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cook.”
    “Cooking was something I learned young.”
    Her eyes were curious. “Where was that?”
    “Lees.” Shortly. He put a spoonful of chowder in his mouth so that his terseness would be more understandable.
    “I never heard the name.”
    “It’s a planet.” Mumbling through chowder. “Pretty obscure.” He didn’t want to talk about it.
    “I’m from Earth.”
    He looked at her. “Really? Originally? Not just a habitat in the Sol system?”
    “Yes. Truly. One of the few. The one and only Earth.”
    “Is that what got you interested in whales?”
    Her spoon stirred idly in her chowder.   “I’ve always been interested in whales. As far back as I can remember. Long before I ever saw one.”
    “It was the same with me. I grew up near an ocean, built a boat when I was a boy and went exploring. I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m on the ocean.”
    “Some people live on the sea all the time.”
    “In floating habitats. That’s just moving a city out onto the ocean. The worst of both worlds, if you ask me.”
    He realized the beer was making him expansive, that he was declaiming and waving his free hand. He pulled his hand in.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, “about the last time we talked.”
    She looked away. “My fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”
    “You didn’t do anything wrong.” He realized he had almost shouted that, and could feel himself flushing. He lowered his voice. “Once I got out here I realized…” This was really hopeless. He plunged on. “I’m not used to dealing with people. There were just a few people on Lees and they were all… eccentric. And everyone I’ve met since I left seems at least five hundred years old. Their attitudes are so…” He shrugged.
    “Alien.” She was grinning.
    “Yes.”
    “I feel the same way. Everyone’s so much older, so much more… sophisticated, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s sophistication.”
    “They like to think so.”
    “I can feel their pity sometimes.” She toyed with her spoon, looked down at her bowl.
    “And condescension.” Bitterness striped Anthony’s tongue. “The attitude of, ‘Oh, we went through that once, poor darling, but now we know better.’”
    “Yes.” Tiredly. “I know what you mean. Like we’re not really people yet.”
    “At least my father wasn’t like that. He was crazy, but he let me be a person. He—”
    His tongue stumbled. He was not drunk enough to tell this story, and he didn’t think he wanted to anyway.
    “Go ahead,” said Philana. She was collecting data, Anthony remembered, on families.
    He pushed back from the table, went to the fridge for another beer. “Maybe later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
    Philana’s look was steady. “You’re not the only one who knows about crazy fathers.”
    Then you tell me about yours , he wanted to say. Anthony opened the beer, took a deep swallow. The liquid rose again, acid in his throat, and he forced it down. Memories rose with the fire in Anthony’s throat, burning him. His father’s fine madness whirled in his mind like leaves in a hurricane. We are, he thought, in a condition of mutual trust and permanent antagonism. Something therefore must be done.
    “All right.” He put the beer on the top of the fridge and returned to his seat. He spoke rapidly, just letting the story come. His throat burned. “My father started life with money. He became a psychologist and then a fundamentalist Catholic lay preacher, kind of an unlicensed messiah. He ended up a psychotic. Dad concluded that civilization was too stupid and corrupt to survive, and he decided to start over. He initiated an unauthorized planetary scan through a transporter gate, found a world that he liked, and moved his family there. There were just four of us at the time, dad and my mother, my little brother, and me. My mother was— is— she’s not really her own person. There’s a vacancy there. If you’re around