Now and then Barton felt a really heavy wave of pres- sure, very general, not concentrated; for seconds it practically knocked him on his head, but didn't make him .want to do anything. Mark Gyril said it was the Children, ^rarming up under direction; The ship was still a time t^ort of no-return when the surges became more than Y^tty nuisance. So there was still a race on-the humans and the fuel supply against the Others and the Children.

**But why don't we just dump some fuel?" Lisa Teragni 479.

asked. They were in meeting at Cyril's and Elys's quarters, and Ferenc Szabo had joined the informal cabal.

Ren Bearpaw shrugged; Barton, sitting alongside Limila, waited to see who had an answer. He wasn't sure how he could have Jettisoned fuel from Ship One, in space, but he expected he could have managed it if he'd had to.

This ship, though, he knew very little about, reaHy.

When Ferenc started talking. Barton realized he knew even less than he'd thought. To beat light, a space-drive had to do two things. Get traction on space-time, and hold your space and time vectors closely in line-to those of the rest of the universe, so as to avoid mass-increase and time-dilation. The Demu ships did those things, and so did Earth's first and second fleets, and this big tub had to do them, also. But this drive wasn't adapted from what Barton had swiped from the Demu; it did its jobs in a considerably different way. Not just the efficiency- improving multiplex of components that he'd seen in the great ship on Sisshain, but an all-out different approach.

The bottom line was that you couldn't mess with the fuel supply, in any way, without cutting power to the whole ship. So refueling was done only in dead orbit, or downside.

"There's standby power," Ferenc said, "for essential items such as keeping the computer's memory alive, and minimum Comm-gear. But that doesn't even cover life- support; in orbit the maintenance crews would work in suits. Of course, in the drive areas they'd need those against radiation, anyway." Which surprised Barton, because with the ships he knew, radiation was only a problem if you went too far up another ship's drive wake, above light-speed. Well, he hadn't planned on doing any drive maintenance, on here.

Another thing that surprised him was that ship's- per- sonnel wouldn't know all this stuff already. But he'd seen that with a crew this big, people specialized a lot more. Not like Ship One, where everybody did .a little of everything.

Lisa wasn't done, though. "Then why don'f we look for the nearest planet we could settle on? And leave the ship in orbit with the power off? Why couldn't we have done that, weeks ago?"

"Same reason we couldn't change course to avoid Opal," Bearpaw said. "Base didn't think of it, J^nd we can't monkey with orders, or Dahil and Tiriis ta^ ^ver;

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school's out for sure." She nodded, obviously she had to buy it, but Barton saw she was looking for still another answer. That she didn't quit easily ...

Teragni's pregnancy was well along, but any time Bar- ton had seen Ren Bearpaw getting solicitous about it, she'd laugh and put him off. "Compared to last time, this is like having eaten a little too much for dinner."

And of course Barton realized another difference: this child, the two of them had begun on purpose. And the.

woman didn't have to be afraid of it.

When he and Limila left the meeting and went back to quarters. Barton had occasion to think more on such matters. Because that was when Limila told him she was

pregnant.

By Dahil, of course.

He looked at her, realizing that he'd been so taken up with the ship's problems, lately, that he hadn't been pay- ing her more than perfunctory attentions. Her hair had grown long enough to hang nearly to her brows, in front, obscuring the high Tilaran hairline. But not yet long enough to pull back. Her silver-irised eyes stood wide now, and if she hadn't had her lower lip between her teeth, he thought it might have trembled. Probably not, though; she wasn't much given to that sort of thing.

Barton cleared his throat^"How do you feel about it?"

Even to him, it sounded dumb, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Possibly. I want to see the Children. I want to know

what it is, that my body carries."

Well, that was certainly reasonable enough. He stood.

"I'll talk to Ferenc. We'll see what can be done."

