“A religious institution?”

“Or something.”

“How do you know this?”

“Never mind. I just thought you might want to know that Ganelial Crade isn’t the only one with an agenda.”

I considered asking Sammann what his agenda was but decided to let it drop. He was probably wondering how a bunch of Bazian priests would treat an Ita.

My agenda was looking at the photomnenomic tablet, which I knew that everyone in this vehicle—except for Cord, who’d been driving—must have been studying. I’d only had a brief look at it before. Cord and I sat together in the back. The sun was shining in so we threw a blanket over our heads and huddled in the dark like a couple of kids playing campout.

This thing that Orolo had wanted so badly to take pictures of: would it be something that we would recognize as a ship? Until Sammann had showed me this tablet a few hours ago, all I had known was that it used bursts of plasma to change its velocity and that it could shine red lasers on things. For all I’d known, it could have been a hollowed-out asteroid. It could have been an alien life form, adapted to live in the vacuum of space, that shot bombs out of a sphincter. It could have been constructed out of things that we would not even recognize as matter; it could have been only half in this universe and half in some other. So I had made an effort to open my mind. I had been prepared to be confronted by some sort of image that I would not be able to understand at first. And it had, indeed, been a riddle. But not the kind of riddle I’d been expecting. I hadn’t had time to study it, to puzzle over it, at the time. Now I had a good long look.

The image was streaked in the direction of the ship’s motion. Fraa Orolo had probably set up the telescope to track it across the sky, but he’d had to make his best guess as to its direction and speed, and he hadn’t gotten it exactly right, hence the motion blur. I guessed that this was only the last in a series of such images that Orolo had been making during the weeks leading up to Apert, each slightly better than the last as he learned how to track the target and how to calibrate the exposure. Sammann had already applied some kind of syntactic process to the image to reduce the blur and bring out many details that would have been lost otherwise.

It was an icosahedron. Twenty faces, each of them an equilateral triangle. That much I’d seen when Sammann had first shown it to me. And therein lay the puzzle, because such a shape could be either natural or artificial. Geometers loved icosahedrons, but so did nature; viruses, spores, and pollens had all been known to take this shape. So perhaps it was a space-adapted life form, or a giant crystal that had grown in a gas cloud.

“This thing can’t be pressurized,” I pointed out.

“Because the surfaces are all flat?” Cord said—more as statement than question. She dealt with compressed gases in her work, and knew in her bones that any vessel containing pressure must be rounded: a cylinder, a sphere, or a torus.

“Keep looking,” Sammann advised us.

“The corners,” Cord said, “the-what-do-you-call-’em—”

“Vertices,” I said. Those twenty triangular facets came together at twelve vertices; each vertex joined five triangles. These seemed to bulge outward a little. At first I’d mistaken this for blur. But on a closer look I convinced myself that each vertex was a little sphere. And this drew my eye to the edges. The twelve vertices were joined by a network of thirty straight edges. And those too had a rounded, bulging look to them—

“There they are!” said Cord.

I knew exactly what she meant. “The shock absorbers,” I said. For it was obvious, now: each of the thirty edges was a long slender shock absorber, just like the ones on the suspension of Cord’s fetch, except bigger. The frame of this ship was just a network of thirty shock absorbers that came together at a dozen spherical vertices. The entire thing was one big distributed shock absorption system.

“There must be ball-and-socket joints in the corners, to make that work,” Cord said.

“Yeah—otherwise the frame couldn’t flex,” I said. “But there’s a big part of this I’m not getting.”

“What are the flats made of? The triangles?” Cord said.

“Yeah. No point making a triangle out of things that can give, unless the stuff in the middle can give too—change its shape a little, when the shocks flex.” So we spent a while puzzling over the twenty flat, triangular surfaces that accounted for the ship’s surface area. These, I thought, looked a little funny. They looked rugged. Not smooth metal, but cobbled together.

“I could almost swear it’s stucco.”

“I was going to say concrete,” Cord said.

“Think gravel,” suggested Sammann.

“Okay,” Cord said, “gravel has some give to it where concrete doesn’t. But how’s it held together?”

“There are a lot of little rocks floating around up there,” I said. “In a way, gravel’s the most plentiful solid thing you can obtain in space.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But that doesn’t answer your question,” I admitted. “Who knows? Maybe they have woven some kind of mesh to hold them in place.”

“Erosion control,” Cord said, nodding.

“What?”

“You see it on the banks of rivers, where they’re trying to stop erosion. They’ll throw a bunch of rocks into a cube of wire mesh, then stack the cubes and wire ’em together.”

“It’s a good analogy,” I said. “You need erosion control in space too.”

“How do you figure?”

“Micrometeoroids and cosmic rays are always coming in from all directions. If you can surround your ship with a shell of cheap material—aka, gravel—you’ve cut down quite a bit on the problem.”

“Hey, wait a sec,” she said, “this one looks different.” She was pointing to one face that had a circle inscribed in it. We hadn’t noticed it at first, because it was around to one side, foreshortened, harder to make out. The circle was clearly made of different stuff: I had the feeling it was hard, smooth, and stiff.

“Not only that,” I pointed out, “but—”

She’d caught it too: “No shocks around this one.” The three edges outlining this face were sharp and simple.

“I’ve got it!” I said. “That one is the pusher plate.”

“The what?”

I explained about the atomic bombs and the pusher plate. She accepted this much more readily than any of us had. The ship that Lio had shown us in the book had been a stack: pusher plate, shocks, crew quarters. This one was an envelope: the outer shell was one large distributed shock absorber, as well as a shield. And, I was beginning to realize, a shroud. A veil to hide whatever was suspended in the middle.

Once we’d identified the pusher plate—the stern of the ship—our eyes were naturally drawn to the face on the opposite, or forward end: its prow. This was hidden from view. But one of the adjoining shock absorbers was visible. And something was written on it. Printed there neatly was a line of glyphs that had to be an inscription in some language. Some of the glyphs, like circles and simple combinations of strokes, could easily be mistaken for characters in our Bazian alphabet. But others belonged to no alphabet that I had ever seen.

And yet they were so close to our letters that this alphabet seemed almost like a sib of ours. Some of them were Bazian letters turned upside-down or reflected in a mirror.

I flung the blanket off.

“Hey!” Cord complained, and closed her eyes.

Fraa Jad turned around and looked me in the face. He seemed ever so slightly amused.

“These people”—I did not call them aliens—“are related to us.”

“We have started referring to them as the Cousins,” announced Fraa Criscan, the Hundreder sitting next to Fraa Jad.

“What could possibly explain that!?” I demanded—as if they could possibly know such a thing.

“These others have been speculating about it,” Fraa Jad said. “Wasting their time—as it is just a hypothesis.”