Don met her in the mess hall and handed her a disk with the downloads—years of back-issues of her regular subscriptions—electronic versions of The London Times and her professional magazines, Archaeology Today and The Archaeology Journal. The Journal had interviewed her just before the ship left for Neznaiyu. It'd been a good interview, full of heroic speculations and as much enthusiasm as she could manage.

"What did you get?" said Althea.

Don patted the disk in his pocket. "Medical journals. The most entertaining reading on the planet."

He went to his room, and Althea went to hers with a cup of coffee and a muffin. She slid the disk into her computer and settled down for a good, long read. Especially in the Journal there was always an undercurrent of gossip that made the articles far more interesting than they appeared to be. If you knew how to read between the lines, you could almost always find out who was stabbing who in the back academically speaking, who'd developed an "Indiana Jones" complex about their particular dig, and who had finally discovered their inner Heinrich Schliemann. She was sure Hoshi would be in there somewhere. Althea opened the file for the Journal and saw the headline for the first article;

Althea stared as the cover illustration filled the screen. A vaguely humanoid figure apparently cast in gold, gleamed on its pedestal in a high-ceilinged room. Writing—there was no mistake about it—swirled over the walls in copious, flowing, gold-edged script. And they had found it six months after she'd left for Neznaiyu. Had Hoshi known about this too?

Althea hurled her muffin across the room and went to find Don.

"Look at this." She dropped down beside him on the bed and pushed the laptop into his hands.

"God damn," said Don. "Damn. You just missed this, didn't you." He gave her a quick, apologetic look.

"Read it," she said, on the breathless verge of tears. "Just tell me when Hoshi found it."

She sat up straight, tense, as he scanned the first few paragraphs.

Don frowned. "I don't see Hoshi anywhere in here."

"Oh, she's there all right," said Althea. "She's got her fingers in the entire pie."

"Oxford's not even involved in this, Althea. The archaeologists are from Harvard."

"Harvard?" She grabbed the laptop back and read through the first page. "Hoshi never got near this. Oxford should have been organizing the expedition. Harvard barely has a foot off their own campus, much less on Jupiter."

"Then I guess Hoshi screwed up," said Don. "A good thing, right? Maybe they'll kick her out of the department."

Althea closed the laptop and clenched her fists on top of it. Nothing was a safe bet when it came to Hoshi. "Do you realize that nobody's ever, ever, ever going to see what I've found? Even if there was something here, it'd take years for the Journal to find out about it, and another quarter-century for anyone to come out and see it. Hell, I'll be dead by then." She glared at the floor. "They're all heading straight for Io. No one gives a damn about Neznaiyu anymore. And even if they do come, what do I say? 'Look! I found something that's exactly like what Hoshi found on Mars!'"

"Except for the obelisk."

"Except for the damn obelisk," said Althea, "and as far as I can tell, it never had a purpose. It was never carved, or painted, or inscribed. Nothing was ever put on top of it, nothing was ever buried underneath it, nothing was ever arranged around it. It's not even in the middle of the site—it's sort of off to one side, like they couldn't figure out where else to put it. And," she said, "it wasn't even important enough to put in a solid foundation. The thing's ready to fall down."

"But look," said Don. "Doesn't the fact that this site is here mean that these aliens perfected interplanetary travel and took their culture with them all over the galaxy?"

"But there is no culture! All we've found is similar sites on two completely different planets built by people who could hardly stack two rocks on top of each other. There's just the site. There's just the column. All you can do is take it at face value. You can't make a pile of rocks into something just because you want it to be something. Unless you're Hoshi Noh. She just buries the things she wants to find and has someone else dig them up. Well, anyone can do that."

Don rubbed his knees, and she could see the things he was struggling not to say to her. Things about seeing the reality of her situation and how outrage was only going to make her old before her time. Instead he took her sweaty hand in his and didn't say anything.

Althea took a shaky breath. "My career is trashed. You know that? It was trashed from the minute she walked into my office."

He squeezed her fingers gently.

"I mean, I could make things up, too. But she has a reputation now. She has my Chair."

"I know."

She swallowed hard. "There's not much for me to do around here, Don. Not unless I want to go down to the river and strain water samples with the biologists."

He leaned against her and put his head on her shoulder. "So what do you want to do, Althea? You're in a beautiful place, and you have all the time in the world. What do you do want to do?"

She wiped her eyes, with no idea how to answer.

"They're putting on a play," said Don, as the two of them walked down the path to the sandy brook where the bio team spent their days.

"A play?" Althea echoed doubtfully.

