It was like that faraway time when his mother had taken him to the Shipmen. He had been five years old, a child of Earth. She had taken him by the hand up the ramp to Ship Reception. He had not even known what Ship meant then, but he had been sensitized to what was about to happen to him because his mother had explained it with great solemnity.

Panille remembered that day well—a green spring day full of musty earth smells which had not vanished from his memory in all the Shipdays since. Over one shoulder, he had carried a small cotton bag containing the things his mother had packed for him.

He looked down at the shipcloth bag into which he had crammed the things for his groundside trip. Much more durable . . . larger.

The small cotton bag of that long-gone day had been limited to four kilos—the posted maximum for Ship Reception. It had contained mostly clothing his mother had made for him herself. He still had the amber stocking cap. And there were four primitive photographs—one of the father he had never seen in the flesh, a father killed in a fishing accident. He was revealed as a redhaired man with dark skin and a smile which survived him to warm his son. One picture was his mother, unsmiling and workworn, but still with beautiful eyes; one showed his father’s parents, two intense faces which stared directly into the recording lens; and one slightly larger picture showed “the family place” which was, Kerro reminded himself, a patch of land on a patch of planet lost long ago when its sun went nova.

Only the photo survived, wrapped with the others in the amber stocking cap within his shipcloth bag. He had found all of this preserved in a hyb locker when the Shipmen had revived him.

“I want my son to live,” his mother had said, handing him over to the Shipmen. “You have refused to take the two of us as a family, but you had better take him!”

No mistaking the threat in her voice. She would do something desperate. There were many desperate people doing violent things in those days. The Shipmen had appeared more amused than disturbed, but they had accepted young Kerro and sent him into hyb.

“Kerro was my father’s name,” she had explained, rolling the r’s. “That’s the way you say it. He was Portuguese and Samoan, a beautiful man. My mother was ugly and ran away with another man but my father was always beautiful. A shark ate him.”

Panille knew that his own father had been a fisherman. His father had been named Arlo and his father’s people had escaped from Gaul to the Chin Islands of the south, far across a sea which insulated them from distant persecution.

How long ago was that? he wondered.