The heir swept back the curtain, throwing a beam of sunlight across the operating room. It gilded the side of the old man's face and as he turned his head blindly toward it, it lighted his strange eyes huge and bright.
Wide and deep, with buried spiders of red, fringed by lashes that beat as frantically as the wings of a wounded kauri, the eyes glowed. Their small black centers mirrored in duplicate Kit's face. They reflected in miniature her slow collapse into Jeff's arms in the instant of silence that followed her one word: "Konrad."
As Jeff carried her from the room, the earless young man crowded ahead of him, unwrapping his damp package.
"Please sire, am I not next?" He waved a freshly cut pair of ears in Jeff's face.
"Not right now," the doctor mumbled absently as he pushed through the doorway.
The door closed. The weapons of the assassins clashed bravely as they prepared the retreat to the crags and the old man croaked ecstatically of the beautiful woman he could not possibly have seen.
Two months later the outgoing rocket carried two passengers who held hands. A third passenger was on the way, an Earthman to be.