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SETI Library: The Grace of Tragedy

Written by Gregory Benford

"What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." —Werner Heisenberg

It felt good to yell. Good and loud. Ruth pounded on one of the pale elephant-ear formations, and with her comm set off, she shouted full force. That at least helped her frustration. She slammed gloved fists into the meaty folds, but the massive mat didn’t budge.

All the big, leafy sheets of the Marsmat on the uphill side of the chamber had closed, sealing them in. And Akralan was gone.

A kilometer below the Martian soil, they had managed to lose the alien. He had vanished in the sudden pulse of pale ivory light that streamed from the Mat itself.

Vayl knocked on her helmet, touched his helmet to hers and said, “Over this tantrum?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Alien is gone. Let us get out of here.”

The comm buzzed with speculations, complaints, cursing.

She grinned. “I can do better than that. Let’s find him.”

He frowned, grimaced skeptically. “Mat is blocking us. He must have gotten out with some trick.”

“I have another trick. I put a tracker in his suit.”

Vayl blinked. “How?”

“Stuck it with an adhesive below his oxy tanks.”

“Ah. Hard to see there.”

Ruth nodded and popped up a virtual screen on the left side of her helmet visor. “I’ll activate it.”

The software pinged up quickly. She got a flashing signature dot, moving slowly in the coordinate space. “I’ve got him.” She pointed.

“How distant?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Move down this corridor,” Vayl said, gesturing. “Get triangle.”

She saw his point. The rest of the team was muttering on comm when she checked, then shut it off. She had to keep her head clear of talk. She made her way over rocky footing, careful to avoid the Marsmat where it clung, and got perhaps a hundred meters away from the rest of them. Vayl barked orders to the others to use the new electro-shock methods on one of the big elephant ears, then turned to follow her. Ruth stopped and sent a ping to the tracker. It answered with a flashing icon. She punched in commands and the software compared with the previous signal.

“There!” she pointed at her own helmet display. “He’s about two hundred meters away, to the right.”

Vayl squinted from near her right ear, trying to make out the display. “Don’t bother send to me. We got to go after him.”

A shout from the team. They had sprung open one of the big Marsmat irises. It had jerked open, startled by the jolt of high voltage current.

They stepped through, single file. The nearby craggy corridors yawned vacant in the pale Marsmat light.

Vayl flashed his big lamps up and down the new, rough cave they stood in, cloaked in a damp fog. “Plenty mat, but did the alien come this way?”

Ruth checked her helmet display. “He’s still to our right. Moving, too.”

They carefully made their way through the cramped corridor, avoiding outcroppings of thick mat. Ruth thought about how the Marsmat had separated her, Zuminski and Xiaoling off with the rest, using its iris-valves. Why? Had the alien sent the Mat some signal they had missed? Akralan had written the coded messages they displayed days before, using their screen—still the best way to “talk” to the Mat, they thought. What had that message actually said? Akralan had given Ruth a supposed translation from his own swirly script, but how would they know if it was really what the tangle of symbols meant?

They made their way through dizzying labyrinths of passages—steadily deeper and deeper, warmer, wreaths of moist gases wrapping around them. Ruth sent a ping and, watching the moving display, said, “Akralan is right in front of us. Not far.”

The murky walls spread slowly, opening like a funnel. They stood in the flaring entrance to a huge vault, shrouded in thick mists and pervaded by an ivory glow. Ruth could see almost nothing in the shadowy depths that fell away, still downhill.

“What’s that?” Vayl whispered on comm.

Something glinted in their headlamps. They moved forward cautiously. The Mat retreated here, forming an exactly circular arc around—

“Looks artificial,” Xiaoling said. It seemed to be asculpture of an odd, lustrous metal. Silvery, but with streaks of yellow and deep blue in its depths, almost like the facets of a jewel.

Vayl said, “Has to be manufactured.”

Xiaoling said, “Maybe this is from Akralan’s species? The Mat couldn’t make it.”

Ruth ventured, “Maybe . . . left here long ago?” Is this the mother cavern? The place where the Mat network concentrated? Some theorists thought there should be one.

They stayed a respectful distanced from the thing, angular and oddly curved, about a meter on a side and sunk into the rocky floor. This grotto reminded Ruth of a family vacation when she was a girl: the Carlsbad caverns. Stalactites had speared down from a high ceiling, dripping with creamy droplets. Stalagmites answered them, rising from the hard, white floor to heights above Ruth’s head. “This is old,” she said. “A primordial cavern.”

