Starburst

19

SINCE I DON'T HAVE ANYONE MUCH TO TALK TO, I TALK TO myself. I look in my mirror, at that ugly old face that's really only about thirty-eight years old, well, maybe forty or so but certainly not much over, and I say: "Hello, Eve Barstow. Let me introduce myself. I'm Evelyn Clarissa Letterman. You used to be me, you know, before you married that good-looking Jim Barstow. Heaven knows who you are now." And heaven does know, I hope, because I am not sure I always do. Mostly I am called Aunt Eve, and mostly by the kids. The grownups seldom call me at all. And what I mostly do is tend the truck garden and the cabbage patch.

It isn't just that my fellow pioneers don't much want to talk to me. I'm not thrilled to be talking to any of them, either. Their conversation never did much to raise my spirits, even when I could understand what they said.

I used the word "said" very loosely, for they have evolved their own quicker, preciser ways of communicating. Old married couples rub together for half a century before they understand that his yawn means he doesn't agree and she signifies depression by sewing curtains. My dears didn't take that long. They didn't confine it to their true spouses, either. My God, no. Jim said so little to me over the years that, without the kids, I would surely have lost the power of speech while he was smacking his lips and snapping his fingers and twitching his toes and his nose and, I swear, his ears and his scalp to Flo and Ski and Dot and even now and then to some of the kids. But never, ever, to me. All right. I'm the dummy.. I don't care. I don't want to hear what they're saying anyway. I do sometimes want them to hear me, to be sure. That's mostly when I think they're doing something wrong, which is a lot of the time. They don't listen to that, either. They didn't even listen to me when we found out what Shef and Ann had been doing. They don't care if I oppose them, and they don't even care if I approve. (Do you care if a daisy approves when you pluck its petals?)

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to us. I pull out the family album I have meticulously hung onto through all these years. There are our prelaunch pictures, with the King of England kissing Dot Letski's hand, and the President of the United States, looking like Bugs Bunny in a morning coat, pinning a ribbon on Shef. The grownups won't even look. Even the older kids are pretty tired of Aunt Eve's photographs, although the littlest ones are generally thrilled with them. Or pretend to be.

We have all changed so very much since those pictures. Shef is a stick figure of himself, less than a hundred pounds, his Ruggero the Gnome King whiskers flying all around his head. I think he starches them. Or perhaps it is only willpower that stretches them taut. Flo has become grossly fat. She says it has to be that way so she can accommodate two uterine lobes working at once, since she is a frequent mommy. But it is also from eating too much. As to the late Will Becklund—well, Will is what he chooses to be, and mostly he chooses to be nearly invisible. So we are rather an odd-looking lot, skeletal Shef, gross Flo, pyknic Dot, bent Ski, willowy Ann—not to mention my lord and master Jim, who seems to have sagged all of his innards into a potbelly you cannot imagine. I am the only mesomorph in the bunch and even I, I must confess, no longer trim my nails or blow-dry my hair. Add in the scuttling littlest kids and the half-civilized older ones and, if you want to know what we all look like, go to any swamp and tip over a rock.

I will not speak of the other sensory impressions you might get of the lot of us, or at least not of the smells.

As to the sounds, ah, my God, how strange! Back when the U. S. of A. really cared about us they used to transmit cheer-up tapes. I have one of all of us on "Meet the Press" —steam radio, not TV— broadcast over the American propaganda network so that all the world could hear what delicious middle-American types we all were. And we really were. Shef's Tulsa, Ann's Bryn Mawr, just a hint of Brooklyn in Ski. Now, my heavens! None of the grownups speak English anymore, or at least not if they can help it. Except to me, and there they try when they have to but don't always succeed. Shef has completely lost the knack, and uses a computer translator to convert those majestic thoughts of his into words I can understand, but I would not say that it works at all well. The children speak pretty good English, it's true. But for some reason or other they'd rather talk to each other than to any of us. You've heard of a generation gap? No. You just think you have. Here on the old Constitution we've raised a race of enemies. I don't know why. Except that we original eight have ourselves become quite inimical people, or seven-eighths of us have.

The Holocaust was Jim's fault, originally. For all I know they were all in it, but it was James Madison Barstow, my dear whilom Ail-American hubby, who was our resident nuclear wizard, custodian of quarks, basher with the big stick. Way back in circumsolar space he began tinkering with the ship's fusion drive. Along about midpoint he rebuilt it. Well, that produced both good news and bad news. The good news was that it worked a lot better. The bad news, not counting that it killed old Will, was that he got Shef interested in his hadron hatchery, and, oh, how I wish that had not happened!

