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specifications. Sid’s door was solid. He shut it behind him and shot the bolt: checked the ribbon of yeasted oily dough around the frame, and slicked the seal back into place with his thumb. This was an old anti-Aleutian trick, supposed to keep wanderers out. Those red lice-things that crept on Aleutian skin, that they ate off themselves and each other like baboons picking fleas: they were the principal carriers of information. He’d never heard of them being used as spies. But he didn’t want them in here.
    It was believed that the wanderers were the key to the mystery of Aleutian telepathy, and Aleutian immortality. It was believed…. Sid pulled a wry face. No human knew for sure what went on inside an Aleutian body, much less in Aleutian brain chemistry. Physical investigation was a big taboo. It was dangerous to suggest the idea. But their genuine lack of interest was an equally effective block. Their living science didn’t progress by leaps of theory. It simply worked, like life itself, insensately trying this and that until something clicked.
    Their knowledge of their own physiology had weird gaps. When it came to interactions below the threshold of life, they cut out entirely. What humans called pure science was to them the preserve of a minority of eccentrics. Electrons aren’t things, a human savant had once pronounced. If electrons aren’t things, said the Aleutians, the hell with them.
    He sat on his bed, a soft grey pallet unrolled on the floor. An Aleutian product for the local market: what they called “half-killed” and humans called “sterilized.” It was cozy, once you got over the nightmares about being eaten by your bedding.
    …But there was no need to make a mystery of it. The Aleutians “communicated over distance” the same way they read the body language: by knowing each other very well. They’d learned the responses by heart in those character records. Maitri knew how Yudi would jump in situation A. Yudi knew what Rajath would say, if you asked him question Q. If everybody acted in character, and it seemed they generally did, then Maitri “knew” what Yudi, far away, was doing and saying. That was the whole thing: a feat of memory and deduction.
    Which is fine for Aleutians telepathizing with Aleutians, he thought. But if you badly need to know what’s going on in the human world, and you don’t happen to know the responses of the human brood-entity off by heart: then it is time to call up the electrons and the photons. He pulled a wadded bag from inside the folds of the pallet, and whistled softly between his teeth as he put together the components of his global-mobile.
    Let’s find out if there are any snowflakes in the. Is there anybody there? he muttered to himself. Are my little spirit guides going to answer me? He tried to crank up a calm and merry mood whenever he used the phone, in case his terror spilled out into the air around him. Is the chemistry of fear a cosmic determinate? He preferred to take no chances.
    The transmitter’s tiny screen sizzled. We have snowflakes!
    First he tried to raise his boss. Not Maitri: the other boss. He failed. He was not perturbed. He was beginning to feel more relaxed about the situation. He was indoors, which made a grand difference to morale. The aliens were calm. What could happen? He decided to go to Trivandrum and talk to the children.
    It was about time. They’d be forgetting what their parent looked like. It was a cruel shame he had to leave them for so long: “I’m a tramp and a no-good and not fit to be a mother!”
    He attached the contacts. Flip, flicker. The phone took his picture, fired the image to a Low Orbit Ephemeral, along with a tightly detailed set of 4 space co-ordinates. Sid sped a quarter of the way around the world to the Malabar coast, into the heart of the Aleutian Enclaves
    He was on the roof. It was in a mess. What can you expect? he thought defensively. I’m never here, because someone’s got to pay the