Renna's enthusiasm was infectious. Maia had never known anyone so uninhibited, so unrestrained by conventional ideas. Still, a part of her wondered. Is he always like this? Was everybody like this, where he came from?

"I don't know," she cut in when he paused for breath. "What you're saying makes sense . . . but what about that happy, stable world Lysos wanted? Are we happy? Happier than people on other planets?"

Renna smiled, meeting her eyes once more. "You get right to the heart of the matter, don't you, Maia? How can I answer that? Who am I to judge?" He looked up at low, white cumulus clouds, whose flat bottoms rode an invisible pressure layer not far above the Manitou's topmast. "I've been to worlds which might seem like paradise to you. All your terrible experiences, this year, would have been next to impossible on Passion or New Terra. Law, technology, and a universal maternal state would have prevented them, or instantly stepped in with remedies.

"On the other hand, those worlds have problems rarely or never seen here. Economic and social upheavals. Suicide. Sex crimes. Fashion slavery. Pseudowar, and sometimes the real thing. Solipsism plagues. Cyberdysomism and demimortalism. Ennui. …"

Maia looked at him, wondering if he even noticed his lapse into alien dialect. Most of the words had no meaning to her. It reinforced her impression that the universe was vast, unfathomably strange, and forever beyond her reach.

"All I can do is speak for myself." Renna continued in a low voice. He paused, looking across the sun- and shadow-splashed sea, then turned back and squeezed her hand again, briefly. His face crinkled in a startling manner at the edges of the eyes, and he smiled.

"Right now I'm happy, Maia. To be here, alive, and breathing air from an endless sky."

Maia cheered up considerably once the talk moved on to other things. Answering Renna's questions, she tried to explain some of the mysterious activities of Manitou's sailors — climbing the rigging, unfurling sails, scraping salt crust, oiling winches, tying lanyards and untying them, performing all the endless tasks required to-keep a vessel in good running trim. Renna marveled at myriad details and spoke admiringly of "lost arts, preserved and wonderfully improved."

They told more of their personal stories. Maia related some of the amusing misadventures she and Leie used to have, as young hellions in Port Sanger, and found that a poignant warmth of recollection now overcame much of the pain. In return, Renna told her briefly of his capture while visiting a House of Ease in Caria, at the behest of a venerable state councillor he had trusted.

"Was her name Odo?" she asked, and Renna blinked. "How did you know?"

Maia grinned. "Remember the message you sent from your prison cell? The one I intercepted? You spoke of not trusting someone called Odo. Am I right?"

Renna sighed. "Yeah. Let it be a lesson. Never let your gonads get ahead of clear thinking."

"I'll take your word for it," Maia said dryly. Renna nodded, then looked at her, caught her expression, and they both broke down, laughing.

They continued telling stories. His concerned fascinating, faraway worlds of the Great Phylum of Humanity, while Maia lingered over the tale of her ultimate conquest, with Leie's help, of the most secret, hidden part of Lamatia Hold, solving the riddle of a very strange combination lock. Renna seemed impressed with the feat, and claimed to feel honored when she said it was the first time she had ever told anyone about it.

"You know, with your talent for pattern recog—"

A shout interrupted from the radar shed. Two boys went scrambling up the mainmast, clinging to an upper spar while peering in the distance. One cried out and pointed. Soon, the entire ship's complement stood at the port rail, shading their eyes and staring expectantly.

"What is it?" Renna asked. Maia could only shake her head, as perplexed as he. A murmur coursed the crowd, followed by a sudden hush. Squinting against reflections, Maia finally saw an object hove into view, ahead and to the south.

She gasped. "I think . . . it's a greatflower tree!"

It had all the outward appearances of a small island. One covered by flagpoles draped with tattered banners, as if legions had fought to claim and hold a tiny patch of dry land in the middle of the sea. Only this isle drifted, floating at an angle to the steady progress of the ship. As they approached, Maia saw the flagpoles were like spindly tree trunks. The ragged pennants weren't ensigns at all, but the remnants of glowing, iridescent petals.

"I saw a clip on these, long ago," Maia explained. "The greatflower lives off tiny sea creatures. You know, the kind with just one cell? Below the surface, it spreads out filmy sheets to catch them. That's why Poulandres ordered us to move away, instead of going closer for a better look. Wouldn't be right to hurt it, just out of curiosity."

"The thing looks pretty badly damaged already," Renna commented, noting the frayed flowers. Yet he seemed as enthralled as Maia by those remaining fragments, whose blue and yellow and crimson luminance seemed independent of reflected sunlight, shimmering across the waters. "What are those? Birds, picking away at the plant? Is it dead?"

Indeed, flocks of winged creatures — some with filmy wingspans wider than the Manitou's spars — swarmed the floating island like midges on a dying beast, attacking the brightly hued portions. Maia replied, "I remember now. They're helping it. That's how the greatflower breeds. The birds carry its pollen in their wings to the next tree, and the next."

As they watched, a small detachment of dark shapes swirled off the cloud of birds and came swooping toward the Manitou. At the captain's sharp command, crewmen dove belowdecks, emerging with slingshots and wrist catapults, which they fired to drive the graceful, soaring beasts away from the straining sails. The fliers inflicted only a little damage with narrow jaws filled with jagged teeth, before losing their appetite for canvas and flying away . . . though not before one tried nipping at the bright red hair of one of the boys aloft. An event that everyone but the poor victim seemed to find hilarious.

The greatflower flowed past only a hundred meters away. Its maze of color could now be seen extending beneath the water's surface, in tendrils that floated far behind. Schools of bright fish darted among the drifting fronds, in counterpoint to the frenetic feeding of the birds. Maia snapped her fingers. "Too bad we missed seeing one in late summer, when the flowers are in full bloom. Believe it or not, the trees use them as sails, to keep from being blown ashore during storm season. Now I guess the currents are enough, so the sails fall apart."

She turned to Renna. "Is that an example of what you mean by … adaptation? It must be an original Stratoin life-form, or you'd have seen things like it before, wouldn't you?"

Renna had been staring at the colorful, floating isle with its retinue of scavengers, as it drifted behind Manitou's wake. "It's too wonderful for me to have missed, in any of the sectors I've been. It's native, all right. Even Lysos wasn't clever enough to design that."

Soon another greatflower hove into view, this time with fuller petals, diffracting sunlight in ways Renna excitedly described as "holographic." In turn, Maia told him about a tribe of savage sea people who had cast their lot forever with the greatflowers, sailing them like ships, collecting nectar and plankton, netting birds and fish, and snaring an occasional, castaway sailor to spark their daughters for another generation. Living wild and unfettered, the runaway society had lasted until planetary authorities and seafaring guilds joined forces to round them up as "ecological irresponsibles."

"Is that story true?" Renna asked, both dubious and entranced at the same time.