"'Evolution on Neznaiyu,'" said Don. "'A Musical in Three Acts.' And they're having refreshments. It's the first decanting of the Nez-Nectar wines."

It was a typical summery day on Nez. The sky was a flawless azure, the breeze blew just enough to keep everyone comfortable, and the lizards trilled sleepily, musically. The bio team had built a lean-to beside the brook to keep their electronics out of the sun. Today they'd slung a red curtain over the front and arranged folding chairs from the mess in rows for their audience. Someone Althea recognized from the tectonics team was setting up a video camera to record whatever pearls of wisdom might be revealed.

The refreshments were arranged on a long table decorated with colorful stones from the river and hanks of piney branches. Striped lizards darted between bowls of blue-yolked, lizard-egg-salad and Ehrlmeyer flasks filled with fermented night-nectar. Half a dozen lizards had congregated around the potato chips and were lifting them out of the bowl one at time, licking them with cat-like tongues.

"I'm told they like the salt," said Don, filling a plate with cut celery and slices of baked eggplant from the hydroponics unit.

Althea noticed that only a few people had sampled the egg salad and everyone was avoiding the potato chips.

Don poured two cups of fermented nectar and gave one to her. He tapped his cup against hers. "When's your grand opening of the Forbidden Zone?"

Althea sipped. The drink was a bit savory to pass for wine, but it had a distinctly alcoholic kick. "Why should I show them a dud?"

Don sighed and took a deeper swig. The biology team bustled behind the red curtain. Someone came out and pranced back and forth turning a flashlight on and off. People in the front row laughed. The tectonics guy behind the camera shooed people out of the way. The folding chairs were filling up.

"Let's find seats," said Don.

"In the back."

"In the back."

Althea lost interest as soon as the curtain lifted and the kazoo chorus began. She finished her drink and picked at her food, not paying attention to the festival of post-doctoral idiocy the biologists had somehow had time to come up with. The only thing she really noticed was the paper-mache copy of her obelisk. Grown men in rugby shirts carried it out to center stage and skipped around it like little girls. It was a good copy. Someone had obviously snuck down there and taken pictures. And that sour old woman with the pine-needle crown was probably supposed to be her. She got to her feet in disgust.

Don looked up, trying not to grin. "Don't leave. It's funny."

"It's stupid," she said and put her plate on the seat of her chair.

It was when she straightened up again that the realization hit her. Maybe it was the fermented nectar. Maybe she'd given up at such a deep level that her mind was finally open. She stared at the stage and the stacks of painted boxes that made up the set. She looked back at the camera, the distance between the stage and the audience. Someone dragged the copy of the obelisk off to stage left and bounded into the next dance number.

"Oh my god," she said.

Don burst into laughter as the head of the biology team waltzed out with a lizard clinging to his head. He sang a catchy little number about Darwin. Althea steadied herself on the back of her chair.

Don looked up, wiping tears from his eyes. "What's the matter?"

"It's a stage," she said. "That whole thing is a stage."

She turned and bolted away from the party, up the hill and past the research station. She ran the kilometer to the dig site at full speed, weightless with comprehension.

The fronts were no more or less finished than the backs, so making the visible side of the set pretty or presentable didn't seem to be important. Permanence didn't seem important. The only thing that was important was the fact that it was exactly the same as what Hoshi had found on Mars. Did that indicate a ceremonial use? But why build something so flimsy if it had any importance at all? It was almost as if the builders had come here just to have a different background for the same scene. Like in a movie.

Althea sank onto the warm, needle-strewn ground. Like a movie. Or TV. Or the alien equivalent of streaming video. Those kinds of sets didn't need to be permanent or well built. Aliens who could flit from Mars to Neznaiyu could build these exact structures anywhere they chose. And if they were moving props and actors and needed to duplicate their scenes in each new location, why would they leave anything behind? Althea pushed her fingers through her hair. For all she knew, she and Hoshi had discovered the backdrops for an interplanetary soap opera. Instead of bones and potsherds, they should be looking for lost lens caps.

It got dark, and Don came looking for her. He was drunk and dropped down beside her with an old man's oof.

"The songs weren't bad," he said, "as long as you didn't listen to the singing."

"I figured this place out," she said.

"Really?" He sounded impressed. She told him, and he sat there nodding, pretending to be sober. She couldn't tell how much of it he was buying until he got up and went to the middle of the "stage."

Don struck a theatrical pose. "'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.'"

Althea laughed in spite of herself. From where she was sitting it looked exactly right. The night flowers in the background, the stars overhead, the lizards chanting in the tops of the trees, all suffused by the salty perfume from the forest. At that moment, Don's question seemed to answer itself. She knew exactly what she wanted to do, here on this beautiful planet, with all the time in the world.

