It was more than just a break from work, more than simply a variation in routine. It was the fire that sustained culture; it was the gut ties that bound families.

A hover-bus settled out front of Ponter and Adikor’s house. The two men entered through the door at the back and found a pair of adjacent saddle-seats upon which to sit. The driver activated the fans, and the bus rose above the ground and started moving on to the next house, off in the distance.

Usually, Ponter gave no thought to something as mundane as a hover-bus, but today he couldn’t help pondering how elegant a solution it was compared to what they’d done about transportation in the Gliksin world. There, vehicles of all sizes rolled on wheels. Everywhere he’d gone on the Gliksin world (admittedly only a few places), he’d seen wide, flattened trails covered with artificial stone to make it easy for those wheels to roll.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Gliksins used a chemical reaction to propel their wheeled vehicles—a reaction that gave off a noxious smell. Apparently it wasn’t as irritating to the Gliksins as it had been to Ponter; not surprising, he supposed, given their minuscule noses.

What a wonderful quirk of nature that had been! Ponter knew that his kind had developed their large noses—much bigger than those of any other primate—during the last glacial epoch. According to Doctor Singh, the Gliksin who had looked after him at their hospital, Neanderthals had six times the nasal capacity of Gliksins. The original reason had been to humidify cold air before it 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 slipped into the other universe. Still, Adikor was clearly delighted to see his woman and his child.

Ponter’s woman-mate Klast was dead, but he’d expected his two daughters to come greet him. Granted, he’d seen them recently, too; indeed, Jasmel had been instrumental in recovering Ponter from the Gliksin world.

Adikor looked at Ponter apologetically. Ponter knew that Adikor loved him deeply—and he showed that love twenty-five days out of each month. But this was the time for him to be with Lurt and Dab, and, well, he wanted to savor every beat of it. Ponter nodded, letting Adikor go, and Adikor headed off, one arm around Lurt’s waist, the other holding little Dab’s left hand.

Other men were joining up with their women, and boys were going off with girls from the same generation. Yes, there’d certainly be much sex over the next four days, but there’d also be a lot of playing and fun and family outings and feasting.

Ponter looked around. The crowd was dissipating. It was an unpleasantly warm day, and he sighed—but not just because of that.

“I can call Jasmel, if you wish,” said Hak. Hak was Ponter’s Companion implant, embedded in the inside of his left forearm, just above the wrist. Like most Companions, it consisted of a high-contrast, matte-finish rectangular display screen about as long and wide as a finger, with six small control buds set beneath it, and a lens at one end. But unlike most Companions, which were pretty stupid, Hak was a sophisticated artificial intelligence, a product of Ponter’s colleague Kobast Gant.

Hak hadn’t spoken aloud, although she could; Ponter thought of it as a she, since Kobast had programmed the device with the voice of Ponter’s late woman-mate. On days like today, though, that seemed a terrible mistake: it reminded him of how much he missed Klast. He’d have to speak to Kobast about getting a different voice.

“No,” said Ponter, softly. “No, don’t call anyone. Jasmel has a young man, you know. He probably came in on an earlier hover-bus, and she’s off with him.”

“You’re the boss,” said Hak.

Ponter looked around. The buildings here in the Center were much like those out at the Rim. Most had main structures grown through arboriculture, tree trunks shaped around building forms that had subsequently been removed. Many had brick or wooden additions tacked on. All had solar-collecting arrays, either on their roofs or propped up on the ground adjacent to them. In some hostile climates, buildings had to be entirely manufactured, but Ponter always thought such structures were ugly. And yet the Gliksins seemed to make all their buildings that way, and to cram them together like herds of herbivorous animals.