“I wish you would. I once was Rigg, back when we spent so many years together, but I’ve been Noxon for months now and I need to make that identity completely my own.”

“As you wish,” said Ramex.

Father would never have said that, so this was the obedient expendable, not the domineering tutor.

It took very little time to reach the starship in Ramfold. Noxon watched out the windows and then on the screen that showed what was passing directly under and a little ahead of the flyer. They passed over Upsheer right at the falls. He barely caught a glimpse of the handful of buildings that made up Fall Ford. He couldn’t see the stairway but he did see the broken-off nubs of the most recent of the bridges over the top of the falls. The others had long since crumbled away, becoming boulders in the pool at the base of the falls, and eventually becoming ever smaller rocks and stones as one rock broke another.

“You didn’t want to linger, did you?” asked Father. “Stop by and say a fond farewell to Nox? I think she’d be flattered that you took her name.”

“I think she’d be annoyed. And with this thing on my face, I doubt she’d believe that I’m me.”

“She would if I told her to.”

“She’d be alarmed to see you back from the dead.”

“Less alarmed than you might think,” said Father. “I think she has some idea of my seeming immortality. I’m not sure if she believed your story.”

“If she had thought I was lying—”

“She would never have protected you, I know. But there’s a difference between believing in your honesty and believing in the factuality of the story you were telling. If you believed it, then it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t necessarily the truth, either.”

“I don’t want to stop in and see her.”

“I think the flyer would have been hard to conceal from prying eyes,” said Father. “But I do miss the old village.”

“No you don’t,” said Noxon. “You just pretend to have feelings like a human being.”

“I have much nicer feelings than most.”

“I’m sure,” said Noxon.

He had wandered for years through the forest on the plateau of the starship’s crater. Now it seemed small. They passed over it so quickly, and then straight down the shaft to the starship itself.