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was drawn into the sensitive tissues of the lungs. But when the great ice sheets had eventually retreated, the large noses had been retained because they’d provided the beneficial side effect of an excellent sense of smell.
    If it hadn’t been for that, maybe Ponter’s kind would have used the same petrochemicals, resulting in the same level of atmospheric pollution. The irony did not escape Ponter: the kind of humans he’d hitherto only known as fossils were poisoning their skies with what they themselves called fossil fuels.
    And worse than that:
every
adult Gliksin seemed to have his or her own personal vehicle. What an unspeakable waste of resources! Most of these cars spent the bulk of each day just sitting. Ponter’s own city of Saldak had some three thousand travel cubes for a population of twenty-five thousand—and Ponter often thought
that
was too many.
    The hover-bus came to rest at the next house. Ponter and Adikor’s neighbors, Torba and Gaddak, as well as Gaddak’s twin sons, came on board. Males left their mothers and moved in with their fathers at the age of ten years. Adikor had only one child, an eight-year-old boy named Dab, who would come live with him and Ponter the year after next. Ponter had two children, but both were girls: Megameg Bek, a 148, also eight years old, and Jasmel Ket, a 147, now eighteen.
    Ponter himself, as well as his man-mate Adikor, were members of generation 145, making them both thirty-eight years old. That had been another bizarre thing about the Gliksin world: instead of controlling their breeding cycles, so that children were born only every tenth year, they gave birth constantly, every year. Rather than nice, neat, discrete generations, their world had a smooth continuum of ages. Ponter hadn’t spent enough time there to figure out how they managed the economics of that. Without manufacturers shifting their focus from baby-wear to toddler clothes to young adult garb, in step with the growing of a generation, the Gliksins simultaneously had to produce clothes for people of any age. And they had this ridiculous concept of “fashion,” or so Lou Benoît had told him: perfectly good clothes were discarded for reasons of capricious esthetics.
    The hover-bus took off again. Torba and Gaddak’s house had been the last stop on the Rim; Ponter settled back for the long drive through the countryside into the Center.
    * * *
    As usual, the women had put up decorations: great pastel streamers stretching from tree to tree, circular bands of color around birch and cedar trunks, banners waving from the roofs of buildings, golden frames surrounding the solar collectors, silver ones adorning the composting units.
    Ponter used to harbor a suspicion that the women left the decorations up all the time, but Adikor had said there’d been no sign of them when he’d come into the Center during Last Five, looking for someone to defend him against Daklar Bolbay’s spurious charge.
    The hover-bus settled to the ground. It wasn’t yet the time of falling leaves, although next month’s Two becoming One would be during the start of that, and the fans would then send brown and red and yellow and orange foliage whirling about. Ponter would be glad when the cold weather returned.
    The computer scientist in Ponter couldn’t help noticing that Torba, Gaddak, and Gaddak’s twin boys were the first to disembark: the hover-bus operated on a last-in/first-out system. Ponter and Adikor were the next to step out. Lurt, Adikor’s woman-mate, hurried over to him, accompanied by little Dab. Adikor swept his son up in his arms and lifted him high over his head. Dab laughed, and Adikor was smiling widely. He set Dab down and gathered Lurt into a hug. It hadn’t been a full month since he’d seen them—they’d both been on hand during Adikor’s
dooslarm basadlarm
, the preliminary hearing into whether Adikor had murdered Ponter, a charge raised by Daklar Bolbay over Ponter’s disappearance when he’d