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repaired her. The cost, however, had been him , a ten-year term with the Confederation military.
    Of course, the treatment had also cost him Angela. They’d done something to her brain while saving her… something that had shut down her affection for him. Or, maybe that had been an effect of the stroke. That’s what they’d told him, anyway, that that sort of thing often happened when old neural pathways were burned out, new paths channeled in. Whichever it had been, his once-wife had chosen to leave him rather than going back to the canals and vine-covered islands of the Ruins.
    Hell, he couldn’t even blame her for that. She’d downloaded the skill sets allowing her to become a compositor, a career classification completely unknown to him. She’d moved north to New New York City’s Haworth District, he’d heard, and was living with an extended family there.
    At least she hadn’t been in Columbia when the impactor wave had brought the arcology tower down. Or at least, so he hoped. He hadn’t heard from her since he’d left for the Naval Training Center five years earlier. He’d been told she’d moved to Haworth and that she didn’t want to see him… but he didn’t know .
    “Shall I reply?” his PA asked.
    “Negative,” he said. He couldn’t imagine this crowd having anything pleasant to say to him.
    He’d tried to get out of coming tonight. Lieutenant Commander Allyn had told him yesterday, in the squadron ready room on board America , that he’d been volunteered for the fly-by show, with attendance at the Yule Festival afterward.
    “Why me?” he’d asked. “I’ve got nothing to do with Earthies anymore.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” the Dragonfires’ skipper had replied. “Maybe because you had something to do with saving all of their asses?”
    That again. “Fuck that, sir,” he said, using the Navy’s preferred gender-neutral honorific, though ma’am would have done as well. “I was doing my job.”
    “And maybe your job includes being a visible symbol of the Confederation Navy,” she’d told him. “Don’t give me grief, Gray. You’re on the flight roster, like it or not.”
    And here he was.
    In a nearby temporary alcove, Donovan was holding a young woman very closely indeed. She was wearing a sheath of golden, rippling light, and appeared to have extended the field to include Ben in her embrace. Gray looked away, embarrassed, and found himself looking into another alcove, this one with two men and a woman on a round sofa bed, engaged in some extremely passionate foreplay.
    Angry, he turned his head again and strode forward, determined to find something to eat. He felt so damned out of place here… .
    Within the Periphery, the necessities of survival tended to draw people into close, monogamous couples. Elsewhere, at least through much of North America, family groupings tended to be larger and extended, polyamorous, and impermanent. Throughout much of the background culture of the Confederation, the half-barbaric denizens of the Periphery were seen as amusingly quaint, or worse: as narrow-minded or even sexually perverted. They were commonly called “Prims,” which was short for “primitives,” of course, but the epithet held the double meaning of someone who was self-righteously prudish or closed sexually. “Monogies” was another derogative term for Prims who preferred a monogamous lifestyle; why would anyone want to restrict their life and their love to a single person?
    Gray was neither prudish nor self-righteous. He knew other communities did things differently when it came to sex and marriage, and had no problem with the fact. Extended social group marriages and sexcircles simply weren’t for him . The thought of casually coupling with a woman he didn’t know—and couldn’t trust—left him vaguely uneasy.
    A table extruded from the floor beneath an enormous transparency overlooking the Hudson was covered by dishes of various kinds, all of them pretty, few of