“How do you know?” Xiaoling asked.

“These are like the drip-formed limestone caverns on Earth. It takes a long time to form them.” Ruth looked around; no sign of Akralan in the dim grotto.

One of the biologists said, “Uh, Earthside ones came from the shells of dead sea creatures, like the white cliffs of Dover.”

Xiaoling snorted audibly over comm. “Shells in a Martian ocean? That—”

“Right, can’t be. But limestone can form directly from sea water too, in shallow areas where there’s too much calcium for the briny water to hold,” the biologist said. “So it precipitates out in layers. Then plate tectonics scrunches it, buries it, and it forms a stone layer. Later water can creep through it from above, carrying it down in solution. Then it deposits again in stalactites like these.”

Xiaoling said, “Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics.”

“It did,” the biologist shot back, “when it had oceans. That lasted maybe a billion years, tops. This cavern must have formed when the oceans froze, then got covered in dust. Some water was warm enough to drip through the limestone, and hollow out this cavern.”

Ruth said, “Ah. So that’s why it looks like Carlsbad caverns.”

She walked over to some glistening snottites—moist, meters-long colonies of single-celled extremophilic bacteria. They hung from the walls and ceilings of caves, like small stalactites, with the consistency of snot.

Vayl said, “Marsmat must remember that, know this is really ancient. From before the time that the Marsmat itself evolved to intelligence. So it’s a holy place to the mat? Maybe. Or maybe just a place where it deposits truly old things. Like this—and what is it?” He pointed at the strange metallic object, standing at the center of an exact circle of mat.

Ruth walked carefully to it, crouched down, turned off her headlamp. Three round bumps near the top caught her eye—shiny, reflecting. “These look like crystals—seems to be a weak glow behind them.”

Others gathered round. “Some energy source running it,” a voice said.

“The Mat didn’t make this,” Xiaoling said, “but Akralan must have gone searching for it.”

“How come we didn’t find this?”

“Might be, we never explored this way,” Vayl said. “Doubtful, though.”

“Or maybe . . .” Xiaoling pointed to the precise circle formed by the Mat. “Could the Mat have covered it, when a human team went through?”

Vayl touched the lip of the Mat with a finger. It jerked back, a surprisingly quick reaction. “It’s sensitive. Maybe slid off this object—”

“When Akralan gave it a signal,” Xiaoling said—and shrugged. “Somehow.”

To Ruth the thing looked old, even in this setting. She had imagined there might be some quarry Akralan was seeking, but—this? It very existence implied another thread of speculation, and she made a swift decision.

Ruth stood up, taking quick photos with her shoulder-mounted camera, and said, “Let’s find Akralan. Maybe he will ‘fess up.”

That broke up the circle, sent them off down the grotto, their head beams stabbing into the thick murky fog. Vayl herded them into search teams, as she knew he would—but did glance back at her for a long moment, as if suspecting something. She bent down again before the artifact and used her hand flashlight to send quick, on-off signals toward the three crystal “eyes” as she thought of them.

It flashed back, the same pattern. Ruth wondered if it ran on the hydrogen sulfide that filled this chamber—a convenient energy source, just as in the thermal vents on Earth. Ancient chem wisdom.

She waited, watching the artifact, and on an intuition started her shoulder video camera. The quick flash of it activating brought a response from the three “eyes”—and they started sending short flashes, in a rippling sequence that darted among the three, long and short bursts in a complex pattern. Her instincts told her immediately: a code string.

It ran several minutes as she watched intently, holding her camera view steady, not saying a word on comm. Data time, yes!

She wondered if this was why this artifact was deep down, somewhat isolated from the Marsmat. Awaiting the right messenger?

The strange long code string stopped. The “eyes” went dull, done.

She backed away, looked around. The team was far down the cavern now, their beam lights a diffuse glow. Then over comm. she heard excited talk.

Vayl called, “Akralan! Stay where you are.”

Ruth listened as Vayl shot questions at Akralan. The alien gave one-word answers. She used the time to carefully inspect the artifact, which now stood inert, with no glimmer from the three crystals.

Now was her last chance, she saw. Ruth carefully fetched a small thing that looked at first glance like a rock, much resembling the rough gray igneous walls of this grotto. She had fashioned a simple stucco wrap around the device inside, then dirtied it up.

