The stars were hard and cold, and the spaces between them pressed on her. The planet, locked in place, had not moved since she stood here. "The image on the plain," she said, "is terrifying, not because it has wings and claws, but because it is alone."

She was beginning to feel the cold, and it was a long way back to the ship. (The Flickinger fields do cool off, in time. They're not supposed to, and there are all kinds of tests to demonstrate they don't. But there you are.) Half a dozen moons were in the sky: Titan, with its thin methane atmosphere; Rhea and Hyperion and some of the smaller satellites: frozen, spinning rocks like this one, sterile, immeasurably old, no more capable of supporting a thinking creature than the bloated gasbag they circle.

Richard followed her gaze. "She must have been very much like us." His lined features softened.

Hutch stood unmoving.

The universe is a drafty, precarious haven for anything that thinks. There are damned few of us, and it is a wide world, and long. Hutch wondered about her. What had brought her so far from home? Why had she traveled alone? Long since gone to dust, no doubt. Nevertheless, I wish you well.

PART ONE

MOONRISE

1

Quraqua. 28th Year of Mission, 211th Day. Thursday, April 29, 2202; 0630 hours local time

Almost overnight, every civilization on this globe had died. It had happened twice: somewhere around 9000 B.C., and again eight thousand years later. On a world filled with curiosities, this fact particularly disturbed Henry's sleep.

He lay awake, thinking how they were running out of time, thinking how the Quraquat had known after all about the anomaly on their moon. They were unaware of the two discontinuities, had lost sight of them toward the end, and remembered them only in myth. But they knew about Oz. Art had found a coin which left no doubt, whose obverse revealed a tiny square on a crescent, at the latitude of the Western Mare. Precisely where Oz was located.