"You couldn't possibly be proved to be a Darian, then?"
She shook her head. Calhoun remembered, and started the coffee.
"When you left Dara," he said, "you were carried a long, long way, to some planet where they'd practically never heard of Dara, and where the name meant nothing. You could have settled there, or anywhere else and forgotten about Dara. But you didn't. Why not, since you're not a blueskin?"
"But I am!" she said fiercely. "My parents, my brothers and sisters, and Korvan—"
Then she bit her lip. Calhoun took note but did not comment on the name she'd mentioned.
"Then your parents had the splotches fade, so you never had them," he said absorbedly. "Something like that happened on Tralee, once! There's a virus, a whole group of virus particles! Normally we humans are immune to them. One has to be in terrifically bad physical condition for them to take hold and produce whatever effects they do. But once they're established they're passed on from mother to child. And when they die out it's during childhood, too!"
He poured coffee for the two of them. Murgatroyd swung down to the floor and said, impatiently, "Chee! Chee! Chee!"
Calhoun absently filled Murgatroyd's tiny cup and handed it to him.
"But this is marvellous!" he said exuberantly. "The blue patches appeared after the plague, didn't they? After people recovered—when they recovered?"
Maril stared at him. His mind was filled with strictly professional considerations. He was not talking to her as a person. She was purely a source of information.