She found the small button near its base and clicked it on. The device murmured in her hand, opened a port and sent a verifying dart of light out. She put it about a meter from the artifact, sight it carefully at the three crystal lenses, and stood up just in time. The team was materializing out of the mists, their glow lighting up the area. She stood between them and her device, asking of Vayl—who was the most alert, always—“Where was he?”

He eyed the artifact and crouched to take more pictures of it, but her legs blocked his view of the device. “Trying get away, I think.”

Xiaoling said, “Let’s get him out of here.” And whispered, “Bastard.”

Ruth could tell from the team’s faces that they were worried, angry, tired, or all of the above. So she chimed in with the chorus and they soon marched away, retracing their route to the ruptured, enormous soft pedals.

She knew her device would self-actuate within an hour, and convey run through a coded sequence she had gotten from her buddies back at the SETI Library. It was a simple attempt to give to the alien device a hail, plus some questions. And, who knew?—maybe that artifact could convey it to the Mat, as well. She would put very little past the strange intelligence that surrounded them now, as they threaded their way through the bowels of a life form that was in many ways still beyond their comprehension.

****

They came slowly up from the Martian depths, Ruth’s mind working furiously. Mostly, pointlessly. Furiously, yes.

A day down the vent in a cramped suit reeking faintly of old sweat—despite the new, improved self-cleaning liners and ‘freshers—left her with aching muscles. Not so much from all the grunt work, but a suit never let you get the best leverage. The designers had never fixed the basic problem—most of the suit’s weight hung on the shoulders. She had tried to build hers up into hard slabs of muscle, but after days below they always wailed. And untended to, they got other muscle groups to join in the concert. She ran the shower long and hot, relishing the steam.

****

For most librarian work, the best rule was Ass in the chair.

Even on the wild frontier, Mars.

Ruth pondered. Usually the people around her had the same work habits. Everyone involved with the SETI Library or on Mars had a fierce, autodidactic, gnarly idiosyncrasy—indeed, maybe that was the entrance ticket to the Librarian Life.

Back in her cramped cabin, swathed in a comfy puffy bathrobe, she let herself ease into the analysis. Earlier, she had compared notes on inter-world email with the SETI Mathists. Some of her SETI colleagues there were hardcore mathist types. They could visualize four-dimensional surfaces in a non-Euclidean geometry, just to make sense of some messages. Apparently, this took inordinate quantities of caffeine. She was happy to leave them to it.

At her request, already they had traced the Mat images that Akralan had called forth. Then they linked those images to old SETI messages that had holographs, asking—did any resemble these objects?

Some did. Her buddies back on the moon found cross-references to other SETI messages, after days of steady crypto-sorting. Those had similar symbol strings and “weaves”—jargon for interconnected slabs of data that seem to be intelligible only in a holographic way. They were called librarians, those mathists, but they didn’t just keep track of books. They linked symbol groups in different linear parts of the message, by imposing an appropriate math mapping. It was all quite complex and wonderful, going far beyond her math competence. For this, she was grateful. Then she tried to explain it to Vayl. Big mistake.

“Not understand,” he said in his minimalist way.

She flicked a command into her voicewriter and said, “Think of a sentence like this one, only the parts don’t relate in a straight line sequence.” Her voicewriter noted this down as she spoke. “So my previous sentence could read,” she said, adjusting the voicewriter screen again to redeploy the sentence, “Parts straight line sequence sentence, one that doesn’t previous relate like.”

A trick, but it worked. He stared at the voicewriter screen. “Ah, I . . . think I see. To unwrap the above line and make sense of it, you need a mapping function.”

She nodded. “Now expand that idea to whole paragraphs, and then to whole idea groups. The weave of them would be complex, and would not convey a simple logic.”

He blinked. “Ah.”

“There are various conventions about how to represent numbers—for example, least significant digit first versus most significant digit first—and remember, aliens won’t know that U+FFFE is a guaranteed non-assigned codepoint.”

“What?”

“Maybe I’m more of a nerd than I know. Anyway. what the ‘natural’ order to represent a sequence is, whether signal on represents 1 or 0—if, say, we restrict our aliens to binary—nobody knows. Mathematics may be universal but transmittable representations are not.”

“But binary has own logic.” He spread his hands, as if this was obvious. And of course, it was.

“You know more trans-group math than you let on,” she said, in what she hoped was a nerdy, coy tone.

