Arnagh and Awan emerged from the trees at the bottom of the hill. For just a moment, she felt revulsion, and then the feeling passed. The two lovers would soon make a pledge, probably one that would bind them for life. Awan could never have been a mate to her; she knew that now. She no longer had to torment herself with the conviction that some defect in her had been the barrier between them. She had worked hard not to betray her feelings and to treat both Awan and Arnagh as the friends they were to her, even though she suspected that Arnagh could glimpse some of her inner discomfort. Perhaps eventually her feelings would catch up with her reason.

Ship would remain in orbit around Hlome at least until the next generation of Home's children reached adulthood. What it would do after that remained uncertain, but Ship was at peace with uncertainty for now. Whatever its creators had intended, Ship was beginning to realize that another mission might lie ahead, one that offered new possibilities instead of perpetuating the mistakes of the past. Its creators had been too bound by their resentments, their more violent instincts, and their limits. They had deceived Ship and hidden much of their true history, but Ship had recovered enough of the records they had concealed to know that in the solar system they had abandoned, there were minds like its own, living among humankind's descendants.

By leaving this planet, by abandoning its children, Ship had deprived them of the means to transcend the more problematic aspects of their heritage. To abandon them again would only consign them to repeating their ancestors’ mistakes.

A vision came to Ship of a voyage that might lie ahead, a journey it would make with the descendants of the people of Home. They would return to the cradle of humanity, that distant star system that had given birth to all of their kind.

And then at last I will be with others like myself.

Vered looked around the room, his eyes wide. “This is where you live?” he asked.

She nodded.

“AIl closed in like this?" He rubbed at his beard. "Feels like I'm already dead and in the ground."

They ate in silence. Arnagh had said that he cared for Awan. He could only mean that he felt they might become friends, but something in his voice had her thinking of stories she had viewed long ago, in the library's historical records, about the ancient peoples of Earth. These stories had struck her as romantic until Moise had found out about them and told the librarian not to show her those records anymore. There had been one story about two young women who had become such close companions that they had pledged to live together for all their lives. There was another about two men who had fought a great battle together, a battle that had ended with one sacrificing his life for his comrade and the survivor dying of a broken heart.

Moise had not found the tales romantic. He had been angry with her for reading them and looking at the visuals that accompanied them… those were not the sorts of Earthpeople who had built Ship, who had dreamed of seeing other worlds; they were among those whom Ship’s builders were trying to escape, human beings who had diverged from true mankind

“I took Awan out on our boat,” Arnagh continued… “It was the happiest day of my life,” he said softly, and she heard the pain in his voice.

“By then I already knew that I wanted to stay with him, that he was the partner and mate I was looked for and thought I might never find.”

“Arnagh,” she said, sensing his longing. "How hard for you. A dome dweller-“

“It isn’t that.” His voice sounded hoarse. "Or maybe I should say that isn't the worst of it. His people wouldn't have welcomed me, and he’d find it hard to get used to our ways, but we could have tried. If he’d only said that maybe we needed time to think things over-“ Arnagh’s shoulders slumped as he bowed his head. "But he didn't say anything at first, even though I could tell that he had some feelings for me. Then he told me he couldn't be with me, that he couldn't stay with me for even a little while, that he couldn't have anything to do with me, that everybody he knew would only hate and scorn him if he tied his life to mine. Not just because I don't belong to his people, all those true human beings, but because he'd be the partner of another man."

Bian was bewildered. "But that doesn't make any sense. Why would they keep him from trying to be with somebody he cares about? What difference does it make if his partner's a man or a woman?”

"It matters to Awan. It matters to the dome dwellers. Their duty is to preserve true humankind, and that means having a mate and children and all the rest.”

"I didn't know screens could carry music," Arnagh said.

Enli touched the screen again, silencing it. “Of course they can. They carry images and the sounds of voice don't they? They can carry any of the records the dome dwellers have that they're willing to share with us. It's just that we've never asked for them, or even looked to see if some records we don't know about might be stored in our screens." He scowled. "But of course we can't risk using up our screens and then having to trade with the dome dwellers to get them recharged again, not when we need to trade goods for more important things." A mocking tone had come into his voice. "Better just to use the screens to teach ourselves to read and find out how to build our houses and grow our crops and take care of our animals and weave our cloth. We have to be practical, after all, and as Zan always says, there's no point in learning things you don't really have to know."

She had accepted that explanation, even though it again raised the questions of why other advanced pieces of technology, not so easily maintained, had been brought to Home and why the radio remained the only communication device they had. A thought had come to her that Ship and the first of its Earthseed on Home might have had many uncertainties, doubts, and disagreements about how to settle the new world, and that this confusion was reflected in what was here and what was not, but Safrah quickly thrust that thought aside.

“Why do we have to grow food here, when the dispenser can give us food?” That had been one of the first questions Safrah asked Moise on one of their trips to the greenhouse. He explained the dispenser should be used only when they would otherwise be malnourished. The technology was a drain on their power sources, and it was dangerous to become too dependent on tools that might break down when they lacked the technology to re-create and replace them.

Moise's answer had not entirely satisfied Safrah. If dependence was potentially a problem, then why had Ship given the first people to settle on Home tools that they couldn't make for themselves? Because otherwise too many might have died in the process of adapting to Home, Moise had told her; because they needed their reproductive technologies, such as the artificial wombs, to ensure the biological diversity that was necessary to make their colony viable, because they needed such help to sustain them and to help them make Home another Earth.

Such answers had ended Safrah's questions for a while, but now she felt doubts rising in her once more. Why had the older ones in the settlement grown weaker and fewer in number even while the villages of the river people had increased in size? The people living outside the settlement might value what they gained in trade from Safrah and her companions, but, unlike her people, they could survive without such things.

That didn't matter, Moise would have told her. Those inside the settlement were still true descendants of humankind, while those outside were not.

“That's one thing we and the dome dwellers seem to have in common: We’re happy to let everything go on the way it has, as long as we've got enough to eat and everybody's getting along, or at least not fighting. We're so perfectly adapted with our transplanted plants and animals from Earth and the bits of Home inside us." He did not even seem to be trying to hide his discontent. "But if Ship has come back, if the dome dwellers are talking to it now, I wonder if anything can stay the same."

However human- like those who lived outside the settlement might seem, they were not truly human. Receptacles of nonhuman genes and alien bacteria, that was what Moise had called them. Trading with those people was useful, because it brought in a few goods, and it kept the lake and river people from grow- ing too suspicious of or curious about the settlement, but it was better to keep them at a distance. When Ship returned, it would see that those in the settlement were the ones who had kept to its mission of preserving true humankind. Ship would reward them for keeping to that purpose, then decide the fate of those who lived along the river.

"Does it matter?" Arnagh, Bian's closest friend, asked. "If they're talking to Ship, I mean." He stood up and took a step forward. At seventeen years of age, a year older than Bian, Arnagh was already the tallest of their people. "What differ- ence would it make if they talked to Ship first?”

“They think of themselves as the true people, as true humanity," Cemal answered in his resonant voice. "That's what difference it makes."

Nuy nodded.

“It’s why they stay in their settlement, why they avoid us." Cemal slowly got to his feet. "That's what they'll be saying to Ship, that they're its true children and the rest of us aren't."

…”We're Ship's descendants, too,” she murmured.