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feeling the same reluctance she had so often before. She knew what spacers wore, and what ship captains wore, and she knew, without waiting for her mother to say so, that those simple outfits were not what her mother had in mind.
    “Even if you are in the wilds of the Borderlands,” her mother said, opening Ky’s closet. Ky could see that someone had already unpacked her luggage and put things away. “Even there, you must be prepared to present yourself properly. Perhaps even especially there.”
    When her mother was in one of these moods, it was easy to forget she was also a professional engineer of considerable reputation. It was the family background, Ky thought: being the eldest daughter of a socialite—for Grandmother Benton was still making news in the gossip columns with her endless string of admirers.
    “Not this. Not this either,” her mother said, flinging clothes to one side. “I know you thought you’d spend the rest of your life in uniform, dear, but surely you had more sense than this—” She held out an outfit in rust and green which, Ky had realized only after paying for it, made her look like someone a day away from death.
    “Sorry, Mother,” she said.
    “I don’t care what your father says, you simply must get some suitable clothes.” She eyed Ky up and down. “You aren’t shaped like anyone else in the family, worse luck. I can’t just tell you to put some meat on your bones. You have meat; it’s just not…”
    “Mother!”
    “Oh, be reasonable, Kylara. You’ll be representing the family; you must have clothes and they must fit. I’m not saying you’re ugly or misshapen; you’re just not…” Again her voice trailed away. “Well,” she said, after a moment’s awkward silence. “Measurements first and then we’ll see what we can order. Shops here on Corleigh are useless, but if something can be delivered to the ship before you leave, that will do.”
    The last thing Ky wanted to do was stand in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her, but she stood in the middle of the room while her mother ran a clothes scriber over her anyway. Halfway through, with her mother tut-tutting about the way the uniform had concealed what was after all an acceptable shape, it began to be funny. She wasn’t ready for it to be funny—for anything to be funny—but a bubble of laughter caught in her throat and she could feel the corners of her mouth turning up. Here she was, back home being measured for clothes yet again, clothes that would, she was sure, turn out to be impractical and uncomfortable.
    “What are you laughing at?” her mother asked, from knee level, without looking up. Her mother always knew, without having to see Ky’s face, when the ill-timed laugh demon caught her in the throat.
    “Nothing,” Ky said, sulky again.
    “It’s not funny,” her mother said, scribing her lower legs, her ankles, her feet.
    It was, though. Everything else in the universe was horrible, but this one thing was funny.
    The dinner chime saved her from unseemly giggles; her mother stood abruptly. “You’ll want to get out of that,” she said, without specifying what that was. They both knew.
    Ky took off the uniform she had been so proud to put on that morning, stepped into the ’fresher briefly, and put on loose slacks, blouse, and overrobe for dinner. She left the remnants of her past on the bed. Someone would take them away, clean them, fold them, put them somewhere… She didn’t care where.
    Dinner on the wide veranda… Father, Mother, and Sanish. Ky slid into her usual seat, facing the garden. Candles flickered in the evening air. Someone had gone to the trouble of preparing a festive meal—they had had, she realized, the hours she was in the air to put it together. The haunch of ’lope, boned, stuffed, and rolled, in a pastry crust. The stuffed grape leaves. The “tower of heaven” salad. Once again her body surprised her with its insistence on refueling;