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to such novelties?
    The hike was long, the terrain rocky. Babnol would come close to Toroca for a while, they’d talk a bit, then territoriality would get the better of her, and she’d fall off to the rear or speed up to put some distance between her and him. Toroca usually looked forward to the times when she was willing to talk: it made the trip go more quickly. On one such occasion, though, she startled him with her boldness. “Forgive my impertinence for asking,” she said, “but it’s well-known that you are Afsan’s…”
    “Son,” said Toroca. “The word is ’son.’ “
    “Afsan’s son, yes. And Novato’s, too.”
    “That’s right.”
    Babnol looked fascinated. “I don’t mean to pry, but what’s it like, knowing your parents?”
    Toroca was a bit taken aback at this, but he was going to spend much time with Babnol, so he decided to answer her question. “It’s interesting. Strange. All things being equal, I think I’d prefer not to know who they are.”
    “Oh?” She seemed surprised. “I’ve spent some time idly wondering who my parents might have been. I’ve got the father narrowed down to three possibilities, I think, back in Pack Vando. The mother’s more elusive. I’m not obsessed with knowing, you understand. But I’d think it would be satisfying to know.”
    “It’s … it’s not. Not really.”
    She turned her muzzle to face him. “I don’t understand.”
    “Well, perhaps it would be different for you,” said Toroca. “Forgive me; this is going to sound callous. You see, my parents aren’t just any two people. They are Sal-Afsan and Wab-Novato, the one who discovered the nature of the world and the one who invented the far-seer and now leads the exodus. Great people, famous throughout Land.”
    “They are indeed.”
    “You know the old greeting, ’I cast a shadow in your presence’?”
    “Sure.”
    “Afsan is blind; I doubt he’s aware of how luminous he is. I’m — I’m washed out, lost in his glare. And in my mother’s. People judge me differently. They know where I came from, and they expect great things from me. It’s … it’s a burden.”
    “Oh, I’m sure no one gives it any thought.”
    “You do, Babnol. You asked me what it was like knowing my parents. In fact, one could take that question two ways: what’s it like knowing who your parents are? Or what’s it like knowing Afsan and Novato? I do know them both, you know. Indeed, Novato is my overseer on this survey project. It’s not just in the eyes of strangers that I see the implied message that, oh, he’s Afsan and Novato’s child; he must do great things. I see it from them — from my mother and father. They expect much of me. It’s not like I have just duty to the Emperor and duty to my Pack and duty to my profession. It’s as though I have an additional duty to them, to live up to their expectations.”
    Babnol scratched the side of her neck. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
    “So you can see that it is a burden, this knowledge of one’s personal ancestors.”
    “But you will do great things…” began Babnol.
    Toroca grunted. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
    Musings of The Watcher
    Life seemed to be taking hold on the Crucible. For an eternity, it was all unicellular. After that, small groupings of cells began to appear. And then a miracle happened, an explosion of complexity and diversity, with more than fifty different fundamental body plans appearing almost simultaneously. One had five eyes and a flexible trunk. Another had seven pairs of stilt legs and seven waving arms. A third had a central nervous cord running the length of its tube-like body. A fourth looked like two perpendicular hoops of segmented tissue joined together.
    I knew how evolution worked on this world. Only a handful of the forms would survive. This time my task was even harder, for I wanted to seed samples of all these forms on different worlds, hoping that on each one a different body plan would