Since they cannot get to the system normally before the harvester strikes again, the crew votes to risk the "Helix" and its hundreds of thousands of stored inhabitants by making a very short Hawking drive jump. The jump succeeds, and they begin scanning the system for life. On an inspiration, they scan "inside" the red giant star, and discover a truly ancient rocky world which the star had enveloped in its expansion. It is honey-combed, and occupied by a curious oxygen-breathing race, whose primary method of technological communication is via modulated gravity waves (explaining the failure of previous attempts to contact the harvester). Aboard is Ces Ambre, the only survivor of the family which took in Raul Endymion; though she is not an Aenean, she received the Aenean nano-technology; she cannot freecast, but she is capable of empathatic communication with the more than 3 billion "modular... so fibrous" minds in the cinder planet. She successfully explains the harm their harvester has caused. They are devastated to learn of what they had done, and immediately transmit a gravitonic sequence which would reprogram the harvester (they offer further to commit collective suicide to atone for their crimes, but the Spectrum feels that this is not needed), as indeed it does. They also reveal the reason they stubbornly stay in their original planet and constructed the harvester and tree-ring: they like their home, and don't want to leave.