“There’s another possibility,” said Mirissa, who was standing with Brant and Kumar near the back of the chamber. Every head turned towards her, but Brant looked slightly annoyed. Despite his love for Mirissa, there were times when he wished that she was not quite so well-informed, and that her family had not been in charge of the Archives for the last five generations.

“What’s that, my dear?”

Now it was Mirissa’s turn to be annoyed, though she concealed her irritation. She did not enjoy being condescended to by someone who was not really very intelligent, though undoubtedly shrewd — or perhaps cunning was the better word. The fact that Mayor Waldron was always making eyes at Brant did not bother Mirissa in the least; it merely amused her, and she could even feel a certain sympathy for the older woman.

“It could be another robot seedship, like the one that brought our ancestor’s gene patterns to Thalassa.”

“But now — so late?”

“Why not? The first seeders could only reach a few percent of light velocity. Earth kept improving them — right up to the time it was destroyed. As the later models were almost ten times faster, the earlier ones were overtaken in a century or so; many of them must still be on the way. Don’t you agree, Brant?”

Mirissa was always careful to bring him into any discussion and, if possible, to make him think he had originated it. She was well aware of his feelings of inferiority and did not wish to add to them.

Sometimes it was rather lonely being the brightest person in Tarna; although she networked with half a dozen of her mental peers on the Three Islands, she seldom met them in the face-to-face encounters that, even after all these millennia, no communications technology could really match.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Brant said. “You could be right.”

Although history was not his strong point, Brant Falconer had a technician’s knowledge of the complex series of events that had led to the colonization of Thalassa. “And what shall we do,” he asked, “if it’s another seedship, and tries to colonize us all over again? Say “Thanks very much, but not today”?”