We need ritual and ceremony. You run an interesting planet."

I picked her up, kissed her, put her down, and ran.

The shuttle angled in over To'an Betes, and before it had settled the Aerans mobbed it, cheering and flinging things. The hatch creaked open and our saviors appeared, and I thought the people would rupture their throats with yelling.

Hetch, Merkit, Tham. Bakar carrying Jes. Injured? My throat tightened, and I pushed forward, but Bakar shook my son and put him down. Jes rubbed his eyes, then saw the people and looked at first surprised, then sheepish. Mish came from the shuttle and put her hand on his shoulder, and my throat tightened again. I knew that set of face, that absence of expression, and I batted people out of my way, trying to reach her. Jes said something to her and she smiled, a flat, terrible rictus. Jes laughed, and the people surged up the ramp and down again, carrying my wife, my son, my friend, and the crew on their shoulders. Mish's lips were pale around her grimace. I saw Hoku standing on the packed dirt barrier, looking at Mish. The doctor began shouting, but couldn't be heard. I bulled my way through the crowd, ignoring the shouts.

"Hey!" I yelled. "Gimme my wife!"

The people laughed. Mish stretched her arms toward me and fell, and I caught her to my chest. She grabbed me and hid her face against my neck. Her body shook. I carried her from the pad amid cheers and ribaldry, then ran through the meadow to the nearest shelter, the trees along the stream. Water splashed into my boots, and when I found a small clearing I sat, still holding her. She held tight, shaking. She wasn't crying.

"Mish, are you hurt? Are you all right?"

Her nod was a jab of chin against my neck. After a time the shaking lessened. She pulled away and put her hands to her face. I waited.

"Jes and I were in the hold, and we had to get out. I pushed two guards into the hold and I emptied it." Her voice was without inflection, and she didn't look at me. "Jes and I ran away, and I fell into a storage bin and hit my head. When I came to, Jessie was gone. I looked all over for him. Bakar was in the crew room. There was a guard. The guard told Bakar that they'd taken Jessie to another ship. He didn't see me."

She stopped. I put my hand on her arm, but she twitched away from me, and I put my hand back in my lap.

"I picked up a pipe and I killed the guard. I hit him on the back of his neck and I killed him. Bakar and I went to the bridge and we killed Hetch's guard. Bakar strangled her. Hetch and Bakar went to the control room and killed the other two guards. I don't know how. I think Merkit killed one of them. Then we went through the grab, then Jessie came back."

She stopped again. She still hadn't looked up at me. I didn't speak.

"Before we came down, we opened the hold to see what was there. If we could bring it down. Some of it. I pushed two soldiers into the hold. I emptied it." She began shaking again. "There were, there, pieces of them, Jason? They were alive when I, but, pieces of uniforms. Gray stuff. Red. All over. I killed them, Jase. And the one in the crew room." She looked up at me now, her face pale and still.

"I killed three people," she said. "Three. And I'd do it again."

And there she sat, as though awaiting judgment. I stared back at her. I knew how Mish felt about killing. She had once come before the Family Council on Terra, come to argue for the life of one of her coworkers. The hearing had been held, the man judged guilty, the sentence passed, yet she walked into the Council room small and intense and furious, and delivered herself of a lecture on morality such as I doubted the Council had heard in years. To kill, she said, is to commit an act of murder. To kill in self-defense is still to commit an act of murder. To kill as punishment is to commit an act of murder.

To murder is a foul and evil thing. Did the Council wish themselves to be seen as a pack of murderers? As no better than those whom they judged? If the punishment for death was death, they would all, by their own laws, have to commit suicide the moment the sentence was executed on the prisoner, and she doubted whether they had the courage or conscience to do so. Therefore, their only rational course of action was to commute the sentence. Tiny, logical, furious Mish. They paid no more attention to her than they had paid to similar arguments over the years. We confirmed the sentence. And I descended from the dais to argue further with this irritating gnat of a woman, and fell in love.

To kill is to murder. No exceptions. No excuses.

That she had done it, and said that she would do it again if necessary, did not mean that she stood ready to disregard her own moral imperatives. She had killed in the defense of her son and of herself; self-defense is no excuse. It could be argued that her killing of the soldiers had saved our entire planet, but the murder nevertheless remained.

