Gravitational waves passed through anything, so the onlyantidote was a second train of waves, tailored to cancel out the first.There was nothing to be done about sporadic cataclysms — supernovae, orblack holes gorging on star clusters in the centers of distantgalaxies — but the most persistent gravitational waves, coming fromlocalbinary stars, were cyclic, predictable, and faint. So the Quietener wasringed with countersources, their orbits timed to stretch space at thecenter of the device when the bodies they mimicked squeezed it, andvice versa.

As Cass passed within a few kilometers of one of thecounter-sources, she could see the aggregate rocky surface thatbetrayed its origins in Mimosa’s rubble of asteroids. Every scrap ofmaterial here had been dragged out of that system’s gravity well over aperiod of almost a thousand years, a process initiated by a package ofmicron-sized spores sent from Viro, the nearest inhabited world, atninety percent of lightspeed. The Mimosans themselves had come from allover, traveling here just as Cass had once the station was assembled.

The scooter’s smooth deceleration brought her to a haltbeside a docking bay, and she was weightless again. Whenever she wasclose enough to either the station or the Quietener to judge hervelocity, it seemed to be little more than that of a train, giving theimpression that in the five-hour journey she might have traveled thewidth of a continent on Earth. Not to the moon and back, and more.

One wall of the bay had handholds. As Cass pulled herselfalong, Rainzi appeared beside her. The Mimosans had dusted projectorsand cameras all over the walls of the places she visited in theQuietener, rendering guest and host mutually visible.