It glowed a brilliant orange, matching the dying glow of Pallatin's K-2 star. With the sky not yet dark, it looked as though there were two suns in the sky: a brighter, sinking one in the west; another, seemingly only slightly dimmer, climbing the eastern sky. He smiled, remembering the children's tale his mother used to tell him on those occasions when the moon's orbit was just right and both objects were in the sky at the same time. "The sun doesn't go down until the moon rises," she had told him, just as countless other mothers had told countless other children. And like those others, he had listened wide-eyed and believing. "He waits there, seeming to hang forever on the horizon until his son appears. For a while, when they're in the sky at the same time, he tells his son of his day: what happened on the world below him and what the little people were doing. He tells him to look after the little people, and sometimes…" She had paused then, he remembered, and lowered her voice as if imparting a secret meant only for him.
