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awake, back in her bed. She forced her eyes open; if she closed them, she would find herself back in the desert. Arms held her.
    “Lydee,” Reiho’s voice said in the dark, “what’s wrong?”
    She clung to him, her fingers digging into his arm. “I’m all right.” Her body was growing calmer; she relaxed. “Homesmind will have to provide some dreams for me — I can’t sleep with my own. I keep seeing Earth.”
    She stretched out again. The bed’s surface flowed under her, cradling her. Reiho held her hand.
    “Perhaps you shouldn’t have viewed it,” he said at last. “You knew what you needed to know. You didn’t have to experience those things.”
    “I had to try. I won’t anymore. I know why Earth frightens you now.”
    Earlier, Homesmind had shown her part of Daiya’s life. It had stored the Earthgirl’s experiences inside Itself along with the records of the lives of Home’s inhabitants It had always kept. But Daiya, unlike the cometdwellers, had not shielded her deepest feelings from Homesmind, and It had recorded them as well.
    Lydee had not only seen Earth through Daiya’s eyes, but had also touched her emotions. She had viewed only a few incidents before closing her link, but the images persisted: sheer-faced mountains hiding the pillars holding Earth’s cybernetic Minds, a village of huts with grassy roofs, people with physical deformities — thinning hair, wrinkled faces, sagging bodies. Worst of all had been the desert, where some of Daiya’s friends had died undergoing the rite the Earthfolk called an “ordeal.” The emotions of rage, fear, and despair had underscored the visions.
    “She cared for you,” Lydee murmured. “I saw enough to grasp that. But there was one she longed for, a boy in her village. It felt almost as if she wanted to swallow him, to make his thoughts hers. Love is an illness there.” Even her own feelings had never been that strong.
    “Perhaps.” Reiho sighed. “And yet I sometimes feel I can understand it.”
    Lydee could not. She had felt what she called love for Pilo and Jerod and Reiho himself, but they would all love others as well. Earthpeople formed pairs, reaching out to others only when they were old; that much she had understood from Daiya’s thoughts.
    “Once,” her mentor continued, “that young Reiho thought that this world and Earth would grow closer, that we would learn from one another. We would give them our science, and they would offer their visions, their dream of being united in one vast mind. He even believed that a way might be found for those of us without powers to acquire them. But he was only a boy.”
    “It might still happen.” Even as she spoke, she heard the insincerity in her voice. Daiya’s own mother and father, a woman named Anra and a man called Brun, had been willing to have their own child die to preserve Earth’s ways; she had seen that much in Homesmind’s re-creation of Daiya’s life. If Earthfolk would sacrifice their own young in such a cause, they were hardly likely to reach out to cometdwellers.
    “We should have left this system,” Reiho said. “There’s nothing for us here. It would have been easier for you, too. Earth would be distant.”
    “I may leave this system anyway. My friends think we should seed our own comet.” She paused. “But they might not want me with them now.”
    “Oh, they will.” He stroked her hair. “Sleep, Lydee. Dream other dreams.”

    * * *

    The shuttle dropped toward Home. The comet’s tail pointed away from the sun; the Wanderer would soon cross Earth’s orbital path once more. A jungle of giant trees obscured the distant blue globe.
    Lydee glanced at Pilo, who was at her side. He had been gazing intently at Earth before the comet’s trees had blocked it from view.
    “Do you ever want to go to Earth?” he said casually. “I mean, now that you know.” He cleared his throat.
    “I certainly don’t.”
    “Not that I think you should, of course.” His voice