She joined him, then, casting herself into his arms, laughing and weeping. He had known of emotional depth in her, beneath the schooled reserve. But never before now had he found as much warmth as was hers.

* * *

Long, long afterward, air locks linked and she bade him good night. “Until tomorrow,” she said.

“Many tomorrows, I hope.”

“And I hope. I promise.”

He watched the way she had gone until the locks closed again and the ships parted company. A little drunkenly, not with alcohol, he returned to the saloon for a nightcap.

“Turn off that color thing,” he said. “Give me an outside view.”

The ship obeyed. In the screen appeared stars, and the cloud from which stars were being born. “Her sky,” Laure said. He flopped on to the couch and admired.

“I might as well start getting used to it,” he said. “I expect I’ll spend a lot of vacation time, at least, on Kirkasant.”

“Daven,” said Jaccavrie.

She was not in the habit of addressing him thus, and so gently. He started. “Yes?”

“I have been—” Silence hummed for a second. “I have been wondering how to tell you. Any phrasing, any inflection, could strike you as something I computed to produce an effect. I am only a machine.”

Though unease prickled him, he leaned forward to touch a bulkhead. It trembled a little with her engine energy. “And I, old girl,” he said. “Or else you also are an organism. We’re both people.”

“Thank you,” said the ship, almost too low to be heard.

Laure braced himself. “What did you have to tell me?”

She forgot about keeping her voice humanized. The words clipped forth: “I finished the chromosome analysis some time ago. Thereafter I tried to discourage certain tendencies I noticed in you. But now I have no way to avoid giving you the plain truth. They are not human on that planet.”

“What?” he yelled. The glass slipped from his hand and splashed red wine across the deck. “You’re crazy! Records, traditions, artifacts, appearance, behavior—”

The ship’s voice came striding across his. “Yes, they are human descended. But their ancestors had to make an enormous adaptation. The loss of night vision is merely indicative. The fact that they can, for example, ingest heavy metals like arsenic unharmed might be interpreted as simple immunity. But you will recall that they find unarsenated food tasteless. Did that never suggest to you that they have developed a metabolic requirement for the element? And you should have drawn a conclusion from their high tolerance for ionizing radiation. It cannot be due to their having stronger proteins, can it? No, it must be because they have evolved a capacity for extremely rapid and error-free repair of chemical damage from that source. This in turn is another measure of how different their enzyme system is from yours.

“Now the enzymes, of course, are governed by the DNA of the cells, which is the molecule of heredity—”