1

Mayzelle hurried from her hab-hut, tacked shut the canvas door, and hustled down the bamboo steps. She’d sworn she wouldn’t stand for this anymore. She’d sworn.

In the clearing, the sledges were already packed, the clan assembled, the fluttering caravan ready to set off for the port.

Yet here Mayzelle ran, hurrying along the trails of the commune, calling, “Rayet!” with all the air in her lungs and searching into every corner.

She ran first to Benito, who was setting out seats for the older generations on the antifriction sledge.

“You seen Rayet, Ben?”

“Sorry, May, no.”

She ran to the Conclave Hall, where Suleman stood on the dais, orchestrating with his radio wand as the chairs and tables waddled into place.

“Rayet here, Sule?”

“Haven’t seen her, nope.”

At last, in the Gathering Glade, Mayzelle stopped, shut her eyes, and socked herself in the thigh.

She knew. Yes indeed, she knew exactly where the child would be.

Headscarf fluttering, Mayzelle stormed for the gate.

The gardens and pocket thickets of the tanglewilds spread out below in green profusion as Mayzelle hurried from the commune core. Beyond was the vale, and in the vale, nestled like glassy eggs, the clutch of ecomodules, glittering in the sun.

Mayzelle gathered up her Reunion Day cloak and hurried, snorting with fury, down the hill.

Sure enough, the girl stood beside the marine habitat, data visualizer plunked on her head, fingers jittering at the controls.

Mayzelle stomped up and whipped off the headset.

“Hey!” Rayet wheeled.

“Where have you been? It’s noon! It’s time to go!”

“I was using that, Mom!”

“Well, you can stop using it.” Mayzelle slammed the headset into the locker, slapped shut the door. “We’re late as it is.”

Something in the girl’s sullen, slit-eyed expression . . . Mayzelle found herself on her back foot. Maternal worry vied with maternal fury. Then Mayzelle’s eyes widened, and the blood boiled in her heart.

“Where’s your cloak? Your robe? You’re not even dressed!”

Understanding grew between them.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Mayzelle said.

“Why do I have to go anyway?” Rayet groaned, lifting her chin in what Mayzelle interpreted as a carefully rehearsed display of defiance. “You’ll all be coming back soon enough with those . . . those . . . ” Disgust trembled through her. “Those void suckers.”

“Don’t you dare use that phrase.”

“But why can’t I stay here and work on my habitat? Why do I always have to do what you want to be doing?”

Years of old arguments smoldered between them. Mayzelle wondered if she had the energy for this struggle. On this day, of all possible days, when she was already drained, already giving everything she had to properly venerate and celebrate the moment.

“He’s your gene-kin, Rayet. He’s part of your clan. A great, great man. He hasn’t come for the past four reunions. This may be your last chance to properly meet him.”

“A great man to you, maybe,” Rayet scoffed.

“Now, you listen to me.” Mayzelle’s anger resurged, and with it, her energy. “You will show respect to him. You will come to the Welcoming, and you will wear the robe. I will not tolerate selfishness in my only bondchild. I am your womb-mother, I am your gene-mother, and it is my responsibility to oversee your communion with the clan. The whole clan,” Mayzelle added after a moment, standing back with arms firmly folded.

The girl toed the warm earth.

“I hate Spacers, though. They’re so . . . so rough. They wreck things. They break things.”

And build things, too, Mayzelle thought . . . at times. But this wasn’t an occasion for fine distinctions. She took Rayet’s hand.

“You’ll just have to cope.”

2

By the time Mayzelle and Rayet had caught up to the rest of the traveling party, the five clans were already gathered, motley in their multitudes, on the slopes of Harbor Hill. Below, the gleaming, enclosed complex of the starport had been draped in garlands and vine-twinings for the Welcoming.

A cheer went up from the assembled clans as the star of the rocket appeared in the sky. White-gold, it floated in the deep blue of noontime, flickering and throbbing like a limpid reflection of a watch face on a painted wall.

And while everyone gazed up, laughing and applauding, Rayet Waterweaver of the Willow Clan clenched her fists and stared in silent rage at the earth below.

Nonsense! Ritualistic folly! In all her growing years, Rayet had seen only three Reunion days: three journeys to the starport in its fenced-off valley, three Welcoming ceremonies outside the entry gate.

And she had hated every one.

The formalities struck her as a superstitious slog. First would come the rituals of arrival, with Grounders and Spacers reuniting on the hillsides, reciting the formal greetings of the Welcoming and exchanging the glass-encoded geneprints of the firstgens, symbolically renewing their gene-kin bonds.

Then the long hours of convocations and presentations, reports on key projects, community updates, plenary sessions of the kin-group reps.

Tedium.

Finally, worst of all, they would sit for the feast, with the clan gathered under tents and awnings on the sward below the Conclave Hall, carousing and clamoring into early morning.

