Bayley's Ochoneuf; Lament; Potter's Field; Santa Tsubaraya; Death's Vineyard; Iolanthe; Ithaca; Orb Vecchio; Orb Nuova; Star's Lee; Phoenix; Sleep; Catter Van Sees; Angel Rookery; Dirac; Farther; Old Mao; Quantico; Perspect; Black Pool; Plurabelle; Gautama; Gift-of-Isis; God-Does-Battle; Veronike . . .
God-Does-Battle was being terraformed; city builder Robert Kahn was designing palatial organic cities for the Judaeo-Christians and Moslems who had contracted the world, determined to bring heaven down to solid ground, far from the unfaithful.
Dirac was a bleak world, circling a supernovaed star at one end of the Pafloshwa Rift. Anna picked up a chunk of silicon doped with five superheavy elements, which she later turned into several pieces of jewelry.
On Sleep, a thickly misted world renowned for its floating forests, they swam in the living Omphalos Sea, letting the oils of the hundred-kilometer creature soak into their skins, and the hallucinogenic pollen carry them into dreams.
On Gift-of-Isis they watched a sunrise from the tallest volcano in the Galaxy. It was a triple sunrise, on cue, which happens once in a millennium.
On Plurabelle, a world of twenty thousand rivers, they journeyed for a week up and down tributaries, through tortuous canyons etched from rock, breathing oxygen generated at a terraforming station at Ninety North.
None of them were satisfactory to Kawashita. They were beautiful, soothing, even heavenly—but on none of them could be find any trace of what he was looking for.
The kami had never been to them, had never left their mark.
There was only one place he could go.