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they were concrete, they were real. They altered human body-shapes, and that implied a lot; self-images were malleable, the bastion of the soul was soft—what else was prey to change?
    In just a few short moments, Jobe’s world had grown in size, was now a doubly complex place, with new events to classify. And while her map of the terrain might now be more complete, it seemed that when she looked around, the terrain was far more rugged than imagined. They left the tea-booth then and proceeded to the Plaza where Dida’s marriage was arranged with a family in the north—she’d be living on a vast plantation near the Azure Sea. Jobe didn’t whine at all for the rest of the day; she was lost in introspective thought and the chests of passersby. If they bore tits, she classified them Rethrik, of the Mother; those tits were magic purses—but if not, then Dakka was at work. Sometimes Jobe looked long and hard, staring to be certain—some fat old Dakkariks were confusing, looking more like grandmeres than the -peres they surely were. In any case, the Dakkariks had magic staffs instead.
    But when the day was almost over, and the sun was nearing zenith—all the light had turned a shade of clay, the “dusk” before eclipse—they returned at last to Wester-Dock where their trimaran was moored. Jobe took her grandpere’s hand and asked, “Grandpere Kuvig, were you fibbing?”
    â€œEh? Fibbing? About what?”
    â€œAbout the magic staffs. I looked all day—and I saw a lot of purses, but I didn’t see the staffs.”
    Kuvig laughed then, heartily, and with surprising strength, she plucked her grandchild from the dock and hugged her to her chest. “Don’t worry on it, little one—it’s not all that important. Someday you’ll have a chance to see more staffs than you will want to.”
    Jobe let the subject drop then. It was just one more grown-up mystery, the kind they all referred to without trying to explain. Jobe’s concern was not a major one, but one born out of boredom, and now that they were heading home, she was content to let it die. But occasionally thereafter, the thought would rise to haunt her. Where were the magic staffs?
    Satlin is 104 million miles from its primary, a small white orb with an overabundance of heat radiation. The Satlik call it, “Godheart”—not because of any specific religious significance, but because of its refusal to be easily understood or explained by human beings. It is just far enough off the main sequence to confound most explanations for its existence, and the best rationale is simply that it is trying to burn itself out in one hell of a hurry, that being the quickest way to remove itself as a certifiable anomaly.
    Satlin too is an anomaly, refusing any easy explanation. There is evidence that it was once the core of a massive Jupiter-type planet, a gas giant that had its outer layers burned off at some point in the past when its star was nova. The composition of its mantle and core structure tend to support this theory; however, there is also evidence that the planet was once a rogue and was captured by this star—for instance, the irregularity of its orbit; the plane of it is 60 degrees off the ecliptic. The planet also has too much water in its crust; on the other hand, its orbit is nearly circular. There is just enough evidence of either origin to make Satlin’s history uncertain. If anything, the planet is one more proof of the innate perversity of the universe.
    But, because the likelihood of a habitable planet around Godheart is slim, Satlin is not a planet that one would either predict or expect; hence its belated discovery far after the Diaspora of colonization had spread beyond it. Satlin is the only planet circling its primary, except for a ring of asteroids and assorted other rubble scattered in a belt some 225 million kilometers out. (The orbit of the asteroid spill