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figured it out for myself before Paul had a chance to enlighten me: it was the Earth’s shadow, blocking off sunshine from the lunar debris. Sort of an anti-moon, a little bigger than the moon and moving much faster through the sky.
    The constant meteor shower seemed to be slowing down, or maybe I was just getting used to it.
    There was a quiet rustle behind me, and I started. But it was only Snowbird.
    “I wondered whether you were ready to eat,” she said. She held out something that touched my arm.
    “Thanks.” It was some kind of candy bar. I unwrapped it and was grateful for the creamy chocolate and unidentifiable nuts. “How are you doing?”
    “I’m in a complex state, which is also simple. Preparing to die.”
    “In Mars, I suppose it would be much different.” I knew a little about their death customs. “With your family.”
    She shuffled in the dark. “Newsies called it telepathy, but it’s nothing so strange. More like a data transfer. We don’t quite understand how it works, but the result is clear. Experiences that are unique to the dying individual are transferred to a sort of family memory. Like adding to a scrapbook in a human family, but all in the head.”
    “You would have a lot of those. Unique experiences.”
    She made a two-click sound of agreement. “I don’t think anything will be transferred without physical contact, though.”
    “The more reason for you not to give up.”
    There was a long pause. “You really think the Others will turn the power back on?”
    “Anybody’s guess. I don’t suppose it’s likely. Do you?”
    “My instinct says no. They aren’t kindly.” That was an understatement. “But it’s hard to predict where their logic may have taken them.”
    The Others think very fast, superconducting neurocircuits, but they live and move with glacial slowness, slithering through liquid nitrogen. Their dealings with species like ours are planned out years ahead of time, or even centuries or millennia. Their automata, who perceive and react at our speed or faster, observe us and decide which branch of the logic tree to follow. The decision to turn off the free power doomed a billion or more humans, but as far as we know it was just remorseless logic, a chain of events that started tens of thousands of years ago. If humans do this, then we will do this , in self-defense.
    Many races on earthlike planets have been evaluated this way. They say that many were not destroyed.
    As we weren’t, quite. Yet.
    “They haven’t been unkind to you. To Martians.”
    “No, but we aren’t competitors. It bothers me to think that we’re not particularly useful to them anymore. We were created for a purpose and have fulfilled it.”
    The Others created the Martians, biological machines, and put them in an Earth-like bubble in Mars, to serve as an advance warning, in case the unpleasant denizens of Earth evolved into space flight.
    It was illustrative of the Others’ slow, tortuous, logical method. When we finally were sophisticated enough to leave Earth, one of our first targets would be Mars. When we found the Martian underground city, that would trigger a signal to Neptune’s moon Triton, where an individual Other was resting in frigid nitrogen slush. It would evaluate the situation and choose among various pre-ordained courses of action.
    It chose a scenario where humans and Martians had to work together to defuse a bomb that would destroy all advanced life on Earth. Then it went back to its home planet, almost twenty-five light-years away, to report.
    One assumes that the Others were ready and waiting, when it came back with news of what it had done and learned. The one best course of action was chosen, and the tools for it sent back almost twenty-five light-years to the waiting Earth.
    In the intervening fifty years, though, the Earth had built an interplanetary defense fleet, which was obviously not unexpected.
    Those thousand defensive ships posed no real threat to the