Grounders and Spacers. Every clan had them, and every clan suffered from the same old rifts.

Grounders were workers. They were rooted to their communes, cultivating habitats, stewarding ecologies, cleansing the Terran soils, waters, and weather systems as they studied the ancient bioways of Mother Earth.

There was so much, so very much to do here on the ground! Cultivating biomes, plotting evolutionary timelines, fitting models to natural cycles, and preserving those cycles against disruptions, communicating with the conclave network that wrapped the Earth like a protective shroud. Nurturing, shepherding, planting, harvesting. Tending the great global garden of the globe, from seas to deserts, snowfields to savannas.

A whole thrumming planet to live for and care for.

Spacers?

Crammed in their cold ships, plying the darkness of the solar system, with all their mad groping after desolate frontiers, they knew nothing of nurture, of balance, of warmth.

This great uncle of Rayet’s? Uncle Biswas? Admiral Biswas? As the first of the Spacers, progenitor of that crazed convoy, he was bound to be the worst of all.

True, his genes circulated in Rayet’s clanpool. So what? Rayet scoffed at the fact. Who cared about gene-kinship anyway? It was all a lot of superstitious jibber-jabber, held over from the atavistic families of the old days. Biomystical hooey, in Rayet’s view.

Had Biswas been present at the clan birthings? At the cradle days? The plantings? Had he joined in the Night Raves, when all the clan’s little ones put on their headdresses and antlers and flowers, and drank from the wilding urns, and dreamwalked in the feral lands, learning from their elders the ancient arts of symbiosing with forests, fields, and soils?

No? Well, then, Rayet thought, let Spacers have their feast, if they wanted it. Let them have their ceremonies and flatteries. And Biswas . . . great, glorious Uncle Biswas . . . let him go back to his skyways bloated with seedwine, fattened up on Grounder food, to continue his crass, pointless conquest of the planets.

That was neither here nor there, to Rayet.

Only why, why did she have to be a part of it?

“Look!” Her mother nudged her. “They’re about to touch down.”

In the sky overhead, the star of the thruster burned bright enough to force the members of the five clans to turn away their eyes. When Rayet looked up, the ship had clicked into the docking tube and was slowly, gracelessly unfolding into its lander form.

The arms of the port reached up . . . took hold . . . guided the process with mechanical tenderness.

As the first bell sounded, the gates sprang open—to a merry fanfare blown on real brass horns.

And the gangways descended, and the Spacers emerged.

3

At first, Mayzelle was disappointed.

Uncle Biswas (Old Biz, as she had always known him) wasn’t with the first group that spilled from the port.

She looked for him in the crowds that came after: the riotous, jostling, roaring crewfolk, the engineers in their grim-faced lines, the builders and burrowers with their thick-muscled shoulders (he had always been a small, inconspicuous man). But one Spacer regiment followed another, lining up on the grassy slope, and still there was no sign of her uncle.

Strange. And, in Mayzelle’s view, distressing.

As the Welcoming ceremonies drew to their conclusion, Mayzelle hurried across the lawn to address the two Spacer clan leaders, Captain Forth and Dame Obingwa, who stood at the port gates consulting with their crews. Both laughed at her concerns.

“Old Biswas? Oh, don’t worry, he’ll be here.” Captain Forth was a small, compact, tough woman, virtually ageless, though since the last Reunion gathering, new lines of rude merriment had appeared in her pert face. “He peeled off the fleet before the final approach. Said he needed some time alone. You know how the old goat can be.”

“He’s coming in his private shuttle,” Dame Obingwa said in her proud, fluting voice, which she seemed to pipe straight through her nose. Tall, unsmiling, every inch the austere frontierswoman, Obingwa cast a disapproving eye heavenward, her long-fingered hands clasped behind her back. “He has grown . . . reclusive in his later years.”

“But is he coming?” Mayzelle wrung her hands. “It’s just . . . he’s missed so many reunions. I wanted him to meet his bondniece.”

Captain Forth’s eye was already wandering to the seedwine cart. Her voice broke out in a bark of lusty laughter as she rolled her shoulders and licked her lips. “I wouldn’t waste time wondering what the old man wants. After eighty-five years off-world . . . I mean, a guy gets to be a little odd, spending all that time in the void. Anyway, he told us not to wait. Shouldn’t we, well, move things along?”

Yes, Mayzelle was thinking, and after eighty-five years off-world, you’d think the old man would be eager to come home once in a while!

But Captain Forth was already strolling toward the seedwine cart, her hands upraised as she beckoned to her crew.

The festivities, it seemed, were underway.

---

In the rush of chores and challenges that followed, Mayzelle scarcely had time to fret about an unchecked entry on her guest list.

Tours to chaperone, snacks to prepare, local assemblies to call to order . . .

But the biggest challenge, as at every Reunion, was trying to keep the Spacers in line.

