Fafnir’s twenty-two-hour day has encouraged an active life. Couch potatoes court insomnia: it’s easier to sleep if you’re tired. But hurrying is something else. There are transfer booths, of course. You can jump instantly from a home on some coral extrusion to the bare rock of Shasht…and buy yourself an eleven-hour time lag.

Nobody’s in a hurry to go home. They go by dirigible. Ultimately the floatliner companies wised up and began selling round-trip tickets for the same price as one-way.

“I do know all this, Beowulf.”

“Mph? Oh, good.”

“So what’s the plan?” Feather asked. “Find an island with nothing near it and put down, right? Get out and dance around on the sand while we blow the boat up and load it and go. How do we hide the lander?”

“Sink it.”

“Read about lamplighters,” she said, so I did.

After the war and the settlement, UN advance forces landed on Shasht, took over the kzinti structures, then began to explore. Halfway around the planet were myriads of little round coral islands, each with a little peak at the center. At night the peaks glowed with a steady yellow light. Larger islands were chains of peaks, each with its yellow glow in the cup. Lamplighters were named before anyone knew what they were.

Close up…well, they’ve been called piranha ant nests. The bioluminescence attracts scores of varieties of flying fish. Or, lured or just lost, a swimming thing may beach itself, and then the lamplighter horde flows down to the beach and cleans it to the bones.

You can’t build a home or beach a boat until the nest has been burned out. Then you have to wait another twelve days for the soldiers caught outside the nest to die. Then cover the nest. Use it for a basement, put your house on it. Otherwise the sea may carry a queen to you, to use the nest again.

“You’re ahead of me on this,” I admitted. “What has this lander got for belly rockets?”

“Your basic hydrogen and oxygen,” Feather said. “High heat and a water-vapor exhaust. We’ll burn the nest out.”

“Good.”

Yo! Boy, when Carlos’s ’doc is finished with you, you know it!

Open.

The sky was a brilliant sprawl of stars, some of them moving—spacecraft, weather eyes, the wheel—and a single lopsided moon. The island was shadow-teeth cutting into the starscape. I slid out carefully, into a blackness like the inside of my empty belly, and yelled as I dropped into seawater.

The water was hip deep, with no current to speak of. I wasn’t going to drown, or be washed away, or lost. Fafnir’s moon was a little one, close in. Tides would be shallow.

Still I’d been lucky: I could have wakened under water.