The cylinder on the workbench had been closed, though not sealed. The liquid inside, now black, gave off a foul, heavy, sweetish odor. A few samples of the thick liquid and floating fragments —mushy, crumbling to the touch like over-soaked cookies— had been removed and transferred to a series of smaller beakers lined up on another counter.

  “Truly fascinating!” chattered Master Maff, the head of the lab, his bloodthirsty bandit face smiling melancholically this time. Quite a change from the last time the mayor had visited him. “This is a psychoprojective jelly, the theoretical existence of which Rihu Corleroy had predicted back in the Third Epoch, but which they had never been able to reproduce...”

  “Psychoprojective?” sighed Attan Ze, hoping that his tiredness and unwillingness to listen to digressions was obvious. He had an idea what the word might mean, but he wanted to force the scholar to be straight.

  “Telepathic, let's say.”

  And why not say it?

  “But not only that! This is the most surprising part: the substance creates a strong mental link, but it is also capable of transferring matter across space, almost instantaneously. In other words, our unfortunate guests were continuously fed by their organic city during their stay here. An extraordinary and marvelously efficient process!”

  The mayor went back to staring at the slop in the cylinder and the disgusting samples ordered before him.

  “Until yesterday afternoon.”

  The scientist ignored the objection.

  “It is unfortunate that it has been polluted, but we do not despair: we are confident that we can recover at least a modest amount to clean and study at leisure. We may even be able to recreate it! Well, actually, it is a living substance. It cannot be created from nothing; it probably needs to be cultivated...”

  Attan Ze heard and understood the other's words, but the meaning remained foreign to him. Was Maff talking about conducting scientific research on a purely theoretical problem, immersing himself in intellectually stimulating experiments of little practical interest in the midst of a monstrous emergency, instead of helping him organize a plan to protect the citizens?

  The mayor turned silently, without taking a breath. He remained silent, watching Maff, who continued to ramble on, dreaming of publications, demonstrations in scientific circles, lectures. And perhaps honors and wealth. The frown Attan Ze felt forming on his face did not shake the academic's enthusiasm.

  It was the Samavorian technician's elbow that interrupted the tirade.

  Master Maff looked at the mayor in astonishment, blinked reluctantly to leave his daydream, and jumped when he realized he was being stared at.

  “You asked me about the cylinder,” he said after a cough.

  Attan Ze preferred to leave it at that. But he did not give up on straightening up to tower over the man with all his stature. Maff was a big man with broad shoulders, but he stepped back, his gaze shifting.

  Fingers intertwined behind his back, the mayor rocked his slender body back and forth a bit, then allowed himself a smile.

  “The Zerafians have never used this wondrous technology, have they? How come?”

  The technician answered before his superior.

  “In our opinion, it is a recently developed discovery,” he interjected, trying again to smile reassuringly, but only managing to twist his mouth. The pupil-less eyes remained the same, unable to convey emotion. “In a hurry, you might say.”

  Attan Ze hesitated before asking the question. The future of all depended on it and what would follow.

  “So... unreliable?”

  The two scientists looked at each other in cautious confusion.

  They may have been geniuses in their fields, he thought, but they sometimes lacked the skills necessary to carry on a normal conversation.

  “Did the cylinder fail?” he suggested hopefully. “Is that why they died?”

  Maff narrowed his eyes and scratched at his beard.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn't say that. As I explained to you, it is not the cylinder that works, but the gelatinous substance inside that...” This time he caught the threatening look and hurried to give a clear and quick answer, “There is nothing wrong with it.”

  “Except that it turned into this horrible gruel.”

  “It's the city fragment's fault, that's what melted into it. But the jelly still works.”

  He fell silent, perhaps only then did the significance of the situation sink in.

  “It would work if there was something to transfer. My guess is the mother fungus is dead.”

  Attan Ze Kosh exhaled with deliberate slowness, his eyes closed.

  “Then it is as we feared.”

  The assistant technician tried to be helpful, taking the floor in a flurry of excitement, but his voice reached the mayor with an irritating falsetto that was far from conveying optimism.

  “Something terrible has happened in Zerafia, yes. But it could be anything!”

  Attan Ze opened his eyelids again. He tilted his head toward the young man, looking at him in silence until he saw him swallow and put down the ash-colored hands he was gesturing with.

  “For example?”

  The two scientists had no ready answer.

  “That would be a strange coincidence after what we learned,” he added.

  Maff stared at the floor, drawing awkward curves with the toe of a shoe, a shy big boy who did not want to talk to strangers.

  But that was not the worst of it. Attan Ze had the distinct impression that for these people, the impending destruction of the city was a nuisance, not a tragedy. Something that interfered with their work. A vulgar thing, even an insult. No more important than someone coming to cackle in their neat cubicles, wasting time with meaningless chatter. They tried to ignore it, to convince themselves that if they refused to believe it, the threat would go away, annoyed by the lack of attention, like a bully on the playground.

  The assistant cleared his throat, but his voice did not improve.

  “We had called you, Excellency, to give you another piece of news. An unexpected discovery,” he said, trembling with excitement. “We have examined the vehicle...”

  The small group moved away from the specimen table, much to the relief of the mayor and his olfactory stalks, which were all rolled up and closed to endure the stench of rotten jelly. They were beginning to hurt. As soon as he could, he loosened them and felt them move cautiously in the stale air. He tried to erase the grimace of disgust that wrinkled his lips as he listened to the new report.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “It, too, is a living being. A vegetable, to be specific, but equipped with a primitive nervous system. Its movements can be controlled by small electric shocks, stings, and who knows what other kinds of stimuli. We haven't been able to study it thoroughly yet.”

