He stood, threw the stick away and wiped his hands on his pants, staring at the ground. She went to him and hugged him fiercely. Then they returned to the cave, gathered up the Objects in their cases and, fully burdened, carried them down the hill to the whitewashed house where Rhita had been born.

4

Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

The journey into Axis Euclid city memory was brief. Olmy chose a downline link and dropped a complete copy of himself into the matrix buffer to await entry into the central crèche. His body appeared to sleep; in fact, a partial in his three implants was processing data on recorded Talsit ambassador interviews, searching for behavioral oddities that could give him clues to true Talsit psychology. He knew he had no time for rest; he could feel it as well as think it, an itch, a compulsion, a restless impatience difficult to control.

If he felt a personal kinship to any male beside Korzenowski, it was Tapi, his son. He had known many children in the city memory crèche, sometimes as a tutor, sometimes as a judge; few were as high in quality as Tapi, and Olmy was convinced his opinion was objective. In less than five years of city memory education, the youngster was progressing to a level of sophistication rare in the crèche. Olmy doubted the boy would have any difficulty earning an incarnation; still, the exams were not easy.

He had resented Ram Kikura’s motherly suggestion that he visit Tapi; and yet, without her making the suggestion, he might have sacrificed such a luxury to his work…

Fatherhood was not a simple proposition.

They had applied to create Tapi seven years ago, two years after Olmy’s official retirement. At that time, the conflicts between the orbiting bodies and Old Natives on Earth had not seemed particularly strong or destructive; the Recovery had seemed on track, and both had felt there would be time to create and nurture a child. They had planned the boy’s mentality in close cooperation, deciding against the orthodox Naderite fashions of less structured creation as well as physical childbirth. Ram Kikura, with a feminine sensibility that had struck Olmy with its strength and conviction, had said, “A mother and father are not made by a few hours of pain and awareness of bad physical design…”

They had referred to the great philosophical treatises on mentality, and used classic design templates for non-parental aspects that Olmy (actually, Olmy’s tracer) had found uncatalogued in Thistledown’s third chamber library. Working in city memory for eight days (almost a year in accelerated time) they and their partials had combined the parental mysteries, selected large blocks of parental memory for endowment at certain growth stages, and overlaid the templates with great care to create the mentality they would call Tapi. The name came from Tapi Salinger, a twenty-second-century novelist they both admired.