The Ambassador was over by the Star Chamber’s service machine, fiddling nervously with the controls.

“Nothing.” Chan sat with arms folded and knees together. “Cut the crap, MacDougal. You knew, didn’t you?”

“About the ending of the quarantine? I swear, it was a total surprise—”

“About the Geyser Swirl. I’d never heard of the place, but you had. I could see your face in the little monitor on my seat, and when they said that their expeditions hadn’t come back, you nodded.”

“I knew about their expeditions, but that wasn’t what had me worried. It was whatever I knew.” MacDougal moved to sit across from Chan. He had a gigantic drink in his left hand and placed another just as big on the table next to him. “Cheers.” He raised the glass he was holding and took a long draft. “God, I needed that. I had no idea they were going to talk about the Swirl, and when they did I was more afraid of what they might know than what they might tell us. Look, Dalton, you’ve not been off Earth for a long time. You know they closed all the remote Links so we can’t use them?”

“Of course I do. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t be down on Earth. I’d be out where the action is — where it used to be, near the Perimeter.”

“Then you should have some idea how frustrating it has been for me; Ambassador to the Stellar Group, and I can’t even visit another star or a planet outside the solar system. It’s been twenty years. We keep on testing, living in hopes that we might find a Link open. Nothing. The Stellar Group has some sort of general Link inhibitor that closes down everything for human ships. Or it did. About seven months ago, we picked up a signal from a new Link. You can guess where.”

“In the Geyser Swirl.”

“Right. The Swirl is at the edge of Angel territory, and we knew next to nothing about it. As the Angel said, it just seems like an uninteresting clot of dust, a few lightyears across, with no Sol-type stars. Why put a Link there? The answer was, nobody did. So humans never felt a reason to go there when we had Link access. When we picked up the signs of a new Link, we thought the Angels must have opened it. We did our usual tests, expecting the usual “denied access” message. But we didn’t get that. The return signal said the Link was open to our ships.”