“Old doesn’t mean dead.”

“Nigel, I know what you’re angling for.” Ted smiled sympathetically, his manner becoming milder. Nigel wondered how much of it was a controlled response. “You want first contact. The EMs still don’t know we’re here, if our tricks have functioned adequately—I’m pretty sure your radio blanket notion has worked out, Bob—and I want to keep it that way. Our directives, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone here, are to stay invisible until we fully understand the situation.”

“Pretty clear,” Bob said laconically.

“Until you inquire into the definition of ‘fully understand,’ perhaps so,” Nigel retorted. “But we’ve seen the EMs. They’ve tried to catch our attention already. And we don’t know bugger all about the satellites.”

Ted laced his fingers and turned his palms up, a diffuse gesture Nigel recognized as meaning What are you trying to say? with a hint of irritation, a sign all at the table would get, while simultaneously Ted said calmly, completely without any irked tone in his voice, “Surely a well-preserved artifact will tell us more about the high period of this civilization—”

“If it’s from here, yes.”

Ted’s eyes widened theatrically. “You think the Snark came from here? Or the Marginis wreck?”

“Of course not. However, in the absence of knowledge—”

“That absence is precisely why I feel—as does the majority of this panel, I take it—that we should keep our distance from the EMs for a while.” The section leaders around the table agreed with silent nods.

“They aren’t nearly as potentially dangerous to this mission,” Nigel said. “And they’re native life-forms. We have things in common, we must. Any opportunity for our kind of life to communicate—”

“Our kind?”

“The machine civilizations are out here somewhere, too.”

“Ummm.” Ted made a show of considering the point. “How prevalent do you think life is, Nigel?”

A sticky point. Isis was the sole source of artificial transmissions that astronomers had found in over half a century of cupping an ear to every conceivable part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Nigel paused a moment and then said, “Reasonably.”

“Oh? Why the radio silence, then? Except for Isis?”

“Ever been to a cocktail party where the person who’s unsure of himself babbles away? And everyone else keeps quiet?”

Ted smiled. “Lord protect me from analogies. The galaxy isn’t a cocktail party.”

Nigel smiled, too. He had no way of reversing the decision here, but he could show the flag. “Probably. But I think it’s not an open house, either.”

“Well, let’s knock on a door and see,” Ted replied.

Nigel found Nikka and Carlotta cooking an elaborate concoction at the apartment. They were peppering slivers of white meat and rolling them in scented oils. There were savories to fold in and each woman worked solemnly, deftly, the myriad small decisions provoking a phrase here, an extended deliberation there, all weaving a bond he knew well. Not the right moment to break in.

He volunteered to chop vegetables. He took out his intensity on onions and carrots and broccoli and had a cup of coffee. The first fruit of the “season” was in so he made a salad, following Carlotta’s directions, composing a light, spicy sesame oil for it. The first citrus had come ripe the day before, greeted by a little ritual. Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges had rolled over the witnessing crowd, echoing in the cavern. Someone had salted the clouds that formed on the axis, so that crimson and jade streamers coasted in ghostly straight lines overhead, up the spine of the ship.

Finally, at a lull he said, “I just heard the news.”

“Oh,” Nikka said, understanding.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d volunteered for the satellite mission?”

“Volunteer? I didn’t. I’m on the list for rotating assignments.”

“They thought it was better for morale,” Carlotta put in, “if we just let the personnel optimization program pick the mission crew. Fairer, too.”

“Oh, yes, we must be fair, mustn’t we? A fabulously stupid idea,” he said.

“Everybody’s dying to get out of the ship,” Carlotta said.

“It might well turn out precisely that way,” he said sourly.

Nikka said, “I thought it was better if I simply let the news come up as usual. I nearly told you before—”

“Well, then, nearly thank you.”

“It’s my chance to do something!”

“I don’t want you risking it.”

Nikka said defiantly, “I take my chances, just as you do.”

“You’ll be on the servo’d equipment, the manifest says.”

“Yes. Operating the mobile detectors.”

“How close to the satellite?”

“A few kilometers.”

“I don’t like it. Ted’s going ahead with this without thinking it through.”

Carlotta put down a whisk beater and said, “You can’t run Nikka’s life.”

He looked steadily at her. “And you cannot expect me not to care.”

“Madre! You really want to fight over this?” Carlotta asked.

“Diplomacy seems to have broken down.”

Nikka said mildly, “This mission is planned, there are backups, every contingency—”

“We’re blasted ignorant. Too ignorant.”

“The satellite rock looks to be about the same age as the last major craters on Isis, correct?” Nikka asked lightly, to soften matters.

“So?”

“It stands to reason they represent the last artifacts of EM technology. The two satellites, the superconductors in the village—that is all that remains.”

“Possible,” Nigel muttered. “Possible. But to understand Isis we’ve got to go carefully, start from scratch—”

“We’re scratching, that’s for sure,” Carlotta said.

“I do not want you to risk your life on an assumption.”

Carlotta’s face darkened. “God, you push things damned far. Are you really going to keep Nikka from doing the job she was born to do?”

Nigel opened his mouth to say, Look, this is a private thing between the two of us—and saw where that would lead.

“You may be a goddamn living monument,” Carlotta said, “but you can’t rule by authority. Not with us.”

Nigel blinked, thinking, She’s right. So easy to fall into that trap and

—suddenly saw how it was for Nikka, her mind shifting, restless, clotted with memories, reaching out toward him now with hands still moist from the cooking, the determined cast to the face, the firm lift in the stomach, a tight pull won from endless hours of exercise, keeping the machine ready so that she could still go out, the outstretched hands slick and webbed by age and brown liver spots, narrowing the space between them—

“You cannot fix me in amber,” she said.

“Or any of us, damn it,” Carlotta added.

To him Nikka’s face glowed with associated memories, shone in the spare kitchen with a receptive willingness.

“I … suppose you’re right.”

—It was 2034 again and he comes home in the warm Pasadena evening, putt-putting on a scooter. He clicks the lock open and slams the big oak door to announce himself, bounding up the staircase. In the white living room he calls out to her. Something chimes faintly in his ears. His steps ring on the brown Mexican tiles as he walks into the arched intersection of kitchen and dining nook. A woman’s spiked shoe lies on the tile. One shoe. Directly underneath the bedroom arch. He steps forward and the ringing in his ear grows. Into the bedroom. Look to the left. Alexandria lies still, facedown. Hands reaching out, clenched. Arms an ugly swollen red, where the disease was eating at her, would never stop eating—

He knew it then, saw her falling away into nothingness. The ambulance that shrieked through night mists, the antiseptic hospital, the terrible things done to her after—all that was coda to the symphonic life the two of them had shared, had tried to have with Shirley as well, yet the three-body problem had forever remained unsolved—