“I never show all my cards.” He grinned, and launched into a little song:

“A problem worthy of attack

Proves its worth

by fighting back.”

“Sounds like a march,” she said.

“Was trying for Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A sly grin. “Grandiose.”

“Look, becoming a SETI librarian for the money and the fame is like becoming a Jesuit for the kinky sex and hard drugs. I know that.”

“Ambition is good,” he said enigmatically.

She decided to bring up a dicey issue. “Look, I’ve seen your background. Damned impressive. Why be here, when you could do so much elsewhere?

To her surprise he sprang to his feet—overshooting, springing a meter high in the low grav. He paced back and forth, face a clown mask of bright-eyed wonder. “Why didn’t I think of that? Here I am, yes?—wasting my golden years on this dangerous dustball, all messed up with mysterious smart plants? When I could, with just a little thought, be seeking and striving! Putting my shoulder to the wheel—or is it my face to the grindstone?—for betterment! Plus that of all mankind. I’ll bet I could write a billion bucks a year in over-scale insurance on asteroid shipments. Pull a big oar in the flagship of life! Exercise impressive skill set. Or wait, maybe it isn’t too late—do you think? I could race back Earthside, find the little woman, get in with MegaCorp or Solaristics, go to executive lunches, nod soberly at board meetings, make money while I sleep! Why, the opportunities—thanks so much for finally pointing me in right direction!”

He stopped with twirl, arms spread like the end of a showbiz number.

When she stopped laughing, he said, “You’re not working for my parents, are you? Sent all this way to talk me out of this crazy career?”

“Uh, no.”

He slid hands all around her, ignoring her squeals. “Know that.”

A knock at the door. The Base Bioneer’s stern face told them, “We’ve had an infection. Some Marsmat got in, apparently on part of a suit. It’s inside our envelope. Evacuate now—into suits, outside.

“Damn!” they said together.

The Bioneer suddenly grinned at them. “Getting it on during work hours? Tsk tsk.”

Vayl ignored her, closed the door, turned to Ruth. “Let’s find place to make this happen.”

****

They trooped out with the others as she struggled with the psychic mulch of emotions. Swerving from the Akralan problem to cryptology to, suddenly, Vayl—she had to keep her equilibrium. The Vayl issue roamed through the labyrinths of her mind as they formed up in units outside the habitat, watching the cleaning crew do their thing.

She liked men, but didn’t like them by the gross. That had been in the offing here, where men so outnumbered women—but she had planned on keeping to herself. Somehow, Vayl had come in under her guy radar. His soft eyes belied a sinewy toughness, plus a quirky humor like her own.

Vayl touched helmets and said, “We go.”

She blinked, then followed him around the garage and support buildings, to the greenhouse. They cycled inside to find no one there. The habitat air system provided clean, moisturized air at 1/3 Earth sea level pressure, like living on a mountaintop at 23,000 ft. but with plenty of oxygen. They didn’t feel altitude effects, and had lots of energy—but the air tasted flat. Here, they could work without helmet or gloves. With just a skin suit on, she shucked her Marswear insulated outer garments. Vayl threw off his suit and sucked in the flavorful air. “Ah!”

They looked past the rows of plants, through the clear side walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. Nobody around. She ambled down the aisles, breathing in the aromas. In this little space, cupped against the soil, was a tiny human garden in all its moist promise. Growing food on Mars was immensely symbolic as well as practical—wheat, rice and potatoes, various beans, and popular vegetables like broccoli and tomatoes. These swelled in large hydroponics trays, some using Martian soil. There was something very calming about being surrounded by green leaves and vines, nodding gently in the endless, moist updrafts.

Vayl said, “Wonderful, to see something alive that can’t talk.”

Vayl started with a grin. Just a cockeyed lurch of the lips and raised eyebrows. She thought they would make slow love, maybe try out the lighter gravity a bit, do some stunts. He took his time and she thought they would kiss and grin and joke but as their clothes fell she came up like thunder, her need outpacing style. She put the tender moves away and got into the fever of it. So did he. Some wild moves, perspiring and heart thumping, a fast bonanza. Then long slow drifting, maybe the best part of all. It was outside of time, boundless as the ocean. The only way to get back to the Cambrian, warm salty waters, awash in time, endless. Nothing was separate, everything joined together and made the ebb and flow of day and night were like the winking of a great eye. Making love was, among all humans had, the most profound form of nostalgia.

