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There's a record in the fourteenth chamber, late in the sequence, of one of them standing in front of an instrument, entirely still, for what the timestamp says is four hours.

Selka says the caption is a single word and she can't translate it.

I think I can. I've seen that exact posture on a woman standing in a marsh at dusk holding a basket she'd forgotten she was carrying, watching a village she'd known for sixty years, and what it means is: look what came of it.

And then they stop.

Not destroyed. There’s no war in the record and nothing that reads as a catastrophe. The record simply thins, and then goes rare, and then there is one final entry, and it reads as no farewell. It’s housekeeping. Somebody set the archive to keep running, checked the instrument alignment, logged the check, and never came back.

They finished. That's what I think. Eleven million years of work, and eventually they decided it was done, and they put the results somewhere safe and switched off the lights on their way out.

“Clara.”

Draeven has been in the doorway for a while. He does that.

“I know,” I say. “I know how long we've got.”

“That isn't what I came to say.” He crosses and stands beside me while a person who has been dead longer than my species has been upright continues, patiently, to align an instrument. “I came to ask what it's worth.”

“It's priceless.”

“No. Priceless is a word people use to avoid the question.” His eyes stay on the record. “Vane reaches the bottom of that shaft in ninety minutes with a legal claim and a small army. Within the hour I must decide where twenty-two people stand and what they stand for. So I need it from you, plainly, in words a fisherman can repeat to his son. What is in this room?”

I think about it properly. He's earned that.

“It's where everyone comes from,” I say. “Not in a religious way. Literally. Every intelligent species in the catalogue — you, me, Selka, the man on that boat — started as a decision somebody made in this filing system about a rock. And they wrote it all down, and they kept it running, and they left it here for whoever showed up.”

“And if it's sold?”

“Then it's sold in pieces, because that's how you get the most for it. Fourteen buyers, fourteen private collections, fourteen fragments that never sit in the same room again.” My voice does something I don't authorize. “And the answer to where we all come from becomes a thing that four hundred people know and nobody can check.”

“That'll do,” Draeven says.

He goes to say it to the others. I stay, because there's one more thing and I've been putting it off for two hours.

The eleventh chamber has a second reader, smaller, and it holds a log of every access this facility has ever recorded.

The log holds four hundred and six separate entries. Four hundred and one belong to the makers, and they end abruptly, and then nothing for a very long time.

Entry four hundred and two is dated thirty-one years ago.

So are four hundred and three, four hundred and four, and four hundred and five. Thirty-one years, twenty-nine, twenty-two, and nine.

He came four times. Four times, in thirty-one years, and the gaps between them are enormous, and I understand exactly what those gaps are because I would have done the same. He came, he saw what it was, and he went away and spent seven years being certain he could keep it safe. Then he returned and checked he hadn't imagined it. Then thirteen years of nothing at all.

Then, nine years ago, the fourth visit — the year the surveys started vanishing.

He came down here to make sure it was still sealed, and then he went back up, and he never returned, and for the last nine years of his life he sat in a stilt house above a marsh with the whole thing in his head, alone, lying to a village that loved him, while a man on another world paid people to find him.

The last belongs to today.

I sit down against a wall of an alien archive, ten millennia of somebody else's homework, and I cry for about ninety seconds, efficiently, the way you do when there's a schedule.

Then Draeven's hand settles on my shoulder, and I put mine over it, and for a moment neither of us speaks, and out in the great chamber I can hear Joren explaining to seventeen fishermen, in his own words, in his own accent, that this is where all of us started.

Behind me, the log adds a line.

Four hundred and seven.