So what Shef wound up with was one of those marvels of technological sophistication from the space program we used to hear about all the time. Only this one wasn't a frying pan. It was a way of frying Dieter von Knefhausen. Shefs miracle of better living through science gifted him with a whole new litter of feisty little nuclear particles that just loved fat atoms. When any one of them came near a big one it screwed right into it, and all that superheavy fission energy just oozed out as great gooey glops of heat.

I'm not sure why. Or how. After I cooled down I kept after them until they explained it to me, but there were gaps. Jim gave it a good try but, whatever he was saying, what I heard was:

"All he had to do was , modulate a of for baryon-baryon interactions with Then he just , and and every heavy actinide on Earth had to ." And that's when I began to scream, but they'd done it anyway.

On the next morning, which was the morning of Day 3841, I woke up not really wanting to wake up at all, because it was so nice to be dreaming of home and Mom and Dad and all the heads I used to hang out with in Southern California.

Of course, the home I had now wasn't so bad. The architect for our little world was a fellow named Tsiolkowsky, or maybe O'Neill; my nearly eidetic memory tosses up both names and I've long since tired of arguing which. I didn't have a personal room anymore. I had a personal house. Or maybe you would call it a hut, because it surely wasn't fancy, but at least it had a kitchen and a bathroom and a plot of herbs and flowering plants around it. And a lock on the door. And when I opened the door to go out and see if this day, finally, was going to be worth living, I found something tucked under my door-knocker. It was a vegetable. Or a fruit, or a flower; I couldn't really tell what, so I reached out and caught the arm of one of Flo's two-year-olds as she bounded past. "Modany, do you know who put this here?"

Her eyes widened politely. "Wower, Aunt Evel Doesn't that smell sweet!" But she didn't know. I patted her bottom and let her run on to the cookies and milk and took the thing out of the knocker.

It was something like a large carrot, heart-shaped in cross section, the color of honey. It was not anything I had grown, or even seen growing. Since I was the woman of all work in the hydroponics department, that meant somebody had been deliberately keeping it secret. When I bit a piece off, it tasted the way it smelled, chocolaty-mint. I didn't observe until I lifted it for a second bite that inside, on the fracture surface, it bore a message:

Happy Birthday Dear Aunt Eve Barstow

The lettering went all the way through the length of the stalk, like a stick of Brighton rock. It was unsigned. But who needed a signature to recognize the work of her first-born and maybe best-born son?

Jeron's personal room was only two north and four east of mine, but he wasn't in it to be thanked. Or scolded, if that was what I was going to decide to do. As I was breakfasting I decided that it would be thanked because, although in my simple old-fashioned heart I did not approve of his courting his own mother, he had at least taken my mind off Uncle Shefs villainy. I was able to make myself go to work. No matter what, someone has to till the cotton and someone has to hoe the corn, and that's me.

While I was stewing up the morning's protoplasts Molomy came flying back through the fruit vines, giggling and shrieking, along with half a dozen others of her cohort. They raced like bunnies being chased by a friendly fox, and the fox was the very son I was looking for, Jeron. As they came in sight he paused, yelled something after the prey good-naturedly, and let them escape. "Hello, Aunt Mommy," he said in his sweet, pure soprano.

I decanted the bright green soup and handed him the flask. "Hold this while I get some filter paper. What are you doing to those kids?"

He grinned. "Uncle Ski told me to struggle them while he works on the fifth cohort, but they're okay. Happy birthing day."

Jeron's simple English was pretty good, like most of the kids, but not perfect. "That's birthday, dear." I counted up. "My God. I'm thirty-nine years old today. And feel like ninety."

He steadied the flask while I repoured the decoction through the filter. "Don't be upset on your birthing day— birthday," he wheedled. "It's all over."

Jeron is a very handsome boy, not tall, complexion darker than either his father's or mine, a little portly for a seven- year-old. When he scowled he looked much older, and he was scowling now. "I know, Jeron. Thanks."

He rubbed his downy chin, nodding, then helped me put away the filtrate and knelt gracefully with me to snip shoot tips for the next enzyme stew. He was watching me out of the corner of his eye, and I knew I was in for some cheering up. "Aunt Mommy? If you were home on your birthday now, what would you be doing?"

"Oh, Jeron, you don't want to hear all that stuff again." But I could feel myself cheering. He persisted.

