along his shoulder. “Anyhow, why are we talking about this? You told me I had to stop you from talking shop. Okay, I just did. Quit it.”
Colman grinned and stroked her hair. “You’re right. So what do you want to hear about?”
She wriggled closer and slid an arm across his chest. “Tell me about Earth. I’ve told you how I grew up. What was it like with you?”
Colman smiled ruefully. “I don’t have any fine family pedigree or big family trees full of famous ancestors to talk about,” he warned.
“I’m not interested in anything like that. I just want to hear about someone who lived there and came from there. Where did you come from?’
“A city called Chicago, originally. Heard of it?”
“Sure. It’s on the lakes.”
“That’s right-Michigan. I think I was something of a not-very-welcome accident. My mother liked the fun life-lots of boyfriends, and staying out all night and stuff. I guess I was in the way a lot of the time.”
“Was your father like that too?”
“I never found out who he was. For all I know, nobody else did either.”
“Oh, I see.”
Colman sighed. “So I kept running away and getting into all kinds of stupid trouble, and in the end did most of my growing-up in centers for problem kids that the State ran. Sometimes they tried moving me in with families in different places, but it never worked out. The last ones tried pretty hard. They adopted me legally, and that’s how I got my name. Later we moved to Pennsylvania . . . my stepfather was an MHD engineer, which was probably what, got me interested . . . but there was some trouble, and I wound up in the Army.”
“Was that where you learned about engineering?” Kath asked.
“That came later-after I’d been on the ship for some time. At first I was with the infantry. . . saw some combat in Africa. I spent most of the voyage in the Engineer Corps though. . . up until about a year or two back.”
“What made you sign up for the trip?”
Colman shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess there didn’t seem much risk of making any worse a mess of things than J had already.”
Kath laughed and rolled back to stare up at the ceiling. “You’re just like us, aren’t you,” she said. “You don’t know where you came from either.”
“That happened with a lot of people,” Colman told her. “Things were so messed up after the war. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” Kath said. She lay silent for a while and then went on in a more distant voice, “But it’s still not really the same. I mean, it must be wonderful to have actually been born there … to know that you were directly descended through all those generations, right back to when it all began.”
“What?”
“Life! Earth life. You’re a part of it. Isn’t that an exciting feeling? It has to be.”
“So are you,” Colman insisted. “Chironian genes were dealt from the same deck as all the rest. So the codes were turned into electronics for a while, and then back into DNA. So what? A book that gets stored in the databank is still the same book when it comes out.”
“Technically you’re right,” Kath agreed. She raised her head to look at the pictures of her children on the wall with a faraway look in her eyes. “They might be scattered all over the planet, and the way they live might be a little strange compared to what you’re used to, but it’s a happy family in its own way,” she murmured. “But it’s still not really the same. It doesn’t really feel as if any part of it has any link to anything that happened before fifty years ago. Don’t you think it’s … oh, I don’t know, kind of a shame somehow?”
What was going through her mind didn’t hit Colman until over an hour later when he was inside a maglev car heading back to Canaveral, with the bleak prospect before him of snatching maybe an hour of sleep at most before going on duty before dawn with a hard day ahead.