Incandescence

Lahl shook her head. «Strictly speaking, the crucial evidence was obtained by a third party, but that's not the point. We can quibble all day about the formal attributions, but at present only a fragment of the story is known. Almost everything about this world remains to be discovered, and until someone is willing to pursue the matter vigorously, the few scraps of information I'm carrying will mean very little.»

Viya said, «So you're here to trade what you do know?»

«Trade?» Lahl appeared startled. «No. I'm merely hoping to find someone who can do justice to this, since I don't have the time or inclination myself.»

Rakesh was beginning to feel as if he was being prodded awake from a stupefying dream that had gone on so long he'd stopped believing that it could ever end. He'd come to this node, this crossroads, in the hope of encountering exactly this kind of traveler, but in ninety-six years he'd learned nothing from the people passing through that he could not have heard on his home world. He'd made friends among the other node-dawdlers, and they passed the time together pleasantly enough, but his old, naive fantasy of colliding with a stranger bearing a surfeit of mysteries — a weary explorer announcing, «I've seen enough for one lifetime, but here, take this crumb from my pocket» — had been buried long ago.

Now that it was being resurrected before his eyes, he felt more wary than excited. He addressed Lahl respectfully, but chose his words with care. «I can't promise you anything, but if you have the time to tell us what you've learned, I'd be honored.»

Lahl explained that she belonged to a synchronization clan. Its members roamed the galaxy, traveling alone, but had agreed to remain in contact by meeting regularly at prearranged locations, and doing their best to experience similar periods of subjective time between these reunions. She was on her way to the next such event, in a planetary system twelve hundred light years outward from this node. Given that the meetings took place just once every hundred millennia, travel plans could be made well in advance, and there was no excuse for tardiness.

However, for reasons she did not wish to detail, when the time had come to begin the journey Lahl had found herself on the wrong side of the galaxy, with no prospect of fulfilling her appointment by any conventional means. The communications network run by the Amalgam skirted the crowded sphere of stars that formed a bulge at the center of the galactic disk, adding several thousand lightyears to the journey compared to the straight-line distance. So she had weighed her options, and her sense of obligation, and placed her fate in the hands of the Aloof.

Viya gazed at her wonderingly. «You've been through their network?»

«Yes.»

«You would have been encrypted, though?»

«That's the usual practice,» Lahl said. «But I came at a bad time. There'd been an unexpected surge in traffic a few decades before, and there were no encryption keys available for my destination. Keys have to be distributed the long way around; shortages can take centuries to fill. So I had no choice. I traveled in plain sight.»

«Yet you emerged unscathed?»

«I believe I'm intact,» Lahl replied. She added mischievously, «Though I would think that, wouldn't I?»

Three hundred millennia ago, certain brash citizens of the Amalgam had studied the Aloof's data traffic, deciphered its basic protocols, and constructed links between the two networks. This unilateral act of bridge-building had apparently been tolerated by the Aloof, albeit with only a trickle of data passing through, since few people were willing to trust the short cut. The Amalgam had tried many times to extend its own physical infrastructure into the same territory, but the Aloof had calmly and methodically reversed the trajectory of every spore.

Csi said, «I think I would have arranged for a suitably located backup to wake, and attend the reunion on my behalf instead.»

«That would have been grossly discourteous,» Lahl explained. «And to have the slightest chance of pulling it off, I would have needed to start planning about sixty millennia ago. If I'd had that much foresight, I would never have ended up cutting things so fine in the first place.»