So Mary could be Katha, given a fast passenger ship.
And Arnel could be Katha, too. Arnel had a mole in the right place. So did Lillian. And Ruth. And Virginia.
Yes, Garrity married every one of them. Six girls, six planets. It took him a while, and by the time he got as far as Ruth, he was going to a lot of trouble to arrange his shipping runs so he could make the full circuit. But every so often I'd hear from him, or run into him, and there would always be a new one.
The Garrity plan was going fine, but it lacked that one ingredient he had counted on—variety. Every one of those girls was Katha.
He didn't think so. He could call off the differences between them by the hour. To listen to him, if you hadn't actually seen them, you'd have believed every word he said.
Each one of them gets a share of Garrity's pay—a big share, from the looks of it. Each one of them keeps a nice place for Garrity and, when he comes into port, he eats and sleeps as well as any honest groundwalker. And each one of them has a small fat baby boy, of whose exact age Garrity never seems to be quite sure. Two or three of the kids seem extremely advanced for their ages and they were all born fairly close together, which was enough to make Garrity as proud as a rooster.
And Garrity seems to be the only one who can't tell.
Thinking about it might make a man want to rush off to Serco and find a girl like Katha ... and Serco is full of them. I'd like having a girl like Katha. I'd like having six Kathas even better.
But I'm not going to.