Call it a Welcoming Day tradition. Mayzelle was more inclined to view it as an ancestral burden. The same pattern played out every four years, with fresh quirks and variations each time.

First came an incident in the tanglewild, when a Spacer showing off his rocktorch burned away nearly an entire briar patch.

Later, there was a brawl in the Conclave Hall, after Suleman, while rearranging tables, sent a procession of mobi-chairs marching straight through an impromptu Spacer wrestling match.

Next came a shouting match in the greenway, another torch accident in the data hall, and a jumping contest that nearly flattened the gardener guild’s new mushroom crop!

In short, their little party was host to all the ructions and rumbles that made people like Rayet—and even Mayzelle herself, at times—regard Spacers as something like genuine aliens, inhuman invaders from another world.

But the biggest disruption, this year, surprisingly, came from Rayet herself.

The girl, bless her untamed soul, was in her fourteenth growing year, all sharp angles and prickly opinions, with elbows and fists that were quick to strike, a headful of inflexible beliefs, and a soul like glass, brittle with insecurities.

She just couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. At every opportunity, Rayet managed to express, in forms both subtle and direct, her boiling dislike for these rowdy gene-kin who’d come to Earth from the skyways of the outer worlds.

At luncheon, Rayet nearly came to blows with a Spacer boy who’d eaten all the cold roast beef.

Didn’t he know that Grounders never slaughtered animals? Didn’t he know that natural meat was a rare, precious gift of the cycle of life and death?

Later, in a tour of the restock farms, Rayet had attacked two Spacer men who’d provoked the cloned marmosets in their pen. Punches were thrown. Eyes were blackened. A terrible, humiliating scene.

And then, in the Spacer report on asteroid redirection . . . and in the plenary session for the reps . . . and the info session on colonization . . .

Rayet seemed to be constitutionally incapable of keeping her opinions to herself.

And Spacers . . . well, they didn’t take insults in stride.

Now, looking down from the hill above the port, Mayzelle drew her Reunion shawl tight across her shoulders. She sometimes wondered if she was unfit to be a bondmother, unfit for any leadership role. She’d already spoken to Rayet three times today. The girl merely glared at her. Words had no effect. Mayzelle’s patient arguments, so carefully phrased, only seemed to inflame the child’s youthful convictions. In Rayet’s view, she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was simply acting as a staunch defender of the Grounder way of life. And, Mayzelle had to admit, Rayet was right, up to a point.

But why fight about it? This was the thought that nagged at Mayzelle. Why did the girl’s violent convictions need to express themselves in violent acts?

Mayzelle turned and looked up into the sky, straining her eyes for the telltale shimmer of a shuttle dropping through the layers of the atmosphere. Things had been very different in the old years, back when Spacers were just setting out to begin their conquest of the deeps of the sky. In the garlanded Reunion Days of Mayzelle’s youth, the social gulf between Spacers and Grounders had been a mere cultural cleft between friends. They’d all known the songs of the former world. They’d all seen the same historic films. They’d all been steeped in the lore and lingo of the last waning era of global civilization, the Time of the Cities, the Age of Entertainments.

It was Biswas who loomed in Mayzelle’s mind when she thought back to those vanished times. His calm conviction, his air of self-possession. He’d been so skilled at steering society, guiding them all into this new way of life. It was Biswas who’d kept them united in those years, in the difficult stretch after the great division. Without Biswas . . . she shivered. Without Uncle Biswas, where would any of them be now?

And where, for that matter, Mayzelle wondered, was he? What was keeping the man? Why wouldn’t he come?

“Mayzelle! Mayzelle!”

A voice floated toward her over the twilit lawns, thin and strident with distress. Mayzelle dropped her eyes. Poor Suleman came struggling up the hill from the Conclave Hall, wringing his hands and shaking his head. Another fight had broken out in the Glade, it seemed, another argument that had rapidly escalated into a tussle. The Spacers and Grounders were at loggerheads again.

Sighing, Mayzelle turned her back on the empty sky and hurried down to keep the peace.

4

Even before the sun left the sky, Rayet knew she’d had enough.

She couldn’t take these people anymore. Their nonexistent manners, their jostling ways!

And she knew . . . oh, she knew . . . that she wasn’t the only one.

All through the Grounder ranks, eyes narrowed, fists clenched, and faces settled into deep-lined frowns of forbearance. The Spacers were impossible! They’d already completely trampled the fungus garden. They’d hassled the marmosets, ruined the tanglewild, urinated in the clear-water brook. They were out of control, wild, worse than ever, completely refractory, unfit for life on Earth!

Poor Suleman had discovered to his dismay that they’d broken into the stores for the feast. Like children, these people were. Like rats. How could such beings be allowed to run wild?

Already, they’d drunk up most of the seedwine. Now these roistering extraterrestrials were growing more unruly by the hour, and Mayzelle had had to run off to the Quartz Clan to fetch more barrels for the evening feast.

