“Depends on where in Yinfold. It’s a big place. There are only nineteen wallfolds on two very large continents. Each one is as big as—well, you don’t know Earth, so the comparison—”

“I studied maps and globes of Earth when we were in Odinfold,” said Rigg. “We all did.”

“Each of our wallfolds here is the size of Europe from Poland on westward. The size of India. Han China. I once divided the land masses of Earth into nineteen roughly equal parts and in some of those parts, there was an amazing amount of history. Great empires rising and falling.”

“But not in all.”

“Well, some of them were desert wastelands. Either very cold deserts, or very hot ones. But we have no great deserts in Garden. Only little ones.”

“So all the wallfolds are habitable.”

“When I plotted out where each starship should make landfall, I made sure that every one of them included plenty of well-watered arable land.”

“I get it. Each wallfold is huge and there’s a lot of variation within them.”

“More than you know. And also less. But no, I’ll let you find out.”

Rigg shook his head. “If you’re already dropping hints . . .”

“Do you have any idea how long it’s been, with no other human to talk to?”

“You have the expendables. I know from experience that they can be lively conversationalists.”

“Walking, talking databanks,” said Ram Odin. “Not people.”

“So in Yinfold, what’s our reason for wandering?”

“They have a lot of traveling healers and soothsayers. People who tell fortunes and then move on before anyone can tell whether their prophecies come true.”

“You’re not going to have me time-shift and come back with true answers, are you?”

“It wouldn’t even work, because foreknowledge would change their behavior so it wouldn’t come true after all, likely as not,” said Ram Odin. “But I’m thinking we make up a whole new category. Something that will actually work, but something they’ve never seen before.”

Even though Yinfold was settled everywhere, there was no trouble finding an uninhabited place to set down the flyer, even quite near to what passed for a city there. Rigg thought of Aressa Sessamo, built up out of a swamp in a river delta. Nearly empty watery land all around it, and yet what land there was, incredibly fertile with the silt of millennia of river floods. Water to carry boats and therefore cargos for trade. A huge natural moat for defense. But it still hadn’t kept out the horse warriors of the Sessamoto.

“This is good land,” said Rigg. “Why is it empty?”