Demring relaxed. The unhuman universe he could cope with. “Proceed at will, Ranger.”

* * *

When he had heard Laure out, though, he scowled, tugged his beard, and said without trying to hide distress: “Thus we have no chance of finding Kirkasant by ourselves.”

“Evidently not,” Laure said. “I’d hoped that one of my modem locator systems would work in this cluster. If so, we could have zigzagged rapidly between the stars, mapping them, and had a fair likelihood of finding the group you know within months. But as matters stand, we can’t establish an accurate enough grid, and we have nothing to tie any such grid to. Once a given star disappears in the fog, we can’t find it again. Not even by straight-line backtracking, because we don’t have the navigational feedback to keep on a truly straight line.”

“Lost.” Demring stared down at his hands, clenched on the desk before him. When he looked up again, the bronze face was rigid with pain. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “It is why I was reluctant to come back at all. I feared the effect of disappointment on my crew. By now you must know one major respect in which we differ from you. To us, home, kinfolk, ancestral graves are not mere pleasures. They are an important part of our identities. We are prepared to explore and colonize, but not to be totally cut off.” He straightened in his seat and turned the confession into a strategic datum by finishing dry-voiced: “Therefore, the sooner we leave this degree of familiarity behind us and accept with physical renunciation the truth of what has happened to us—the sooner we get out of this cluster—the better for us.”

“No,” Laure said. “I’ve given a lot of thought to your situation. There are ways to navigate here.”

Demring did not show surprise. He, too, must have dwelt on contingencies and possibilities. Laure sketched them nevertheless:

“Starting from outside the cluster, we can establish a grid of artificial beacons. I’d guess fifty thousand, in orbit around selected stars, would do. If each has its distinctive identifying signal, a spaceship can locate herself and lay a course. I can imagine several ways to make them. You want them to emit something that isn’t swamped by natural noise. Hyperdrive drones, shuttling automatically back and forth, would be detectable in a light-year’s radius. Coherent radio broadcasters on the right bands should be detectable at the same distance or better. Since the stars hereabouts are only light-weeks or light-months apart, an electromagnetic network wouldn’t take long to complete its linkups. No doubt a real engineer, turned loose on the problem, would find better answers than these.”

“I know” Demring said. “We on Makt have discussed the matter and reached similar conclusions. The basic obstacle is the work involved first in producing that number of beacons, then—more significantly—in planting them. Many man-years, much shipping, must go to that task, if it is to be accomplished in a reasonable time.”