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far enough inland to feel comfortable, and set the car down. It was not raining there, and there was even a suggestion that the disk of Mandel might show its face through the clouds. She climbed out and looked around. It was strange to be on a world so empty of people that there was no one to be seen from horizon to horizon. But it was not an unpleasant experience. She walked closer to the edge of the Sling. The soft-stemmed, long-leaved plants that fringed the ocean were bowed down with yellow fruit, each one as big as her fist. If Cap could be believed, they were safe to eat, but that seemed like an unnecessary risk. Although her intestinal flora and fauna had been boosted on arrival by forms suited to Opal, the microorganisms inside her were probably still deciding who did what. She walked closer to the ragged boundary of the Sling, took off her shoes, and leaned forward to scoop up a handful of seawater. That much she was willing to chance.
    She sipped a few drops from her palm. It was brackish, not quite sea-salt. Rather like the taste of her own blood.
    The complicated chemical balance of a planet like Opal made her sit back on her haunches and think. In a world without continents, streams and rivers could not perform their steady leaching of salts and bases from upthrust deep structures. Microseepage of primordial methane and the higher hydrocarbons must occur on the seabed, with absorption taking place through the water column. The whole land-water balance had to be radically different from the world that she knew. Was it truly a stable situation? Or were Opal and Quake still evolving from their condition before that traumatic hour, forty-odd million years ago, when they had been cast into their wild new orbit around Mandel?
    She walked a hundred meters inland and squatted cross-legged on a hummock of dark green.
    The parent star showed as a bright patch, high in the cloud-covered sky. There would be at least another two hours of daylight. Now that she had taken a closer look at Opal, she saw it as a warm and friendly world, not at all the raging fury of her imagination. Surely humans could thrive there, even at Summertide. And if Opal was so pleasant, could its twin, Quake, be all so different?
    But it would have to be very different, if her own conclusions had any validity. She stared at the gray horizon, unmarked by boats or other land, and reviewed for the thousandth time the train of analysis that had brought her to Dobelle. How persuasive were those results, of minimal least-square residuals? To her, there was no way that such a precise data fit could occur by coincidence. But if the results were so persuasive and indisputable to her, why had others not drawn the same conclusions?
    She came up with only one answer. She had been helped in her thinking because she was a stay-at-home, a person who had never traveled between the stars. Humanity and its alien neighbors had become conditioned to think of space and distances in terms of the Bose Drive. Interstellar travel employed a precise network of Bose Nodes. The old measure of geodesic distance between two points no longer had much significance; it was the number of Bose Transitions that counted. Only the Ark dwellers, or perhaps the old colonists creeping along through Crawlspace, would see a change in a Builder artifact as generating a signal wavefront, expanding out from its point of origin and moving across the galaxy at the speed of light. And only someone like Lang, fascinated by everything to do with the Builders, might ask if there were single places and times where all those spherical wavefronts intersected.
    Each piece of the argument felt weak, but taken together they left Darya fully persuaded. She felt a new anger. She was in the right place—or would be, if she could just leave Opal and get herself over to Quake! But instead she was stuck in a sleepy dreamland.
    Sleepy dreamland. Even as those words formed in her mind there came a grating whirr from