"Please, Aunt Mom. You would have a cake with candles?"

"Most likely, uh-huh. Of course, that kind of a party is really for children. If your father and I were still in our old apartment in Houston we'd probably ask a few friends over, maybe for dinner. You remember how we used to eat our meals, getting together in kinship or friend groups, all at about the same time? I told you about it."

"Parents and children, yes. And everybody eating the same thing."

"Well, that's because preparing meals was a lot harder, and it was pretty inefficient, yes. But it made a meal a kind of ceremonial. Especially if there was a real occasion, like Christmas or a birthday, or everybody getting together after the family had been all over."

"So that's what you would do for your birthday?"

"Oh, maybe more than that. After dinner perhaps we would all go to a play, or out dancing—to a public place, with a bar and a live band. Ther.e might be four or five hundred people all together in a place like that."

"Will you teach me how to dance, Aunt Eve?" "Why, Jeron! Of course I will. If you're sure you really want to learn. I don't want you just being kind to me."

He frowned to look older. "Aunt Mom? I hate your logical inconsistencies. You praise me for being kind, and now you tell me you don't want to do it."

I said humbly, "You're right, Jeron, and of course I'll teach you how to dance and it doesn't matter what your reasons are."

"Now?"

"Well. I should be getting the crops in right now—"

"Not now," he decided. "Not because of your crops, though. Because I want to show you something."

There was no arguing with Jeron when he had his mind made up. He took my hand and tugged me through the quarter-acre I was supposed to be tending, and would not say why.

That didn't surprise. What would have surprised about Jeron would have been an occasion when he didn't go out of his way to be surprising. I tried to slow him down when I saw that he was dragging me into the unfinished sections of the shell. I didn't like going there. Outside of the microclimate of my little garden patch the air was too thin and too dry and generally too uncomfortable still, though not nearly as bad as it had been. But he wouldn't stop, not until he clattered across a bare strip of structural steel, nothing between us and the vacuum outside but a fingernail's width of asteroidal iron, and jerked me to a stop. "There!" he cried.

I looked.

It was Ann Becklund. Not one of my favorite sights. "She's meditating again," I said. "Now I'm going back—"

"Look!" He darted over and touched her; she didn't move. "Full padmasana! She's been there all day!"

"She does that all the time, Jeron," I said scornfully.

"Touch her!" he said angrily. "Stupid!"

The time for teaching manners to my son was unfortunately long past, so I decided to ignore his rudeness. I touched her.

Ann didn't seem to be breathing, but I was pretty sure she was, somehow—there was a trick of breathing in one , nostril and out the other that went with the full-lotus pretzel she had bent herself into. She looked strange. Not just her padmasana position. I have mentioned that Ann's slim figure and long blond hair were a source of constant aggravation to me. They looked fine. In fact, she looked as perfectly well groomed as she ever had . . . except for one thing.

When I got close I noticed that there was a faint patina of dust on her hair and skin.

Jeron was hopping with excitement. "You see? All day today, just like that. And all day yesterday, and all day the day before, and—"

"That's impossible. After all, she had to eat—drink water, at least."

He stopped short, his nostrils flaring furiously. "It is not impossible, since I have said it was so!"

"I only meant it was hard to believe, dear. I wonder if there's something wrong with her. Maybe we should try to wake her up."

"Yes? Yes!" he crowed. "Please do!"

Well, I know a dare when it is offered, but I didn't like looking cowardly in the eyes of my oldest son. I touched her again, harder, and called her name.

There was no response, at first. Then the rolled-back eyes came slowly down to focus on me, and the lacquered face cracked into an expression of rage.

I said shakily, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I was worried about you, Ann." She made a sound—I wouldn't say she spoke. "I didn't understand that, dear," I said, full of tenderness and sympathy.

Her mouth moved slowly for a moment, rehearsing the nearly forgotten skill of speaking. "No," she croaked. And then, "You don't." And then she hit me.

I don't mean she made a fist and punched me with it. It wasn't like that. I didn't know what she hit me with, but I felt it, all right; it was like an explosion in the air before me, and I went flying.

The shock must have dazed me, because the next thing I remember was hearing Jeron whimpering, and feeling his hands under my armpits as he was tugging me away. "You got her mad, Aunt Eve! How stupid!"

"Let go of me!" I pulled myself to my feet, holding onto Jeron's shoulder to keep from wobbling in the light gravity. "She's saying something."

"That does not matter. Let's leave her alone, Aunt Eve!"