But the worst of the group, by far, was Captain Forth.

Rayet had taken a dislike to this woman almost from the instant the Spacers left their ship. Most Spacer women, in Rayet’s eyes, were intolerable: brash, rude, competitive, argumentative, always doing their best to prove they could be just as insufferable as their menfolk. Forth, by far, was the worst of the pack. In every altercation, her shouts boomed the loudest. In every brawl, she was first to swing a fist. Her voice, grown husky from years of roistering, barged its way into every conversation. And, though no one directly accused her, she was obviously the one who’d raided the wine.

By feast time, Forth had grown ragingly drunk: drunker even than most of the Spacers, with half-crazy eyes and shining lips. And she had, for some reason, fixated on Rayet, with all the stubborn focus of the inebriate, and was now leaning red-faced over the table, saying in a sloshy voice:

“You don’t like us Spacers much, do you, Rayet Waterweaver?”

Rayet cast about for help. Mayzelle wasn’t back yet from her trip. None of the other Grounders seemed eager to join the debate. None were even looking in Rayet’s direction. Like Rayet, they were all simply bearing up, waiting for the ordeal to end.

“Let the girl alone, Forth,” a man grumbled, but his voice was instantly swamped in Spacer jeers.

“Nah, nah, it’s all right,” Captain Forth said expansively, rising from her bench with a slanted smile. “I don’t wanna fight. I get it. I do. Y’know, I don’t like any of these idiots either.”

Roars of laughter greeted her taunt.

“You hear that, you worthless void suckers?” Forth roared, wheeling on her people with a drunken grin. “I don’t like a single damn one of you! You Spacers can all lick my filters and suck my shower hose!”

Laughter thundered.

“I mean,” Forth raved on, “you’d have to be an absolute shivving psychopath to want to leave this planet, eh?” She drained her cup and slammed it down in front of Rayet. “This cozy little human cradle. This safe little nest for the baby hairless apes. You’d have to be deeply broken inside to leave all this behind and suck void.”

Spacers were banging their fists on the tables, chanting some awful, tuneless song that sounded to Rayet like subhuman yawping. She fought an urge to put her hands over her ears.

“Who wouldn’t hate these garbage-eaters?” Forth roared, stomping both feet onto the bench and standing aloft with her hands held high. “These fart recyclers? These filtered piss swillers? Look at you all. If I were a sweet little flower-faced Grounder girl, I’d be flicking my nose-pickings at us too!”

Rayet spoke softly.

“It’s not easy living down here, either, you know.”

Forth plunked back into her seat, eyes widening. “No? You think life’s hard on Earth? You think this is what they call rough living? But wait . . . no, no . . . maybe . . . maybe I can see it. I forget, sometimes, when we’re out there putting up the tunnel shields, racing to fix an air recycler before the oh-two runs out for good, pulling the guts out of some rad-rash patient who floated too close to a gamma-ray source . . . fighting the bone rot, piling up the gees, living on muck because the ponics went to rot . . . literally bouncing off the walls . . . I mean, I forget sometimes, sure, there are challenges to living down on old Sol Three. You got,\ what? The perils of chronic oversleeping. You might eat a fruit that’s slightly overripe. It might literally rain on your parade. And all this leisure time to dispose of! Gosh, I mean, how’s a little girl to cope?”

“Forth,” a man said, warningly, and the captain snorted and refilled her glass.

“There are worse things about it,” said Rayet softly.

“Oh? Yeah? Like what?”

“Like having to play host to rude jerks from outer space.”

Explosive laughter tore through the glade. The Spacers beat the tables and stomped the ground and thumped their fists against Forth’s back.

“She gotcha, Forth!”

“What’re you gonna say to that?”

Forth laughed too, but her eyes were diamonds.

“Awright, awright, Grounder girl. Why don’t you show me what it is you do all day down here in Mother Terra’s lap. We’ll see who’s got the harder life: the kid from Eden or the lords of the abyss.”

Another roar acclaimed the challenge.

Rayet was halfway out of her seat when Suleman came up behind her and laid his big hand on her arm.

“It’s all right, Rai. Let it go. Wait till Mayzelle—”

Rayet shook him off.

“You want to see? Really? Well, fine. Come and see!”

---

Moonlight glittered on the crowns of the ecopods as Rayet led the procession down the hill. Beyond the lights of the commune, the stars flocked in bold abundance, all that vast, strange wilderness of lights the Spacers presumed to call their domain.

“Well,” Forth grunted, “let’s see this great project of yours.”

Rayet took position at the console for the marine habitat, pulling the visualizer down over her head, her back sweating even in the nighttime chill as she set tingling fingers to the controls.

“I have to assess the current conditions before I activate the public viewer.”

“What, you mean there’s waiting involved?” A Spacer clapped his hands to his face. “You people down here do have it rough.”