  “But we have noticed that it has strange reactions to certain sound frequencies,” Master Maff interrupted loudly, as if to demonstrate with a voice command.

  Attan Ze Kosh glanced distractedly behind him to make sure that the monstrous vehicle was not behind him, gaping its huge, cavernous mouth.

  The mouth had opened like the damp, vibrant entrance to an organic tunnel. A mine. It had opened as the mine collapsed and the city mushroom of Zerafia crumbled between the walls of Faspath.

  “This creature was not symbiotic with the city, and we have good hopes of keeping it alive,” the young man continued.

  “Vibrations or actual music?” asked the mayor, hearing his own lost and all too faint voice.

  “Very low frequencies, inaudible to us. Some of them confuse it, cause it to turn on itself, while others paralyze it completely, and it just crouches and shakes as if in panic.”

  “But that's our impression, because it's still a plant, and it has no thoughts or feelings,” the lab chief clarified. “It's just a physiological reaction, a disturbance in its motor system.”

  Attan Ze took a deep breath, sucking the air through his lips as if it were a delicate liquor. He smiled again.

  “Frequencies around twenty, sixteen, ten cycles?” he asked, and the tickle of inappropriate laughter rattled his diaphragm.

  The scientists were repeating the little game of confused looks they had entertained him with moments before. It was becoming tiresome.

  “True, Excellency,” Master Maff admitted, a spark of suspicion in his grim gaze. The braids fluttered on his cheeks and he sent them back with a shake of his large head.

  “Do you know what they are?” the mayor asked.

  It was the young man who tried.

  “A kind of signal?”

  The mayor smacked his lips. All right, a scholar, no matter how experienced, could not be expected to know everything about every subject. But how often had this admittedly unavoidable limitation led to tragicomic situations? How many physicists unknowingly held the answers to medical dilemmas, to name just one?

  “These are the sounds produced by our mine vibropumps. Which can travel tens of miles into the rock, and which must have disturbed Zerafia's life, and greatly so.”

  The humming of the coolers on the other side of the room was the only sound for a long time. Attan Ze struggled to focus on Maff's face, which blinked slowly.

  “They're upsetting these creatures, but we don't know if they had any effect on the Zerafians themselves.”

  “But it is possible, probable, and it would explain why these poor fellows haunted and sabotaged for so long a mine that produced a commodity they had no interest in or use for, yet we thought they were trying to steal it from us.”

  The scientist snorted, with a sound that resembled a growl.

  “Why didn't they tell us?”

  “Beings so different from us, maybe they just didn't know how to communicate.”

  “But they did come here,” the technician protested. “To their enemies, to entrust us with a treasure!”

  “Desperate,” the mayor concluded, bowing his head.

  The young man's face was a pale oval, his mouth a dark horizontal gash.

  But there was no time for inaction, not even a minute's silence in memory of the Zerafian people.

  “What treasure?”

  “The one we wanted to tell you about, Your Excellency. Inside the vehicle...”

  Maff carefully placed two fingers on Attan Ze's forearm, barely touching the shiny fabric of the wide sleeve.

  “Here, see for yourself.”

  The lab chief directed the mayor’s gaze with a blatant gesture, extending his whole arm to point to a raised platform in a corner below the light switches. A square object, a squat parallelepiped, rested on it. The spongy, pale-yellow surface appeared randomly pockmarked from a distance, but when it was a few steps away, Attan Ze recognized the pattern. The small, rounded dimples —whether they had formed naturally on the skin or by the work of a craftsman would never be known— darker orange dots formed the outline of two spirals that wound in opposite directions to enclose three wavy vertical lines. The symbol of Zerafia, repeated on the lid and all sides of what was clearly a ceremonial box.

  “They left this, a gift for us,” the man said.

  Attan Ze bent down. That was not enough, so he kneeled. He stretched out his arm as far as he could, squatting down while he placed the palm of his right hand over the pattern imprinted on the top of the container. He felt it warm, throbbing.

  “They knew,” he murmured.

  The casket. May the casket live forever.

  “They knew their days were numbered. They brought it to us for safekeeping, entrusted it to us. To us, despite everything. Their only hope.”

  Friends, thank you.

  The silence behind him irritated him more than all their babbling had done before. Attan Ze Kosh rose with a rustle of silk robes and faced the scientists, this time without hiding his anger.

  “What is in it?” he asked, his voice low but resonant with overtones.

  “S-some vials,” the technician stammered. “Twelve sealed vials, and a scroll with very clear explanatory drawings...”

  When Attan Ze moved a little step forward, he had the satisfaction of seeing the technician back away so hard that he slammed into the edge of a counter, rattling numerous vials.

  “Good. Now, I want twelve vials intact in this chest until we decide what to do,” he said, darting his eyes from one to the other of his interlocutors. “Pray that not a single shard of the container is missing when I see it again, or the relic we will leave behind will be lined with your hides.”

  A blush flashed under the skin of the young Samavorian's face; he looked as if he were on fire. And not figuratively.

  Maff, on the other hand, still found the strength to interject, even in a dry, breathless throat.

  “We believe they are spores, Excellency.”

  “It is obvious,” he agreed, finally allowing himself a smile.

  The relief and new hope that had warmed him were already coalescing into a heavy lump, along with the fear of the future, now more uncertain than ever.

  “Just what we needed.” He sighed. “Two civilizations to keep safe.”