In spite of all the empty space in the Ship, we were crowded in our apartment. Somehow after I left the dorm and moved in with Daddy we just had never gotten around to trading in his small apartment for a larger one. We were too busy living in the one we had. The one thing I had disliked most when I was living in the dormitory was the lack of space — they feel they have to keep an eye on you there. Moving now meant that I would have a larger room for myself. Daddy had promised I could.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. “Which apartment are we going to move into?”

The population of the Ship is about 30,000 now, but once we had transported thirty times that many and cargo besides. The truth is that I don’t see where they had fit them all. But now, even though we’ve spread out to fill up some of the extra space, all the quads have empty apartments. If we had wanted to, we could have moved next door.

Then Daddy said, as though it made no difference, “It’s a big place in Geo Quad,” and the bottom fell out of my elation.

I turned away from him abruptly, feeling dizzy, and sat down. Daddy didn’t just want me to leave home. He wanted me to leave the precarious stability I had worked out for myself. Until I was nine, I had nothing, and now Daddy wanted me to give up everything I had gained since then.

Even now, it isn’t easy for me to talk about it. If it were not important, I would skip right over it and never say a word. I was very lonely when I was nine. I was living in a dormitory with fourteen other kids, being watched and told what to do, seeing a procession of dorm mothers come and go, feeling abandoned. That’s the way it had been for me for five years, and finally there came a time when I couldn’t stay there any longer, and so I ran away. I got on the shuttle, though I don’t know quite how I knew where to go, and I went to see Daddy.

I kept thinking about what I’d say and what he’d say and worrying about it all the distance, so that when I finally got in to see him I was crying and hiccuping and I couldn’t stop.