Mouse saw it too. Nothing escaped Mouse's little devil eyes. He shrugged, lengthened his stride so benRabi would not overtake him.

They were not supposed to be acquainted this time. That left Moyshe without any anchor at all. He did not need lots of people, but he felt desolate when he had no one.

He daydreamed about Stars' End and the High Seiners, the unchanging boulders that had ghosted across his mind before he had become distracted by his own past.

Sheer mystery was Stars' End, a fortress planet beyond the galactic rim, bristling with automatic, invincible weapons that slaughtered everyone fool enough to come in range. Not one of a dozen expeditions had produced a shred of why.

In the lulls, the deep, fearful lulls when there was nothing to say and nothing being said, people seized on Stars' End as strange country to explore, in litanies meant to exorcise the dreadful silence. They were intrigued by the godlike power there. Theirs were the eyes of the godless seeking gods in a majestically powerful unknown, a technological equivalent of an Old Testament Jehovah.

Or, if Stars' End was momentarily passé, they turned to the High Seiners. The Starfishers.

The Starfishers should have been no mystery. They were human. Stars' End was just a dead metal machine voice babbling insanities in non-human tongues, the toy of gun-toting pyramid builders so long gone no extant race remembered them. But, because of their humanness, the Seiners had become the greater, more frightening puzzle.

Landsmen did not comprehend the quiet, fixed culture of the Starfishers at all. They yearned for the Starfishers' obvious peace, yet hated them for their blissful stasis. The Seiner trail was a perilous one, wending tortuously among yin-yang pitfalls of envy and jealousy.