"It's still our responsibility." Paul sat up. His eyes kept returning to the towering courage of the trees. Brave as any cathedral spire, scarcely one was free from the clutch of the purple-leaf vine. "As for moving here to the island, Pak sees it, but the idea's too new. You just don't pull up stakes, venture on the Big Water, crossing forbidden kaksma country." Sears chewed a grass blade. "Anyway we've got to bring Dorothy and the baby here, and Ann. Dorothy won't fuss, will she, son?" "Since there _is_ Helen--no, she won't. I still dream sometimes, as I did during her first pregnancy. Things, shapes, trying to pull her away--or she's where I can't find her, can't push through the leaves." "She told me. It's something else that's made you blue lately." "No." Sears watched him. "Yes.... Want to start back tomorrow?" "Might as well. We've learned all we need." "Mm.... Second thoughts about the daddy of Dorothy's second----" "No no. We settled that. She's proud to be carrying it." "Good genetics could be damn bad psychology." "No, Jocko. Don't think that. She's close to me as ever." Sears waited and spoke softly: "New York late on a rainy night, a few car lights moving, street-lamp reflections like golden fish----" "Orange paintbrush in New Hampshire meadows----We'd better stop." "We better. I want boat whistles--floating city coming out of the fog. Call it a slow-healing wound.... And look across the channel." Paul saw it presently: a cliff formation in the coastal range made a brow, nose, and chin. Below this, rounded rock could be a shoulder straining in heroic effort; then, tumbled reality of mountain-fancy must supply whatever held the figure in bondage. "Yes. He looks west. Past us, at the sun." "Why, no, Paul. I think he looks west of the sun...." A red-furred girl wandered down from the woods. "I got tired." Arek had lived twenty-two years; she was seven feet tall, not yet adolescent but near it. In the next Red-Moon-before-the-Rains, ten months away, she might take adult part in the frenzy of love if her body demanded it: if not, she would go apart with the other children, whose play also became innocently erotic at that time, and help care for the youngest. Sears grinned as she sat down with them. "Tired or lazy?" "Both. You Charins are never lazy enough." The name Charin, Paul thought, was almost natural now, a pygmy word for "halfway," intended by Pakriaa merely to convey that Wright and his breed were halfway in size between her people and the giants, but Wright took sardonic satisfaction in it as a generic name. "Work and loafing are both good. Why can Ed Spearman never sit still in the sun? Or maybe I like to talk too much." "Never," Sears chuckled. "Well--his best pleasure is in action. Maybe it's the technician in him--he must always be doing something."