Elaneth-imire finally gets his sensory power all the way through the portal-maze to the planet of the contagiously winged humans. He waits for a moment when there will be a clear path he can flicker along without anyone glimpsing him on the way.

He writes Esarkan an update.

...just for the sake of completeness he writes the peal an update too, noting that their involvement is not required.

Esarkan does in fact send someone in search of news, after a little while.

"There's one species they've made contact with that survived their genocide sprees, humans, have some kind of dimensional maze ability, Elaneth-imire's chasing them down. There's a planet of them with some potential for being dissuaded from the genocide spree, we're thinking of kidnapping it and trying to complete the conditions of their apocalyptic prophecy, I wrote Esarkan a letter -"

"Thank you, I'll take it to him. I assume Raika-seren's busy, then?"

"Yes, but it's possible he'd get something out of summarizing the situation for you."

"I can spare the time. Where do I find him?"

"Where we evacuated Independence, using his healing aura to handle the vacuum, monitoring the aliens."

"Thank you."

He goes there. He brings air with him; his soul can do that.

"Hi, Dad."

"Elaneth-imire couldn't spare the time to make you a little space station on his way past? Well, far be it from me to tell you how to manage your own comfort. What are you up to?"

He explains about the eavesdropping and the genocidal aliens and the sensible cultists and Tseiza-3 and what Elaneth-imire is currently uninterruptably up to, half out loud and half via shared memories.

"So obviously we're hoping Dawn-shining branches a power to stabilize the orbits of teleported planets before the mass panic arrives. There's definitely going to be a mass panic."

"I can see that. These aliens sure are something. It sounds like you've got the situation pretty well in hand, but - bounce me some more of your eavesdropping?"

He does that. Corino suggests some things to focus on to get a broader sociocultural analysis. They work very well together and it's a big help in refining his picture of the aliens' society.

Like, if you trace out these patterns of thought, it sounds like the underlying reason for a lot of their cultural trends is that their species is heavily shaped by having started out on a world overrun by absolutely terrifying diseases. Their public health programs are amazing, and their paradigmatic taboo is breaking quarantine, it's an idiom for an unthinkably wrong action. That in turn ties into their drive to follow their bizarre moral code - which, with the cultists to compare against, turns out to actually be a drive to follow societal consensus, and the cult stays stable by having its own consensus separate from the wider context of civilization as a whole.

This is also how they manage to run their tidy little galactic civilization with thirty-four inhabited planets and no formal central governing authority: these people just don't make war on each other. They used to, in the very distant past, but once a single overarching civilization emerged, it immediately became unassailably stable. Well. Until they went and set themselves up to fall apart as soon as they met aliens too powerful for them to exterminate.

And after a while:

"I think that's as much time as I can spare to this fascinating exercise; I'd better get home to deliver Esarkan his letter. Enjoy your vacuum."

He hugs his father goodbye.

(There's something about that last remark—oh, of course, he noticed that Raika-seren is having relationship problems, and also noticed that he's putting his personal feelings on hold to deal with higher priorities, and so is not actually openly commenting on any of it but is just sort of aware of it in the background as he comments on the somewhat related subject of Raika-seren hanging out in interstellar space with no air continually healing from vacuum-related damage because he can't be bothered to care about his physical comfort when it isn't impeding his effectiveness and there's a crisis to handle. Well, fair enough.)

He hugs his son. He goes home. The air he brought with him dissipates.

He's not sure what kind of relationship problem 'his soul manifested the ability to let Maitimo affect it in various ways, Maitimo did that' is, and he doesn't have a place with air to recommend him, so he gets back to making sure everyone everywhere knows what's going on and has assignments for reconstruction and is assured that the humans will all be restored to life as soon as possible.

Elaneth-imire sees a clear path into the maze.

He takes it.

He arrives in the middle of the strangely shaped planet, in midair between two distant floating jungles. There's no gravity here; he floats freely. 'Above' and 'below' him, the two halves of the planet float separately, flat discs curving in at the edges to not-quite-meet around their jagged rims. Through that gap, the arcs of the celestial circles shine, bringing a dim light to the planet's inner surface. Although he can't see them directly from here, his sensory power shows him the planet's sun and moon, vast beads of light sliding along their shining cosmic strings.

The view is kind of amazing. He pauses, floating there for a few minutes, to give it the appreciation it deserves.

A winged stranger approaches. Bat wings, dark brown with silver accents. He also has claws, fangs, a tail, and long pointed ears.

"Who are you and why are you glowing?"

...alt of Grandfather.

This is good. This is very good.

"My name's Taliar," he says. "And it's kind of a long story but let's start with this part—" and he conjures a globe of rock bigger than he is, twists it with landshaping into the form of a snake and has it fly in a circle around them, then burns it away with his god-killing power.

"This is a story I'm interested in hearing," he says. "Faidre Kevarsin. Good to meet you."

"So, there are multiple worlds," he says. "The genocidal aliens come from a different one, linked to this one by a maze of tiny worlds with portals between them. I come from yet another one that's farther away. Someone I know had occasion to move his planet into a different world, and it happened to be the one the genocidal aliens come from, and they found it and attacked it. So he brought me in to help because I'm a very useful person. We got away from the genocidal aliens and now we're trying to figure out how to get them to stop being so genocidal without wiping out their entire civilization, because we can afford to do that because we are just that stupidly powerful."

Pause. Does he - yeah, he should.

"Also, there are sometimes versions of the same person in different worlds, and I'm pretty sure you're an alt of my grandfather."

"Really."

He studies Taliar thoughtfully.

"Eldest of a set of triplets, by any chance?"

"...Arguably yes but not in the way you mean," he says.