A short distance from the burrow stood a marble statue ofRainzi, arms folded, smiling slightly. Cass gestured at the messengerand it came to life, the white stone taking on the hue and texture ofskin. Rainzi himself was several generations removed from anyone who’dbothered to simulate a living dermis, let alone possess one, but Casswas not equipped to make sense of the Mimosans' own communicationsprotocols, so she’d chosen to have everything translated into thevisual dialect used back on Earth.

"We’ll give you our decision at nine o’clock, aspromised," the messenger assured her. "But we hope you won’t mind if weprecede this with a final review session. Some of us feel that thereare matters that have yet to be entirely resolved. We’ll begin at halfpast seven." The messenger bowed, then froze again, expecting no reply.

Cass tried not to read too much into the sudden change ofplan. It was unnerving to discover that her hosts still hadn’t beenable to reach a verdict, but at least they weren’t going to keep herwaiting any longer than she’d expected. The fact that she’d alreadbriefed them in detail on every aspect of the experiment that hadcrossed her mind during three decades of preparation, and they nowhoped to hear something new and decisive from her in twenty minutes'time, was no reason to panic. Whatever loose ends they’d found in heranalysis, they were giving her the chance to put things right.

Her confidence was shaken, though, and she couldn’t stopthinking about the prospect of failure. After a month here, she stillwasn’t lonely, or homesick; that was the price she’d pay uponreturning. Even at the leisurely pace of the embodied, seven hundredand forty years cut a deep rift. It would be millennia before thechanges that her friends on Earth had lived through together wouldcease to set her apart from them. Millennia, if ever.