Rainzi didn’t pursue the argument; he followed her insilence as she clambered into the display chamber. This was a smallcavity in the Quietener’s outer structure, not much larger than herroom at the station, equipped with a single chair. There was noquestion of Cass being allowed any closer to the action; even theprocessor on which the Mimosans were running, scrupulously designed tospill as little noise into the environment as possible, was banished tothe rim of the Quietener. Lacking the same antinoise features herself,she had to agree to be snap-frozen to a few Kelvin, three minutesbefore each run. Apart from being immobilized, this had no unpleasantside effects, but it served as an uncomfortable reminder of the factthat the closed-cycle "breathing" of her Mimosan body was pure placebo.Still, she’d been willing to put up with it twenty times so far, merelyfor the sake of sparing herself the three-second time lag for data tomake its way back to the station.

As she took her place in the cryogenic chair, the otherMimosans began to appear around her. Teasing her, congratulating her onher stamina. Livia joked, "We should have had a wager as to whether ornot the incremental targets would turn out to be a waste of time. Youcould have relieved me of all my worldly goods by now." Livia’s solematerial possession was a replica of an ancient bronze coin, carvedfrom leftover asteroid metal.

Cass shook her head. "What would I have put up? My leftarm?" They’d been right to do things Livia’s way, and Cass had long agoceased resenting it. Not only was it safer, it was better science,testing each novel structure one by one.

It turned out that Livia was alluding to a real wager:Bakim admitted that he’d made a bet with Darsono that Cass would notremain at Mimosa to the end. But he was unable to explain the stakes toher; her Mediator couldn’t find a suitable analogy, and nothing she