Mark would have wished for a wife or three, but he saw no point in telling Clave or Minya that. "I want nothing from the Clump. We're here. Twelve adults, twenty children, happy as dumbos in Citizens Tree. We shouldn't be announcing that all over the sky. Even if the Clump doesn't keep copsiks, maybe somebody out there does. Things aren't perfect here, but they're good. I wouldn't want to wind up as somebody's copsik."

Clave nodded. "That's what I'm afraid of."

Minya said, "We worked so hard to make this our home. Gavving knows how close we came to dying. How can he risk what we've got?"

"We seem to be agreed," Clave said briskly. "Well? What do we do about it?"

Lawri and Jeffer were missing dinner. Lawri had led her husband east along the branch, beyond the region of the huts. In a dark womb of foliage and branchlets, they were making babies.

Resting, relaxed for the first time in many days, Lawri plucked foliage and put it in Jeffer's mouth. He talked around it, indistinctly. "Does this remind you of being young?"

She lost her smile. "No."

He leered. "Little London Tree boys and girls never snuck off into the foliage-?"

She shook her head violently. "It isn't like that for a girl in London Tree. When boys get old enough, they don't need us. They go to the in tuft. Copsik women belong to any male citizen. Jeffer, you know that much!"

"I should. That's how Mark got Minya pregnant, before we got loose."

She changed position to lie along his length. "If he did.

Any man can father a dwarf."

"Even Rather doesn't believe that."

"Bother him?"

"Yeah . . . But women had children in London Tree, didn't they? And married?"

"Yes, if we were willing to act like copsiks ourselves. How else could we compete? I would've been some man's copsik if I wanted to make babies. So I never made babies."

Jeffer looked into her eyes as if seeing her for the first time. "Are you glad I came?"

She nodded. Perhaps he couldn't see her blushing in the near-darkness.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

That was a stupid question. Knowing how she needed him, he'd use his advantage to win arguments! "This wasn't what we came to talk about."

"Did we come to talk?"

"What did you find on the burned tree?"

"We didn't keep any secrets. -That's right, you weren't there when Booce was telling us what we had. Well, we got a pot full of charred stuff-honey, he said-and a metal thing for cutting wood, and hooks . . . miscellaneous stuff. And the metal pipe. Everything else that burned-I've forgotten what he called it all, but it can all be replaced, except the-what did Booce call it? The sikenwire."

"I want to go to the Clump," Lawri said.

"Me too. Clave would never let both Scientists go."

Jeffer kissed her cheek. "Let's wait till the last minute and then fight about it."