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I grunted htness filled ut, and the certainty that he would offer me his sympathy and walk away filled my throat I took hold of his arm as if I could keep hi to you a lot?”

“They have,” he said “The Martian officer hasn’t been there It’s just the Belter guards”

“What do they say?”

“They ask me what it is”

“And what do you tell theain “What is it?”

“It’s an elaboration of the original protoave back the terminal?”

“I did,” I said Candor about that cost

“The thing is, they know I’m sure of it This isn’t a problem they need to solve It’s a test They want to see if we can solve a puzzle they’ve already cracked They don’t say it, but I can hear the at me”

That piqued me, but this wasn’t the ave me my opportunity, and I drove ain “Tell them they need two Tell them to take both of us, and I’ll help”

I saw the spark of greed in his eyes, hisOnce I helped hireeht to keep my expression innocent My wounds and my beard helped with that, I think

“Thank you, Cortázar,” he said, and drew the hand terminal from his jumpsuit

I took it froertips, the files blooes and analytic su into an ocean of data The surface I had skimmed before lay over an abyss, and I fell joyfully into it Soin: lipid bilayers, proton puht once have been a ribosonition That, I believed, had led Brown astray

He assu as a cellwhat cell ht be used to sos

They could just as easily provide highways for e of water molecules Or any polar solvent Like the optical illusion of faces and vases, the bilayers could define either the volu them or the web of pathways they created And these were only massive, macro-scale expressions of the information in the initial particles

I paged through, going deeper,across seas of inference and assuot that Broas beside me until he touched my shoulder