While Rayet stared into the glowing charts, Forth pressed her face to the glass curve of the pod.

“Doesn’t look like much in there.”

“I see slime,” said a man behind her. “And mud. Oh, and some muck. Yeah, there’s muck in there, too. Fascinating.”

“What are you talking about, starboy, they got fish.” Another Spacer crowded in close. “Weird-ass, freaky lookin’ fish. What’re you doing down here, people, cooking up mutant monsters?”

Stupid, Rayet thought. They were all so rotting stupid. For an instant, she doubted the wisdom of her challenge. What was the point, trying to communicate with a bunch of vacuum-heads from outer space? But once the pod display came up, her pride in her work took hold of her fingers. She wheeled on the Spacers with her shoulders thrown back, glaring at them through the holographic readouts.

“There’s no monsters here. Ever. That’s not how we see things.”

Forth looked up, interested in spite of herself. “It’s like restoration, right? Reviving dead species, that kind of thing?”

“Actually . . . ” Now that the opportunity presented itself, Rayet wasn’t quite sure how to explain. Restoration was a niche concern, worked on by a few clans, but not many. She waggled her fingers. “Could you all back up a little bit, please?”

They obliged for a second. But curiosity drew them back. In a moment, more Spacers came crowding in.

“It’s not really about species, exactly,” Rayet tried to explain, turning back to the pod console and flicking through metrics as she spoke. “Like, the species is just one level of focus when you’re looking at the health of the overall system. It’s more about the balance, the cycles, the flows. What we try to do is find an equilibrium. A healthy living system can be volatile in the short term, but it should resolve to stability over time. Change, but slow change. Right? Maintaining the curve, finding that equilibrium, it might mean reintroducing old species. Or it might mean inventing new species or even taking out members of a species who contribute too much disruption to the flow. Are you even listening to this?”

The Spacers weren’t listening. She could tell they weren’t. More and more crushed in toward the pod, pointing and gaping at the murky forms inside.

“Y’know, there could be useful applications here. Scoop that detritus, that’s sod for the ponics. Bug farming, germ lines, biostock diversification.”

“Or soil growth, yeah.”

“Or colonization.”

“Could terraform the hell out of some frozen crater puddles.”

“I’m thinking deep-injection bac colonies. Grow that humus from the subsurface up.”

“Move aside, man, yo, I can’t see.”

“Uh, could you all take it easy?” Rayet pleaded. “What I’m trying to say is, it’s really, really difficult to manage these kinds of flows down here. Because it’s not just for one human crew. It has to be everything.” She swung her arm. “It’s all connected. It’s like the most complicated space ark ever made. So—hey! Can you please be careful?”

They were like children, unable to help themselves. They’d shown no interest throughout the day’s tours, trampling and elbowing through the commune with impatient indifference, killing time until the feast. Now the feast was on, and all they wanted to do was gawp and leer at the macroorganisms in her habitat. Like this was an alien world they’d discovered, and now they were lining up to conquer and explore. Invaders! Never anything but invaders, these people. Perpetually bullying out toward new frontiers.

“Wonder if we could eat that stuff . . . ”

“Or ferment it. Drink it.”

“Ha! That is what you’d think.”

“Hello in there? Little funny fishies? Hello? Hello?”

“Please don’t tap on the glass,” Rayet begged.

“Helloooooo little fishies . . . ”

“Moron, she said don’t tap,” Forth snapped, wheeling round and giving the offender a shove.

“Lay off him, Forth, he’s only having fun.”

“I’m your captain, idiot. I don’t believe in fun.”

“You don’t believe in fun, Forth? Huh! That’s hard to believe.”

“You come over here, and I’ll teach you to believe it.”

“No ranks at Reunion, Forth. You’re not the boss, now. Keep your orders in your hole.”

“I’ll show you orders!”

They were wrestling, now, rocking beside the pod.

“Try me, cadet! You couldn’t kick ass-high in half-grav.”

“Are you ray-wasted, woman? You think you got enough meat in those arms to lay your laws on me?”

“Come get it, cadet!”

“Please be careful!” Rayet wept. “You’re too close to the—”

Someone’s shoulder slammed into her chest, knocking her breath out in a hot burst. The whole crowd shifted like a breeze-blown field, an ecosystem tipped off-kilter. Bodies swayed. A muddled yell went up, part alarm, part joy. Everyone stumbled, only the density of the crowd keeping them upright. In the commotion, Rayet heard a crack.

“No!” Her voice rose up feebly to join the cacophony. “Stop! Stop!”

An alarm began to chirr. The cry went around, passing telephonically through the crowd. “Stop! Stop! Cool off! Cool off!” Like an iceberg crumbling, the mass of figures loosened, cracked, and tumbled apart, becoming a mob of stumbling figures in the gloom. Eyes dropped, heads hung. In the sudden stillness, Rayet saw the smashed console in the grass.

“No!”

