He put out both hands, palms out, in the “stop” gesture. “We can’t possibly do that now there isn’t sea between your home and ours,” Maecenas said, reasonably enough. “We’ll put together an overland expedition, with plenty of food and supplies, and take you home. Everyone agrees. But winter is setting in here, and it looks as if it’s going to be a cold one, so it’ll have to wait for spring.”

“But meanwhile our people in the Lucian cities will have no idea what happened!” Aristomache insisted. “They’ll be alone and confused all winter. It’s bad enough as it is, but think of coping with this with no explanation! You’re planning to install electrical heating here, but they don’t have electricity. How are they going to cope?”

“Eventually we will install solar plants to produce electricity in all the cities,” Maia said.

“We’ll get you home as soon as we can, that’s all we can do,” Maecenas said.

Then Aristomache turned to me. “Crocus, can’t you help?”

“How?” I wrote on my wax tablet and held it up to her. She brought it close to her eyes to read it.

“You have those treads, you can cover ground much faster than we can walking. Maybe you could carry me back to Marissa in only a few days,” she said.

“I could try,” I wrote. I was worried that it would take me too far from a feeding station. I need to spend several hours every day recharging.

“No,” Maecenas said, as I was writing. “We don’t know exactly where Marissa is now, or what terrain lies in between. We can’t risk Crocus alone on a wilderness expedition. He has the treads, yes, but what if he got into trouble out there, fell into a lava pit, say?”

“Maecenas is right, hard as it is,” Maia said. “There’s nothing we can do for them this year.”

I erased what I had written without showing it. I wanted to help Aristomache, and I sympathized with the plight of the people in the Lucian cities, but Maecenas was indeed right. There was no way we could do it immediately. Aristomache nodded. She had tears falling down her cheeks, but she ignored them. Maia hugged her, and she embraced her back fiercely.

“Sorry,” I wrote.

“It’s not your fault, Crocus,” Maia said, looking down at the wax. “We’ll do it as soon as we can.”

“I hate feeling so helpless,” Aristomache said, breathing harshly.

I hated it too.

IV. On the Railroad

“What you should do is build a railroad from here to our cities,” Aristomache proposed in Chamber one day that first winter. “Then we could travel between them rapidly and safely whenever we wanted, and all the cities could be linked together.”