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making until Sigmund asked.
    Eric looked—grim? No, stunned.
    The alarms were silent. New Terra was not under attack. What, then?
    â€œIs it
Don Quixote
?” Sigmund asked. Eric’s wife, Kirsten, was aboard
Don Quixote
, its navigator and chief pilot.
    Eric shook his head. “You have to see this, Sigmund. Jeeves, the incoming hyperwave message. Time—”
    â€œI have it, Eric. A distress call, looping.”
    Like a soap bubble pricked, the spinning globe vanished from above Sigmund’s desk, replaced by a 3-V playback. The text crawler was all squiggles, and Sigmund did not understand a single symbol. But that was not why he stared.
    The figure in the image looked like a cross between an octopus and a starfish.

6
    Â 
    Cowardice was overrated.
    The notion was insane, even seditious. Baedeker dared to think it anyway. He lived on New Terra in voluntary exile, far from home. Among Citizens, that choice alone branded him as insane.
    He crouched over his redmelon patch, patiently weeding. The suns warmed his back. Both necks ached and the joints in all three legs, but that would pass.
    Besides, few things tasted as fine as vine-ripened redmelon.
    Cowardice was not a Citizen concept, of course. Citizens were prudent. Cautious. Sensible. Where humans had their leaders, Citizens sought direction from their Hindmost.
    Once, the flight instinct was unassailably correct. To stray from the herd was to meet the jaws and claws of predators. Any tendency to wander had been bred from his ancestors long before the first glimmerings of sapience.
    But things change.
    Through fear, technology, and ruthless determination, Citizens had exterminated predators from the land surface of Hearth. They could not eliminate the lifecycle of stars. Now the Fleet of Worlds fled the sterilization of the whole galaxy—
    Headslong into unknown perils.
    Â 
    THE DAY WAS ENDING , all but one arc of suns gone from the sky. Purple pollinators had begun to emerge from their nests, thrumming their delicate tunes. Far overhead, a lone terrestrial bird circled, effortlessly soaring. A cool breeze ruffled Baedeker’s mane. He continued his weeding, trying to lose himself in the moment and the company of friends.
    â€œI’m ready to stop,” Tantalus said, his voices raspy from the dust theyhad raised. In truth, he had just arrived and scarcely started, hoping to hurry Baedeker along to dinner.
    â€œAnd I,” Sibyl agreed. “Food all around and nothing here to eat.” His heads swiveled to look each other in the eyes. Sibyl was partial to irony, not least in the human-pronounceable label he had chosen for himself. Human independence had freed him from hard labor in a reeducation camp—not exactly how he had foretold regaining his freedom. “Baedeker, how about you?”
    Baedeker was hungry, too, and so what? “I’ll work a bit longer,” he sang.
    â€œA glutton for punishment,” Tantalus answered. It was a human aphorism, and as he delivered it in English, it required only one mouth and throat. With his other head, he was already gathering his tools.
    Tantalus’ gibe was hardly fair, but Baedeker saw no reason to comment. Why match wits with his friends when to match wits with these weeds was the limit of his ambition?
    He toiled all day, every day, not as punishment, although once he had been banished to another farm world and condemned to hard labor, and not as penance, although he had much for which to atone. He gardened as therapy.
    With trills of farewell (and grace notes of disappointment) Baedeker’s friends brushed heads with him before cantering off. They dropped their loads of weeds through a stepping disc, to a composting facility, perhaps, or into a food-synthesis reservoir, before they disappeared themselves, leaving Baedeker alone in the sprawling garden.
    He knelt, picked up a trowel (carefully—it was a bladed instrument!), and resumed his task. When he had