She knelt, reached out, and snatched back her hands from the jagged fragments of the screen.

“The trophic settings!”

Within the pod, plumes of milky haze had begun to writhe into the water.

“My habitat!”

The Spacers fell back, slack-faced, seeming more confused than apologetic in response to Rayet’s outcry, like scolded children unsure of their offense.

And as the crowd began to break up and drift off, a steely light washed over the scene, sterile as the glow of an alien moon.

At the head of the trail, Mayzelle stood with a biolume lantern in her fist.

5

“And why exactly did you bring them to the pod farms in the first place? Why did you invite them to leave the feast?”

Amid the weaveworks and etched-stone portraits of the elder’s lodge, Mayzelle looked down into her daughter’s flushed face. Rayet’s arms were so tense they seemed ready to snap. She held the gauze Mayzelle had given her crushed in a bloody ball.

“They were insulting our clan! Insulting all the Grounders!”

“And why did you take it on yourself to answer the insult?”

“I couldn’t let them just say all that stuff.”

“Oh, child.” Mayzelle sank into her slingseat in the elders’ lodge, suddenly wearier than she’d been in all her years. By instinct or habit, or out of some newly awakened deference to the folkways of the clan, Rayet dropped to the kneeling cushion at her feet, thin shoulders trembling, as she hung her head and pressed her shaking fists to her knees.

“Forgive me, Bondmother. But they were in the wrong, too!” the girl fumed, lifting her flashing eyes.

Mayzelle passed a hand across her face. Outside, the night had settled into a silence that seemed worse, in its way, than the scuffles of the evening: the chilled, hard silence of a long-standing conflict freezing into permanent antipathy.

“If only—” Mayzelle began.

“Don’t say it,” Rayet seethed, eyes tightening, as if to concentrate the anger shining through them.

Mayzelle bent forward. “If only your great uncle had been here.”

Rayet leaped up. All the uncertain energy of youth was in the movement: all the wild frustration of knowing what was right, but not the limits of righteousness.

Everything was so different now, Mayzelle thought with a weary sigh. So different from how it had been! In the early years, in the springtime of her life, when the great flaring ships had first roared out to find glory among the outer planets . . . ah, then there had been a sense that Spacers and Grounders were part of one mission, united by bonds as deep and primeval as the molecular wellsprings of life itself. And when Mayzelle’s uncle, great man that he was, had gone out to lead this conquest of the stars, he had gone with the blessing of both these peoples: borne into the sky by their mutual devotion, their shared prayers, even by their love.

“Just because you think they’re so wonderful,” Rayet quavered, “doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Rayet—”

“I wish you’d gone with him!” Rayet shouted, tears on her cheeks. “If you think your stupid Uncle Biswas is so great, I wish you’d go to space with him. Just go!”

Leaping up with a flash of long limbs, leaving her bloody ball of gauze behind, she whipped away and bounded out of the lodge.

6

Morning came like a reminder to the commune hillsides . . . the trampled gardens, the littered hillsides, the sullied brook and trash-strewn greens . . . a reminder that, slowly turning through every human scandal, Mother Earth would forever hew to her old routines.

In the ecopod vale, Rayet shivered awake under a chilly film of dew. She sat up and shuddered. Sunlight was twinkling at the crest of the hilltop, shooting down through the bushes in pencil-thin beams and diamonding the tips of the grass. Away beyond the briarfields and gardens, the morning tocsin had begun to chime.

Wincing with stiffness, Rayet smoothed her sleep-wild hair. Every movement sent shooting pains through her neck, like little muscular manifestations of regret. In a sudden rush that made her moan, the events of the night came back to her.

The fight at the feast . . . the disaster in the vale . . .

She’d exploded at Mayzelle. At her own bondmother! Had brawled, had yelled, had lost control.

Yet still! Her soul sang with furious insistence. Still, yes, she’d done all that. But she’d been in the right. In the right!

And afterward . . .

Afterward, Rayet had run. Stumbling, tear-blinded, breathless, heedless, plunging pell-mell into the tanglewilds, to tumble here at last, sobbing, in the night-damp grass, and thrash herself into an anxious sleep.

Her stiff knees popped as they levered her up. All around her, the ecopods glowed with diffuse light, rimmed gold-pink at their crowns by the dawn. Rayet hobbled on dew-numb feet through the clutch. Seemingly egg-like from afar, cradled in the nest of their vale, the pods loomed like monuments from this close vantage, an open-air temple reared to Mother Earth.

At the marine habitat, Rayet squatted and searched for the shattered console in the grass. She was crawling on hands and knees around the pod when something glimpsed through the corner of her eye made her straighten. She rose, advanced, and peered, frowning, into the murky swirls within the glass. It took her a moment. Then . . . yes! There! Look! Rayet leaped forward, slapping her palms to the warm glass curve.

The trophic clouds! The milky whorls of biotic pollution. They were gone!

