they are smart. Language and intelligence aren't all that strongly correlated even on Ear—"

James rolled her eyes. "Why not try, at least? It's what we're here for. It's what I'm here for. Just send a bloody signal."

After a moment Bates picked up the ball. "Bad game theory, Suze."

"Game theory." She made it sound like a curse.

"Tit-for-tat's the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball's in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much."

"I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don't want to look needy."

"The rule only applies when you're going up against an unknown player, " the Major explained. "We'll have more options the more we learn."

James sighed. "It's just—you all seem to be going into this assuming they'll be hostile. As if a simple hailing signal is going to bring them down on us."

Bates shrugged. "It only makes sense to be cautious. I may be a jarhead but I'm not eager to piss off anything that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living. I don't have to remind anyone here that Theseus is no warship."

She'd said anyone; she'd meant Sarasti. And Sarasti, focused on his own horizon, didn't answer. Not out loud, at least; but his surfaces spoke in a different tongue entirely.

Not yet, they said.

Bates was right, by the way. Theseus was officially tricked out for exploration, not combat. No doubt our masters would have preferred to load her up with nukes and particle cannons as well as her scientific payload, but not even a telemattered fuel stream can change the laws of inertia. A weaponized prototype would have taken longer to build; a more massive one, laden with heavy artillery, would take longer to accelerate. Time, our masters had decided, was of greater essence than armament. In a pinch our fabrication facilities could build most anything we needed, given time. It might take a while to build a particle-beam cannon from scratch, and we might have to scavenge a local asteroid for the raw material, but we could do it. Assuming our enemies would be willing to wait, in the interests of fair play.

But what were the odds that even our best weapons would prove effective against the intelligence that had pulled off the Firefall? If the unknown was hostile, we were probably doomed no matter what we did. The Unknown was technologically advanced—and there were some who claimed that that made them hostile by definition. Technology Implies Belligerence, they said.

I suppose I should explain that, now that it's completely irrelevant. You've probably forgotten after all this time.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even oneEarth exists; to hope for manyis to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?

Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there areany, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.

It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?