"Clear and secure!" Heather McKennie called. The pilot acknowledged, and let down the landing ramp.

Cadmann Weyland was the first out. He waved to Justin and Jessica as he strode down the gangplank. Sylvia followed, then the stooped figure of Big Chaka.

Cadmann and Jessica regarded each other. Justin watched carefully. This was, the first time they had seen each other in eight weeks. The longest they had ever been separated. Their relationship had suffered a terrible blow: who knew what might happen?

Sylvia went to Justin, and embraced him. He wanted to lose himself in his mother's arms. He'd forgotten how much he missed her, how very good it felt to allow himself to be enfolded. She looked a little tired, a little more worn, but still wonderful.

But he kept a bit of peripheral vision on Jessica and her father, and he wasn't disappointed.

Jessica took the step forward, and held out her hand. Cadmann took it.

He held it, and they looked at each other.

Justin could see Aaron's face over Sylvia's shoulder. As Chaka and Justin and Jessica embraced their parents, Aaron Tragon beamed like a proud schoolmaster... well, not quite.

"How is Mother?" Jessica asked finally.

"She's fine. Your brother Mickey is watching her. She wanted me to come over to check on you."

"I can believe that." Her eyes shone.

There was still so much in his face. She had looked up and into those eyes so many times, over so many years, and she had watched it slowly age like good leather. He was still the man that she knew, and she couldn't quite bring herself to say the things that she needed to say.

"Come on," she said. She took his hand, and led him away from the others. Aaron tried to stay in step with them at first, but she locked eyes with him. This is about me and my father. There really wasn't a place for him here. He nodded, and turned to something else.

Big Chaka embraced his son. "I saw the grendel brain scans," he said. "A month ago Tonya got bitten by a leech-like parasite, didn't she? While swimming upriver... ?"

Jessica led Cadmann though the streets. They rang with the smell of iron and singed plastic. There were a thousand different projects under way at the same moment. Everywhere, Star Born labored efficiently at a hundred vital tasks.

Little Carey Lou Davidson ran past lugging a bucket of plastic nails.

He called "Hi, Cadmann!" and disappeared into a half-erected wood frame.

Cadmann waved back. "You've done well," he said.

"You must have been able to see most of this through Cassandra."

"Yes. That was nice, the virtual tour through the streets. But it's never quite real for me until I can feel the wind on my skin, and smell the trees."

They walked all the way through the town, back to the stone stairs cut into the mountainside. She took the stairs two at a time until they were above the rooftops, until they could see everything in the colony at one sweeping glance.

She sat him down, and took his arm, leaning her head against his shoulder.

"I wanted you to see this," she said. "I wanted you to really know that it wasn't just a pipe dream."

"I knew that it wasn't going to be that..." he said, and his voice trailed off. He was looking out over the mainland shantytown. From here, the individual human voices were as soft as wind chimes, and the sounds of industry dwindled to a burr. There was something of newness in the air, and it was easy to imagine that it was the beginning of a new world. Of course, in some ways it was. He could see more than the camp from here, too. From this altitude, he was looking out over a river plain, seeing the stretch of mountains gently wreathed in fog. There was a mystic quality to the scene. The land was waiting. The land was alive. Beyond the mists lay adventure, and romance.

The clouds on the horizon were a light haze shading slowly from blue to white, to blue again in the sky above. Tau Ceti burned a yellow-orange hole through the haze.

Cadmann inhaled deeply. Jessica watched as something within him tensed and then relaxed, but she didn't interrupt him.

What are you thinking, Father? She reached out to touch his arm, and felt him take her hand. There was a rough quality to his skin, a masculine smell to him, which was of infinite comfort. His face, so weathered by the elements here, so grooved by care and loss, seemed more angular to her. He didn't seem old to her now, as he often did. He seemed... historical. She almost laughed.

The silence stretched on, long and unnatural. Then Colonel Cadmann Weyland said to her, at last, "You may have done the right thing, but that can't make up for how it was done. Nothing can."

"Toshiro?"

"More than that."

"What could be—more than that?"

"We trusted you, then. When we found we couldn't, everything changed. Toshiro died because we no longer knew what we could expect from you. From any of you. From him."

"But he wouldn't—oh." She leaned her head against his shoulder.

"I'd have said that about you," the colonel said. "And did. Toshiro wouldn't kill Carlos. Jessica wouldn't—Jessica, I can stand being made to look a fool. Anyone who has to make decisions knows that will happen some day. But—you came into our home and took advantage of your status there. That can't happen again."

Her throat tightened.

"But there's another thing that you need to hear," he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. "I'm still your father, and I love you."

"Really?" she hated the sound of her own voice, the little-girl quality, the needing-Daddy's-approval quality. There was something there that she hadn't heard in her own voice for years, and she wasn't certain if she hadn't missed it.

"Really," he said. "I'll visit you here on the mainland. Both of your mothers will come over. But you're no longer welcome at the Bluff. Not now. Perhaps later, after we see what you do with your responsibilities here. Love you get just because you're my daughter. Trust has to be earned."

She reached up and kissed his cheek. Started to speak, and he said, "Shhh."

She nodded, and looked.

"Is everything all right here?" he asked "Is there anything wrong?"

"What you see is what you get around here, Dad," she said.

He nodded again, and she wondered what it was that he had almost said, almost commented upon.

"Some of the First will never accept you," he said. "Will never be able to accept that you have a right to live the lives you want. To accept you as equal partners in this entire venture."

"What are they saying?" she asked.

"They suggest that you need to create your own society because you can't get along. That you have an adolescent need to break free, regardless of consequences. It's not just the First who say it, you know. There are plenty at Surf's Up—what's left of Surf's Up—who' II say it too."

A pterodon flew past, close enough that a well-thrown rock would have clipped a wing. Cadmann watched it for a long time.

"The nest," Jessica said.

He nodded.

"But that was long ago."

A smile.

"Dad, I'd say the same thing old Hendrick did. I'd tell a child,

'Don't touch the eggs. We don't know what the pterodons will do, but you won't like it.' "

He nodded again and looked away from the pterodon to stare down across the dry rock areas to where the river lay beyond grendel range. It wound off out of sight, an old river running through a long-silted valley, a snakelike, misty ribbon.

"The wells are over there," Jessica said. "No connection with running water."

He nodded. "You've chosen a good site. I'd say Shangri-La is safe.

Unless—"

"Yes?"

He shook his head. "In the military we called it ‘taking counsel from your fears.' You can get so concerned about what might happen that you can't do anything."