it had to do.

Mryna was pawing through a footlocker looking for boots when she heard a
hesitant step behind her. She whirled and saw a small, stooped,
white-haired man, naked except for trunks like the ones she was wearing.
The wrinkled skin on his wasted chest was burned brown by the hot glare
of the sun. Thick-lensed glasses hung from a chain around his neck.

"My dear young lady," he said in a tired voice, "this is a men's ward!"

"I'm sorry. I didn't know--"

"You must be a new patient." He fumbled for his glasses. Instinctively
she knew she shouldn't let him see her clearly enough to identify her as
a stranger. She shoved past him, knocking the glasses from his hand.

"I'd better find my own--ward." Mryna didn't know the word, but she
supposed it meant some sort of sleeping chamber.

The old man said chattily, "I hadn't heard they were bringing in any new
patients today."

She was in the corridor by that time. He reached for her hand. "I'll see
you in the sunroom?" It was a timid, hopeful question. "And you'll tell
me all the news--everything they're doing back on Earth. I haven't been
home for almost a year."

She fled down the hall. When she heard voices ahead of her, she pulled
back a door and slid into another room--a storeroom piled with cases of
medicines. Behind the cartons she thought she would be safe.

This wasn't what she had expected. Mryna thought there might be one man
living in a kind of prefab somehow suspended above the rain mist. But
there were obviously others up here; she didn't know how many. And the
old man frightened her--more than the dazzling sight of the heavens
visible through the mica wall. Mryna had never seen physical age before.
No one on Rythar was older than she was herself--a sturdy, healthy,
lusty twenty. The old man's infirmity disgusted her; for the first time
in her life she was conscious of the slow decay of death.

The door of the supply room slid open. Mryna crouched low behind the
cartons, but she was able to see the man and the woman who had entered
the room. A woman--here? Mryna hadn't considered that possibility.
Perhaps the Earth-god already had a mate.

The newcomers were dressed in crisp, white uniforms; the woman wore a
starched, white hat. They carried a tray of small, glass cylinders from
which metal needles projected. While the woman held the tray, the man
drove the needles through the caps of small bottles and filled the
cylinders with a bright-col