Finned shadows moved through the dappled green gloom of a healthy, balanced marine ecosystem.

Rayet pulled back, hands squeaking down the smooth glass. What—how—?

“It’s not easy to correct for an acute trophic imbalance. But with the right settings, it can be done.”

A white-haired man, no taller than her shoulder, was leaning against the curve of a nearby ecopod, fiddling with a portable console as he spoke. His wrinkled, dark face looked unfamiliar. But Rayet knew him, instantly, all the same.

“Uncle Biswas?”

The man’s bushy white eyebrows flicked up and down. She saw two milky, once-brown eyes peering out of his crinkled face. Then he dropped his gaze back to the console.

“The thing about nutrient imbalances is that the right kind of algal bloom will just . . . will just mop them all right up! It’s the cell engineering that does the trick. You can shift all that extra chemical energy very quickly to the top of the ecosystem, seal it up in those big fish bodies. Yes, there’s toxin accumulation, but, well, better a bit of biomagnification, I say, than a full microbial blowout, eh?”

With a shy smile and without quite meeting her eyes, Biswas handed the portable to Rayet. She thumbed the sliders, reviewing his settings, marveling at what looked to her like a pretty darn expert cleanup job.

“I used to do some ecofarming myself,” Biswas reminisced, rocking on his heels in the grass. “Still do enjoy it, when I get the time. Of course, it’s not the same on-ship.”

Rayet tucked the console under her arm. Her uncle bore no resemblance to the holoportraits she’d seen, which always made him look regal and authoritative. And tall, she mused, too, for that matter. Much taller. But he had the same wistful, distant expression.

“So you came,” she murmured. “You came after all.”

His cloudy eyes rolled to hers.

“Your mother wouldn’t have it any other way.” Before Rayet could react, Biswas held up a hand. “She’s tied up in knots over you, you know. Now, now. No need for recriminations. I’m sure everything that happened last night . . . I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding. The truth is, your mother’s afraid you’ll run away.”

“Run away? But why? Where would I go? To the Quartz Clan? I—” Then Rayet understood. Biswas was watching her with a shy smile. “With the Spacers?” She choked on her surprise. “She thinks I want to be a Spacer? Are you serious?”

Biswas’ smile was an ephemeral presence, flickering over his wrinkled face before tucking itself away in his dimpled cheeks. “I wouldn’t be so surprised, if I were you. Where do you think Spacers come from, after all? Many of us were Grounders once. And every Grounder we’ve taken on, they all found their way to us in the same fashion. First, they picked fights with us. Then, over time, they got to like the fighting. And then . . . well, what makes a good Spacer, after all? Why settle for a quarrel among fellow humans when you can join the greatest fight there is? The fight . . . with that.”

“With the void,” Rayet said, following his pointing finger to the sky.

Biswas lowered himself with a grunt to the grass. Rayet remembered that Spacers often set the gravity in their toroid ships to slightly above Earth normal: a proof of their strength.

She sank down beside him. “I could never be a Spacer, though. Why would she think that? I don’t actually like fighting. I’m not—”

“Rude?” Biswas finished her thought with a smile. “We are rude, aren’t we?” he chuckled. “Rude, pushy, and full of beans. If you ask me, some people are just born that way. It helps them to have something to push against. And there are some advantages to a rambunctious disposition. A high tolerance for risk, for one. The mortality rate up there can be frightful.”

Rayet opened her mouth to protest, but Biswas anticipated her.

“Ah, but why go up there at all? That must be what you’re wondering, eh? I’ve wondered it myself. Why take the risk? Why fight the great fight? I’m not sure it’s my place to answer. This old rock,” his small fist pounded the soil, “she made us the way we are, after all. It may be that Spacers have a role to play in this universe, one that you and I can’t quite understand. It might be that pushing is simply what life does. In which case, Spacers, with all their rudeness—”

He suddenly broke off, eyes swinging away, and lifted a hand and waved.

“But here’s your mother. And, much as I might deplore the task, I have a hundred drunken rocket-riders to herd. I’ll see you at the Leavetaking, I hope?”

Rayet was too distracted to answer promptly. By the time she nodded her assent, little Biswas had already departed. She saw him stumping along halfway up the trail. Before Rayet could call out to him, he turned and called to her.

“Of course, Rayet Waterweaver, if you do decide to join us . . . ”

Rayet could only shake her head. Biswas smiled, turned away again, and dipped into the bushes.

A moment later, Mayzelle hurried up, wringing her tunic hem in her hands.

“Did I miss him? I just saw him!”

“He went . . . ” Rayet gestured helplessly at the bushes. Mayzelle slumped, squeezing shut her eyes.

“Ai, ai, ai. He always does this! Well, I suppose I’ll catch him at the noon meal. I swear, I love the man, but he must be the shiest, most timid, most introverted . . . ”

She saw that Rayet was laughing.