"I want to hear!" I moved back toward her, though keeping a fringe of high-bush rhubarb between us. The expression on her face showed how hard it was for her to say English words, but she finally forced them out:

"Not again."

Jeron was tugging at my arm. "She doesn't want you to bother her again," he said accusingly. "Now let's go!"

"Wait a minute, there's more!"

She was bawling something at us. It was more complicated and she forced the words out twice, but I could not understand them till Jeron translated for me: "She's saying "Chandrasekhar's other limit,' Aunt Eve, whatever that means, and now can we get the hell out of here?"

On the morning of Day 4104 Jeron woke me up by stroking my ear. He was lying stretched out next to me, but on top of the flower comforter. "Jeron," I said sternly, coughing to get the hoarseness out of my throat—it had been a rough night—"cut that out. Your mother is not an appropriate sex object for you."

"I know that. I just like your bed." He was sulking, of course.

I have developed the bed myself, out of honeysuckle and milkweed mostly, but with flower scents bred in. "Do you want me to grow one for you?"

"If I wanted one, I would grow one, and it would be better than this." But he wasn't really angry, because he reached behind him and handed me a steaming cup of coffee—well, as near as we had come to coffee. It wasn't bad.

"God bless you." I swallowed as much as I could gratefully. "That's very sweet of you, Jeron."

"I know. You told me your mother used to do that for you in the mornings, and I wanted to surprise you. Don't worry, I made sure Uncle Ski was gone before I came in." He tasted the coffee to confirm that he still didn't like it, made a face, and handed it back to me. "Did he tell you what Aunt Ann meant about Chandrasekhar?"

"Now, just a minute, Jeronl How did you know what I asked Uncle Ski?"

"I wasn't listening at the door," he said indignantly. "Everybody knows everything you're going to do long before you do it, don't you know that? You're the easiest to figure out!"

I took another sip of the coffee and decided to let that pass. Actually, I had asked Ski, when there was time for talking, but of course he hadn't really been able to answer. Most of the grownups could talk to me, somewhat, if they wanted to, but not easily. And seldom wanted to. "I want to get cleaned up, Jeron," I said.

He grinned. "You mean you want me to leave. You are so very strange, Aunt Eve." But he was being courteous enough to grant me my idiosyncrasies; only, to make sure I understood he was going out of his way to be courteous, he took his time about it. He paused at the door to stroke his small, thin, dark mustache. "Do you like it?" he demanded.

He had been working on it for months, so I knew what he wanted to hear. "It makes you look older," I said, and I said it as though it were a compliment. Wholly pleased, he left me to my privacy and my unusual habits. Shower, eat, get to work: I was probably the only adult person within four light-years with so fixed a morning ritual.

It kept me going. It did not give me comfort. As I rinsed myself clean of sweat and Ski, and replenished my blood-sugar level at one end of me and replenished the hydroponics cultures at the other ... as I tugged a comb through my very uncoiffed hair and studied the jagged ruins of my fingernails, as I headed across the fields of seedling trees and fabric plants to where my ten little helpers had already begun the day's work ... I wondered why, really, I bothered.

But there was one good reason, always. I bothered because of the kids. I loved them every one. All of us had children—frequently and multiply—but I had more than anyone else, because I had theirs as well as my own. I was the only one of the crew, I think, who actually wanted children; what the others wanted was only subjects.

My work crew was unusually silent, all ten tiny little toddlers of them, and I instantly saw why. There was Aunt Flo, perched on a dewpole, silent as dusty Ann. She was wearing one of those red muumuus that were all the trouble she would go to to dress and, fat as she was, she looked like a candy apple on a stick. A mean one.

Under that wicked, wordless gaze my crew were busier than they had ever been for me, skinning plant cells to make protoplasts, challenging tip-of-the-shoot meristems with the witches' brew I had left for them. Actually, the recipe was Flo's in the first place. Flo was the one who started all those new models coming off the hydroponic assembly line, way back to the beets that tasted like lamb chops and even the exothermic vegetable womb, and so you might think she was just there to supervise our carrying out her project. I doubted that. All the supervision she ever did took one quick glance. Then either she went away ("Pass") or whopped you with a trowel ("Fail"), and that was the way you got your grades. Or you might think she was just being motherly, since all but three of my helpers were her own identical septuplet girls. Wrong again. Flo was often a mother but never motherly.

All of which left the problem of just what she was doing there.

