“What is it that you wear,” she asked, “in your hair?” There was a slight pause in her question that disturbed him. She had been intending to say something else, or perhaps to say it in a different way. He had assumed that the slight affectation in her speech was a function of rank—but she was not playing Captain with him now, and it remained.

He took down the plant. “This is my hvee. It lives on air and love—its love for its companion. If it were to be taken from me, it would die.”

She lifted it from his hand. “I have heard of the hvee fable,” she murmured, studying it. “Charming.”

Again Aton was angry, unreasonably. He had thought the Taphid a fable, until this day. It was not surprising that others did not give credence to the unique property of the hvee. “I’ll demonstrate,” he said, taking it back. He set it on a table across the cabin and stepped back.

The hvee held its bloom for a moment. Then its leaves began to wilt. Aton returned quickly and picked it up, and strength came back to it, making the plant green and fresh and whole again. “No fable.”

The Captain’s eyes were bright. “What an enchanting liaison,” she said. “Your mother gave it to you.”

Aton’s jaw tightened. “No.”

She touched his hand, smiling. “I hurt you.”

“No!” But beneath her understanding gaze, he felt the need to justify himself.

“My father,” he said, “married a girl of the Family of Ten. She lived with him two years, and the hvee flourished as never since. She was kind and she was loving and she died in childbirth.”

The Captain kept her hand on his. “I do not need to know, Aton.”

But now he needed to tell her. “After that, Aurelius went to space. His cousin, Benjamin Five, acted as caretaker of the farm, so that the hvee would not die. Aurelius traveled to far planets, trying to forget. His ship put down for emergency repair on an unidentified planet. He—associated with a native girl, and he took her with him when they left. He brought her to Hvee.”

The Captain gazed into his troubled eyes. “It is not necessary to—”

“She stayed with him just one year—and deserted him. I suppose she returned to her backwoods planet. Aurelius did not travel again; he farmed the hvee and brought me up alone.”

“But she gave him the strength to continue—”

“She did not love him!” Aton shouted, casting off her hand. “She left him. No Hvee daughter would have done that. And I had no mother, real or step.”

“Perhaps she left him because she loved him,” the Captain said. “Could you, could you not understand that?”