It turned out that gEl had a slight fever. Uwen-ka—the camp doctor and lU-twO's older brother—gave the biologist a quick examination and concluded that, just as everyone had thought, gEl had picked something up from all the dirt the drones had thrown into the air.

"We should have brought masks," Uwen-ka said. "I'll put an order in for them to be delivered with tomorrow's rations."

As for gEl, he was prescribed some extra nectar rations and sent to bed early, and he was perfectly happy with both of those developments.

tlE-la stood nearby, right outside gEl's nest. "What are you going to do now?" she asked.

"I'm going to get back to work," EUe answered, "that's what."

"Shouldn't you sleep?" she asked.

Taking a sip from the nectar bottle in her hand, she leaned forward and to the side and pointed at a nest down the path, at the base of a hillock near the camp's exterior wall. "That nest over there has been set aside for you, with all the amenities a person could want."

EUe nodded respectfully. "Thanks, but I'll be fine. Ever since my university years, I've prided myself on my ability to work for several days straight without sleep."

"Don't tell that to Uwen-ka," she said, "he'll chastise you for it."

"I know it's not the healthiest talent," EUe replied, "but it certainly comes in handy, especially at times like these." He looked up to the starry night. "For all we know, time might be running out, so why not act as if it is? Then, at least, we won't get caught off guard."

"How pragmatic of you," tlE-la observed.

"Uh… thanks," he replied. "Now, if you'll excuse me…"

"Don't mind me," tlE-la said, as she walked off to her nest.

EUe buzzed up into the air. It took only a minute or two for him to make his way back to the vessel. He zoomed beneath the Impactor's extruding edge and up through the entry hole, folding his wings against his back as he landed inside, his heart racing in his chest.

All of that hullabaloo with gEl had given EUe an idea. He spent a moment looking around the Impactor's interior, musing about how he might put his plan into action.

If necessary, he could draw power from his dreamshard, drawing from one of the lEs of life and vigor, blessing himself with all the vitality he'd need to complete his task. True, it would shorten his lifespan, but that happened any time a Gatherer used their implanted dreamshards, and, crucially, EUe didn't have anything left to lose.

He tugged nervously at the feathers on the side of his head. He threaded his fingers through them, sliding them back and forth. It was a bad habit he'd picked up as an adolescent. Sometimes, he'd tug so hard he'd pluck his own feathers out, drawing blood.

He clenched his hands into fists and shook out his wings.

There would be plenty of time for self-mutilation when he was dead.

EUe's plan was to try to heal the Impactor through a communion with zEhewawa. There were many gods of health, vitality, and recovery, but zEhewawa seemed to like him more than the others, so it made that god a natural choice for one to call on in a time of need, especially when the healing being requested didn't appear to be needed.

He thought of it like this: if the Impactors' intelligence was truly complex, and had self-awareness and even emotion, he hoped the alien entity would at least be able to recognize a healing blessing as an act of goodwill, and deduce from that that it wasn't alone, and that it was among friendly company. On the other hand, if the Impactors' intelligence was sub-sapient, lacking in self-awareness, EUe hoped that free healing wouldn't trigger an angry, violent response.

Either way, the result of this experiment should show what kind of intelligence he was dealing with.

There were many problems with this plan, aside from the fact that EUe was assuming that the Impactors' psychology—if they even had one—was even remotely comparable to twEfE psychology. More egregiously, Healing ailments and repairing damage to the body were among the most difficult communions to achieve. If done wrong, it could lead to severe deformities, mutations, or cancer, or worse. Only healers who'd devoted years of their life to perfecting the art of healing communions were able to pull it off. Even ordinary doctors struggled with it—and EUe wasn't a healer, nor a doctor for that matter, not by a long shot.

But… doctors didn't have dreamshards.

EUe hoped that would be enough to make a difference.

There were many advantages to dreamshard implantation, other than the awesome power it offered. Implantation massively increased your energy reserves, as well as the maximum depth, intensity, and complexity of the webs of not-light you could wield. Also, though he wasn't a doctor, EUe had studied the webs used to entreat the Gods to heal the wounded. Many Gatherers did; it was a popular method of attempting to stave off the dreamshards' erosion of their bodies and souls.

Spreading his wings, EUe sat down on the floor, crossed-legged, with his eyes closed and his palms facing the wall. He let himself fall ever so slightly into a state of torpor, slowing his pulse and deadening his senses, so that he could put all of his focus on the communion. His breaths came out in a low, muddy warble. Then, opening his mental inner eye, he drew power from his dreamshard and began his weave.

