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realized she sounded like Hiam. Was she beginning to believe it? “The rumor is that the people who are taken to Estrade are never heard from again.”
    “I’ll take my chances.”
    “Take some time to think about it.”
    “I don’t need to think about it.”
    “Eagan, I need you down there. I need what you know.”
    “It’s all on disk.”
    “I don’t want just what’s on disk. I want your private thoughts, your theories, the ones that are too crazy to be put on record.”
    Eagan looked at her for a long time. Marghe saw the lines around her eyes.
    Formed by months of squinting at light reflecting on the water? “You’re assuming I have some theories. I don’t. Winnie had theories. She’s missing.”
    “Tell me what you know.”
    “She decided to go to the plateau of Tehuantepec.”
    “Tehuantepec?” Marghe frowned.

    “The same. Though the name is about as appropriate as ‘Greenland’ was. It’s cold up there, nothing like the climate of the Gulf of Mexico.”
    Marghe went over to her terminal and punched up a large-scale satellite map of the planet. Jeep was encased in huge spiral banks of water vapor. The whole world glowed like milk and mother-of-pearl, like a lustrous shell set in a midnight ocean.
    A few keystrokes removed the clouds. Marghe rotated the naked world. “Come and show me.”
    Eagan pointed to Port Central, on the second largest continent, then tapped a raised area several hundred miles to the north. “Here. Winnie believed she had found clues in their folklore as to the origins of these people. She was heading for a place on the plateau called Ollfoss.”
    “Enlarge.” The screen displayed a more detailed map. Much of the plateau was forested and contour lines showed it at an elevation of almost three thousand feet.
    “Can you show me’the location?”
    “I’m not a geographer. But I ’ll give you some friendly advice. Don’t go. Winnie headed that way, and she never came back.”
    Marghe stared at the screen. “How long has she been missing?”
    “Fourteen months.”
    “She was wearing a wristcom?”
    “Of course. But most places out there they’re useless: few relays, and weather interferes with everything.”
    “What about the Search, Locate, and Identify Code?”
    “A SLIC’s only any good if there are enough satellites out there to scan for it.
    And if the Mirrors are willing to come and get you.”
    Marghe absorbed all that. “Do you have any ideas what might have happened?”
    “Anything could have happened.”
    “You said that one of the reasons you wanted off was because the natives would just as soon kill you as say hello. Or words to that effect.”
    For the first time, Eagan looked uncomfortable. “That’s not strictly true. I exaggerated, to rationalize my need to get off the damn world. They’re just…
    ordinary people.”
    “But—”
    “No.” Eagan cut her off abruptly. “Winnie did not have to be murdered to die.
    The planet itself will do that if you give it a chance. Listen to me. Do you have any idea how many different ways a person could get herself killed? For all I know, Winnie could have fallen off her horse and broken her neck the second day out. Or she could have choked on a piece of meat. Or gotten pneumonia. Or been attacked by something.” Tears, moving slowly in the low gravity, spread a wet line down each cheek. “Or maybe she just forgot to tie her horse up tightly one night and it ran off, leaving her stranded miles from anywhere. Maybe she ran out of food and starved to death. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She brushed jerkily at her cheeks. “All! know is that she went away and didn’t come back.”
    “She went on her own?”
    “Yes,” Eagan said. “I let her go out on her own. I told her she was crazy to try.
    So I let her go on her own, and now she’s dead. And if you go, you’ll die too.”

Chapter Two
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    THE GIG TAXIED to a halt. Marghe stretched to relieve the adrenaline flutter of her muscles