Since college days, it had always been a big turn-on for her to look over the shoulder of a lover into the foliage of a tree. They had started on a plot of grass, where others could have seen them. As soon as the fever left them—though she knew from past performance they weren’t nearly done—they moved to a less obvious part of the long greenhouse, near the work benches, shielded from view.

Vayl took her in his arms and said, “You . . . you don’t have to return to Earth on the next Aldrin, do you?”

“I’ll have to ask my husband.”

He stopped dead still, mouth open. “You are—”

“No, just kidding. Assuming you’re not married either?”

“No, am not. You have strange way of bring up subject—”

“Come on, it was a joke!” She started laughing at him, throwing up her hands—and slipped on the wet floor. She started to get up from under a table, reached for the edge, glanced to the side—and stopped laughing.

Akralan’s filmed eyes stared out at her.

She jerked away, rolling on the slick floor. “Ack—ack—”

“What?” He knelt—and froze.

Ruth stared at the . . . body. Akralan? No, it looked like Akralan—but it wasn’t really, she saw. It was much smaller, the size of a large dog. But it looked exactly like a smaller Akralan lying on its side. Some of the plant feeder tubes snaked down and attached to the body at pale yellow sockets.

“What . . . is it?” she managed.

“You said once, was big puzzle for Earthside biologists, how Akralan reproduced.” He raised his eyebrows. “Looks like, by budding.”

****

They went back to the habitat, filing in behind the others; the cleanup was done. Silently they made their way to Vayl’s Guy Thing room, which Ruth thought of as the proper place for spittin’, cussin’ and scratchin’ in peace. Thinkin’, too. They poured some Martian wine—incredibly, one of the horticulturists had made a decent one—and sat.

“Aside from the interesting biology . . .” she began.

He said, “Akralan must have put the—bud, I guess we call it—out in greenhouse, to conceal it.”

“Maybe he’s like a marsupial?” she guessed. “Kept the bud hidden in a kind of pouch, for it to develop?”

They had inspected the thing carefully, noting that it was fed by an electrical tap, plus basic watery fluids and oxygen. It had been well concealed. Only because Ruth slipped and rolled under a table did she see it. The bud had eyes open but did not respond to them; apparently it was not conscious. A filmy capsule enclosed it, like a chrysalis.

He scowled. “Biology I know—aliens, not. When caterpillar turns into butterfly, it has all it needs. Left to itself, it emerges as a young adult. Maybe this one will come out as an Akralan-like being, transformed.”

“How about that electrical lead? It went into a small package on the bud’s back, then into some sort of slot, near the spine.”

He nodded. “Not biology, something beyond. Maybe is being stimulated? Growth is guided?”

She tried to think outside categories, guess what this bud might mean. You’re a long way from the Library, kid.

“How about, maybe the bud is even educated by some electronic means?—with embedded social knowledge and habits.”

Vayl blinked. Slowly he said, “So . . . skips infant stage of humans, so comes out like four year old. Once kids learn to find a bag of cookies and eat, you know they’ll survive on their own, at least on in the food department. Avoids pelvis problem of humans, too. Artificially extend early childhood with technologies, maybe.”

“We know Akralan’s species screwed up their world long ago. They retreated to their outer solar system, and now live there, mostly. So they’ve had to undergo some fancy bioengineering to stay alive, though they started on a planet somewhat like Earth. Self-engineering of the species for—what?”

“Baboons and chimps have offspring that inherit social skills—otherwise, how would they know to form hierarchies and move in troops? Maybe Akralan is thinking that he’ll stay here, form an offshoot of his species?”

Ruth shook her head. “This is going too fast for me. Akralan kept to himself on the Aldrin cycler—maybe that was during his budding time? He got here, found a place where he could hide his bud . . .”

“We need to know more. Akralan won’t answer questions. We have to do something else.”

She brightened. “Ask the Mat?”

****

They lumbered across the red-brown sands in a new hauler. Humans on Mars had carried the emerging symbiosis of human and machines to new heights. Within a few years of the First Expedition, a private enterprise, wireless sensors lay scattered on the surface. Robots came next—not clanking metal humanoids, but rovers and workers of lightweight, strong carbon fiber, none looking remotely like people. Most were either stationary, doing routine tasks, or many-legged rovers. Only a few years after the First Expedition had suffered their minor falls and sprained ankles, humans never actually took the risk of climbing around on steep slopes. Much of their work was within safe habitats, using virtual reality and teleoperation for exploring and labor. But no machine could deal with the Mat.

