Half the caskets were empty now, their passengers awakened. That included almost all the oldest Children. Nowadays, the kids lived in or near the new castle; some were in school classes here. If she listened carefully, she could hear occasional shrieks of laughter mixed with the gobble of Tinish packs.

So why did I enter the Lander? Oh yes. She’d spent a only few minutes outside, looking through the casket windows at the faces of little ones who still slept, who waited unknowing for there to be enough grownup caregivers. Most of those revivals would be routine, but some of the caskets tested as borderline defective. How could she save the kids in those withered caskets? That had been the reason for today’s visit, to review the results on Timor Ristling, her first attempt with the withered caskets.

The Lander was originally Top-of-the-Beyond technology. Much of that could not function down here in the Slow Zone; she’d never been able to transfer the Lander’s maintenance records to the stable technology of her own ship. She had to come onboard to access those records. Her gaze slid uneasily around the Lander’s freight cabin. Too much had happened in this green-walled room. The Lander wasn’t just Top of the Beyond. It had been at the High Lab, in the Low Transcend, and it had been … modified. If she looked up she would see some of that, the fungus hanging from the ceiling. The magical Countermeasure. Nowadays, it seemed to be as dead as a dusty cobweb, but Countermeasure had dimmed the sun, and killed her dearest love, and maybe saved the galaxy. The remains of the fungus bothered even the Straumer Children.