At last t’Schreiber offers an opinion. “I, for one, think it was unwise of our predecessors to attempt to resume space exploration. They freely gave much value to put new tactran satellites in orbit. What have we gained? Sorrow and confusion.” He lists the contacts made: a garble that might have been from the Martian colony; pitiful pleas for help from old Earth itself; a dozen cocky messages from the base at Alpha Centauri suggesting an attempt at an actual flight to and from Jem. From the rest of the universe, nothing.

Muskie waits uncomfortably, shifting position and scratching just above the plaque of her string bikini. Then she says, “I wonder if we should answer messages from Alphabase anymore.”

No one responds.

Therefore it is agreed; and the judges turn to speaking of the gratifying growth in human population — from one hundred eighty survivors to eighteen hundred in the third generation, and now nearly a quarter of a million in the sixth. There is no longer a fear that humanity might not survive. On Jem Man flourishes.

This reminds Muskie that her newest baby is about ready to be born. She speaks softly into her telephone to the hospital. The mare is in the delivery room even at that moment, but the news is bad. The baby was born dead.

“I blame myself,” says Muskie to the doctor remorsefully. “Sarah Glowbag — was that her name?”

“Mary Glowbag,” the doctor corrects her.

“Yes, Mary. She was nearly sixty years old I should have invited a younger mare to brood my baby.”

“Don’t let it spoil your day.” consoles the doctor. “One must expect a failure now and then. Nearly all of your children have lived, and remember, you have three others in the oven right now.”

“You’re very kind.” Muskie hangs up with a smile. But the news has upset her — and just at Christmas, too. “I would like to leave now,” she tells the other judges, and of course they also wish to close the discussion and return to their homes.

And then there is Muskrat the mother, the honored one at the head of her family.

This is no small part of her. Her family is huge. Forty-four living children, the dozen oldest long since having made her a multiple grandmother, the three youngest still unborn in the borrowed wombs of other women. (She reminds herself to make a voluntary gift to Sarah, or Mary, Glowbag for her kindness in carrying her most recent implanted ovum to term. Not as large as usual, of course; after all, the child had been born dead.) At Christmas all of them will come to give her Ring-Greeting, and she looks forward to the day with pleasure.

But not all of a family’s concerns are pleasurable. As she walks across the pleasant gardens toward the place where she sleeps and keeps her belongings, a short, pale youth pushes toward her through the shrubs. He is d’Dalehouse Dolphin An-Guyen, and he is one of her sons. He has been running. He is breathing hard. Muskie sighs and says, “How nice of you to hurry to give me Ring-Greeting, Dolph.”

He stops and blinks at the pretty Christmas many-tree in the center of the garden, with its ring-shaped lights and yellow Star of Earth at the top. Obviously he has forgotten about the holiday. Muskie sighs again. “Merry Christmas anyway, Dolph. I know you’re going to reproach me some more. Sit down and catch your breath first.”

They sit on a pressed creepystone bench under a grape arbor. (A few raisins had survived the flare-storm under a bunk in that Outpost of the People. From the six germinable seeds that were found in them had come all the wine on Jem, and this arbor.)

Muskie does not look at her son. She knows that in spite of his faults, he is too well brought up to begin before she has given him encouragement, and she wants him to feel the peace of this place. All around the garden are the statues of the First Generation, the eighteen Mothers in gold, the fifty-two Mares in crystal, the eighty-nine Fathers in granite quarried from the cliffs under the Heat Pole. (The twenty-one survivors who contributed no genes to the pool, even by cloning, have statues too, but they are ranged outside the park. None of them were even mares.) There are further distinctions in the statues. The eighty-one survivors who returned from Farside have their names picked out in frost-etched silver. The thirty-two who survived in the burrows under the Outpost of Food when the flare caught them before the ferrying to Farside was complete are marked in ruby. And the sixty-seven others — few of them viable — who survived the flare in caves, under machines, inside space capsules, or wherever they could hide from the rage of the star are marked in orange chrysolite, the color of flame. That was six generations back. Muskie could have been descended from 2⁶ of them, more than a third, but actually only eleven are truly her ancestors, with considerable overlap. (For instance, she is quintuply each descended from Marjorie Menninger, Ana Dimitrova, Nguyen Tree, and Firstborn McKenzie, the tiny phocomelic child born to the one woman who survived both the nuclear bombing of the Outpost of Fuel and the flare. She lived only long enough to bear her damaged child, but the child was marvelously fertile.)

When Muskie feels that this holy place has done all it can for her son, she scratches below the waistband of her slacks and says, “All right, Dolph, you may as well say it.”

He cannot wait to get the words out, he is so impatient. “All right, I’ll say it! You’ve made a mistake, Mother Muskie. We can’t say no to Alphabase!”

“ ‘Can’t’?”

He is doggedly stubborn. Even ferocious. “Yes, that’s what I said, can’t. It’s a crime against the human race! Jem’s rotting away before your eyes, Mother Muskie. This is the best chance we’ve ever had to get things going again. They’ve got high-energy technology on Alphabase! Do you know what it means, what they’re suggesting? They’re able to put ten tons standard into the tachyon charge state — we couldn’t do that to save our lives.”

“Dear Dolph,” she begins, sweetly reasonable, “we have more pressing problems right here on Jem. Do you know how many wild flocks of Loons there are? Krips who still wallow in savagery? Creepies unreached and unbenefited. We have a duty—”

“We have a duty to humanity!” he cries.

“Yes. Certainly! And we are carrying it out. Our ancestors gave their lives to save us, and we are true to the Six Precepts. There is no tyrannical government, no coercion, no contending nationalities here. We haven’t raped Jem, we’ve wooed it. We live off renewable resources, while the Alphs are back to industry and all the evils of technology.”

“Dear God,” he shouts, “resources? The quarter-million of us don’t begin to scratch the surface of them! Do you know that fossil fuel is forming faster than we use it?”

“Good! Proper! That makes it renewable. But be reasonable, Dolph dear. Why spoil everyone’s happiness by striving for something foolish? Suppose everyone wanted to do what you say. Who would mine these fossil fuels?”

“Krips. Creeps. People. Machines! I don’t care. If they don’t want to, they should be ordered to!”

Muskrat is shaken. “You have spoiled my Christmas,” she says sorrowfully, and walks away. What a shame! A foolishly stubborn boy and an incompetent mare, and her whole holiday was ruined before it had rightly begun. Dolph is her favorite son, or often is. She admires his tiny, quick body and his bright mind. But what rot, really! What a bore! Why can’t he accept paradise like everyone else and be happy in it?

Dolph’s holiday is spoiled, too, and he sits on the creepy-stone bench so angry and frustrated that he does not even hear the carols beginning.

A’es’e fi’eles, lae’i’riumphan’es.

If only she could be made to understand! The winning of Jem had cost so much in blood and pain. Not just in that first terrible year. Over and over again, every time Kung had flared in those first decades. There had been eight flares since the days of the ancestors, and only the last two or three had been fairly painless. Plenty of warning. A frenzied rush to ionproof the domes and hustle essential perishables inside. A week of confinement while the star raged, a year or so of one or another kind of scarcity until the planet replenished itself. But that left half a dozen sieges of misery, the first worst, but all of them catastrophic. Was all that to go for nothing?