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volunteered."
    "I volunteered without being told what I was in for," Ariel said.
    "You were told," Martin said dubiously.
    "We were children. We were playing glory games. Out for quick revenge. They're asking us to get serious now, and we don't even know why… Because they won't tell us everything."
    "They haven't asked us to do anything yet. Hakim's team found the group—"
    "The moms have been watching those stars for thousands of years. Don't you know that?"
    Martin swallowed and looked away. "They're telling us all we need to know."
    Ariel smiled bitterly and shook her head. "They sent us out this way deliberately, to track these stars. Now they're going to use us to kill somebody, or get ourselves killed," she said. "I'm not alone. Others think this is shit, too."
    "But you're the only one with the guts to come forward," he said. He felt he had to leave soon or lose his temper completely.
    She regarded him with nothing quite so strong as hate; more like pity, as if he were a mindless demagogue not responsible for his actions.
    "I'm not alone," she said. "You remember that. We have our… doubts about all this. The moms had damn well better do something about it."
    "Or what, Ariel? You'll leave?"
    "No," she said. "Don't be an ass, Martin. I'll opt out for good. I'll kill myself."
    His eyes widened. She turned away from his shock and pushed out from a curved cylinder mounted to an interior conduit. "Don't worry about blood on your watch. I'm giving them time. I still hope we can do what we came out here to do. But my hope is fading fast. They have to tell us all, Martin."
    "You know that they won't," Martin said.
    "I don't know that, and why shouldn't they?" She turned around and echoed back, coming on like a slow tiger, extending her ladder field and hooking to a stop just seconds before they collided.
    Martin did not flinch. "The Benefactors have a home, too. They come from somewhere."
    "No shit," Ariel said.
    "Hear me out, please. You asked."
    She nodded. "All right."
    "If the whole galaxy is full of wolves, no bird peeps, not even eagles. The moms need to protect their makers. If we knew all about the Benefactors, in a few hundred years, a few thousand years, we might become wolves, too. Then we'd know where they were, and we'd come and get them."
    "That is so… cynical," Ariel said. "If they are so worried about us, why did they save us at all?"
    This was a question with many answers, none of them completely convincing. They had all debated the point, and Martin had never been satisfied with any of the answers, but he tried to put his best theories into words.
    "They believe in a balance," he said. "Whoever they are, they made the Ships of the Law to keep single civilizations from scouring the galaxy and having it all to themselves. Maybe it started out as self-defense—"
    "Maybe that's all it is now," Ariel said.
    "But they must believe that we'll contribute something eventually, when we're grown up."
    Ariel blew out her breath.
    "The moms tell us all that they can. They tell us what we need to know. We could never avenge the Earth without them. You know that. There's no reason to hate the moms."
    "I don't hate them," Ariel said.
    "We have work to do, a lot of decisions and thinking. I'd like us all to be together."
    "I won't disappoint anybody," Ariel said.
    "Please don't talk about killing yourself. It's stupid."
    She looked at him with narrowed eyes. "It's the only thing that's really mine, out here. Leave me that much."
    "I'm not taking anything from you," Martin said softly. His anger had flown, replaced by a cavernous awareness of what they were heading toward, what they were planning to do. "I ask nothing of you that you didn't volunteer to do."
    "How could we know what we'd lose?"
    Martin shook his head. "We've never had a chance to be people, much less to be children. We're a long way from a home that doesn't exist any more. We won't grow much older until after we do the Job. If we go back to the solar