Even from four-point-three light years away, Althea now knew how to destroy Hoshi Noh.

She just put her arms around it and dragged it to center stage, where Don had quoted Shakespeare the night before. The stone wasn't heavy, and it had never been secured to a foundation. When it was steady enough to stand on its own, she stood back and was surprised to find that her heart was pounding: not from the exertion, but nerves. It wasn't as if she'd never moved an artifact before, but those had been small things—potsherds, tools. It wasn't as if the obelisk's original position hadn't been thoroughly mapped. It was what she was about to do, now that its position made more sense.

She pulled her lawn chair and umbrella around into the audience part of the site and sat down with her laptop. Normally she kept her notes in English, but now she was afraid that the nosy biologists might come snooping, and she wrote them in Latin. Of course they knew enough Latin to get through a species and genus list. Some of them probably knew more. She switched fonts on her computer and wrote in her other undergraduate fluency; ancient Greek.

Σκηνη πας ο βιος …

She worked until late in the afternoon, absorbed and oblivious. Don found her in the lawn chair at the foot of the obelisk. He squatted next to her, and when she saw him, she flinched in surprise.

"Good grief," she said. "Don't you have a hospital to run?"

"I just wanted to see how you were doing." He gave her a funny look. "What are you doing?"

She turned the computer to show him her photo of the obelisk and the digital chicken-scratch she was pasting onto the image. "I wrote a paragraph in Greek, Latin, and English and then cut up the words." She touched a key on the laptop and showed him the preliminary versions. The graphics program she used for site-mapping could be applied, clumsily, to text as well. She'd mirrored the letters, turned them upside down, sliced them in half and skewed them. Each of the three paragraphs was about the same length, but each "alphabet" was distinctly different.

He stared for a minute. She'd been so careful with the shadows and textures that the chicken-scratch looked carved, even missing in places where the plaster had fallen away. "What're you going to do with it?"

She chuckled. "I'm supposed to send Hoshi pictures. So I am."

Don sighed. "And what does your paragraph say?"

She grinned. "It starts, 'All the world's a stage …'"

While the robots sat idly, she took pictures of the stunted walls and labored over them on her laptop, adding layers of graphics. But even after two weeks of steady work, the facades she tried to create looked unconvincing. It had taken all of her artistic skill to embed a little text onto the obelisk. With her limited software, nothing she could cobble together had the same tactile authenticity, and at the end of the day that upset her as much as being stuck in the middle of nowhere at the end of her career.

Three weeks after she'd moved the obelisk and sent the doctored photo to Hoshi, it rained hard enough to make the burnished paths around the dig site into muddy wallows. Althea slogged down to the site the next morning and found the lawn chair too wet to sit in, so she perched on the edge of one of the walls instead, where the morning sun had dried the stones. The force of the downpour had washed a considerable amount of plaster off the obelisk, and she wondered if she should repair it. She went over to inspect the column and turned back to the wall for a moment. Mud had splattered the sides of the foundations and dried to a light brown like adobe. She went back to the wall and crouched beside it, examining the pocks and spatters. She sat on her heels for a long moment and then took a handful of fresh mud and wiped it across the surface of the wall. It stuck there, thick as paste. She added more, filling in the spaces between tumble-stacked stones until she had a smooth surface. Then she plucked a ferny weed, pressed it into the mud and pulled it out, leaving a precise image.

Althea stood up, squinting at the site in the bright morning. The vision of what she would do for the rest of her days on Neznaiyu came over her with such shining clarity that she had to close her eyes. She stood there, steadying herself against the crudely built wall, finally seeing the site as she herself would make it, and how Hoshi Noh would seethe over it when she saw it in the Archaeology Journal.

The head of the biology team raised a cup of fermented nectar. "You've done an amazing job with this place, Althea. Just amazing."

"And to think you started out with nothing," added one of the oceanographers. At this point it was an old joke, but everyone still laughed. Even Althea.

She scooped a handful of potato chips onto her plate and shook off the salt-craving lizards. She ducked under the decorated lizard egg mobiles she'd strung across the doorways of her reconstructed stage houses and waited for Don in the noisy wedding crowd. He and the zoologists had gone off to get another case of bottled nectar from the research station. The biologists had put together a new musical as a wedding gift, and no one wanted to be sober for that.

