Sitting a little apart on a stone was a fair‑haired girl, yes, of thirteen or so. This child was easy for Connie to distinguish because her cotton shirt was open all the way down like a jacket, and her small cups of breasts were visible as she got up and turned toward them. The skin of her chest looked tattooed. Connie stared. As they moved into a close group, she could see it was paint. The girl wore pants and that open shirt and had at her feet a basket, which now she swung up to wear like a rucksack. She also picked up a bow and slung it over her shoulder. Connie could see at her waist a knife sheath, hanging under the shirt‑as‑jacket.

“This is our child, Innocente. Innocente, here is Connie, from the past.” Bee turned to her, stately today in his movements. “This day is Innocente’s naming. Otter, Luxembourg, and I are about to leave together by floater to see per safely landed. We’ve been Innocente’s mothers, and this is end‑of‑mothering.”

“As if you won’t be tumbled to get rid of me!” Innocente stuck out her tongue at him.

“You guessed it. We plan to drop you in the bay.”

“Except that you float like a bladder.” Otter, the woman in deerskin, spoke.

“When I’m eaten by a bear, you’ll bottom!”

Otter slipped her arm around Innocente. “A skinny bit like you? And tough! Like chewing on locust wood.”

“Do you not want to go?” asked Luxembourg, in the flowing blue dress. “Say it–don’t comp yourself. If the time isn’t ripe, wait. We’re not nipping to let you escape us.”

Innocente screwed up her nose, kicking at the stone with new‑looking heavy boots. “Fasure I want to go. It’s not that I’m running eager to get away from you lugs. Only, my two best friends are already youths. I think it’s time. I keep dreaming about going. Besides, what a ticky name you stuck me with. What am I supposed to be innocent of?”

“You said that twice you dreamed going,” Otter commented. “That sounds right. Nobody ever feels yin‑and‑yang sure.”

“Of that or anything else on earth.” Bee stroked the child’s shoulder. “You have me to blame. Innocente was a naming from the heart, partly for Luciente, who speaks Spanish. We’d been lovers only a short time. Partly I liked the sound, pretty in my mouth. Finally I’d just finished a task period working on reparations to former colonies, when I came home and put in to be a mother. I’d been traveling for a year in Latin America. It made me brood about those centuries of the rape of the earth, the riches stolen, the brutalizing and starving of generations … toward that day when all trace of that pillaging will be healed … . That’s how you got named. It’s up to you now to improve on it.” Bee stepped back. “Did you sharpen your knife?”

“Fasure. I checked everything. Canteen, stringing of my bow, arrow points.” Innocente looked at Connie. “Are you coming?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just where are you going?”

“Where it’s been decided.” Innocente gave a dry, choppy laugh.

“Innocente will be dropped into one of the wilderness areas we use,” Luciente said. “This is how we transit from childhood to full member of our community.”

“Drop her in the wilderness? Alone?” Her voice rose.

“Fasure I’ll be alone,” Innocente said with indignation. “What point would there be, at now? I’ve been in the woods plenty.”

Connie turned to Bee. “Does she stay out there overnight?” They had to be crazy.

“For a week. Then the aunts person selected–advisers for the next years–return for per. Not us.” Otter adjusted her elaborate hair.

“But theywon’t be able to speak to me for threemonth when I come back.” Innocente sounded gleeful. “They aren’t allowed to.”

“Lest we forget we aren’t mothers anymore and person is an equal member. Threemonth usually gives anyone a solid footing and breaks down the old habits of depending,” Otter went on.

“Suppose she breaks a leg. Suppose she’s bitten by a snake. Suppose she gets appendicitis!”

Bee smiled at her almost sadly. “We take the chance. We have found no way to break dependencies without some risk. What we can’t risk is our people remaining stuck in old patterns–quarreling through what you called adolescence.”

“A rite of passage that doesn’t involve some danger is too much a gift to create confidence,” Luxembourg said in her soft, rather deep voice.

“I’m afraid to go … but I’m willing, fasure. How come you don’t talk to me? You only talk to them,” Innocente said to Connie.

“How can you know what you’re getting into? You’re only a child!” She turned to Bee. “It’s criminal dropping her with wild animals and poison ivy and who knows what? How is she supposed to eat and clean herself and take care?”

“I know what to eat in the woods! I’m twelve and a half, not four. I can fly a floater myself, you ask if I can’t! There’s only one other twelve‑year‑old who flies a floater alone in this whole township. You can’t expect me to go through life with an unearned name, stuck on me when I wasn’t conscious yet! How can I go deep into myself and develop my own strength if I don’t get to find out how I am alone as well as with others? … Zo?”

Luciente took Connie’s hand. “I see it’s strange to you. But your young remained economically dependent long after they were ready to work. We set our children free.”

Bee shook out the folds of his robe. “Come see us off. It’s time. Come with us in the floater if you like, or stay with Luciente and person can show you the children’s house. We have an hour’s flight. We want Innocente to have long hours of daylight to fix camp, scout food, and take stock of the area.”

Innocente strode off and they fell in behind. Soon they were ambling together, Innocente arm in arm with Luxembourg, who murmured in her ear soft cautions and advice, while Luciente and Otter walked linked, Luciente telling a broad story about Neruda’s naming.

“You’re just going to toss her out in a parachute into the woods and run away?” Connie asked Bee.

“Parachute? We lower per to the ground and mark the spot with a radio beacon and big red marker.”

Luciente leaned close, grinning. “We haven’t misplaced a child yet. You’re right, accidents happen … . But why try to control everything? Grasp, we think control interfers with pleasure and with communing–and we care about both.”

“I won’t go along. I don’t want to see a child abandoned!”

“Connie, can’t you see Innocente wants to go?”

“Kids can be brainwashed into wanting any piece of garbage. My … own child cried for a week once for a mechanical walking man she saw on the TV that cost so much I couldn’t believe it. Should I have let us go hungry two weeks to buy it to stop her tears?”

“We’ll see them away. They’ll be happier alone. It’s tender, end‑of‑mothering. Comprend, we sweat out our rituals together. We change them, we’re all the time changing them! But they body our sense of good.”

Gently Bee adjusted Innocente’s jacket. “Don’t slow or trance till you build your shelter, grasp?”

As they came over a small rise, they faced a bigger hill. Cut into its side was what appeared to be a hangar, its top standing open like a box with the lid up. Three grasshoppery machines the size of police helicopters stood inside. The hangar was built much larger than needed to accommodate them, as if sometimes it might hold more of them or something else besides.

A blond woman wearing overalls came toward them from the floater in front. She was tanned, her cropped hair was shoved up in a bandanna, her nose reddened by the sun, her eyes wide and blue, and her wiry arms were daubed with grease. “Zo, a good naming, Innocente. You’re off now?”

“You got the floater ready, Red Star?”

“Alt checked. You flying today?”

“Ha! They said no. What do you think?”

“You don’t even know where you’re going, or have you guessed?”

“If I did, they’d change it”