Starrise at Corrivale

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THE WOMAN STOOD at the window, watching the planet turn beneath her, or seem to turn. The ship's orbit was low, but not so much so that the dun and emerald curve of Ino would seem to take up the whole view that her two-meter-wide window afforded. Over the world's edge, night was approaching, one of ninety or a hundred nights that the ship would see in the course of one of Ino's genuine rotations. Under the ship, for the moment, a golden day of early summer in the planet's northern hemisphere lay drowning deep in lazy afternoon. The startling blue of the huge twin lakes of Aimara and Noumara, old meteoric impacts in the planet's equatorial continent, looked at her like eyes, round and surprised, a little hazed even at this altitude with the slowly burgeoning seasonal warmth. There would be people fishing out in little boats on those lakes right now, while overhead, water birds skimmed by uttering little lazy cries. Nothing disturbed the placid waters but the stroke of oars and the glittering golden circles of water where the fish rose into the endless brazen afternoon, daring the edge of their world for a gulp of air. But if you raised your head only a little from the blue of the lakes and the thought of the afternoon, you could see the night coming-the blurred, shadowy edge of it sliding on toward the unsuspecting afternoon, silent, inexorable, and uncaring. And how do you stop the night? she thought, shivering, just once.

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