“Let me guess. He’s not what you expected, is he?”

Rayet blinked. “I thought he would be taller, that’s for sure.” She turned to see Biswas reemerging on the far side of the tangle to go stumping up the hill. They watched together as his little white head bobbed toward the commune.

“And, yes, I thought he would be . . . well, more like a Spacer, you know?”

“If anything,” Mayzelle said, “he’s bolder now than he used to be as a boy. My mother used to say that in the growing years, he was the commune’s most sensitive child. He fell into a depression every time a habitat failed. He always did love to garden and farm. If he had his way, I’m sure he’d have spent his whole life down here with the ecopods.”

“He didn’t want to go to space?”

“Oh, no. Biswas? No, no, no, he was never that type. That was the whole problem, you see, back in those days. In his time, there were no long-haul ships. Little orbit jumpers, yes. Little stations, sure. But nothing that could even get to Mars. The Spacer soul, all that restlessness, that drive, all those people were still living down here. Quite a challenge for the commune leaders! You have to understand, this was just after the Long Decline. Memories of the Time of the Cities were still fresh in people’s minds. The conclave network had just barely formed, and the state of the biosphere . . . ah, well. You know the history. Suffice it to say, in the past, the people who now become Spacers would have ventured out to tame the earthly wilderness, or sailed on the high seas, or ventured over mountains, or gone out to conquer other lands. But now . . . ” Mayzelle’s gaze drifted over the fresh green fields and forests, the gentle sweep of the wide, tamed Earth. “Now, with the whole world one giant garden, what are fidgety people to do? Biswas simply gave them something new to distract them. A more stimulating habitat. There’s no particularly pressing need to conquer a bunch of sterile rocks and gasballs, after all. But if it keeps those people busy . . . ” She shook her head. “If poor Biswas had his druthers, I’m sure he’d never have . . . ”

Rayet laughed again. “So the great leader of the Spacers . . . isn’t even a Spacer!”

Mayzelle smiled. “He was the first. That doesn’t make him representative. The first to lead a long-haul flight. Others followed, of course, but . . . ” Her tone softened. “Why do you think we all loved him so much? Biswas gave up everything—everything he valued—to neutralize a threat to our way of life.”

Rayet shook her head, amazed. “He became a Spacer because he hated Spacers?”

Mayzelle flushed. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite like that. It is a relief, though, when children exhibit certain . . . tendencies . . . that we can now give them an outlet for their passions. Which brings me to my point, Rayet. I wanted to say—”

Rayet drew back. “Oh, no! No, no, no.”

“If you’d just listen—”

“He told me what you’ve been thinking, Mom. Really? Me? A Spacer? Are you crazy?”

“I just thought, if you could meet the man, listen to what he has to say . . . ” Mayzelle’s eyes were downcast. “You do seem to have . . . well . . . a forceful personality . . . ”

Rayet grabbed her bondmother by the shoulders. Then, surprising herself, she broke out laughing. Her laughter ran on, nervous, incredulous, until Mayzelle, with a touch of embarrassment, laughed too.

When their laughter faded, Mayzelle said defensively, “You can’t blame a mother for trying, after all.”

They set off, together, up the slope to the commune, and had made it almost to the edge of the tangle when Rayet suddenly yelped in delight.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mayzelle asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking. Uncle Biswas, he did what he always loved doing. He found an equilibrium.”

“Hmm? How is that?”

“You said ecoculture was his passion, right? System management, habitat maintenance. Well, he did it. He found a new flow, shifted excess energy out of the system. It must have been . . . ” Rayet’s laughter rang out over the greenswards. “I mean, getting the Spacers off the Earth . . . creating those two cultures, Spacers and Grounders, it . . . it has to be the greatest work of ecoculture in history!”

They topped the hill. From the edge of the tangle, Rayet could see the frail little white-haired figure, first of the Spacers, standing on the commune green, between the Conclave Hall and the Gathering Glade. His shipmates were gathered behind him, rowdy as ever. On the trampled, foot-divoted, trash-littered lawn, the mob of cosmonauts frolicked like puppies, jostling, teasing, exchanging jabs and backslaps, working themselves up for their next adventure. Yet, Rayet saw, they were, in their own strange, energetic way, like one great single unified organism . . . rough, yes; rambunctious, true . . . but with the energy and fierceness required to survive a harsh life in the void. They weren’t bad, so much as out of their element, like creatures adapted to a different habitat.

At the fore of the pack, the tiny figure of their admiral posed like an eagle at the prow of a ship.

“He’s not their leader, really,” Rayet said. “He’s ours.”

Mayzelle rested a hand on her shoulder. They waved together. And, with a shy wave back, the lonely little man in the distance turned to his flock and led them forward, rustling, rushing, hustling, striding, like a great creature dense with muscular energy, vividly alive in the morning sun: tensed, expectant, and prepared to take flight.