“Y’know,” Ruth said, “I broke one of my own rules.”

“What?”

“Don't go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself.”

He laughed. “Would make life dull.”

“You agree?”

“A craziness contest? You win easily—a librarian on Mars.”

It was her turn to laugh. “Maybe it’s a tie. We’re going down a deep hole together to cross examine a lifeform that looks like a carpet.”

They were in a crazily good mood as they descended. Vayl had authority to lead small expeditions, so he used it—and filed the proper notices electronically five minutes before they left the habitat.

Two hours later they approached the artifact, having taken longer than expected to electro-shock their way past a massive valve membrane. They worked forward in deep gloom, through a somber fog that thickened toward the ceiling of the grotto.

The mat pulsed suddenly with an ivory glow. It knew they were there. She crouched beside her planted, rock-like device and eyed the alien artifact. The three crystalline “eyes” of the thing lit up. A rippled pattern cycled, quick flashes of life. She picked up her device and checked its actions. The coded sequence she had gotten from her buddies back at the SETI Library had gone out, and hours later, got a reply. Her message had been a simple attempt to give to the alien device a hail, plus some questions. Apparently the mat had answered.

“Let’s call this thing the sphinx,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s old, mysterious, we don’t know for sure who made it.”

“The sphinx doesn’t talk.”

“This one does.”

She tucked the device into her gear belt and beamed at Vayl.

“What’s the worst feature of these pressure suits?”

“Must pee in them.”

“Nope. I can’t kiss you.”

****

Hassan fumed across the table from Ruth. His long black eyebrows fluttered like street signs in a hurricane.

“I just read your—” he nodded toward Vayl— “report on the descent with Akralan. Frankly, it’s skimpy.”

Vayl said mildly, “I keep it simple. Mat pulsed, blinded us. Alien got away, we followed. Found artifact in side cavern.”

“This constitutes an unauthorized contact with the Mat.”

Ruth said, “Stuff happens. You follow up on it. That’s how discoveries occur.”

Hassan did not even look at her. He peered at Vayl. “You were in charge, not her. You could have broken off contact.”

“Leave Akralan down there? Alone?” Vayl laughed merrily. “Lose only alien we have?”

Ruth thought, Actually, not the only one, now . . .

Hassan brushed this away with a wave of his hand. “What did Akralan want from the artifact?”

Vayl said “We call it the Sphinx. What does anyone want from a sphinx? Who made it? What does it know?”

She saw the twinkle in his eyes and nearly laughed. Hassan’s mouth jerked around in an anthology of irritated angles.

She noticed that his beard was like a sheen of dirt. Not reddish actual Mars dirt, just grunge. Maybe he was too busy to take one of the one-per-day allowed showers. Worrying sure can take it out of you.

“What makes you think the Mat wanted you go to there, disturb it?”

“I followed the alien. Had no choice.”

Hassan’s eyes narrowed. “I shall file a formal report on this clear breach of protocols.”

Ruth got up, stretched. “By the time Earthside processes it, other events will make it irrelevant.”

Hassan eyed her. “Such as?”

“Plenty.”

****

The next turn surprised her, though.

The alarm came at night. She stumbled out of Vayl’s cabin in a hastily thrown-on robe. Some people in the corridor raised eyebrows when they saw her with Vayl, but the excitement and alarm swept all that away. She flocked into the communal room and watched the big screen at one end of the room. Somebody was explaining but the sight of the night sky was the point.

A camera atop the habitat had alerted them all. Its feed let them all see it. A smudge of light hovered on the horizon. It was a pale white cloud, linear, fuzzier at one end. It seemed to point downward. The camera was looking north, and the cloud glowed. A pale ivory finger of illumination spiked up from the surface, broadening.

It came from the vent, she knew instantly—an impossibly brilliant outpouring.

Vayl gasped. “Mat is outgassing.”

A spire of light forked up, luminescence dancing in the filmy cloud, probing with colors that shifted from blue-green to a reddish amber.

To poke such a glistening probe of light into the sky must have cost the Mat enormous energies, she thought. To make it, the vent would first have to expel a gusher of vapor. Then the Mat would all have to pour its reserve energy into the pale glow, coherently.

That took coordination,