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hard candy had been set out, refreshments intended to keep the attendees comfortable during the long hours they spent in session.
    As the principal speaker for this session, Ramirez was seated in front of the fireplace, with the conference chairman to his right. He turned out to be someone Ramirez had encountered many years ago: Sir Peter Cole, the Royal Society professor of physics at Cambridge who, only a little while ago, had been appointed Britain’s Astronomer Royal. Tall and slender, with longish grey hair and an air of studied affability, he greeted Ramirez with a firm handshake and a pleasant smile, as if they were old colleagues who’d simply been too involved with their own careers to drop each other a line now and then. Yet Ramirez hadn’t forgotten that Sir Peter once published a blistering critique of his work in the Astrophysical Journal ; perhaps he was no longer a foe, but he certainly wasn’t a friend either.
    His left knee involuntarily twitching beneath the desk, Ramirez watched the other conference members as they filtered into the room to resume their places at the table. Besides Cole, Beck, and Shillinglaw, the only person he recognized was Donald Sinclair. The political officer gave him a cursory nod, then opened his screen and began to review his notes from the previous session. The rest were strangers, identified only by last-name placards arranged along the table. Most looked like tenured academics or government officials of one stripe or another; they regarded him with guarded curiosity, as if he were a rare beast, reasonably domesticated yet nonetheless dangerous, that had been temporarily released from his cage and trotted out on a leash.
    Once Cole rang a small silver bell to bring the meeting to order, he began the meeting by reminding everyone that the proceedings were officially classified Top Secret, and that the nondisclosure agreements they’d signed forbade them from any pubic discussion or publication of what they learned during the conference. Knowing nods from around the table, yet once again Ramirez was puzzled by Sinclair’s presence. Why had a WHU political officer—along with a contingent of Union scientists, no doubt—been invited to attend a high-level scientific conference sponsored by the European Alliance? Had the rivalry between the two superpowers eased that much while he was in Dolland? He doubted it, yet nonetheless there they were, just the same.
    Sir Peter then briefly introduced Ramirez. He pointedly didn’t mention where he’d been the last nine years, or the crimes for which he’d been convicted—everyone there knew those things already. Instead he stated that Ramirez was an astrobiologist associated with the Union Astronautica and, in his capacity as a SETI researcher, the creator of Raziel. Then Cole turned the session over to Ramirez.
    Ramirez didn’t rise to speak, but instead remained in his seat. Although he made use of his screen’s interactive features, for the most part he consulted the handwritten notes he’d made during his trip from the Moon. Much of his material was already well-known, of course. Christened after the ancient Hebrew angel of mysteries, Raziel was a lunar-based optical interferometer: twenty-seven twenty-meter reflector telescopes configured along a Y-shaped axis, with each arm six kilometers in length and the entire array having a baseline of ten kilometers. Located within Mare Muscoviense on the far side of the Moon, a few kilometers from the Union Astronautica’s long-baseline radio telescope to which it was linked and operated, Raziel was designed to work independently for years at a time, conducting full-sky sweeps of the galaxy in cycles that would take up to two years to complete before they’d begin again.
    In the beginning, Raziel hadn’t been intended for SETI research. Its primary mission had been the discovery of habitable worlds—or at least