Sundown burned across great waters. Far to the west, the clouds banked tall above New Zealand threw hot gold into the sky. In that direction, the sea was too bright to look upon. Eastward it faded through green and royal blue to night, where the first stars trod forth and trembled. There was just enough wind to ruffle the surface, send wavelets lapping against the hull of the ketch, flow down the idle mainsail and stir the girl’s loosened pale hair.

Terangi Maclaren pointed north. “The kelp beds are that way,” he drawled. “Main source of the family income, y’ know. They mutate, crossbreed, and get seaweed which furnishes all kind of useful products. It’s beyond me, thank the honorable ancestors. Biochemistry is an organized mess. I’ll stick to something simple, like the degenerate nucleus.”

The girl giggled. “And if it isn’t degenerate, will you make it so?” she asked.

She was a technic like himself, of course: he would never have let a common on his boat, since a few machines were, in effect, a sizable crew. Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively — whereas Maclaren was one of the few in his who did not. She was of carefully selected mutant Burmese strain, with amber skin, exquisite small features, and greenish-blond hair. Maclaren had been angling for weeks to get her alone like this. Not that General Feng, her drug-torpid null of a guardian, cared how much scandal she made, flying about the planet without so much as an amazon for chaperone. But she was more a creature of the Citadel and its hectic lights than of the sunset ocean.

Maclaren chuckled. “I wasn’t swearing at the nucleus,” he said. “Degeneracy is a state of matter under certain extreme conditions. Not too well understood, even after three hundred years of quantum theory. But I wander, and I would rather wonder. At you, naturally.”