The web was terrifically complicated. It was like planning a legal contract with the Gods, only worse. If you asked for too little, nothing meaningful would happen. If you asked for too much, the patient would wish you hadn't. It took EUe nearly an hour before he was even reasonably confident that he'd gotten it right. But he couldn't risk losing himself to endless worrying. There wasn't enough time for that.

Before he initiated communion with the various gods he'd supplicated for the occasion, EUe opened his eyes and slid down his second eyelids to double-check the web for any errors. It was hard not to marvel at the concentric, interlinked spheres of not-light like visual scripture; it was beautiful.

Then, willing the spheres into the wall, he opened his heart and communed.

The dazzling, radiant spheres spun before his second lids. Like with all the other communions EUe had thrown at the Impactor, the energies triggered reactions on the wall's surface.

And he gasped, beak wide.

Up till now, the lEs he'd conjured had only stirred the wall to make waves in particular shapes. But in response to the healing communion, the wall sent out three patterns, superimposed on one another: triangles on pentagons on hexagons.

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EUe didn't need to check the notes on his slabboard. He'd been staring at them long enough to know the classifications by heart. Triangles appeared in response to temperature-related lEs, pentagons for time-related lEs, and hexagons for lEs about communion and not-light.

But to see all three of them at once? That was very strange. It was like asking someone to give you nectar, only for them to hand you an elU seed, some soil to grow it in, and the water to hydrate it. Yes, when combined, those ingredients would—eventually—lead to an elU whose flowers were rich with the finest nectar, but, besides that, they were completely different things! A seed wasn't a plant, just as a plant wasn't a seed. Eggs weren't twEfE—though they could hold them; twEfE weren't eggs—though they could lay them.

All of these things belonged to different categories, different lEs. They were only related because time worked to connect them to different lEs, changing their essence from one type to another.

The same was true for communions. Healing communions were healing communions, and nothing else. True, while matter and energy had many complex interactions, the Gods themselves worked in terms of their lEs.

And that's when it hit him. His wings went stiff. The feathers on his back bristled.

"Wait a minute…" he muttered.

It was like he was working on his research all over again.

"I was wrong," he said, chirruping with excitement.

He'd been wrong. Gloriously, gloriously wrong—and he couldn't have been happier to have realized it. He leapt to his feet and whistled in astonishment while fluttering his wings and tail feathers.

Why would aliens believe in twEfE gods? Supposedly, the different colors of twEfE didn't all believe in the same gods; it was one of the many reasons the clans killed each other back in the Barbarian Ages.

"The Impactors and whoever created them would have organized information in their own way, not in the twEfE way."

Grabbing his slabboard, his heart a-blur, EUe paced about, passing through his notes, grouping the lEs of the communions he'd used on the Impactor according to the reactions the wall had made in response to them. When he was done, it was like he was seeing it for the first time.

It lined up. It all lined up!

"The Impactors don't have any concept of lEs!"

Without lEs, everything would collapse into just one thing: stuff! Without lEs, there'd be no essential difference between a twEfE and a pile of dirt. Both were made of stuff, both came from stuff, and to stuff both would return. Everything would be nebulous and relative. Without the lE of redness, the color red wouldn't exist; it would be a subjective convention—a name, without any reality to hold it up.

Talk about a strange way to go about living!

"But… it makes sense," EUe admitted.

Nothing had puzzled him more than the fact that the wall responded with triangular ripples whenever he used communions of heat, cold, or force. Heat and fire were completely different from ice and cold; they were shadows of two different lEs! gEl hadn't petitioned a god of ice to roast those dashcrickets!

A person who didn't believe in Gods or lEs would think hot and cold were just two different forms of movement. After all, the particles in a hot objects moved much more—and much more quickly—than the particles in a cold object, and if you weren't aware of the lEs of fire and ice that anchored heat and cold in eternity, you'd have no reason to think heat and cold weren't just two forms of motion, and without the lE of motion, motion would itself be nothing more than an alternate form of motionlessness. It would be impossible to metaphysically distinguish between moving forward and moving backward backwards!

And the Impactor didn't recognize that difference!

EUe rubbed his hands together in glee. "Alright," he said, "this is progress," adding, "at least I hope it's progress," after folding his wings. He ran his claws through the iridescent red feathers on his gorget.

But then he drooped his wings.

"Wait… if they don't know about lEs, then why didn't communicating in binary work?"

