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such matters. I was a Carr, wasn’t I? Perhaps I should go home after all, and …
    No. Anth had to realize I was nearly grown. I couldn’t crawl to him. He’d have to come to me.
    “In anything. You can stay the night. Tomorrow, I’ll decide if it’ll be longer. But if Mr Carr tells me you’re to go home, you go. In the meantime, keep away from the Cathedral. Really, I should steer clear of you, but you’re Kevin’s friend, and your family took him in when …” He threw up his hands. “Enough. Kev will show you your room, and you’ll help fix dinner. We’ll eat when I get home.” He eyed my rumpled shirt. “You have clothes?”
    I shook my head, ashamed. It wasn’t as if I’d planned to leave home, for Christ’s sake.
    “Kevin, sort through the closet in the green bedroom where I packed away your old things. They might fit.”
    “Yes, sir.” Kev tugged me toward the door. “Thanks, Dad.”
    “And show Randy where the shower is. We should all be clean for dinner.”
    I blushed to the tips of my ears. “Thank you.” It was no more than a mumble.
    On the way home, Kev took it easy on my tired feet. “That’s where the reservoir used to be, and the hospital. Back when the fish bombed us …”
    I barely listened. It was ancient history, and I already knew. “Jeez, your dad is strict.”
    “Yeah, well …” Kev strode a few more paces. “He claims he was a real heller when he was a joeykid, and he’s determined I won’t be.” He kicked a pebble. “He’s nice enough, I guess. But he embarrassed me, the way he was looking you over.”
    “Hell, he had to decide. It’s his home.”
    “Mine too,” Kev said.
    “What did he mean about taking you in?”
    “Last spring, before he put me in the farm program, we didn’t get along too good.” He reddened.
    “What’s your grandfather think about it?”
    “Huh?”
    “Dakko & Son. If your dad’s the son …”
    “Oh, Grandpa. He died last winter. The T.”
    My breath hissed. “Melanoma T?”
    “Yeah. Grandpa loved to travel, and he started interstellar late. The odds finally caught up with him. He was ninety.”
    It was one of the drawbacks of sailing among the colonies. Fusion drives generated the N-waves that enabled our ships to bypass the speed of light. But the waves could be deadly. Every so often they mutated simple melanoma, which was curable, into melanoma T, which generally was not. That’s why the U.N. Navy recruited joeykids as young as thirteen to cadet Academy; if you were exposed within five years of puberty, the risk was much reduced. It was in a bunch of physics stuff I was supposed to take next year. Who cared? Only an idiot would want to be cooped in a ship a year at a time.
    I said so.
    Kev’s face tightened. “Don’t call Grandpa an idiot.”
    Oops. “I didn’t mean that.”
    “He was really cool.” We walked a while. Presently, the heel of his hand flicked past his eye, as if wiping away an itch.
    I wished I hadn’t unsettled him. “Kev …” I stopped short. “If my being here stirs up trouble between you and your—”
    “No, once Dad agreed, it’s all right. He’s just got this attitude …” A vague wave of the hand. “I do what I want most of the time, and don’t even have to let him know. But when he tells me to do something …” A glum shake of the head. “He says I’ll be raised better than he, and I have no choice in the matter. Grandpa thought it was funny.”
    “What’s your mom like?”
    “Who knows? She’s lived on Constantine for thirteen years.”
    “How come you didn’t go?”
    “She has my sister.”
    It made no sense, but I kept quiet. Family arrangements weren’t to be pried into. It was gauche, whatever that meant. Or so Anthony warned me.
    Kevin sighed. “Dad doesn’t believe in cloning. Says it plays hell with the gene pool.”
    He’d opened the subject, so I was free to inquire. “You had a host mother?”
    “No, they each wanted a joeykid, so they married. When