The children! Protect the children! Where are the children? The Surgeon must be tickling my adrenal glands. I’m not awake, but I’m frantic, and a bit randy too. Then the sensations ease off. The Playmate program. It guards them and teaches them and plays with them. They’ll be fine. Can’t take them to Carlos’s place…not tonight.

Sharrol was their mother and Carlos Wu had been their father. Earth’s Fertility Board won’t let an albino have children. Carlos’s gene pattern they judge perfect; he’s one of a hundred and twenty flatlanders who carry an unlimited birthright.

A man can love any child. That’s hard-wired into the brain. A man can raise another man’s children. And accept their father as a friend…but there’s a barrier. That’s wired in, too.

Sharrol knows. She’s afraid I’ll turn prickly and uncivilized. And Carlos knows. So why…?

Tonight was billed as a foursome, sex and tapas. That was a developing custom: dinner strung out as a sequence of small dishes between bouts of recreational sex. Something inherited from the ancient Greeks or Italians, maybe. There’s something lovers gain from feeding each other.

Feather—

The memory blurs. I wasn’t afraid of her then, but I am now. When I remember Feather, the Surgeon puts me to sleep.

But the children! I’ve got to remember. We were down. Sharrol was out of the ’doc, but we left Louis and Tanya frozen. We floated their box into the boat. Feather and I disengaged the lift plate and slid it under the ’doc. Beneath that lumpy jacket she moved like a tigress. She spoke my name; I turned…

Feather.

Carlos’s sleepfield enclosed most of the bedroom. He’d hosted bigger parties than this in here. Tonight we were down to four, and a floating chaos of dishes Carlos said were Mexican.

“She’s an ARM,” Carlos said.

Feather Filip and I were sharing a tamale too spicy for Sharrol. Feather caught me staring and grinned back. An ARM?

I’d expected Feather to be striking. She wasn’t exactly beautiful. She was strong: lean, almost gaunt, with prominent tendons in her neck, lumps flexing at the corners of her jaws. You don’t get strength like that without training in illegal martial arts.

The Amalgamated Regional Militia is the United Nations police, and the United Nations took a powerful interest in Carlos Wu. What was she, Carlos’s bodyguard? Was that how they’d met?

But whenever one of us spoke of the ARM that afternoon, Feather changed the subject.