Next year we may get our turn to go, but I don’t mind saying the prospect of waiting another seventeen months wasn’t welcome. What if we didn’t have a single thing to do all summer except get caught loafing by our parents, then sent to help pack dross ships, unload fishing boats, and perform a hundred other mindless chores? Even more depressing, there wouldn’t be any new books till Mister Heinz got back — that is if he didn’t lose the list we gave him!

(One time he returned all excited with a big stack of old Earth poetry but not a single novel by Conrad, Coope, or Coontz. Worse, some grown-ups even claimed to like the stuff!)

Anyway, it was Huck who first suggested heading over the Line, and I’m still not sure whether that’s giving a friend due credit or passing on blame.

“I know where there’s something to read,” she said one day, when summer was just getting its early start here in the south.

Yowg-wayuo had already caught us, vegetating under the pier, skipping rocks at dome-bobbers and bored as noors in a cage. Sure enough, he right-prompt sent us up the long access ramp to repair the village camouflage trellis, a job I always hate and I’ll be glad when I’m too big to be drafted into doing it anymore. We hoon aren’t as fond of heights as those tree-hugging humans and their chimp pets, so let me tell you it can be dizzifying having to crawl atop the wooden lattice arching over all the houses and shops of Wuphon, tending a carpet of greenery that’s supposed to hide our town against being seen from space.

I have doubts it’d really work, if The Day ever comes that everyone frets about. When sky-gods come to judge us, what good will a canopy of leaves do? Will it spare us punishment?