A far-future mixed crew travels aboard a cephalopod-built starship near a red star. Some crew members survey moons with traces of organic chemistry and possible life, while the narrator, an interlocutor, reflects that the ship carries many descendants of Earth: humans, Portiids, octopuses, other uplifted or altered species, artificial intelligences, and beings shaped by Nod.

The survey finds only primitive life, valuable for study but not yet capable of joining the wider interstellar community. The crew receives ordinary slow messages from other ships, carrying old discoveries, deaths, births, songs, and stories across space, reinforcing that many related travellers now wander the universe.

A rapid wave-travel probe then arrives with urgent news. The crew first imagines war, but the universe is too vast for territorial conflict; the message instead announces discovery. A small ship of their cousins has found something too important for them to study alone and has summoned others better equipped to investigate.

After the survey team finishes its work and returns, the ship charges and travels by wave across a hundred light years. The crew reaches the destination about a century after the original pioneers sent their message. In orbit around the fifth planet, they find a dead, non-native, star-shaped structure seven kilometres across: an ancient alien ruin, apparently left by another intelligence roughly a million years before.

The pioneers have left a beacon containing a gift for the narrator. Their own interlocutor decanted a dormant cryptobiote culture containing accumulated identities and memories. When the narrator absorbs it, the narrator becomes the pioneer interlocutor as well, adding forty-three individuals to an already many-layered self, including Yusuf Baltiel, Erma Lante, Meshner Osten Oslam, Viola, and Salome.

The ship prepares to divide. Some crew will continue travelling, while others will remain to study the alien structure as a new ship-child grows. The narrator will decant copies to both groups, simultaneously leaving and staying. The chapter ends with the hope that, when living alien intelligences are eventually found, the interlocutors will be ready to understand them, speak with them, and invite them to join the journey.