“Nikki!” he said reprovingly. “I thought I told you not to come in when the red light was on!”

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she responded, sounding not the least bit sorry, as she put the tray down and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “But you haven’t eaten in so long we were getting worried.” She looked over, saw the younger man and smiled a very different sort of smile.

“Hi, Ben!” she called playfully, and waved.

Yulin looked over, smiled, and waved back. Then, suddenly, he was thinking hard. A hundred meters, he thought. The kitchen was about that far away, above ground.

She put her arms around her father. “What have you been up to for so long?” she asked in that playful tone. Although physically adult, Nikki Zinder was emotionally very much a child and acted it. Too much, her father knew. She was overly protected here, cut off from people her own age, and spoiled rotten from an early age by her father’s inability to discipline her and everybody’s knowledge that she was the boss’s kid. Even her slight lisp was childish; often she seemed more like a pouting five-year-old than the almost fourteen she really was.

But, she was his, and he couldn’t bear to send her away, to put her in a fancy school or project far away from him. His had been a lonely life of figures and great machines; at fifty-seven he had had clone samples taken, but he wanted his own. Finally he had paid a project assistant back on Voltaire to give him a baby. She had been the first one willing to do it, just to see what the experience was like. She was a behavioral psychologist, and Zinder had had her assigned to his project until Nikki was delivered, then he paid her off, and she left.

Nikki looked like her mother, but that didn’t matter. She was his, and during the most trying periods of the project she had kept him from blowing his brains out. She was immature as hell. But he really didn’t want her to grow up. Nikki Zinder suddenly heard a woman cough, and she bounded up to the rail and looked down on the centaur.