Culture, Laure thought. Yes. That’s mutable. But you don’t change your instincts; they’re built into your chromosomes. Her people must have children.

“Well,” he said, “you can find women who want large families on the central planets, too. If anything, they’ll be eager to marry your friends. They have a problem finding men who feel as they do, you see.”

Graydal dazzled him with a smile and held out her glass. “Exchange?” she proposed.

“Hoy, you’re way ahead of me.” He evened the liquid levels. “Now.”

They looked at each other throughout the little ceremony. He nerved himself to ask, “As for you women, do you necessarily have to marry within your ship?”

“No,” she said. “It would depend on…whether any of your folk…might come to care for one of us.”

“That I can guarantee!”

“I would like a man who travels,” she murmured, “if I and the children could come along.”

“Quite easy to arrange,” Laure said.

She said in haste: “But we are buying grief, are we not? You told me perhaps you can find our planet for us.”

“Yes. I hope, though, if we succeed, that won’t be the last I see of you.”

“Truly it won’t.”

They finished their drinks and went to dinner. Jaccavrie was also an excellent cook. And the choice of wines was considerable. What was said and laughed at over the table had no relevance to anyone but Laure and Graydal.

Except that, at the end, with immense and tender seriousness she said: “If you want a cell sample from me…for analysis…you may have it.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you might regret later,” he said.

She shook her head. The tawny eyes never left him. Her voice was slow, faintly slurred, but bespoke complete awareness of what she was saying. “I have come to know you. For you to do this thing will be no violation.”

Laure explained eagerly: “The process is simple and painless as far as you’re concerned. We can go right down to the lab. The computer operates everything. It’ll give you an anesthetic spray and remove a small sample of flesh, so small that tomorrow you won’t be sure where the spot was. Of course, the analysis will take a long while. We don’t have all possible equipment aboard. And the computer does have to devote most of her—most of its attention to piloting and interior work. But at the end, we’ll be able to tell you—”

“Hush.” Her smile was sleepy. “No matter. If you wish this, that’s enough. I ask only one thing.”

“What?”

“Do not let a machine use the knife, or the needle, or whatever it is. I want you to do that yourself.”

* * *

“…Yes. Yonder is our home sky.” The physicist Hirn Oran’s son spoke slow and hushed. Cosmic interference seethed across his radio voice, nigh drowning it in Laure’s and Graydal’s earplugs.

“No,” the Ranger said. “Not off there. We’re already in it.”