Arno would go with dad and mom and Tarel. Bubba and Lady would keep them company. I was willing to take Arno, but I'd to!d them about his romantic interest in Deneen, and we agreed it might be awkward if she was cooped up with him for sixty-eight days flying to Grinder. And while neither Deneen nor I brought it up, of course, it seemed to me it might be easier on Tarel if Deneen was with us on the scout, instead of with him on the cutter.

We would transfer Arno's fealty to dad; Arno would agree to that if he really wanted to leave with us. The way Amo's mind worked, you swore fealty to someone and then you were pretty much loyal unless you came up with some incentive to double-cross them and some technicality to make it all right. Which I didn't expect from him under the circumstances. And the espwolves would know if he got treacherous ideas.

Meanwhile I'd have Gunnlag to educate. I looked forward to it. Compile a data base of Norse and Standard, run it through the linguistics program, and have him learn Standard; we'd use it now instead of Evdashian. Evdashian was an offshoot dialect of Standard used only on Evdash, and chances were we'd never see Evdash again.

On the evening of the sixth day, the scout and the cutter lifted for Palermo. With the wolves scanning, we located Arno and Gunnlag, and put Moise down with a communicator to arrange the pickup. By communicator, I told Arno to arrange for a couple mule-loads of food and take it to the pickup point, outside Palermo. I'd have preferred three or more loads, but we didn't have storage.

Larger spacecraft would have been nice, for the biovats if nothing else. As it was, we'd have to ration pretty strictly on the long trip to Grinder.

It took Moise and Arno two days to get the food we needed and get it to the edge of an orange grove a couple of miles outside the city. Actually, Arno was nearly broke, way too poor now to buy that much food. But Gunnlag had received a bounty from Guiscard for bringing his Varangians to the recruiter, and that had been enough. (Guiscard and Roger never had enough Norman foot soldiers, and were always looking for high-quality mercenaries.) Arno had borrowed the two mules, and one of the Varangians had gone along to take them back to town.

Bubba okayed the pickup scene, so dad landed the cutter to get the food and the two warriors. Then we all got together on a hill a few miles southeast, got everything distributed, and said goodbye to one another.

The goodbyes were hard, believe me. We wouldn't see each other again for sixty-eight days. But there was no way around it, and at least Jenoor and I were together.

Sixty-eight days in FTL gave us a lot of time to talk-about what might be, how we'd like to have things turn out (and why), what problems we might run into, and even occasionally about what might have been. To give Gunnlag practice in Standard, we had him tell us about his people and others, the places he'd been, things he'd seen and done…

Moise too. Although he was a lot younger, and had less to tell, there was more than you might think, and it was more interesting than he realized. Fanglith and its people in general were marvelously interesting-I'd only seen a small sample myself.

Their stories strengthened our conclusion that it wasn't the place for us. To coin a phrase: It's an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

We worked on Gunnlag's and Moise's education. If you want to develop a better understanding, more insights, into your own culture, try educating someone in it who's from a totally different culture. That can be worth a whole series of university courses to you. Gunnlag, like Moise, was marvelously adaptable and had a quick mind. And of course, they each had some unusual and surprising ways of looking at the things we told them about.

But the most meaningful talks, for me, were some between Jenoor and me in the privacy of her tiny cubbyhold cabin or mine. (There were no cabins for two on the scout.) Talks about the future. And once again, I-we-knew too little, had too little information to plan with, beyond the next step or two, or in broad, vague terms. That kind of planning we could do.

At first, we considered the possibility of settling down as sort of "backup revolutionaries." Not get involved too deeply. That way we could live a semi-normal life, enjoy some stability, raise a family.

But it seemed as if that wouldn't work. Now that the Glondis government had gone Imperial, it was the road to slavery and regret. Fifteen years earlier, when my parents had fled Morn Gebleu, things had been different. And they had children. Now the Glondis Party had consolidated its power on the central planets and was moving to control all the human worlds. We faced a spreading Empire, not a Federation.

So what kind of future could we have together?

We'd had each other, very briefly, and we'd lost each other. It was the wildest luck that we were together again. When I'd thought Jenoor was dead, life had gone on for me. And while she'd had a lot more reason to think I was dead than alive, life had gone on for her, too.

It really had; life had gone on.

So we made a pledge-a pledge subject to change if experience showed us it should change. The revolution would come first with us. We'd be together, work together, enjoy together, as much as we could. For as long as we could. Without clinging to it, without sacrificing the revolution to it. We'd be willing to lose each other, and hope it didn't happen.

Meanwhile we wouldn't worry about it any more than we had to. Life was for living, and hopefully for accomplishing something valuable with. And eventually for dying. For non-revolutionaries, as well as for us. We'd live it while we had it, as ethically as we knew how.

That's the way it sorted out for us-at first only intellectually, but more and more at the gut level, the emotional level, as we got used to our decision.

And that's how it was that, when the Jav came out of FTL mode, Jenoor and I could stand holding hands and feeling good about things as we gazed at the bright blue-white bead of Grinder a couple of million miles away. We had work to do and a life to live there. And who knew where else before it was done.