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somehow—“like Earth?”
    “Like Earth!” Insigna spoke with vehemence. “You’ve never been on Earth. You don’t know anything about Earth!”
    “I’ve seen a great deal about it, Mother. The libraries are full of films about Earth.”
    (Yes, they were. Pitt had felt for some time now that such films ought to be sequestered—or even destroyed. He maintained that to break away from the Solar System meant to
break away;
it was wrong to maintain an artificial romanticism about Earth. Insigna had disagreed strongly, but now she suddenly thought that she could see Pitt’s point.)
    She said, “Marlene, you can’t go by those films. They idealize things. They talk about the long past for the most part, when things on Earth were better, and, even so, it was never as good as they picture things to have been.”
    “Even so.”
    “No, not ‘even so.’ Do you know what Earth is like? It’s an unlivable slum. They’s why people have left it to form all the Settlements. People went from the large dreadfulworld of Earth to small civilized Settlements. No one wants to go in the other direction.”
    “There are billions of people who still live on Earth.”
    “That’s what makes it an unlivable slum. Those who are there leave as soon as they can. That’s why so many Settlements have been built and are so crowded. That’s why we left the Solar System for
here
, darling.”
    Marlene said in a lower voice, “Father was an Earthman. He didn’t leave Earth, even though he might have.”
    “No, he didn’t. He stayed behind.” She frowned, trying to keep her voice level.
    “Why, Mother?”
    “Come, Marlene. We’ve talked about this. Many people stayed home. They didn’t want to leave a familiar place. Almost every family on Rotor had stay-on-Earths. You know that very well. Do you want to return to Earth? Is that it?”
    “No, Mother. Not at all.”
    “Even if you wanted to go, you’re over two light-years away and you can’t
go
. Surely you understand that.”
    “Of course I understand that. I was just trying to point out that we have another Earth right here. It’s Erythro.
That’s
where I want to go; that’s where I
long
to go.”
    Insigna couldn’t stop herself. It was almost with horror that she heard herself say, “So you want to break away from me, as your father did.”
    Marlene flinched, then recovered. She said, “Is it really true, Mother, that he broke away from you? Perhaps things might have been different if you had behaved differently.” Then she added quietly, just as though she were announcing that she was done with dinner. “You drove
him
away, didn’t you, Mother?”

FOUR
FATHER
7.
    Odd—or perhaps stupid—that she was still capable of hurting herself unbearably with thoughts of that kind after fourteen years.
    Crile was 1.8 meters tall where, on Rotor, the average height for men was a bit under 1.7 meters. That alone (as in the case of Janus Pitt) gave him a commanding aura of strength that persisted well after the time when she came to recognize, without ever quite admitting it to herself, that she could not rely on his strength.
    He had a craggy face, too; a prominent nose and cheekbones, a strong chin—a look, somehow, of hunger and wildness. Everything about him spoke of strong masculinity. She could almost smell it when she met him, and was struck with fascination at once.
    Insigna was still a graduate student in astronomy at the time, completing her stint on Earth, looking forward to returning to Rotor so that she could qualify for work on the Far Probe. She dreamed of the wide advances the Far Probe would make possible (and never dreamed that she herself would make the most astonishing one).
    And then she met Crile and found herself, to her own confusion, madly in love with an Earthman—an
Earthman
. Overnight she felt herself abandoning the Far Probe in her mind, becoming ready to remain on Earth just to be with him.
    She could still remember the way he had looked at