Since it was not a problem I could solve, I ignored it. "Modany! Take Thruway and Ringo to the cabbage patch," I ordered—God, what strange names Flo gave her kids! "Check to see that all the babies are warm. Fry and Tud-easy, come with me." And I set about tweezering tiny calli onto a flat, and letting the children poke them into seedbeds.

The work was pleasant after a hard night. What I do makes no demands on the intelligence; I just have to do what any housewife does in the kitchen. Strain it, and stew it, and mix it, and set it out to ripen. You mince up the right parts of your plants. Then you make protoplasts; these are just naked cells, and the way you get the cell to take its clothes off is to stew it with an enzyme. In two weeks your protoplasts grow back their skins and they're cells again. A couple of days later they clump together and form calli, and they've begun to grow.

Of course, that's no good. You don't want them to spread into lumps like mold. You want them to specialize into stems and leaves and roots and fruits and so on, so you challenge them with some brew or other, and you watch your osmotic pressures like a hawk, and, next thing you know, the little callus turns emerald green and it's ready "to be set out.

Most of what you get's no good at all, and at least half of it just dies. But the rest—well, that's where it all comes from, you see. Ski and Flo do stranger things than that, but they've never shown me how. You have to be pretty careful, too. Any time Shef comes near a new batch he's ruined it; he sweats too heavily. My husband, one morning when he stopped by and forgot what it was he wanted of me, ruined one whole crop because he kept sneezing. But it's still no more than cookery. If you can put a perfect chocolate souffle on the table two minutes after the last guest has finished his steak, you can do what I was allowed to do.

By the time I had the whole batch set out I noticed that Flo had moved. She was still on the dewpole, but she had turned around; she was looking toward where Ann Beck-lund still sat, and what she was looking at was Dot Letski.

I drifted over. Dot was studying Ann as carefully as I had, or somewhat more carefully, because she had the intelligence not to touch her.

I never start a conversation with any of my age cohort, but this time I broke my rule. I said, "She's been like that for days, Dot, and yesterday she said something like 'Chan-drasekhar's other limit.' Also she hit me with something."

I have some very good rules, and every time I break them I realize how good they are. Dot didn't say anything. She was peering into Ann's nostrils from an eyelash length away; but she must have given some indication, because I heard a noise from behind me and when I turned Flo was leaping toward us. Behind her the dewpole was still vibrating, and the little foil streamers that catch the moisture in the air and drip it onto the plants were shaking like pennons in a breeze. She wasn't looking at Dot or Ann. She was looking at me. She stopped in the middle of her rush, poised daintily on one foot—Did you ever see the Walt Disney dance of the hippopotamuses? That was Flo—and said several English words. They were, in order, "Dragonfly. Barrier. Roll the bones."

I did not of course understand her any more than I'd understood Ann after she hit me, and I liked this just as little because I had started an argument between my two dear friends. Freely translated, the conversation went like this:

Dot: "Why are you confusing the dummy?"

Flo: "She doesn't understand what Ann's doing."

I mean, that was the first two seconds, if that, and only a tiny fraction of it, and it wasn't in words. It had to be seen to be understood, like dance mime. It went like this:

Why—eyebrows up—you—chin thrust at Flo—confuse— eyes crossed, jaw dropped—dummy?—contemptuous twitch of the shoulder toward me.

And then Flo replying: She—same twitch toward me, less contemptuous, maybe, but no more affectionate—not comprehend— same idiot eyes and jaw—Ann—jerk of the head toward the screening rhubarb.

And then Dot laughed, and stabbed her chin, tongue out and fluttering, toward Flo, shaking her head: The image of fast chatter, with a sort of wrinkle of the nose to suggest that not only did I not understand Flo, either, but perhaps all that Flo had to say was not very important anyway. But you must not think that was all of it. Or even much. Because at the same time they were talking, in clipped, run-together, sketchy words, to each other and perhaps to me or even to distant unhearing Ann. Not in sequence, like the dialogue in a play. Simultaneously. Maybe even interactively, so that the sentence one was saying was modified before it finished by the input from the other. What a catfight! They sounded like cats. They spoke so fast that, even when they used language, the words flew by in growls and yowls and screams.

