Her brow furrowed. No, she did not miss it, she decided resolutely. She did not long for it, nor did she wish to return to it. It was just the peculiar pang of something that had been so much a part of her—however destructively—being gone.

Solaria! The last of the Spacer worlds to be settled and made into a home for humanity. And in consequence, by some mysterious law of symmetry perhaps, it was also the first to die.

The first? Did that imply a second and third and so on?

Gladia felt her sadness deepen. There were those who thought there was indeed such an implication. If so, Aurora, her long-adopted home, having been the first Spacer-World to be settled, would, by that same rule of symmetry, therefore be the last of the fifty to die. In that case, it might, even at worst, outlast her own stretched-out lifetime and if so, that would have to do.

Her eyes sought the stars again. It was hopeless. There was no way she could possibly work out which of those indistinguishable dots of light was Solaria’s sun. She imagined it would be one of the brighter ones, but there were hundreds even of those.

She lifted her arm and made what she identified to herself only as her “Daneel gesture.” The fact that it was dark did not matter.

Robot Daneel Olivaw was at her side almost—at once. Anyone who had known him a little over twenty decades before, when he had first been designed by Han Fastolfe, would not have been conscious of any noticeable change in him. His broad, high-cheekboned face, with its short bronze hair combed back; his blue eyes; his tall, well-knit, and perfectly humanoid body would have seemed as young and as calmly unemotional as ever.

“May I be of help in any way, Madam Gladia?” he asked in an even voice.