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many other species, it was a divine dissatisfaction that impelled them into the unknown, but on the Squeal world it might be forbidden or inconceivable.
    She could not even find an adjustment to the mirror/receiver that showed the sky, particularly the night sky, and she did not know what stars the night sky revealed, or if this world had a moon or moons, and where in the galaxy it might be located. Everything suggested a fatal isolation from the rest of the galaxy. But she did not surrender to despair. And her refusal to accept defeat was not because of the example of her sunny attendants.
    When she was not engaged in conversation, Asha spent a great deal of her time studying the mirror/receiver. She needed more information than her attendants could provide, and she acquired a mastery of how to direct its view of the world. She studied the various climate zones of the planet before she settled on the temperate areas where nearly all the squeal people lived. She guessed that Squeal had little or no planetary wobble and therefore no incentives or opportunities for people to move around, once settled. Or perhaps the arctic and tropical zones offered too many challenges to sustain their philosophy, or illusion, of joy.
    She noted several sizes of communities, from villages in the midst of cultivated areas to modest-sized cities that apparently served as gathering places for goods and services, and larger cities that may have provided manufacturing and transportation. The largest and most complex of these, she found, was the city into which she had been transported, and the comments that she could elicit from her attendants seemed to confirm this. That seemed appropriate. The center of governance, of whatever sort, ought to be the place of honor, or worship, for the Transcendental receiver. Or perhaps she was only glorifying her own materialization here.
    She studied the city, street by street, and house by house, returning, time after time, to the plaza in which she had made her appearance, with its central fountain topped by the Machine. If there was any hope of finding a way off this world, isolated by circumstances or its people’s will, it had to be here. The creators of the Transcendental Machine must have had a purpose for placing a receiver on this planet, though it was a million long-cycles ago. That purpose may have been to influence the development of this planet or the evolution of its creatures, or to conquer it, or just to use it as a way station, but there was something here that had attracted those extinct technologists from another arm of the galaxy.
    But what? And had it been extinguished in the past million long-cycles, a period long enough to predate the Squeal people themselves? Perhaps Squeal was an experiment that failed.
    Asha’s contemplation was interrupted by the opening of the distant doors and the entrance of three of the Squeal people. They seemed a bit larger than the others she had encountered, they were wearing clothing that resembled the finery in which she had been dressed when she arrived, and they were bearing gifts.
    *   *   *
    They looked a little ridiculous in their fancy garments, gowns in royal blue or silver that reached to the floor and hid their feet, and scarves wrapped into headdresses, but they wore them with the happy expression that accompanied the squeal word for “world,” or, perhaps, if that was possible on this Elysium where distinctions might create envy, pride. They came in one at a time but formed into a single line in front of her.
    The one on her left, dressed in royal blue, had a silver globe in its hands, about the size of a child’s head and engraved with cryptic designs. “I offer to you this symbol of Squeal. If you accept my offer of eternal bliss, the world of Squeal will be yours,” the Squeal person said, as nearly as Asha could interpret, though, indeed, the message could have been far more grandiose, or even more