I couldn't follow what they said after the first few seconds, but it appeared that Dot was taking my side—or at least opposing Flo's— on the grounds of an outmoded adherence to causality. Was I grateful? Oh, was I ever not\ For to have Dot best Flo over me made Flo my enemy, and she was bad enough as my gene-splicing guru. I tried to look un-involved. Now and then a single word lay in my ear long enough to be heard, sometimes even a phrase. I caught a few epithets: "Stochastic bitch!" "Aleatory asshole!" "Serendipitous slob!"—for there were times when even the efficiency of quick-speech had to be sacrificed for the solid English-language impact of an insult in words. But whether the names were aimed at me, or at unhearing Ann, or at each other, I did not know. Or care. These same fights had been going on for a decade or more, and my greatest concern was to stay out of them. I didn't care to be in the middle, like the family dog with his head on his paws, looking from Him to Her as they bickered, with no hope but somewhere to catch an "Eat" or a "Come!" or, dream of Heaven!, an "Out?"

So when Dot, still jabbering away at the jabbering Flo, jerked her head to signify "Let's move on," and Flo shrugged "All right," I was not at all displeased. The jabber kept up unchecked until Flo and Dot were ten meters away, and then it stopped like the throwing of a switch. Dot kept on; Flo turned back to me.

All my little helpers had been standing slack-jawed and grinning, enjoying the fireworks that were not aimed at them. When Flo faced back they all instantly resumed their occupations, but it was me she was approaching.

She did not seem to be angry, exactly, or at least not exactly at me. She scowled and scratched her immense belly and wrinkled her face. She was making an effort to find words, and it took her some time. And at last she failed, for what she finally produced was one explosive sentence:

"Forget it," she snapped, and was gone, lumbering lightly up the slope of the shell, over the planted fields.

I slept not very well that night, and alone, which may have been the reason I did not sleep very well.

But when I woke, on the morning of Day 4243, I still had the feeling that I had had visitors in the night. It felt as though some child of my own, lost but loving, had crept into my bed in the middle of the night, but of course when I stretched out my hand there was nothing there. Sometimes waking to find that a pet had snuggled in beside me was comforting. Mostly it was principally sad. Even guilty, in a way, because to some extent it was my fault that Will had made the first pet. I could not accept that Ann's first little girl had died, and pleaded with Will to do for her what he had done for himself—and he did try, but there was not enough there to save, really. Or on that later time, when I came to the vegetable womb to touch and fuss over my own, and found the cabbage soft and cold. I could not accept that, either.

It left me pensive, though, and the always difficult task of getting myself going in the morning took even longer than usual. When I got out of the shower there actually was someone in my bed. I mean someone live. I could not see who; he had the flowerlets pulled over his head, and all I could see was the lump of flesh under the blanket of roses.

It was too big to be one of the work team, and too small to be one of my regular gentleman callers. "If that's you, Jeron," I warned, "you're going to be in big trouble."

But it wasn't he. It wasn't any he, it was six-year-old Molomy, one of Flo's numerous children and, I had always thought, about the sweetest of them. She popped her head out of the coverlet, grinning, as pretty a poppet as Flo had ever pupped. "S'prise, Aunt Evel" she cried. "Can I come back and work for you some more?"

I pulled my shorts on under my robe (how they laughed at Aunt Eve's robe!), dropped a blouse over my head, and sat down beside her. "Well, sure you can, honey," I said, extremely pleased. Molomy had been one of my very favorites, and it was quite a blow when, at four and a half or so, she had decided farming was too dumb for her to stay with and switched over to Shef and orbital dynamics. "I'm a little surprised, though," I added.

"I'm pregnant!" she said proudly. "So I want to tend my own baby the first time—isn't that the way you all used to do it, back on Earth?"

By the time I had explained to her that, yes, we all used to tend our own babies before they were born, but not exactly in the same way, I had got some more information out of her. She wasn't shy about it. She prattled gaily all the way to the farm plots. She just wasn't sure. She thought Jeron was the father, but of course she couldn't be positive until Aunt Flo or Uncle Ski removed the embryo and put it in the cabbage patch, when they would test it and let her know—and change it around any way she wanted, if she wanted, but she didn't really think she wanted to edit it, did I agree?, except of course to make sure that it had her aptitude for navigation and maybe a handful of other useful traits, because your first baby always ought to be kind of natural, as much as possible, didn't I agree?

I agreed. I put her to work, in charge of all ten of the other little girls, to keep them busy while I thought things out.

Actually Molomy was not the first of the girls to come up pregnant, or even the twentieth. Some of the others had been younger at the time than she. It wasn't Molomy I was worried about. Eight weeks after conception someone would take the fetus and implant it in a vegetable womb, and Molomy would be none the worse. What I was worried about was Jeron. He was so awfully young to be a father!