I had killed people myself, during that first raid on NewHome. No more clean then she, yet she looked to me for judgment, and I could find no way around the morals to the comfort, no logical argument to clear her mind.

She sat and looked at me as though prepared to spend the remainder of her life in that small clearing. Giving me her guilt. And she had changed again, from the warm, strong woman of our solitary years, from the cool, distant woman she had become since Meya's birth. She had been lost to me, and now that it seemed I could reach through, touch her, bring back the warmth and strength, I sat silent, terrified of saying the wrong thing and losing her forever.

'We need ritual and ceremony', Hoku had said to me. 'Does us good.'

I rose and waited while Mish struggled to her feet, then turned and walked back to the stream, hearing the brush crackle and snap as she stumbled behind me. A few meters downstream the water made a deep pool, surrounded by stones and forest. I waited until she stood beside me, then nodded toward the water. Without hesitation, she walked right off the bank and disappeared.

She didn't come up again. Her fall had stirred the murk, and I squinted, unable to see her. The water settled again. She didn't come up.

I took three running steps and dove in. Mish sat cross-legged on the soft floor of the pool. Bubbles were caught in her fine, dark hair, and one hand grasped the root of a tree. She looked at me and opened her mouth, loosing a stream of bubbles, and I grabbed her and hauled her out of the pool.

She was shaking again, but this time with cold. I held her in my lap, rubbed her arms and shoulders, and babbled. She put her finger on my lips.

"You came for me."

"Of course I did! Sweet Mother, did you think I wanted you to drown?"

"I didn't know," she said.

I put my face in her wet hair, held her, and cursed her wearily and at length. Then I cursed myself. Mish put her arms around my neck and cried. A little bit for lost innocence, perhaps; a little bit for finding in herself the same sins and darkness as the rest of us. Whatever. After a while she fell asleep. Her face looked older.

When I picked her up to carry her home, she woke and insisted on walking. And when we walked through Haven, she smiled at the people, and nodded, and held my hand.

I didn't know the Mish I brought home that afternoon. Knew very little, save that she had changed again, and the change was, this time, to warmth.

A delegation of bloody-minded Aerans went up to the 'Folly' and cleaned imploded soldiers off the crates. Much of the red stuff, they reported, was the remains of a crate of berries, but Mish still avoided the goods they brought to Haven.

Gaudy fabrics, flashing jewels, tins of exotic foods, crates of artwork, enough small weaponry to outfit a regiment. The weapons, by common consent, were placed under lock and key in Haven's new Town Hall. Fabrics and food were apportioned evenly, and the jewelry, after some bickering, went to Hetch to pay off some of what we owed him. He needn't have given us the goods at all; Mish and Ved and Hoku and I all told him so, but he shrugged and blustered and ignored us. And bargained the price of the jewelry to a minimum.

Hetch and his crew were stranded on Aerie until the grab was fixed, but it seemed a small problem. The Aerans took Hetch out regularly and got him roaring drunk, and he would stumble back to the Tor five days later, hung over and kilograms fatter. The crew we saw even less frequently. They were passed from family to family in Haven, from board to bed and back again, and by late winter Haven seemed populated by women walking around belly forward. Hoku grumbled and yelled and trained a midwife. But the spring crop turned up only three children with Tham's fair hair, and two with Bakar's disposition. Hoku lectured on the biological reaction to warfare and advised against diapers.

Merkit found the kasirene after the second week on planet, and spent most of her time in the native village. I'd see her tall, broad shape stalking out of Haven with a case of beer on her shoulder, and if she saw me she'd give me her black-toothed grin and wave as she swung on down the valley.

Mish would reach a hand to touch me as I walked by her, or spend afternoons in the barn with me as I tinkered in the shop. Coming toward me rather than away from me; when we argued about the farm or plantation or village, the intensity remained, but the bitterness was gone. I dreamed about another child, but remembered Meya and did not want to ask. Rough and careful edges, avoidances and small silences, but the warmth was there. Something to grow. I can't remember that I was always happy, but I can remember that I was content. It seemed enough.

Meya learned to read that winter, and Jes put his heroism aside and went back to school. Hoku put Hetch on a diet, and to my amazement he kept to it. He claimed to be more terrified of Hoku than of any three NewHome warships, and I believed him. Hart spent most of his time in Haven, intent on his own business. And Quilla worked and retreated into silence, insisting that she preferred to be alone. She was seventeen that winter, old enough to know her own mind. I let her be. Tham married one of his big-bellied ladies and two weeks after Year'sEnd went from house to house with his new daughter bundled in his arms. Hoku chased him home before he was too drunk to walk. Mish told me about Tabor. Nothing changed.