Althea wandered out into the open part of the theater where the alien camera crew might once have been and turned to admire her work as her fellow researchers chatted amid the much-improved ruins. Instead of stumpy, uneven foundations, she'd made the structures on the stage slightly-higher-than-human-sized and given the doorways arches. She'd built everything from native stone, stuccoed them smooth with mud and washed them white with local limestone. The painted designs were her own creation as well, based on abstracted versions of six-legged lizards, each matched with its favorite flowers. It looked primitive—brightly colored, energetic, totemic—and maybe just a little alien.

She was pleased even when people called it an "art project," which, as far as she was concerned wasn't really a negative comment. She didn't care what opinions they kept to themselves. She didn't even care what Hoshi thought, or would think, one of these days. Every time Althea had finished a section, she'd sent a picture of it to Hoshi at Oxford. She'd sent a hundred at least by now, and Althea could imagine her photos traveling through the ether of space in a long electronic string, slowly heading home. Early on she'd daydreamed about Hoshi's reactions, but now Hoshi and her old life in general didn't seem so important anymore.

The fact that some things simply didn't matter had been a revelation for her. She'd quit reading the Archaeology Journal when Don pointed out that keeping up on finds she would never see or even have a chance to comment on only made her unhappy. Now four years of back issues lay in a drawer underneath her socks, and instead of trying to mine the magazine for gossip, her biggest pleasure was an afternoon of cloud-watching with Don.

Althea grinned and tipped back her cup. The nectar was sweet and fragrant, filling her throat like warm honey. From where she was standing right now, turning away from her old life seemed like her greatest accomplishment. She wiped her mouth and waved at Don, who was meandering toward her with Waylon, the head of the expedition.

"Congratulations," said Waylon, tapping Althea's cup with his. "Another few weddings and we'll have a bunch of little scientists running around the place."

"It won't be long," said Don. "Two out of three oceanographers look pretty ripe to me."

"I don't know about having kids way out here," said Althea. "How would you tell them they'll never get to see their own planet?"

Waylon cleared his throat and glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the crowd. "Actually," he said in a low voice, "we had a very interesting event this morning. I didn't want to spoil your wedding, so I didn't say anything." He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. "This came in from the ship about four hours ago."

Don unfolded the paper and held it so Althea could see.

"What the hell is this?" said Althea.

"It's the front page of the New York Times," said Waylon, practically in a whisper. "Look at the date."

Althea heard Don swallow hard. "This is Sunday of last week."

Waylon angled a thumb at the sky, indicating the orbiting ship that had brought them here. "The crew up there detected a signal. They sent out a shuttle and found a probe—they were all excited because they thought we'd finally come into contact with aliens—but it was from Earth. It was a faster-than-light probe from Earth." He shook the printout. "Back home they've figured out how to use that alien technology they found on Io, and now they've got faster-than-light ships and instantaneous communications." He took a breath and blinked, like he might burst into tears. "We're not an outpost anymore. Anyone who wants to go home can do it, just as soon as they get here."

"They're coming here?" said Althea.

"Read it for yourself" Waylon handed her the printout. "I'll announce it at the general meeting tonight. Keep it under your hat until then, won't you?"

Don nodded a little numbly, and Waylon walked off.

Althea read through the first few paragraphs, hands shaking. "It says here that they can acquire information in transit, even if it's been sent with old technology. It says they've already got every report we've sent in the past five years." She took a breath. "It says they're coming to bring us a transceiver so we can communicate with Earth in 'real time.'" Althea looked up at Don, wide-eyed. "They're coming the fourteenth." It was less than a week away. "Guess who'll be on the first ship?"

Of course it was Hoshi.

"What else am I supposed to do?" she screamed after he'd wrestled the welding torch away from her. "Don't you know I sent her pictures?"

"Of what?" He pointed at the site, neatly built and perfectly groomed. "Of that?"

"Of everything." Althea tried to take a breath, but her throat felt tight and small. "She must have gotten all of them at once. That's why she's coming. It probably looked like I just pulled off the vines and there it was." She sank to the ground in the briny perfume of the night. She'd been able to accept the end of her career while Nez was a prison. Now she could only imagine the depths of her humiliation. "She's coming to finish me off, Don."

"Ship sure is quiet," muttered Don. "Must be that Io drive."

"Must be," she said, dry-mouthed.

The shuttle's hatch opened and the crew marched out, waving. Hoshi was easy to spot, even thirty years older. She stopped at the end of the gangway, neatly dressed, just a bit of gray in her hair, and put on a pair of glasses, peering around for a familiar face.

Don gave Althea's hand a reassuring squeeze. "Do the right thing. Please?"

She squeezed back and made her way through the crowd to the foot of the shuttle's gangway.

Hoshi saw her and stepped down, as crisp and smart as an army general. She took Althea's damp hand and gave it a firm shake. "You're looking well, professor."

