"Perhaps he is only projecting his appearance," I suggested. "Perhaps he is actually far away on some planet known for its lava pools, and he simply sends out images of himself to ask these questions."

Festina looked at me most curiously… but Uclod waved away my words as if they had so bearing on the subject "What if there’s more than one Pollisand?" he asked "Maybe there are hundreds of these bozos wandering around, just waiting for people to get in trouble.

"Another valid possibility," Festina said, "and I could give you a dozen more. Navy Intelligence has plenty of hypotheses… but no real facts except that this headless white alien occasionally shows up at the precise moment of a disaster and begins to ask infuriating questions. Since the aliens always look and act the same, our NAVINT folks are inclined to regard the Pollisand as the only one of his kind; but who knows?"

Uclod made an ungenteel noise in his throat. "And your gurus think this Pollisand ranks high is the League? A super-evolved creature should have better things to do than thumbing his nose at people who screw up."

Festina shrugged. "In Explorer Academy, we studied all the advanced species known to humanity… and we came to the conclusion no one knows why any of them do what they do. Hell, in most cases, we have no idea how up-ladder aliens spend their time. Do they sit around contemplating their navels? Indulge in arts and sciences we don’t comprehend? Project themselves into higher dimensions and play chess with otherworldly powers?"

"If I were an otherworldly power," I said, "I would not play chess. It is a most boring game. Except for the little horses. If I were an otherworldly power, I would create a new game that only had the little horses. And the winner would receive excellent prizes, instead of that nonsense about the thrill of intellectual achievement."

Uclod gave me a look. "Try to stay focused, missy. Real live aliens don’t play board games with fictitious deities. Presumably," he said, turning back to Festina, "real live aliens have to eat and reproduce and gather raw materials for whatever gadgets they manufacture…"

"Don’t be too sure," Festina said. "From what we’ve seen of highly advanced races, they engineer themselves to transcend mundane needs. At the Academy, one of our professors theorized that to get past a certain point of evolution, species have to jettison almost all their natural drives. You can’t go forward till you dump the primitive crap that’s holding you back. And not just stuff like eating and breeding, but mental attitudes too. Territoriality, for example — humans, Divians, and other races of our approximate intelligence level all have at least some expansionist tendencies. We build colonies, terraform planets, try to keep our economies growing. But species above us on the ladder aren’t interested in such things. None of them has any known planetary holdings. They just… well, have you heard of LasFuentes?"

She was looking at Uclod. When he shook his head, she went back to the keypad and typed for several seconds. The display screen changed to show a bright desert landscape of hard-baked dirt, punctuated in places with scrubby weeds that looked like tiny orange balloons glued onto twigs. A white-surfaced road ran diagonally across the picture — a road pocked with holes where the pavement had turned to rubble. It looked most ancient and crumbling, stretching toward the horizon… until it suddenly disappeared over the edge of a large drop-off.

The view zoomed forward, closer and closer to the drop-off. Soon I could see this was the lip of a great crater, a huge round bowl sunk deep into the land. I had heard of such craters being made from the impact of cosmic objects hurtling out of the sky… but the one on the screen looked more like an artificial feature dug by an alien culture. The road continued forward down the side of the crater, fading now and then due to erosion but always resuming again, traveling in a straight line until it reached the bottom of the bowl.

There, in the center of the crater, stood a simple fountain made of bleached gray stone. No water bubbled from the central pillar and the basin was dry as salt; however, I could tell that long ago this fountain must have gushed as cheerfully as the two fountains in the central plaza of my home village.

"This," Festina said, "is the legacy of Las Fuentes — a race who once occupied most of the worlds now belonging to the Technocracy… including my home planet of Agua." She waved at the screen. "This particular fountain is in an Aguan high desert called Otavalo. There are other fountains all over my world: in rainforests, in the mountains, on the prairies, even a few underwater. Always at the bottom of great whopping craters dozens of klicks across, with one or more access highways leading in. And the fountains aren’t just on Agua; they’re on every planet Las Fuentes colonized."

"Religious shrines?" Uclod asked.

"Perhaps. People on Agua thought so — my nana used to take me to one in the deep jungle so we could light candles." She paused for a moment staring off into the distance; then she shook her head briskly and went on. "Anyhow, Las Fuentes dominated ninety-two star systems till five thousand years ago: a total population estimated to be at least a hundred billion.

"Then," she continued, "they just gave it all up. Peacefully, as far as we can tell — no signs of war or other disaster. And Las Fuentes are still around nowadays… or at least a race that claims to be the successors of the crater makers."

She pressed a key and the screen changed once more this time showing the interior of a room that was plushly appointed according to human standards. By this, I mean it had a number of big fat chairs that might have been very handsome if they had been clear instead of an ugly opaque brown. There were also grumpy paintings of humans on the walls, surrounded by tall shelves of objects that were probably books: the ancient type of book that always tells the same story and has no push-buttons. The scene looked most opulent indeed… except that one of the chairs was filled with a mound of vivid purple jelly.

Festina pointed to the jelly, "That’s what Las Fuentes look like today."

I stared. It did not look like a living creature at all; it had no structure, no orifices, no notable physical features — nothing but purple goo coagulated on the seat of the chair and heaped halfway up the backrest. If placed on the floor, the pile might reach to my knees.

"This creature does not look advanced," I said. "It is nothing but ooze."

"But smart ooze," Festina replied. "The picture was taken in the study of Admiral Vincence, current president of the navy’s High Council. Vincence found the ooze one night when he got home; it had somehow sneaked past the most sophisticated security system our navy ever assembled. The jelly introduced itself as official ambassador of Las Fuentes, gave a comm number where it could be reached, then disappeared — sank straight through a leather armchair and into the floor."

"Were the Fuentes purple jelly before?" Lajoolie asked softly. "When they were building the fountains?"

"Not according to archaeologists. Las Fuentes were big into cremation, so we don’t have any physical remains… but we’ve found a few tools, broken furniture, things that suggest they had conventional bodies. Flesh, blood, bone, the usual. When you ask the jelly ambassador what caused the big change, he’ll only say, We grew up."

Festina turned to look at the purple blob picture once more. "So now," she said, "Las Fuentes don’t have a home planet that we know of… just a single ambassador on New Earth. He won’t talk about trade, refuses to advise on scientific matters, and ignores requests for cultural exchange. Once in a while, he arbitrates disputes or clarifies the League of Peoples’ views on tricky legal questions — what we have to do to stay sentient — but he never seems to want anything from us. He isn’t interested in our labor, our data, our resources, our manufactured goods… so whatever goals jelly-people have, we humans are too primitive to be useful."