Mary Ann poked her head out from under the blanket and breathed a sigh of relief. "Bet it's calmer up about two thousand feet," she said.

"Bet you're right," he said. His hands were locked surely on the controls now. At eighteen hundred feet they hit low cloud cover, rocked for fifteen seconds, and then climbed up into relative stillness.

Tau Ceti transmuted the clouds into banks of gold-white fluff. The air was crisp and clear. The window didn't quite seal on his side, and a bright, Arctic thread of air whistled through, stinging and invigorating.

This was good, one of those moments that made the rest of it all worthwhile. He felt the calm descend upon Sylvia and Mary Ann as well. Here, floating above the clouds, there seemed to be no troubles. Tau Ceti IV was a world of wonders, a calm and nurturing land which would feed and shelter their grandchildren as graciously as it served them. This was a time when he could forget the internecine conflicts within the colony, and the occasional friction between Mary Ann and Sylvia.

There had been less of that for the past year. He thought... he hoped... they had weathered the last true storm in their triad. There were too few Western precedents for three-way relationships.

There was nothing standard about relationships on Avalon. The naked truth was that, in an almost exclusively heterosexual community, there were more women than men to bond with them. There was also no venereal disease. There was one hundred percent employment. Someone would care for the children, whatever the mother's interests and temperament. As a result, no woman need consider anything except who might make the most interesting father. There was no stigma at all for the unwed mother.

But some institutions die hard, and marriage, even such free-form versions of it as existed in Avalon Town, was one of them.

Cadmann and Sylvia had been friends, perhaps in love but not lovers, when the first grendel attacks shattered the colony's tranquil life and sent Cadmann off to the Bluff. Mary Ann had gone to him then, and helped build the Keep. It was as much hers as his.

Cadmann and Mary Ann had been bonded for years before Sylvia, widowed during the Grendel Wars, had joined them. Mostly, it worked. Sometimes wonderfully well. Occasionally it grated... usually on Mary Ann, who remembered when she had Cadmann all to herself, when no one else would have wanted him. No one but Sylvia, who was already married, back when monogamy made sense, before the grendels killed so many of the men.

They were probably two hours from the Bluff, and Mary Ann was getting drowsy. Air travel often did that to her. She leaned against his shoulder, bouncing a little in her shoulder harness. Sylvia looked across at him. Sometimes he wondered exactly what she saw. He knew what he saw in the mirror when he scraped his morning stubble away: a tall, gray old stranger who looked a lot like his own grandfather... or Manuel the Redeemer, or any of Cabell's male characters who were so surprised to find themselves old. Still strong, and unbent, but the hair crept back from his temples now. Both weather and time had creased his skin deeply.

God. Where had the years gone? When was the last time he had awakened without his back flaming at him? He was... he counted rapidly. Sixty-three Earth years old? There was little he could do to avoid the fact that his body was trying to shut down on him. Oh, growth-hormone stimulation, and exercise, and a strict nutritional regimen, and regeneration treatments kept the machine functioning better than he probably deserved, but the aches and pains of a life nowise tame had definitely caught up with him. There were bullet wounds, a bayonet scar . ...ven a goddamn crocodile bite.

All trivial next to the wounds from the Grendel Wars. Bones smashed. The regrown leg. The pale angry tattoo left by serrated grendel teeth. And the memories that would never completely fade.

And perhaps, after all, it was best that they didn't. The grendels were gone, but there were other dangers.

"Good trip," Sylvia said. She could always sense his mood. She was forty-seven now, still beautiful, although daily exposure to the sun had roughened her skin. The mask of youth was beginning to slip, but in her case that was no tragedy. Disguise your thoughts and inclinations as you may, time eventually reveals your true nature to the world. Sylvia was a loving heart in a lively, quick-spirited physical package, a little shorter than Mary Ann, but stronger. She had borne her late husband Terry one child, Justin, and then another for Cadmann, and her figure was still luscious.

Mary Ann was Number One Wife-and she relished the distinction. Needed it. There was little in this life for Mary Ann, save being Cadmann Weyland's woman. Sylvia remained a competent scientist. Mary Ann had ice on her mind. Sometimes she could remember, sometimes there were flashes of brilliance, but sometimes she was lucky to remember the difference between the gametophyte and sporophyte stages of a fern. Once upon a time she had been a brilliant agronomist, but hibernation instability... for Mary Ann, the memories of what she had once been were the worst part.

She was still important as Cadmann Weyland's Number One Wife, and as the mother of strong and self-reliant children. I make good babies, she told herself, and everyone knew it was true. Over the years that had come to be enough. It had to be.

Home, Cadmann thought, remembering Sylvia's attempt at conversation.

"I think I want to break out the east wall of the house, expand it again."

"You've got my permission, God knows."

She gazed out the window at the clear sky, and then peered down at the clouds. "So peaceful up here."

"I need these trips from time to time. Just get away with my ladies."

She reached across Mary Ann's sleeping form, and grasped Cadmann's shoulder hard. So much unsaid. So much that could never be said.

Cadmann's thoughts threatened to drift into another uncomfortable direction, and he focused back on the task of flying. Ahead of them reared a great beveled splay of glacial crust: Clay's Divide, an eight-mile seismic irregularity in the Isenstine. He grinned, anticipating the moment to come.

As the skeeter scooted over the gargantuan sheet of rock and ice, Sylvia began to chuckle. Then they both broke out hooting. Mary Ann was awake now, and smiling. The far side of the divide had been carved-by some unknown thermal device-into Avalon's own Mount Rushmore. Presented for all the world to see were four two-hundred-foot-tall sets of very human buttocks. Anatomical detail was admirably precise. Mount Tushmore was so huge that it had to be seen from at least a kilometer away to be fully appreciated.

Geographic had spotted it first, almost a year before. The general hilarity and grudging admiration was balanced by alarm. How had they done it? And who? Well, the Merry Pranksters, of course, but who were they? Justin and Jessica knew, Cadmann thought; one or the other of them might actually be a Prankster. But there was no way that the carving of Mount Tushmore could have been anything less than perilous. The danger doubtless added to their pleasure in the deed.

"If we knew..." he said finally, hovering at approximately anus-level with the second buttock on the left. A flat, petal-shaped protrusion marred the surface just below the right cheek. "... whether that was just an irregularity in the rock, or a birthmark, it might be possible to figure out just whose buttocks these were... "

"But..." Sylvia choked, "and that's a big but... that still wouldn't establish whether the owner of said birthmarked buttocks was in fact the perpetrator."

"How true," Cadmann said. "It would be just like those rascals to display someone else's buttocks, just to throw us... off the scent. As it were."