"You too," said Althea, and swallowed the bitterness in her mouth, "professor. Would you like something to drink before we get started? It's a long walk to the site."

"No, thank you," said Hoshi. "I'd like to get right down to business." She turned and beckoned to someone behind her, and, to Althea's dismay, Roger Dodd and his news crew trotted out of the shuttle.

"Hi, Doc!" Roger waved, boyish and unchanged, thirty intervening years canceled by plastic surgery and hormone treatments.

Althea's stomach wound itself into one more knot. "This way," she said and started up the hill toward the site.

Roger bounded along beside her. "It sure is pretty here," he remarked. "Is it true what they say about the romantic effect of the midnight blooms?"

"Uh," said Althea. "You'll have to ask the biologists."

Roger nodded energetically. "Say, did you hear about the site Hoshi found on Mars?"

Althea let herself glare at him. "I was there, Roger. Don't you remember?"

"No, I mean the second site," said Roger. "It was just like the first one, but it was intact. I mean, it was amazing. Didn't you see the reports about the excavations? We did a special. We called them the 'Three Unknowns.'"

"Three?" Althea turned to Hoshi. "There were three sites on Mars?"

"Yours is the third," said Hoshi tightly. "The special included pictures of yours. And mine."

"My pictures?" echoed Althea, but they'd come to the edge of the site and now no one was listening.

From here the stage and its painted buildings, the new foundations, the gardens and fields, spread out like a colorful page from a storybook. The obelisk reared up in the middle of everything, casting a needle shadow like a sundial. Althea wiped sweat off the back of her neck. She should have thought of that earlier. She could've made the whole place into an alien Stonehenge.

"Wow!" said Roger. "Wow!"

He sprang ahead, trailed by his camera crew, but Hoshi stopped and turned to Althea.

"I didn't expect to hear from you," said Hoshi quietly. "Not after what happened on Mars."

Was she apologizing? How unlikely. Althea shrugged.

Hoshi reached into her pocket and took out a handful of snapshot-sized color printouts. "You'll see these eventually. This is the second Martian site."

Althea gritted her teeth and looked at the first photo. The structures seemed almost completely intact—slightly taller than human scale, with arched doorways. She flipped through the rest, quickly at first, then again. The buildings were covered with a rust-colored stucco and painted with geometric abstractions. They looked, in short, remarkably like the alien village Althea had built from her imagination.

She stared at the pictures and then at Hoshi. "You—you made this!"

Hoshi put her hands on her hips, then crossed her arms and looked away. "You know," she said, "first the thing happened with Jupiter's moon. They found that site and Harvard grabbed it before I knew what was happening. I took a huge amount of flak. The grand high muckety-mucks at Oxford threatened to send me to Mars permanently if I didn't come up with something. I was scared to death. I was running out of ideas. I never found a single artifact anywhere. Then this faster-than-light thing happened. I got your pictures, and in another year there were ftl ships. By that time …" Hoshi raised an eyebrow at the photos.

"You'd copied mine."

"I'm surprised you didn't see any of this in the Journal," said Hoshi.

"I quit reading it."

Hoshi chewed her lips. "I figured I wouldn't see you until I was well into retirement. Or dead."

Althea eyed Roger, in front of the camera, elucidating with wide, dramatic gestures. "Does he know your second site is a fake?"

"If he does, he's never said anything," said Hoshi. "It was a good news piece, and I gave it to him before I even called the Journal."

"Payback," said Althea. "For screwing me over."

Hoshi spread her hands.

Roger wrapped up his editorial comments with a flourish and started toward them. Althea took a breath. Of course everyone on Neznaiyu knew Althea's site was a complete fraud, and it wouldn't take long for Roger to find out. Someone would probably let him in on the joke at lunch, and then, even for Roger, it would only be a matter of moments before he made the connection to Hoshi's counterfeit site on Mars.

Roger charged over and grabbed each of them by the elbow. "I see a great place to do the interview," he said, pointing at a sunny spot in the middle of the stage where alien soap-opera stars might have had played to galactic audiences. "Hoshi, you can introduce Althea, and Althea, you can explain the site. Can you keep it short?"

Five years of jealousy, fakery, fury, and despair. Could she keep it short? Althea looked over at Hoshi, dressed to the nines, desperately contrite, with everything to lose. Althea's path became precise in her mind. She looked into Hoshi's eyes to see the evaporating wisps of both of their careers. Althea smiled at her with genuine feeling.

"Hoshi, dear," said Althea, "when you introduce me, be sure to mention that I'm the one who made you exactly what you are today."