The winter was a mild one, one of those seasons for which every farmer prays -- a minimum of frost, a sufficiency of rain, a number of days of sunlight breaking through the usual gray overcast. We had gathered enough seed from the first sickly seedlings to plant out about four or five thousand 'Zimania' bushes, in neat, contoured rows, well drained, and in full sunlight, when the sunlight came. Looking at the plantation from the Tor, I could see the oldest plants already at their full growth, and the two-year plants next to them. At the edge of the field were the small green bundles of the one-year seedlings, and beyond them the empty fields stretched, cleared, and waiting for the newest seedlings to be planted in the spring. We would gather our first harvest during the year -- a small harvest, more a token of what would come later than any real return for our efforts and time. Hetch estimated that we would produce just enough to meet our first repayment to him, but he offered extended credit, and in gratitude for his help and optimism, we accepted. How sweet the future looked, that winter after the NewHome scare. I felt my land seeding and fruiting, felt my people moving and growing, becoming ever more firmly Aerans, erasing the scars of their past. The air smelled clean and fresh and hopeful, and I sang as I worked my world.

Ten months Aerie after what Hoku termed "The Great Salvation," the Federation repair crew appeared and cluttered up the sky with hunks of orbiting machinery. They brought with them a Galactic Federation Security Inspector, Division of Transport, Department of Cohen/Albrecht Effect Devices, Malfunction Investigation Desk. We all trooped down to the pad to meet her.

She was a brisk, sharp-faced woman in a uniform, and she marched down the ramp and glared at Captain Hetch.

"You, I take it, are the owner and captain of that orbiting scrap heap up there," she said.

"Bet your ass," Hetch said. "Bet I can beat your time, too."

Jes grinned.

The Inspector clamped her lips as tight as a cold winter and marched up the hill to the Tor.

She had a questionnaire fourteen sheets long. She sat behind the dining table, shooting questions at Mish and myself as Aerie's owners, Hetch as what she termed the "Transport Factor," and Ved Hirem and Hoku as Haven's community leaders. She did the most effective squash of Ved's long-windedness I had ever seen. When she'd filled all fourteen sheets with information on Aerie and its population, location, planet pattern, native-to-human ratio, climate, crops, imports, and exports, and on 'Folly', its captain, crew, and most minute specifications, she pulled out another questionnaire and set to it with grim satisfaction. She interrogated Mish, Jes, Hetch, and the crew about the grab's destruction. Merkit offered her a beer. Laur insisted on a dinner break. The Inspector maintained a disapproving silence throughout the meal, then set to her questions again. No one left. Meya fell asleep in my arms.

Finally the inspector snapped her case and rose.

"The grab repairs will come to two hundred forty-nine thousand, seven hundred eighty-two fremarks," she said. "You'll be tariffed accordingly."

In the ensuing chaos, Hetch leaped to his feet and pounded on the table. His face turned purple.

"What in suckin' hell do you mean, tariffed accordingly? Who do you -- ".

"Not you, Captain -- Aerie."

"That's what I meant! We didn't break your suckin' grab; it was a NewHome ship. Tariff NewHome, damn it!"

"The Federation is not a charity, Captain. If we let people destroy Federation property without penalty, we'd be bankrupt."

"That's not the point!" Hetch roared. "Penalties assessed against the damaging party or the party owning the damaging property: section four-oh-nine, sub-fifteen, sub-nineteen. Regulations! Tariff NewHome!"

People muttered agreement. Mish stood, fists clenched, ready to leap to the attack the moment Hetch faltered. I took her hand, and she shook me away.

The Inspector glared at Hetch and banged on the table herself. "We can't!" she said, shouting to be heard. "NewHome's primary went nova three weeks ago standard. There's nothing there to tariff."

The room silenced and heads turned toward the window.

The Inspector sniffed. "You won't see it for four years standard. Even backwashers ought to know that."

Hoku touched her arm. "We're most of us from NewHome," she said. "You'd better leave."

