"A soul," said Edward Behr, "looking for God."

Vincenzo Giuliani stared at the fat little man standing in the hallway and then at Sandoz, sleeping drugged against an assault on his own body, and wondered, What if that's been it, all along?

It was well into the night before Emilio stirred. He became aware that the small reading lamp by the chair was on and said quietly, his voice blurred with sleep, "I'll be okay, Ed. You don't have to sit up. Go to bed." When he heard no response, he roused himself and turned over, rising onto an elbow, and saw not Edward Behr but Vincenzo Giuliani.

Before Sandoz could spit out the words that were forming in his mind, Giuliani spoke. "Emilio, I am sorry," he said, the calm conviction in his voice concealing the calculated risk he was taking. "You were condemned in absentia by men who had no right to judge. I can't think of any adequate way to apologize. I don't expect you to forgive me. Or any of us. I am sorry." He watched the words sink in, rain to parched ground. So, he thought, that's how he sees it. "If you can bring yourself to it, I'd like to begin again. I know it won't be easy, but I think you need to tell us your side of all this, and I know we need to hear it."

The face closed to him, pride warring with an exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep.

"Get out," Emilio Sandoz said at last. "And shut the door."

He did, and was about to go to his own room when he heard something that gave the Father General pause. It had been, simply, a gamble: a guess at how Sandoz might have felt. But hearing this, Vincenzo Giuliani required himself to remain in the hallway. Head against the wooden door, hands gripping the frame, he listened until the weeping was over, and learned the sound of desolation.

"None for me, thanks," Emilio said.

Sofia sighed. "Three."

"I got a hand that looks like a foot," said D.W., staring at his cards with disgust.

"I'm a skilled surgeon," Anne said. "I could help you with a problem like that." Emilio laughed.

"Nothing's gonna help this mess. Fold."

"One for me," Anne told Alan.

"Dealer takes three. You know, Sandoz, it's draw poker. You don't always have to stand pat," Alan Pace explained patiently, dealing out his own three cards. "You can draw."

"Robichaux's the artist," Emilio said serenely. "He draws. I stand pat."

"Leave me out of this," Marc yelled from the little gym off the commons.

"Nice that you guys have nothing better to do than play cards," Jimmy called from the bridge, where he and George were processing sequential images of the vast region between the center sun and the two outliers, hoping to detect some telltale difference—a smeared line or a displaced dot—that would indicate a planet moving in orbit. They'd been circling at.25 G high above the plane of the Alpha Centauri system for weeks and were collectively bored witless. "Some people around here are actually working."

"Anne and I could take your appendix out if you like," Emilio offered, raising his voice slightly. He looked back at his cards. "See your two and raise you two."

Sofia and Anne folded. Alan tossed in two more Wolverton tube peanuts. George, taking a break, strolled buoyantly into the common room and reached over Anne's shoulder to look at the cards she'd thrown down. "No guts!" he said. "I'd have played that!" She glared at him, but he planted a noisy kiss on the back of her neck. Quarter G was a lot of fun.

Emilio added four peanuts and then four more and leaned back in his chair, squinting through imaginary cigarette smoke. "Cost you eight legumes to find out what I've got, Pace."

Alan ignored the Bogart impression and took the bet. Sandoz would play with anything or nothing. "Fives? You stood pat with a pair of fives?" Alan cried when they laid the cards down. "Sandoz, I will never understand you! Why didn't you draw three cards?"

Emilio smiled delightedly and shrugged. "Fives are good enough to beat fours, yes? My deal. Ante up, ladies and gentlemen, ante up." The cards went out again, Emilio's infectious merriment spreading around the table as they each looked at the hands he dealt them.

"The perfect poker face," D.W. said, shaking his head. "He laughs at everything he gets. The good hands are funny and so are the lousy ones."

"This is true," Emilio agreed amiably. "Alan, just for you. Pick a card at random and I'll draw."

Alan pulled a card from the middle of Emilio's hand and Emilio dealt himself a new one off the top of the deck. Predictably, he found it hilarious, and it was impossible to tell if he'd just gotten four of a kind or busted a flush. When the bets came around to him, he pushed his whole pile of peanuts into the center. "Winner takes all. Come on, Pace," Emilio urged.

They laid their cards down again and Alan roared with indignation. "I don't believe it! A straight."

Emilio was practically crying now. "And the worst part is, you filled it. I was holding nothing!" He pushed the peanuts over to Alan and held up a hand, becoming before their eyes the very Buddha, soul of disinterest. "The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning."

There were cries of "Liar!" and dark mutterings about confession from Anne and Sofia and D.W., who'd all seen Emilio take the skin off his face maniacally sliding into home, and wide eyes from Alan, amazed by the eruption.

"He is completely full of shit, Alan," George told him. "He doesn't care about poker because he doesn't like peanuts. But he'll cut your heart out at second base if he thinks you're going to steal third."

"This is also true," Emilio acknowledged peaceably, gathering up the deck while the others vilified him. "And if we were playing for raisins, it would be different. I like raisins."

"Raisins make a mess of the cards," Sofia pointed out.

"Do you ever get tired of being practical?" Emilio demanded.

"Bingo," they heard Jimmy say quietly.

"No, poker," Emilio corrected him. "Bingo is with those square cards, and you put beans on the numbers…" He fell silent as Jimmy came into the common room. One by one, they turned to look and went motionless, waiting.

"A planet," Jimmy said, dazed. "We found it. We found a planet. Might not be the Singers' planet, but we found a planet."

Since rotating the asteroid at the halfway point, to turn the engines around and begin deceleration, they'd stopped every two weeks to do periodic broad-spectrum imaging, engines off, and to listen for radio signals, which became relatively strong but remained strangely intermittent. As the Stella Maris passed out of the plane of the Alpha Centauri system, rising «above» it in order to image the system at right angles, there was something far odder than interval to worry about: they lost the radio signals completely. It was generally unnerving, although the reactions ranged from Marc's faith that everything would come right in the end to George's palpable frustration at being unable to figure out what could account for it. But Emilio seemed strangely relieved, almost giddy, suggesting cheerfully that they turn around and go home, an idea that provoked howls of rejection.

Now they all crowded around the bridge display as Jimmy ran the images back and forth in sequence, so they could see a point of light, varying in brightness from image to image, moving slightly. "Look," he said, "you can even see the difference in the reflected sunlight. It's sort of gibbous here."

Marc Robichaux, who'd come out of the tiny gym when he heard the uproar, leaned around Jimmy and pointed to a smear, somewhat closer to the central sun. "And here. Another one."