I was not getting much work out of my team that morning; Molomy's news was too exciting. They were all patting her belly and listening to her navel, and I could see the jealousy growing behind their pretty, bright, two-year-old eyes. I could even feel a little jealousy growing behind my own.

Maybe not really jealousy. I certainly didn't want to change places with them! But something unwelcome.

Was it because I felt threatened—because I was not ready to be a grandmother? (But actually I had been at least twice before that—but not with Jeron as the father.) Was it just that I was sorry for them, losing their childhood so early?

Only none of them were really children. They began to talk at six months, to read at two, to write legibly at two and a half—to make love at six or seven, sometimes earlier than that.

Early sexual maturity was bred into almost all the kids, from the fifth cohort on. Back in the early days when we were all primaparas and the simple common miracle of a child was excitement enough, we took what came. But then Flo and my quirky husband decided to play a more complicated game. They spliced and blended and turned out fifteen identical sibs from four mothers and three fathers. It was an experiment, Jim said (he was still talking in those days),-to see if tailored genes could indeed produce absolute genetic clones, and so they did. I could not tell my own babies from the other twelve, and all fifteen were cross-tolerant of implants and transfusions. After that we got all sorts of things, but one of the designed traits for almost everybody was rapid maturation.

Which Ringo now proved—two years old, remember! Her nose was out of joint with Molomy's news, and she stood up and walked toward me: "I can't work anymore, Eve," she piped in her clear, sweet voice, bending her neck to look up at me, "because I have to go pick a tampon. I decided to menstruate today."

"Me too!" cried Odd, delighted by the idea, and so did two or three of the others, crowding around me and all chirping at once.

I started to give them my little menarche speech, about how it was all a natural function and they shouldn't worry (but who could think they were worrying?), and it should not interfere with most of their normal activities, especially including doing their work (but they had other ideas than that!) . . . and discovered none of them were listening.

So I dismissed them all for the day, my temper ragged. I had a small new agricultural experiment of my own that had looked as though it was ripening nicely, and I decided it was as good a time as any to test it out.

We had four sections added onto the habitat by then— nearly a mile along its axis—and the internal diameter was fifteen hundred feet. After the tenement squalor of the Constitution even the first section we moved into seemed like the endless plains of Iowa; by now every one of us, kids and all, had about seven acres to play with. So I hadn't had any trouble finding a section, a quarter of the way around the swell of the third section, where soil was laid and dewposts were moistening it from the water in the air (we didn't have much rain, you see, so we had to trick the water out another way)—and nobody usually came.

Nobody would have done anything to my crops, of course. But I do have this primitive need for privacy now and then, and some of my needs I am not proud of.

This particular patch was planted in a little invention of my own. It started out, basically, as watermelons; but I put a hard shell on them like coconuts, sweetened the pulp a little, injected each one with yeasts and a few other things—and, just the way I wanted it to come out, when I poked a hole in one end. of the nuts, what came out was a really very satisfactory kind of beer.

I had planted rhubarb trees around for privacy, and they already made a sort of grove twice as tall as I was, and I lay back in the stripy sunlight from Alpha and tried another nut, and another, and with each one I felt a little better . . . up until the time I saw somebody sailing purposefully in my general direction, big, bounding leaps of ten yards at a time, and observed that it was Jeron.

I used the word "privacy," but in fact there's not a lot of it in Alpha-Aleph. Not counting the little bit that the old Constitution hid by being suspended at the center of the cylinder, there was hardly any part of the habitat that was not directly visible to every other part. I could see my own little house, with the blue and white honeysuckle growing over it, and the garden plots where the experimental plantings took place, and motionless Ann, still silent in her padmasana position; I could even see the bright red bounding dot that was Flo, pursuing some other bounding dot that I could not recognize for sure, but looked a lot like my husband; and the bad part of all that was that, if it were not for the rhubarb trees, they could all see me, too. Especially Jeron would, as soon as he got a little closer, and I didn't want to see Jeron. More accurately, I didn't want him to see his mother drunk.

Uncle Ghost saved me. Jeron brought up short, listening to what 1 could not see, scowling. "You sure?" he demanded. "I thought I saw her in her malt-nuts." He listened again, to a whisper I could not hear, said something annoyed and turned away.

I cracked another malt-nut and lay back, relaxing.

