Rodriguez received the substance of the previous afternoon's conversation from Rama the following morning — not the full philosophical weight of it, which Rama judged belonged more properly to Timeline's own account whenever Timeline chose to offer it directly, but the practical core: something existed on the other side of the boundary, something Timeline had apparently sensed faintly for the entirety of its existence without recognizing it as separate from itself, and that something was, in whatever fashion applied across a barrier neither side fully understood, beginning to perceive Timeline in return.
Rodriguez absorbed this the way he absorbed most genuinely destabilizing information — by immediately converting it into the question of what Coalition needed to do next.
