Gray and tired, the Elder Statesman stood down on the shore, pausing in his walk back to the main part of the rambling, pleasant hardwood city. His lined and worried face was illuminated by the soft mauve light of the binary moons of Tern, a strange pair of masses which orbited each other while orbiting their planet. The mauve moons were softly lit, rounded and somehow soft looking, and gentle. For reasons no-one had been able to discover the first settlers there had named them as a single entitiy with the obscure but lyrical name Annieaaskones.

The old man stared past them into the dark depths of the asteroid belt and the dangerous radioactive clouds in the far regions of the galaxy which were all that protected his sturdy colony from detection and endless strife at the hands of the psychotic bands of strangelings who populated the distant spaceways of charted areas. Somewhere out there, his son, his only son and all that was left to him of a long-ago memory of happiness when the twins were born, was at risk. He ground his teeth, the ancient loss of the boy's sister, to a Cybanian slave-raiding party from off-planet, asserting its deep-seated sadness. He wondered for the millionth time what had become of her, why her psychic presence occasionally loomed in his awareness, and why it vanished when it did.

Present duty again called him, and he hunched his shoulders against a cool wind from the river delta and turned up the waterfront street heading toward the wider, more graceful spaces of the center of the town. Tall, ornate polished wood buildings, their facades swooping in gentle curves, their curved flanks supporting long polished towers of bright wood with even divisions of metallic light where the wide short windows were, towered over him on both sides, separated by greenery, small streams and crafted waterfalls. He followed a small footpath to the rear of one such building, and inserting a small precisely formed slate touchstone from his pocket, was admitted into a small polished rosewood compartment. Pressing a small lever, the entire chamber dropped rapidly with a hydraulic hiss to a deep subbasement level. Exiting the chamber, he turned into a side corridor and knocked in a precise musical rhythm on the heavy door; shortly, it opened, and he strode in to face a small group of anxious men and women, who looked at him respectfully in expectant silence.

"There is no further news from Cornucopia," he told them. "I fear the worst, but we have no concrete information."