have had to give up Tabath, and the same for all the other bachelors.”
And all the Stars a Stage 179
“Great Ghost. Hmm. How many of them are there aboard ship now, do you
think?”
“None, I’m almost sure,” Ailiss said. “Everyone sur~ viving from the first
generation is married; and of course, we couldn~t make new familiars for
the male children, we diddt have the laboratory to reproduce them.” The
wrinkles at the comers of her eyes suddenly deepened sharply. “Though from
what I saw back up there, she’d solved that problem. Quite an achievement,
when you look at it dispassionately.”
‘Yes. An egg. Thafs what I took that apple-thing to be, too. But only on
intuition.” He stared down at the still-incomplete game on the Castles
board. “And you were asking me what I thought of all thisl You might as
well go on. Why did she do it?”
“Do what?”
“Dodt dodge, Ailiss, this is your field. Why did she help her son’s
familiar to make the egg?”
“If I told you that you would go out of your own mind.”
“There seem to be a good many things that you dodt tell,” he said stiffly.
“There are some things I dont tell until I’m asked,” she said, “and some I
dodt tell even then. You want an explanation? It depends on who died first.
Well never know that now, and we might never have been able to figure it
out; obviously the familiar was living off the corpses’ body fluids, which
was a new departure in itself. But if he died first, then she knew the
familiar would die soon after unless she could get it to reproduce; strong
though it was, it needed some new emotional attachment. And she still felt