I was feeling grouchy, and even the malt-nuts were only blurring my discontent, not curing it. Discontent with what? With everything. With our habitat, with my work, with everyone around me. With myself. I was about as close to a hermit as a human being could get in Alpha-Aleph, and I was getting tired of it. If Shef and Ski, sometimes even Jim, had not come calling every once in a while at night, I would have had almost no contact with my own age group. And with Shef and Ski and Jim I rarely did much talking. I knew most of what was going on in our little community; we were too small for anything to be remote. But I knew it in the way I used to know what was happening in Washington by watching the network news. Most of it seemed no more relevant to personal me.

If the adults were remote, the children were elusive. I could love them, but I couldn't really understand them. I could be jealous of them easily enough. Especially of the little girls. Womanhood had become so very convenient! I'm not just talking about childbearing, because I got the benefit of that too—but that little trollop Molomy had got to me. Before us, I don't think the woman ever lived who took menstruating so easily—not for the first ten years of it, anyway. I don't think the woman ever lived who welcomed it, either—oh, maybe they were relieved sometimes, when they found they weren't knocked up, after all. But it had absolutely nothing else to recommend it. Especially when you were just starting. You'd be sitting in school, or in church, or in your boy friend's car, and you'd feel that warm damp spot growing, and, oh God, what shall you do? Get up and embarrass yourself? Stay there until you died? Ann Becklund could do that, in her damn padmasana, but not me—

"I did not know you hated her so," Uncle Will whispered from the rhubarbs.

"I didn't know I was talking out loud," I said, hiccoughing. "Sorry. Thanks for chasing Jeron away, though."

He didn't answer for a moment, and he had not chosen to make himself visible. Uncle Will makes me nervous. I said, as much to make sure he was still there as because I had anything to say, "She hurt me yesterday."

"I know. You disturbed her."

"I thought she was sick or something! And then .she said something crazy about Chandrasekhar—you know, the astronomer, I guess—"

"About Chandrasekhar's other limit, yes."

"I don't even know what it is! Oh, of course, Chandrasekhar's limit is one point four solar masses, the mass range above which a star goes supernova; everybody knows that. But the other limit I never heard of."

Will did not exactly appear, but he let a shimmering sort of suggestion of himself appear among the rhubarbs. He sighed softly and whispered, "It is an old folk story he is supposed to have liked to tell, Evelyn. It is about dragonfly larvae. You see, if you are a dragonfly larva, swimming around in the water and getting ready to metamorphose, you don't know what will happen to you; you only know that from time to time your friends suddenly go to Heaven. That is, they go up through the surface of the water. What happens to them then? You don't know. What really happens, of course, is that they change into adult dragonflies; but you have no way of knowing that until you yourself become one, and then you can never come back to tell. No one ever does. Can't, because they can't penetrate the surface tension of the water, even if they had the desire to. So, being a stupid larva and not knowing this, you call all your friends around you and say, 'I will be different! I will come back, I promise! And I will tell you what lies beyond this shiny, wavery thing we see over our heads!' But you can't do it, when the time comes. It is an irreversible process."

I lay there staring at him in amazement. It was the longest speech I had heard from Will Becklund since he was alive. "And what has that to do with your dear widow, Ann?"

There was a hint of shadowy laughter, but all he said was, "That, too, is an irreversible process, Eve. And you interfered with it. She still had one tentacle on this side of the surface, so to speak, so she could communicate just a little.

But not anymore. She will pass Chandrasekhar's other limit, you see, and will never speak to a human being again."

I suppose it was the beer, but I suddenly felt that that was the saddest thing I had ever heard. "Oh, the poor thing!" I cried, forgiving her completely.

There was a pause. " 'Poor thing'?" Uncle Ghost whispered questioningly.

"To be cut off like that, forever! When will it happen?"

"It is already happening, Eve. It is what Jeron came to tell you about."

"Oh, my God! Where?" But I didn't have to ask, because I could see. I scrambled to my feet, staring at the place where Ann had sat so long and so silently, but she was not there anymore. She was still in the padmasana position, legs folded back on themselves, hands grasping her toes, head lowered to her breast, but instead of perching on a mound of undistributed soil she was floating in the air, a good hundred yards above the surface, moving slowly toward the end of the habitat. By the time she reached it she was too distant for me to see clearly, but I knew what was happening. That was where the exit lock was. It was open and waiting for her; it closed behind her, and she was gone.

"She'll die!" I cried.

"Why should she die?" whispered Uncle Ghost.

"But even if she lives—out there, all by herself! And you say she won't ever come back?"

"Never, Eve." There was a pause, and then his soft, despairing whisper: "Oh, how I wish I were she!"