Vandar
Springbreeze Farm

In which contacting a spaceship is beneficial only if one has plans to leave the planet.

Faced with the possibility of getting a lift off the planet, Miri and Val Con now need to decide if they want to try and make something of it.

Despite the attraction to Miri of a planet that’s like home except cleaner and with happy children, I think there’s really only one way the choice could have come out. Apart from Val Con, as Miri mentions, having things left undone in the wide universe, I don’t think they actually have the option of staying on Vandar the rest of their lives: with all the people looking for them, they’re going to be found sooner or later. The choice isn’t really “stay or go”, it’s “be found now, when we’re expecting it and have some measure of control over the circumstances, or be found later, perhaps unexpecting and unprepared”.