A couple of hexagonal cargo pods lay in the middle of the floor, seals flipped open. One of them had a plant on top, growing out of an ordinary red clay pot. There was a central column sprouting five tall flat leaves with tapering tips; their edges were serrated and ruffed, lined with small furry buds. The ones near the bottom had bloomed into long trumpet flowers, coloured a delicate purple.

Greg and Julia exchanged a glance.

"Where are you?" Julia said.

There was a drawn out splintering sound as part of the bark wall split open, revealing a tunnel.

"Just you and Greg, Snowy."

"Hey," Rick protested. He ignored the filthy look Julia threw him. "You can't keep me out of this, Royan. Not if the alien is here. I helped you with Kiley. Damn it, I want to meet the alien. You owe me that, at least."

"I'm not sure you can handle the disappointment, Rick," Royan said.

"It's not here?" Rick asked, appalled.

"Oh yeah, it's here all right."

"Then I want in."

"OK, but I warned you."

Greg turned to the three crash team members. "Keep monitoring us. And if I shout, come fast."

"Yes, sir," said Jim Sharman.

"There's no need for that," Royan said.

"I taught you better," Greg said.

"Yeah, sure, sorry."

Greg went first, letting his espersense flow ahead of him. Royan was there all right, his thought currents wound into a compact astral sphere. Greg perceived all the familiar themes, the deep injury psychosis, buoyant self-confidence, bright notes of arrogance and contempt. It was all shrouded by a grey aura of resignation, the scent of failure.

Then there was the other, the alien. Not a mind as Greg knew them, nothing remotely human, there was no focus, just a hazy presence wrapped around Royan's mind. But for all its ethereal quality, it possessed a definite identity. And it was brooding.

The tunnel was circular, high enough for him to stand in, and this time it was easy to believe he was inside a living creature. It was made from convex ring segments stacked end to end, translucent amber, as smooth and hard as polished stone. Fluid was circulating on the other side, a clear gelatin with shoals of orange-pink blobs floating adrift, like dreaming jellyfish. Either the walls or the fluid beyond was giving out a soothing phosporescence, there were no shadows as he walked along.

It opened into a simple rock chamber. The disseminatory plant had been at work here, but something had halted it in the middle of the conversion. Long strings of rubbery vegetation twined their way round the rock walls and ceiling, anchored by a root skin similar to lichen. White dendritic reefs flowered in the interstices. A tenuous silver-hued weave of gossamer fibres had crept up the lower half of the wall; underneath it, the sharper ridges and snags had been digested, smoothed down, while cavities had been filled with a cement-like paste. He could see the start of the curve that would end with a domed roof. There were dense knots of the vegetative strings along the top of the weave, baby light knobs were germinating inside, silk-swaddled imagoes, casting whorl shadows all around.

The floor had already been levelled, coated in the usual grey-green mat of cells. Various hardware modules were scattered about, linked with power cables and fibre optics; there was a customized terminal, a couple of lightware memory globes, domestic giga-conductor cells, a hologram projector disk, some white cylinders that he didn't understand, tall circuit wafer stacks with nearly every slot loaded. All of it top-range gear, sophisticated and expensive. The only things he was really certain about were the four silver bulbs fixed to the rock roof: gamma-pulse mines. The military used them for urban counter-insurgency; the energy release, converted to gamma rays, would sterilize an area two hundred metres in diameter. Completely wiped of life, including soil bacteria down to a depth of two metres. They were in the top ten of the UN's proscribed weapons list; production and trading carried automatic life sentences.

Four of them in a cave barely twenty metres across was a typical Royan overkill.

But when he saw what was in front of him, Greg was swamped with the terrible conviction that this time they might just be necessary. The skin chill of his dissipater suit reached in to grip his belly.

Royan and the alien were in the middle of the chamber.

The alien was shaped like a single gigantic egg; elliptic, fat, four metres high, three wide. It had a pellucid shell which seemed to be vibrating; watery refraction patterns slithered around it, clashing and merging. The first layer, the white, was a clear band of cytoplasm about a metre thick. Inside that was the nucleus, ice-blue, contained within a rumpled ovoid membrane.

Royan was encased within the nucleus. A solid-shadow adult foetus, naked, legs apart, arms by his sides, head tilted back. Greg peered at the silhouette; Royan had no feet or hands, his limbs tapering away to nothing. The nucleus matter about them was thicker, cloudy, preventing full resolution. There was something wrong with his face, the eyes and nostrils were too large, he had no hair left. Large sections of skin were missing, along with their subcutaneous layers. Greg could see several naked ribs, and most of the skull.

"Jesus!" Rick grunted in shock.

A moan escaped from Julia's lips, a sound of pure anguish and horror, forced up from deep inside her chest. Her hands came up impotently, and she took a couple of hurried steps towards the alien.

"Do not attempt physical contact," a voice said from the terminal on the floor. It was perfectly clear, without any inflection, a neutral synthesis.

Julia stopped dead. "What happened?" she squealed. "Oh, darling, what…"

"Confidence and carelessness," Royan said, his voice coming from the terminal. "Or to put it bluntly: hubris. Good word for my life."

"Are you hurt?" Julia asked.

"Only my pride." The terminal chuckled.

Julia swung round to face Greg. "Is that truly him talking?"

Greg nodded silently. The mental activity matched, and the bitter spike of humour.

"Let him out," Julia said.

"You are unaware of the implication inherent in that statement," the bland voice said.

"Royan?" she pleaded.

"The Hexaëmeron is correct," Royan said. "That's why you were summoned."

Rick tilted his head on one side, frowning. "Hexaëmeron? That's a human term, biblical, the six days it took God to make the Earth."

"I have no language of my own. Obviously I have to use human terms. Royan seemed to think this was appropriate."

"What are you?" Rick asked, his voice raised.

"My planet's evolutionary terminus, and progenitor," said the Hexaëmeron.

"And that's the problem," said Royan.

"Did you come on a starship?" Rick asked.

"No."

Rick let out a hiss of breath. "Then how did you get here?" it was almost a shout.

"By my mistake," said Royan. "Have you reviewed the personality programs I left for you, Snowy?"

"Yes."

"Then you know my original edit for the disseminator plant was a symbiotic arrangement; terrestrial landcoral and the alien microbes working in tandem."

"You said it was a prototype, and that geneticists could splice together a single genetic structure once you had proved the concept."

"Yeah. The prototype started to work out pretty good. You saw what I've done with the fault zone. Then something happened."

"Consciousness initiation," said the Hexaëmeron.

"Too bloody true," Royan said. "The alien microbes achieved a rudimentary kind of sentience. I said nothing like that gene sphere could exist naturally, and I was right. It was designed, for flick's sake, a very deliberate design. The core of the sphere doesn't have anything to do with genetics, it's a molecular circuit with a function similar to a neurone, but considerably more sophisticated. And there's a threshold level; clump enough of the microbes together and they develop a processing capacity. For want of a better description, they start thinking for themselves. And of course, I grew them in their billions for the disseminator plant."