But she wasn’t at home. The Navy scouts had determined that the stellar sphere was rotating as a solid, and that this equatorial site was moving at only a little less than orbital speed. This arrangement was why they experienced such an equable gravity; if not for the compensating effects of centrifugal force, they would have been crushed by nearly thirty times Earth standard. She could feel none of this, but nevertheless, standing here, gazing at grass and trees and clouds, she was really soaring through space, actually circling a star in less than a standard day.

‘It takes a genuine effort of will,’ she said, ‘to remember where we are.’

‘That it does. And here comes the welcoming party,’ Dano said dryly.

Two people walked steadily up the road, a man and a woman. They were both rather squat, stocky, dark. They wore simple shifts and knee-length trousers, practical clothes, clean but heavily repaired. The man might have been sixty. His hair was white, his face a moon of wrinkles. The woman was younger, perhaps not much older than Pala. She wore her black hair long and tied into a queue that nestled over her spine, quite unlike the short and severe style of the Commission. Her shift had a sunburst pattern stitched into it, a welling up of light from below.

The man spoke. ‘My name is Sool. This is Bicansa. We have been delegated to welcome you.’ Sool’s words, in his own archaic tongue, were seamlessly translated in Pala’s ears. But underneath the tinny murmuring in her ear she could hear Sool’s own gravelly voice. ‘I represent this community, which we call Home . . .’

‘Inevitably,’ Dano said.

‘Bicansa comes from a community to the north of here.’ Pala supposed he meant another inhabited light lake. She wondered how far away that was; she had seen nothing from the flitter.

The woman Bicansa simply watched the newcomers. Her expression seemed closed, almost sullen. She could not have been called beautiful, Pala thought; her face was too round, her chin too weak. But there was a strength in her dark eyes that intrigued Pala.

Pala made her own formal introductions. ‘Thank you for inviting us to your community.’ Not that these locals had had any choice. ‘We are emissaries of the Commission for Historical Truth, acting on behalf of the Interim Coalition of Governance, which in turn directs and secures the Third Expansion of mankind . . .’

The man Sool listened to this with a pale smile, oddly weary. Bicansa glared.

Dano murmured, ‘Shake their hands. Just as well it isn’t an assessment exercise, Missionary!’

Pala cursed herself for forgetting such an elementary part of contact protocol. She stepped forward, smiling, her right hand outstretched.