He missed the sun.

The planet Ansatz boasts one city, Nightingale, a gem that graces eternal night. Just as a diamond sparkles because light that ventures into its heart is captured, bouncing from face to face, so Jato Stormson was trapped in Nightingale. Unlike the light inside a faceted diamond, however, he could never escape.

After a few years, his memories of home faded. He could no longer picture the sun-parched farm on the planet Sandstorm where he had spent his boyhood. It was always dark in Nightingale.

The Dreamers-the artistic geniuses who created Nightingale-were also mathematical prodigies. That was why they named their planet Ansatz. It referred to a method of solving differential equations. Guess an answer, an ansatz, and see if it solved the equation. If it didn’t, make another guess. Another ansatz. Jato felt as if he were trapped on a guess of a world.

One night he went to the EigenDome, an establishment for dancing. He sat at a table and waited for the drink server, but the server never came to his table. That was why he rarely visited the Dome. The artist who had designed the place considered it aesthetic to have humans serve the drinks and the humans in Nightingale ignored him. But that night he was lonelier than usual and even the icy Dreamers were better than no company at all.

Made from synthetic diamond, the Dome resembled a truncated soccer ball. Jato had looked up its history in the city library and found a treatise on how the Dome’s shape mimicked the molecule buckyball. Its holographic lighting evoked the quantum eigenfunctions that described a buckyball. He didn’t understand the physics, but he appreciated the beauty it produced.