"Once. Our mother had to sing to us to explain the meaning of that word. She refused to do it again no matter how much we asked her to."
"It's one of the things I miss the most. When I was preparing my baggage to travel to outer space, to another planet - Wow! It still seems so incredible even to say it -, I never thought of including such apparently useless things. And it turns out… here there isn't any! Those who were born here can't miss it, and those non-permanent, like me… Well, I guess they set the same practical priorities in their suitcases as I did. Wrong priorities."
She felt something she decided it was best to ignore.
"Mama told me Adelle had said something about the spaceships going to Earth every five years. Is that right?"
"That is right," answered Alan, even more intrigued than her.
"How long have you been here?"
"Two years. Plus the interstellar one-year travel."
"And in three years' time you will go back again?"
"That's the plan."
Roxanne was silent. She was naturally inquisitive and talkative, but the confinement in the castle, together with the estrangement from her, to all intents and purposes, sisters, meant that she was only used to chatting with her aunt-mother Lorraine. And, on top of that, their conversations, though full of affection from both sides, had always inevitably been tinged with unhealthy fear.
"It's funny," started Alan, not really knowing why he felt like sharing confidences with this girl, "how, sometimes, circumstances converge to produce something. I met Joseph on our last year at medical school - yes, I'm a doctor too. He'd travelled to Earth following his dream of completing his studies there, and so I was casually given the opportunity to do this trip - which I'd almost already decided to do anyway, some day, for personal reasons - with a friend, a good friend, I should say."
"What reasons?" asked Roxanne, intoxicated by the nude sincerity of the night.
"They don't matter anymore."
"I'm sure they matter. Seven years is a long time. The reasons cannot be so petty as to be forgotten like that."
A half-smile showed up on Alan's face, caught in his lie.
"Let's say I need it not to matter anymore, since I can't accomplish what I came here to do."
Roxanne was annoyed at his secrecy - the secrecy of a semi-stranger, it was true, but to whom she'd revealed her whole life. Joseph had surely briefed him on what he hadn't personally heard.
"Is Leonard well known," she asked, turning to more practical matters as well as enjoying the longed for occasion of not having to call him Father anymore, "on Earth?"