As per the notes tlE-la had given him, binary communication was one of the very first things the researchers had tried; they'd done it before his arrival; he'd checked their notes earlier that afternoon. tlE-la had gone through basic arithmetic with the Impactor vessel in detail, going so far as to inputting sequences of dots on the wall—•, ••, •••, and the like—in the hopes of establishing a concept of numbers that twEfE could share with the Impactor, but the wall hadn't displayed any noteworthy responses. They'd also tried using communions that triggered differently shaped ripples as the basis for communication in binary. Formally, a written language was just a collection of symbols with rules for ordering them, and so, as long as you could distinguish between at least two symbols, you had an alphabet with which you could build a language.

But that hadn't worked either.

EUe felt pretty confident about his guess that the vessel didn't understand lE theory. But what did that have to do with not understanding numbers?

Wait, EUe thought.

At the end of the day, numbers were lEs in their own right. Without Gods and lEs, numbers were ultimately arbitrary. The only meaningful conclusion you could say about them was that they came in an order, one number following another. But everything else was a matter of convention. Where one culture or species might count "0, 1, 2, 3,…", another might count "0, 1/2, 1, 1 & 1/2,…". It was like letters in an alphabet.

EUe started pacing.

"If you took every letter in the alphabet and replaced it with a different symbol," he told himself, "and no two letters were replaced by the same symbol, the underlying meaning of the message would stay the same, because the meaning wasn't in the symbols themselves—not really—but in the relations between the symbols, and… as long as you knew the rule for converting back and forth between the two conventions, you could view them as being…"

He stopped in his tracks.

"…equivalent."

The Impactor couldn't distinguish between heating communions and cooling communions because it viewed the two as equivalent. And maybe, just maybe, that was why lU-twO and the others couldn't communicate with it.

"I need two, completely inequivalent forms of input," he said.

EUe spent a while in thought, and then it hit him.

Scampering across the vessel's smooth, silvery floor, he rushed back over to the wall, and then cast a sequence of communions, all of them simple fire, hoping Oka-anan wouldn't mind such a trivial use. Plumes of flame spiraled out from EUe's outstretched hand, one after another, first one burst, then two, then three, then four, all the way up to twenty. He paused briefly between each communion, waiting for the triangular ripples to disappear at the wall's edge before drawing from the Gods' powers once more, to make sure that the Impactor understood them as separate bits of information.

Then, he waited.

After several minutes, the Scream happened. Movement writhed all over the wall.

"Yeah, buddy," EUe said, "I'm frustrated too. But, if this works, I hope you'll forgive me." He sighed. "Here comes the moment of truth."

An alphabet with one letter was intrinsically different from an alphabet with two distinct letters. In the former, if you knew how many letters a word had, you knew what the word had to be. The same wasn't true of the latter.

EUe prayed the Impactor would be able to recognize that.

He fired off a sequence of lightning bolts, in between which he manipulated his webs while they were still over the wall, until the wall detected the manipulations and reacted with hexagonal waves. He alternated between the two, first lightning, then flame, and again paused in between each to give the ripples a chance to cross the wall's entire surface. Unlike before, where the ripples were all triangles, here, they alternated between circles and hexagons, just like EUe's communions. He covered all the possible sequences of at most five symbols—a total of sixty-two in all.

Suddenly, all of the geometric extrusions sank into the walls with a harsh grinding noise. Stalactites and stalagmites, gone; branches, gone; rambling dodecahedral streams, gone gone gone.

All the walls became perfectly smooth.

EUe held his breath. It felt like all of his feathers were standing on end.

Then every surface in sight erupted with motion, even the floor beneath EUe's feet. And it was two types of ripples: triangles, and encircled hexagons. Then, a polyhedral branch wriggled out from the ceiling and projected a cone of green light that shined on EUe like a spotlight, as if it was scanning for something.

Sensing the buzz of active communions, EUe flicked down his second eyelids.

He gasped softly. The light cone was as much true-light as it was not-light, and, through his second lids, he could see the details in the not-light, and they were simply extraordinary. Spiral trails of densely meshed linguistics spun around and around, channeling the power of an alien god. When the scan ended, EUe noticed the scan had woven a faint, unobtrusive strip of not-light around his torso, like a bandolier. The abstract 'inscriptions' on the strip moved like mealworms or clam tendrils. They ran through cycles, shaping and reshaping themselves before his eyes. He stared so long, the back of his neck started to ache.

Shaking his head, he rubbed the sore spot while turning to face the big wall.

Overhead, the polyhedra shifted and glistened.

EUe folded his wings at his back, and took a bow.

"It's nice to meet you, too."

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