The people moved aside to let her pass. In a few minutes the lights of her shuttle winked through the sky and disappeared, and one by one the people left the house and went down the hill to Haven. Mish and I and the children stood in the yard and watched their quiet, terrible progress.

"They're really Aerans now," Mish said. She put her head against my chest. I watched the lights of Haven go out, one by one, and bent to rest my cheek against her hair.

Two months after the tariff was imposed, Simit appeared at the Tor for his annual State of the School address, and this time his normal praises of progress and requests for more funds included an interesting piece of information.

"Hart has been doing quite well," Simit told us after the main business of the school had been discussed. "He shows an aptitude for the sciences, which I find quite pleasing. Due to Gren's influence, no doubt."

Mish and I looked at each other with surprise.

"Gren?" Mish said.

"Kalor Gren, who lives next door to the school. You must know about that," the teacher said. "He and Hart have been quite close friends for, oh, quite a while now. Since the beginning, almost."

"Are you sure?" I said, astounded. "Hart doesn't like any of ... anyone outside this family. He's a very withdrawn boy. If he were to make friends with anyone, it wouldn't be Gren."

Simit managed to look both distressed and disapproving, and his scar darkened. "I had no idea that you would disapprove, or I would have mentioned it earlier. I had assumed that you would, of course, know what Hart was doing."

I suspect that Mish and I both looked uncomfortable.

"We've been very busy," I said. "All this tariff stuff, you know.

Paperwork."

Mish took the initiative, covering her uneasiness with an air of earnest inquiry. "How does Gren tie in with the sciences?" she said, leaning forward.

"He was a biochemist on NewHome," Simit said, "quite a famous one, at least on planet. He studied with Harmon, you know, on Kroeber." Simit laughed, his disapproval fading. "At least Gren didn't pick up any of Harmon's habits.

The combination would have been impossible."

"Habits?" I said, eager to keep Simit off the subject of our lack of knowledge of our son's ways.

"Oh, didn't you know about that? Harmon spent a year teaching on NewHome, and I had the opportunity to study under him. Brilliant man, but somewhat eccentric. Kept his clothing in his carry-case, and every time he needed some papers, he'd open the case and out would pop socks and shirts and old crusts of bread. Kept dyeing his beard, too. A regular demon when it came to research, I'm told."

"Fascinating," I murmured. "More tea?"

Simit shook his head. "Gren did research, too, back home." Simit paused, then said, "Back on NewHome. In any event, he's taken quite a liking to Hart. I believe they spend every afternoon together. I had assumed that Hart had your approval." He cleared his throat. "If you would like me to see that Hart remains busy after school..."

"No, that's all right," Mish said. "Everything's fine."

Simit smiled his relief, and I felt sorry for the man. He obviously felt that as a teacher his duty was to scold us for our inattention, but as a citizen of Aerie he had to look up to us as the owners of the planet -- an uneasy dilemma. We chatted about this and that, and as I walked him to the door he said, "Oh, Gren was working in genetic chemistry, that was it." Simit sighed. "No way to use that here, I suspect. Oh, well, in time. In time."

When I came back to the living room, Mish was staring into the fire, her hands folded in her lap. I stood behind her and put my hand on her shoulder, and she bent her head to rest her cheek against my arm.

"You didn't know?" she said.

"Not a thing. And you?"

She shook her head. "Should we do anything about it?"

I came around beside her and sat on the footstool. "I don't know. It's probably harmless. I'm most ashamed of not knowing about it, of not paying sufficient attention."

"Neither of us did. We're all so damned busy, Jase. We end up paying attention only when something goes wrong. I don't like that."

"I don't like it, either. I guess I've just assumed that if the children were doing something new, they'd let us know."

"Jes does. Quilla does. But Hart's a quiet one; he never seems to say much at all."

"Thinks a lot, though. Watches things."

Mish nodded, frowning.

"Mim doesn't like him," I said.

She looked at me. "You noticed that?"

"I'm not totally insensitive," I said. Mish smiled. "Anyway, it's pretty obvious."

"Yes, and he doesn't like her, either."

Mish put her elbow on the arm of the chair and propped her chin on her fist. She looked weary.

"I suppose we should talk to Hart," I said.

She nodded. "At least find out what's going on. Make sure he's safe."

"He's probably safe enough." I went upstairs to Hart's room. He was lying on his bed reading, and he came readily enough when I asked him to.