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record that I named it.”
    “I promise you that, Eugenia. It’s your discovery andthat will enter our records. Eventually, when the rest of humanity discovers the Nemesian region—would that be the right way of putting it?—they will then learn who made the discovery and how it came about. Your star,
your
Nemesis, will be the first star, other than the Sun itself, to shine over a human civilization; and the first, without exception, to shine over a human civilization that originated elsewhere.”
    Pitt watched her leave and felt, on the whole, confident. She would fall in line. His letting her name the star was the perfect touch. Surely she would want to go to her own star. Surely she would feel the attraction of building a logical and orderly civilization about
her
star, one from which civilizations all over the Galaxy might descend.
    And then, just as he might have relaxed in the glow of a golden future, he was shaken by a faint touch of horror that was utterly alien to him.
    Why Nemesis? Why should it have occurred to her to name it for the Goddess of Retribution?
    He was almost weak enough to think of it as an evil omen.

THREE
MOTHER
6.
    It was dinnertime, and Insigna was in one of those moods when she was just a little afraid of her own daughter.
    Those moods had become more pronounced lately, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps it was Marlene’s increasing tendency to silence, to being withdrawn, to be always seeming to commune with thoughts too deep for speech.
    And sometimes the uneasy fear in Insigna was mixed with guilt: guilt because of her lack of motherly patience with the girl; guilt because of her too-great awareness of the girl’s physical shortcomings. Marlene certainly didn’t have her mother’s conventional prettiness or her father’s wildly unconventional good looks.
    Marlene was short and—
blunt
. That was the only word that Insigna could find that exactly fit poor Marlene.
    And
poor
, of course. It was the adjective she almost always used in her own mind and could just barely keep out of her speech.
    Short. Blunt. Thick without being fat, that was Marlene. Nothing graceful about her. Her hair was dark brown, rather long, and quite straight. Her nose was a little bulbous, her mouth turned down just a bit at the ends, her chin small, her whole attitude passive and turned in upon itself.
    There were her eyes, of course, large and lustrously dark, with meticulous dark eyebrows that curved above them, long eyelashes that looked almost artificial. Still, eyes alone could not make up for everything else, however fascinating they might be at odd moments.
    Insigna had known since Marlene was five that she was unlikely ever to attract a man on the physical planealone, and that had become more obvious with each year.
    Aurinel had kept a languid eye on her during her preteen years, obviously attracted to her precocious intelligence and her almost luminous understanding. And Marlene had been shy and pleased in his presence, as though dimly realizing that there was something about an object called a “boy” that was somehow endearing, but not knowing what it might be.
    In the last couple of years, it seemed to Insigna that Marlene had finally clarified in her mind what “boy” meant. Her omnivorous reading of books and viewing of films too old for her body, if not her mind, undoubtedly helped her in this, but Aurinel had grown older, too, and as his hormones began to exert their sway over him, it was no longer badinage he was in search of.
    At dinner that night, Insigna asked, “What kind of day did you have, dear?”
    “A quiet one. Aurinel came looking for me and I suppose he reported to you. I’m sorry you have to take the trouble to hunt me down.”
    Insigna sighed. “But, Marlene, I can’t help but think sometimes that you’re unhappy and isn’t it natural for me to be concerned about that? You’re alone too much.”
    “I like to be alone.”
    “You don’t act it. You show no signs of