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know you come here?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    I hesitated, feeling a sharp pain of recognition in my chest. “No parents at all?”
    Francis didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his feet and rubbed his left ankle.
    “No father,” he finally said. “My mother’s sick. They say she’s dying and they won’t let me see her. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
    “Who are you living with, then?”
    “No one.”
    “No one?”
    “I can take care of myself.”
    Yes, I thought, he probably could. But that wasn’t excuse enough for a thirteen-year-old boy to be living alone. “Don’t you have some other family? Sisters or brothers or aunts and uncles? Grandparents?”
    “Yeah, but they don’t really want me.” He shrugged again. “I don’t want them, either, so it kind of works out.”
    I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t say anything. Then I noticed he had no light.
    “Don’t you have a hand torch, or some kind of light?” I asked.
    “I dropped it back there, when I got stuck.”
    I climbed across the mound of wire and searched for it with my own light. Far inside I saw what might be another hand torch; I lay down and tried to dig for it. But it was well beyond my reach; I realized there was no way I could ever get to it.
    “I can’t reach it,” I said. “We’ll go out together.”
    The boy didn’t respond. When I turned around to ask him where I should take him, he was gone. I swung the light around, among the hulks of old machines, between hanging cables and rusting metal rods, but saw no sign of him. He couldn’t have gone far.
    “Francis.”
    I listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything.
    “Francis.” Louder this time. Again no response, no sound of movement.
    I knew he was nearby, motionless and silent, cloaked in shadows. I was also fairly certain that if I searched long enough I would find him. But he didn’t want to be found,and I felt I should honor his wishes. There was something about the boy that reminded me of myself.
    I stood watching and listening, still reluctant to leave him, but his wishes were clear.
    “Goodbye, Francis,” I finally said. “I hope I’ll see you again.”
    There was still no response, so I headed out on my own.
     
    I have no parents. Certainly there was a woman who gave birth to me (the bishop and the Church forbade all use of artificial wombs), and certainly there was a man who fathered me, in either the “natural” way or as a donor—probably the former, although the use of artificial insemination would have been far easier to conceal than the use of an artificial womb. So I almost certainly had parents of some kind, but I have never known who or what they were.
    I was born an orphan, presumably because of my deformities, and was raised communally by a small circle of families high within the social and command structures of the ship, which leads me to suspect that my parents were among that circle, or at least had some influence.
    I am almost sure that my deformities were known well before my birth, but for some reason I was not aborted (the Church’s strictures against abortion did not seem to stop most convenience terminations). I imagine there are a number of people who later regretted that decision, whatever the reasons for it at the time. This always gave me some degree of satisfaction.
    The people who were my parents may still be alive. I doubt that it would have been difficult to discover who they are, or were, but I never tried. They decided to abandon me at birth, so I have returned the favor throughout my life. As far as I am concerned, they no longer exist, and never did.

6
    P ÄR was talking mutiny.
    There was no other word for it. The thought filled me with both excitement and fear.
    We met again, this time in the Snow Gardens, which were currently out of season. There was no snow on the ground, and the trees were completely bare, without even a dusting of frost or ice. But the air was cold, burning the nose and biting