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beautiful sister but so much easier to love. Everybody loved Ryan, except Elizabeth.
    And Noah, problem child, she and Kyle’s last-ditch effort to save their doomed marriage. Noah was drifting and, she knew without being able to help, profoundly unhappy.
    Were all three of them, and everybody else on the planet, going to die, unless humans and Denebs together could prevent it?
    She hadn’t fainted from hypoglycemia, which she didn’t have. She had fainted from sheer delayed, maternal terror at the idea that her children might all perish. But she was not going to say that to her kids. And the fainting wasn’t going to happen again.
    “I need to talk to you,” she said, unnecessarily. But how to begin something like this? “I’ve been talking to the aliens. In the Embassy .”
    “We know, Evan told us,” Noah said, at the same moment that Elizabeth, quicker, said sharply, “Inside?”
    “Yes. The Deneb ambassador requested me.”
    “Requested you? Why?”
    “Because of the paper I just published. The aliens—did any of you read the copies of my paper I e-mailed you?”
    “I did,” Ryan said. Elizabeth and Noah said nothing. Well, Ryan was the scientist.
    “It was about tracing human genetic diversity through mitochondrial evolution. Thirty mitochondrial haplogroups had been discovered. I found the thirty-first. That wouldn’t really be a big deal, except that—in a few days this will be common knowledge but you must keep it among yourselves until the ambassador announces—the aliens belong to the thirty-first group, L7. They’re human.”
    Silence.
    “Didn’t you understand what I just—”
    Elizabeth and Ryan erupted with questions, expressions of disbelief, arm waving. Only Noah sat quietly, clearly puzzled. Marianne explained what Ambassador Smith—impossible name!—had told her. When she got to the part about the race that had taken humans to “World” also leaving titanium tablets engraved with astronomical diagrams, Elizabeth exploded. “Come on, Mom, this fandango makes no sense!”
    “The Denebs are here ,” Marianne pointed out. “They did find us. And the Denebs are going to give tissue samples. Under our strict human supervision. They’re expanding the Embassy and allowing in humans. Lots of humans, to examine their biology and to work with our scientists.”
    “Work on what?” Ryan said gently. “Mom, this can’t be good. They’re an invasive species.”
    “Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Marianne said. God, if Ryan, the scientist, could not accept truth, how would humanity as a whole? “They’re not ‘invasive,’ or at least not if our testing confirms the ambassador’s story. They’re native to Earth.”
    “An invasive species is native to Earth. It’s just not in the ecological niche it evolved for.”
    Elizabeth said, “Ryan, if you bring up purple loosestrife, I swear I’m going to clip you one. Mom, did anybody think to ask this ambassador the basic question of why they’re here in the first place?”
    “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot. Of course we did. There’s a—” She stopped and bit her lip, knowing how this would sound. “You all know what panspermia is?”
    “Yes,” said Elizabeth.
    “Of course.” Ryan.
    “No.” Noah.
    “It’s the idea that original life in the galaxy—” whatever that actually was, all the textbooks would now need to be rewritten “—came from drifting clouds of organic molecules. We know that such molecules exist inside meteors and comets and that they can, under some circumstances, survive entry into atmospheres. Some scientists, like Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking, have even endorsed the idea that new biomolecules are still being carried down to Earth. The Denebs say that there is a huge, drifting cloud of spores—well, they’re technically not spores, but I’ll come to that in a minute—drifting toward Earth. Or, rather, we’re speeding toward it, since the solar system rotates around the center of