“What?” I asked as the animal vanished.

“It’s called a wahakh,” Nia said. “It can live in water and out of it. The people here say that it carries messages from the spirits, and sometimes it acts as a guide for women who go on spirit-journeys. They never eat it, though it is delicious when roasted.” She paused. “We’ll leave it alone.”

Toward evening we came to a lake. The water was clear and dark green. Rushes grew at the edges.

Nia looked around. “I have been here before—when I came east, after I left my people. I remember this place reminded me of a lake in my country. The Great Rush Lake. This is smaller, of course. Aiya! How the years go by!”

We made camp. Nia spent the evening staring into the fire. I went off and called Eddie and told him what had happened in the last few days.

“You take chances, don’t you?” he said.

“A few. Not many.”

“That crazy shamaness might have decided to kill you.”

“I don’t think that’s likely. I get the impression these people aren’t violent.”

“Uh-huh. Tell that to Derek.”

“What happened?”

“He decided he had to tell the people in his village that he was a man—to see what would happen. He is, as you remember, extremely curious. They tried to stone him. He grabbed his radio and ran.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes. But what would’ve happened to someone else, someone who couldn’t run the way he can?”

I thought about that for a while. Derek was a tall blond from southern California, an aborigine who’d spent his childhood traveling on foot in the desert. When he was fifteen, there had been a drought. He walked up to a trading station on the coast and said, “I’m tired of living like this. Teach me something else.”

They sent him to school, and he took up running as a sport. Over short distances he was good. Over long distances he was unbeatable.

“Where is he? On the ship?”

“No. He’s traveling west. The country is pleasant, he says. Rolling hills, forest, and some prairie. There’s a lot of game, much more than in California. He is going to make a bow.”

A bug flitted past me. I batted at it and missed. “How is Gregory?”

“Fine. But he says his people are treating him differently. They talk to him slowly and firmly, and they give a lot of orders. Very simple orders. He thinks they’ve decided he is not very bright. What other explanation is there? He doesn’t know the right behavior, and he can’t take care of himself.”

I grinned.

“One other thing,” Eddie said.

Aha, I thought. The zinger for today. “What is it?”

“Gregory says there must be gold in the mountains. His people wear a lot of jewelry, and most of it is gold.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“The planetologists think it may be significant. The planet is denser than Earth, and there’s plenty of evidence of volcanic activity. There’s a good chance, they say, of finding metal close to the surface. Not just gold—silver, copper, platinum, tin, iridium, chromium, you name it.” His voice sounded peculiar: flat and careful.

“What’s going on?”

“People up here are getting interested. Members of the crew, mostly. I don’t think they have enough to do. They are talking about possibilities. If the metal is here, and if it’s high quality, and if it’s close to the surface, maybe even on the surface, then it could be mined.”

I rocked back on my heels and looked at the radio. I couldn’t really see it, of course. The night was too dark. “A mining colony? Eighteen light-years from home? Do they have any idea of the transportation costs?”

“They are thinking of a manufacturing center. A colony to build ships.”

“No one is ever going to build a ship at the bottom of a gravity well, unless you are talking about the kind of ship that goes through water, and I don’t think you are.”

“Final assembly would be done in space.”

“Huh,” I said.

“There are problems,” Eddie said. “Everyone admits there are a lot of problems, but they won’t stop talking. They are absolutely fascinated by the idea of all that metal.”

Hardly surprising. Our ancestors had done a job on Earth. Most of the metal and coal and oil that was easy to reach was gone, along with other resources. Much of the water. Much of the soil. Hundreds—no, thousands—of species of plants and animals.

Eddie went on. “I’ve been thinking about Cortez and what happened when he found gold in Mexico.”

“You worry too much.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll bet that’s what Montezuma said to his councilors.”

I rubbed my eyes and tried to think. I was exhausted. “Eddie, I have to sleep.”

“Is it night down there? I guess it is. Sweet dreams, Lixia.”

I went back to camp and lay down. Above me the stars shone. Somewhere up there was a relay satellite and a long way to the south—over the middle of the ocean—was the I.S.S. Number One. I imagined it, turning in the light of this system’s primary, gleaming just a little: an enormous hunk of lithium hydride, shaped like a cigar. The surface was pitted and discolored. More than half the mass was gone. The lithium hydride had been our fuel as well as our main protection against radiation.

At one end of the cigar was a series of metal and ceramic coils. These were the magnets that contained and controlled the fusion reaction that drove the ship. The other end was bare. When we left Earth there had been an umbrella made of cermet, additional protection against the tiny amount of matter between the stars. We had dropped the umbrella at turnaround. From that point on, the engine acted as protection, burning whatever bits of space debris might lie ahead of us into ionic vapors, which the magnets guided away.

That was it: a dirty white cigar and a series of rings, black and tan and gray. The living quarters were invisible, hidden in the middle of the cigar: a cylinder made of ceramic, encased in salt.

That was the part of the ship I knew: the rooms and corridors lined with tile. They gave the ship one of its many nicknames—my favorite, the China Clipper.

It had no sails, of course. That idea had been abandoned early on. And there wasn’t a lot of porcelain onboard. The wall material reminded me of earthenware. It was dull and a bit rough, light orange in color. In places it was glazed, usually white or blue.

It was a lovely material: light and hard and durable, immune to corrosion, resistant to heat, excellent insulation. Eddie was nuts. We hadn’t gone to the stars in a tin can. We had gone in something made of clay and salt. There was plenty of both where we came from. We didn’t need the metal on this planet.

For the next three days Nia and I continued west. The land rose. We entered a canyon. At the bottom was a narrow shallow stream. In the spring it must have been an impressive river, for it ran through the middle of a wide bed. Even now the water moved quickly. Here and there it was streaked with foam.

Cliffs rose on either side of us. They were dark gray and flecked with something that glittered in the sunlight. Mica?

I saw a new kind of animal. It was tiny and dark gray, the color of the cliffs. Its skin—or shell—glittered as if it were flecked with mica. In most parts of the canyon the animal seemed to be uncommon. But one section had hundreds of the little things. Motionless, they were invisible. I saw them when they moved, flashing out from under my feet, running up a rock away from me. It seemed as if pieces of stone were coming alive, changing into—what? Lizards? Not exactly. For one thing, they had six legs. On Earth that would have made them insects. But they didn’t look like bugs, and the bugs on this planet seemed to have at least eight legs.

“I don’t know what they are,” said Nia. “And I don’t know why there are so many of them. This isn’t my country. Ask me questions when we come out onto the plain.”

I made the gesture of acknowledgment.