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worked long enough, and hard enough, sometimes he lost himself in the rhythm of the task and forgot to think.
    Thinking was the root of his problems. Thinking about impregnable hulls that weren’t quite. About how to manufacture neutronium without exploding a star into a supernova. About the great sealed drives purchased from the Outsiders that moved whole worlds, and the all-but-complete mystery of the drives’ operation, and of the stupendous energies involved, and—
    No!
    With grim determination, Baedeker refocused on gathering weeds to add to his pile. After a while, when not a single weed remained within his reach, he stood, joints cracking, to shuffle to a new spot. The sky was nearly dark now. He would have to stop soon.
    The breeze hesitated, then returned from a new direction. He caught a whiff of something foul. The wind stiffened: a sea breeze.
    His nostrils wrinkled at the stench. The coastal ecology had all but vanished, killed by the lack of tides.
    As Nature Preserve Four, as a part of the Fleet, this world had been one of six worlds orbiting about their common center of mass. It had experienced ten tides a day. As New Terra, this world traveled alone. It had no tides.
    Imminent nightfall and the reek of long-dead . . . whatever. . . that had drifted ashore to rot. Baedeker sighed, with undertunes plaintive in his throats. He would get no more relief from thought this day.
    His examinations of an Outsider drive had not been entirely in vain. The mechanism somehow accessed the zero-point energy of the vacuum. Tapping the energy asymmetrically was inherently propulsive, enough so to move whole worlds. What if, he mused, one somehow superimposed the slightest of vibrations into the propulsive fields, applied a bit of a torque? Perhaps waves could be induced in the oceans, sloshing back and forth, to simulate tides.
    And then? The force would not limit its effects to the oceans. A bit too much stress might topple buildings. And more than a bit too much? The strain could unleash seismic faults. An unintended resonance might build the surges higher and higher, until tsunamis crashed across the continents and washed away entire cities.
    Baedeker trembled with the mad hubris his years of exile had yet to purge.
    Perhaps, in these modern and perilous times, cowardice was overrated. When danger is everywhere, you cannot escape it. Except—
    Quivering in shock and fear, Baedeker collapsed to the ground. His heads darted between his front legs, beneath his belly, into a Citizen’s refuge of last resort: a tightly curled wall of his own flesh.
    Â 
    BAEDEKER COWERED IN HIS APARTMENT , picking disinterestedly at a bowl of grain mush and mixed grasses, still shaking from his latest panic attack. A holo played in the background, the ballet troupe surrogates for the companionship he craved but remained too shattered to handle. He would eat first, and comb the tangles and burrs from his mane, and bathe, and sleep. Then, perhaps, he would be fit to see and be seen.
    From the pocket with his comm unit, a glissando sounded, cycling up and down the scale. He ignored the music until it stopped. Moments later a fanfare rang out, louder and more insistent, denoting a higher priority call. He ignored that, too. Before it could interrupt a third time, he dipped a head into the pocket and powered off the unit, averting his eye from the display. He did not want to know who had called. The matter could wait, or it was beyond his present ability to cope.
    More
tones, harsh and discordant, and from a new source: an emergencyoverride alert from his in-home stepping disc. Who? Why? Baedeker sidled away in fear.
    A human stepped off, short and thickset with a round face. He was entirely unimposing—until those dark, intense eyes impaled you. Baedeker knew those eyes. He dreaded those eyes. He flinched and looked away.
    It was Sigmund Ausfaller!
    â€œDon’t be alarmed,” Ausfaller said.
    Baedeker