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glasses; Hanna, who had never seen spectacles before, had examined them thoroughly. He took them off and laid them on the console where they worked. He looked sad. He said, “I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oversight historian. The kinds of questions she asked started me wondering. I’ve asked questions of my own, and Oversight’s free with its library. It’s different out there. With your people, I mean.”
    He meant the five worlds of the Interworld Polity and the others within its sphere of influence. He had ceased to see Hanna as D’neeran.
    He said, “We have a family named N’goto who make the finest porcelain you people have ever seen. Something about the clay on the riverbanks where they farm. The family developed the art of making it, oh, four hundred years ago? The rest of us buy it, sure. We ask for it a year in advance, usually a tea set for a marriage gift, and we pay the price the N’gotos ask, and it’s a high one, and it’s fair. We know how precious it is better than you Oversight people do.” (Hanna did not correct him. Oversight or Contact, it was all the Polity to him.) “The N’gotos don’t have much time to spare from the land, and this is their art, and it’s beautiful. Cherished.
    â€œNow Oversight is talking about markets in the Polity, and the family’s in an uproar.
    â€œI see things coming, Hanna. I see things I don’t like. They even say we have to stop calling this world New Earth, they say every colony ever settled wanted to call itself that and they all had to pick something else, and we’ll have to do that too. Not everybody sees everything I’ve been thinking about, but we’re
all
mad about that.”
    â€œUnderstandably,” said Hanna, but she was thinking of the alternatives to change. Stagnation, for one. A turning in, a narrowing of vision, knowledge trickling away. Helplessness in the face of new threats. She thought of Plague, and Gadrah.
    â€œWell, let’s get back to work,” he said.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    â€œNothing,” Hanna said later to Jameson, light-years away. It was late night in Dwar; Hanna had stayed up to reach Admin in Jameson’s morning. “I was reminded of the mothership, though. At the time of the incident, it was exactly where it is now—in orbit around New Earth. Surely the aliens would have boarded it. It’s clearly a starship, at least, to any beings with experience with starships. If they were here for R&R—a reasonable hypothesis, based on the accounts—they would have checked it for threats. Do you think they might have left traces?”
    She watched him think about it. She had always liked watching him think. The results were often surprising—and sometimes were direct hits on a target no one else had even seen.
    â€œI wouldn’t expect to find physical traces,” he said. “Not after generations of colonists making inspection trips. Presumably they would have noticed any damage or anything out of place—”
    â€œâ€”like alien picnic leavings—”
    He gave her a startled look but said, “If they were curious about it, they might have tried to access the computers.”
    â€œI don’t know if I could recognize that if they had. Especially since these systems are obsolete. Do you think it’s worth my persuading someone here to take me up for a look? If there’s anything to find, finding it is probably beyond me.”
    He didn’t answer directly. “That would be beyond Oversight’s capabilities, too,” he said. “I will contact Fleet, though. It’s worth a look from them.”
    He would get results; and if anything substantial came of the examination of New Earth’s mothership, anything to make the whistling beings more real than one old report made them, Hanna might not be waiting around for transport the next time she