Barton knew that the Others had let the Children be seen earlier, because Bearpaw had said so on the tapes, the censored parts that didn't tell much more than that fact. But later, Perenc told him. they'd blocked attempts to observe the nursery-covered the eye-pickups, for Y. instance. "I don't know why," the man said. "Maybe it's

tttime we found out."

r Limila accompanied the two men to the nursery. One ^*f the human attendants met them there, and after a certain amount of argument, agreed to fetch Tiriis. At first the Other refused to let them in. Then Limila said, "You and I will bear the same kind of young. You know

481.

what it will be; I do not. I think I have the same right, Tiriis." She stepped forward, and Tiriis gave a little ground, but not much. "My name is Limila."

Surprising Barton, Tiriis stepped back and aside.

"Come, man Limila, and man Ferenc, and-"

"Man Barton," Barton said, and followed them. "You remember me, I think."

"Remember, yes. To help Dahil, did. To help man Limila, now?"

"Something like that." Tense, alert for mental pressure, Barton felt none. A few doors along the corridor, they entered a small room. The important thing in if was a viewscreen with fairly sophisticated controls. Tiriis turned it on.

Barton saw a number of smallish creatures climbing around in a three-dimensional lattice. Reaching, he zoomed in on one and froze the picture for a moment, then let it run again in real time.

It took him some while to absorb all the derails, but in that first moment, Barton knew what he was seeing.

He turned to Limila. "This is of our prior knowledge."

And in the same language, she said, "And I think it will be of good. Barton, that of this time, at least, it re- main so."

The head was almost pure Other, except that there were two more eyes, one at each rear corner of the brain- case. Yes, Bearpaw had said, in one fragment,-that any adjacent pair could work together. The median fur strip came to points above and below the rear pay of eyes, leaving a bare space between.

The rest of it: on a blocky torso, four arms and four legs, each with more digits than Barton was used to. He concentrated on details. Upper arms set about human style, lower-Other?-pair on movable shoulders with fore-and-aft traverse. All four legs shaped like a blend of human and Other; Barton saw that the Children walked flatfooted like humans but ran on the toes of their long feet The outer pair of legs swung from hip joints that moved ahead and behind those of the inner pair. Same as the arms; yeh. So this is what they're like. '

"As infants," Ferenc said from behind Barton, "they're clumsy. Remind you of a drunken spider- But they learn coordination fast. You see how they streak through that low-G jungle gym in there. Well, they can dp ttu^.

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before they tackle prosaic things such as walking." He paused. "If you haven't noticed, they're male between the left pair of legs and female between the right. All elimination, though, is centrally located." Barton zoomed the picture; near as he could tell, it confirmed what Ferenc said. "The adult, it appears, will have four breasts, set approximately where humans and Others have their different placements." He repeated Bearpaw's quote of Gyril, on possible multiple births, but now it had context.

A little longer, Barton watched. There was no ques- tion about the Children's intelligence; watching the moves in a sort of flying tag game, he guessed they were using human-style logic and Other-style intuition about equally.

Then one of them, startling Barton, disappeared from one side of the room and appeared at the other.

And in moments they were all doing it. Just fun? A different stage of the game's rules? Barton didn't know, but one thing was clear. The only reason the Children weren't teleportmg all over the ship-if they weren't, and just keeping out of sight-was because they didn't want to.

Then Dahil, injured arm strapped to his chest, entered the Children's room and made one slight gesture, and Barton had an alternate hypothesis. Because the game stopped; all the young creatures turned to face Dahil.

The Other's mouth moved, but Barton could get no sound with the picture. Well, he couldn't know the language, anyway. But the point was, the Children gave Dahil in- stant obedience. So maybe the Children kept to the nursery because Dahil and Tiriis told them to. Barton had a quick thought that turning the Children over to the Others at birth might not have been the best move he'd ever heard of. But then be remembered that nobody had had much choice, about that.

Not that it mattered, because Barton knew, now, that sooner or later he was going to have to cross every Earthani on this ship, ^ He hoped he was up to it.

i He turned to Limila. "Seen enough?" She nodded; so tlid Ferenc, and then Tiriis led them back to the nursery entrance. There Barton paused, and looked at the female Other, seeing things about her that nobody else on the ship was likely to see. Except Limila, of course. He said,

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