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have missed the sailing boats. Unless....
    “The other expeditions,” I mused, speaking aloud. “They never got back. But that’s not to say that they never got here.... ”
    “We should go after it,” said Ogburn.
    “It’s going away from us,” said Nieland. “It’s already out of sight. There’s no point in chasing it all day. Let’s make landfall first and worry about it later.”
    He was very impatient. To him, the only thing that mattered was getting there. I sympathized—and Ogburn didn’t really want to press his case.
    Behind us, a couple of the crewmen were muttering. I knew them as Roach and Thayer. They were making unkind and ominous remarks about the sail and about us. Ogburn ignored them. He didn’t even tell them to get back to work. Instead, he signaled to the mate—a man named Malpighi—and gave him the binoculars, which he plucked from Nieland’s hand without asking.
    “Send a man up top,” he grunted. “Keep a lookout.”
    Malpighi selected Thayer. While he was beginning the long climb up the mainmast Roach slouched away. He glanced at me, and said: “Gone to fetch the fleet, I shouldn’t wonder. Blow us out of the water. Probably what happened to Verheyden.”
    It looked like the beginning of a rumor which, if not exactly ugly, could hardly contribute to the morale of the ship’s personnel. But there was nothing I could do except give him a dirty look. He scowled back.
    I glanced at Ogburn. “If I were a fisherman and I saw something like the New Hope ,” I said, “I’d run for home and tell them I saw one this big. And they wouldn’t believe me.”
    He didn’t laugh.
    I couldn’t blame him.
    The party broke up. Nieland began setting the position of the sun on his sextant—his regular ritual of position-finding. We were still cutting through the weed without any trouble, and the wind was blowing from the southwest, which was about as favorable as we were likely to get. It was brisk enough to be turned to our advantage. I decided to do some fishing, and went below to get some line and a few hooks. I didn’t really care whether I caught anything or not.
    The day wore on at its customary turgid pace—it was about two hours longer than an Earthly day, but there were a few less of them in the planetary year, which was only a couple percent longer than standard. By now I was an expert at letting the time pass unheeded, and I managed to occupy myself while retreating into the privacy of my contemplation. I always did fancy myself a spiritual descendent of Newton: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought—alone.”
    I thought mainly about the aliens, wondering why a dhow was sailing so far south. The most civilized region of Delta was a long way north of here—we’d deliberately set out to sail across the ocean the shortest way, which brought us to the bulge of the lower part of the small-case delta. There was nothing but forest here, and the aliens in the forest—according to the two-hundred-year-old survey reports—were Iron Age swidden farmers without much iron. Not the type of people who’d suddenly take to the sea.
    Did that mean that the aliens had come on a fair bit and were sallying forth on exploratory odysseys? Or did it mean that the colony—unknown to itself—had fathered a little colony here on the alien shore, whose inhabitants were (for reasons best known to themselves) minding their own business instead of letting the prevailing wind carry the good news back home?
    I was tempted to toss a coin, but I was never a great believer in oracles.
    Three fish and a lot of drifting on strange seas of thought later, my attention was once again snatched back to matters close at hand.
    Thayer, from his lonely station aloft, called out in tones as stentorian as they were portentous: “I can see the shore!”
    My first thought, idiotically, was one of disappointment. The fool hadn’t read his script. Everyone knows you’re supposed to shout “Land