"We like to spread the genes around. Nobody talks about it in public, but you hear. A man and a woman get engaged. They make babies together. Sixty, seventy days later, they get married. Maybe the first kid looks like the rest and maybe he doesn't."

"But why?"

"It's the last chance. See, I'm going to marry Raff, but there are men I turned down. They're not going to just vanish. I wasn't with Raff off those sleeps I was away. Raff's been seeing friends too, I don't know who. Rather, it's just different. The officers say it's good. They talk about gene drift."

"Okay."

"What Raff thinks about it is, he'd rather not know. I never did wonder what Jill would think."

Jill. "We never made promises."

"Sure. But who else is there? There's nobody anywhere near her age in the tuft. Just you."

"I suppose. I wish I could have told her I was leaving.''

She said nothing. Rather couldn't drop it. "I wish I could tell her it was worth it. You never wanted that raid on the Library. You were right. If Kendy's really gone, then why did it happen? The Navy'11 never stop being suspicious ofus,and we didn't learn anything, and I can't even tell Jill about the raid because I can't tell her about Kendy."

She stirred. "You don't want me?"

"Sure I want you. Every sleep we're here, I want you. I wanted you for keeps."

"You can't have that. When we marry, that's the end of that. Understand?"

"Stet."

Kendy had run the records from CARMs #2 and #6 over and over. He'd built up a sublibrary of sorts under

RESOURCES, LOCAL USAGE.

Here: Citizens Tree was firing mud to make a cookpot. Here: firing the laundry vat. Both had been recorded by the silver suit as it moved unharmed through the fire. One clip every ten minutes.

Here: curing the lines from the spaghetti jungle. Mark the Silver Man unharmed in the smoke.

Here: the elevator in Citizens Tree. Here, recorded years earlier by Klance the Scientist: the London Tree elevator, run with stationary bicycles.

Here: CARM #6 changing the integral tree's orbit. Here: Logbearer moving another tree.

Here: Rather collecting honey. Booce's voice explaining that it was usually done with handmade armor. Here: a set of hornet armor made to show the Navy customs collectors, lest they seek for such and find the silver suit instead.

The natives used materials from Discipline when they had it. When they didn't, they made do. They were doing very well without Kendy.

Discipline was making its second aerobraking pass, ass-backward through the gas torus. The cone of the fusion drive approached fusion temperatures. That was hardly a danger, but the plasma streaming back along the hull had to be watched.