Rusel felt as if his life was slipping away. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tila came bustling in, with an awestruck little Rus in tow, and an infant in her arms. She too seemed suddenly to have aged; she had put on weight, and her face was lined by fine wrinkles. She said that Tomi was preparing a meal - of course Uncle Rusel would stay to eat, wouldn’t he? - and she sat down with the men and accepted a drink.

They talked of inconsequentials, and of their lives.

Diluc, having stormed out of Andres’s informal council, had become something of a leader in his own new community. Andres had ordered that the two-hundred-strong crew should be dispersed to live in close-knit ‘tribes’ of twenty or so, each lodged in a ‘village’ of corridors and cabins. There were to be looser links between the tribes, for such purposes as finding marriage or breeding partners. Thus the Ship was united in a single ‘clan’. Andres said this social structure was the most common form encountered among humans ‘in the wild’, as she put it, all the way back to pretechnological days on Earth, and was the most likely to be stable in the long run. Whether or not that was true, things had stayed stable so far.

Andres had also specified the kind of government each tribe should aspire to. In such a small world each individual should be cherished for her unique skills, and for the value of the education invested in her. People were interdependent, said Andres, and the way they governed themselves should reflect that. Even democracy wouldn’t do, as in a society of valued individuals the subjection of a minority to the will of a majority must be a bad thing. So Diluc’s tribe ran by consensus.

‘We talk and talk,’ Diluc said with a rueful grin, ‘until we all agree. Takes hours, sometimes. Once, the whole of the night watch.’

Tila snorted. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like it that way. You always did like the sound of your own voice!’

The most important and difficult decisions the tribe had to make concerned reproduction, Most adults settled down into more-or-less monogamous marriages. But there had to be a separation between marriages for companionship and liaisons for reproduction; the gene pool was too small to allow matings for such trivial reasons as love.