"It was part of a comet," Nita said. "Until the comet's orbit decayed. It came in too close to the Sun on one pass, and shattered, and came down—" Kit took his hand away abruptly. "It doesn't care for that memory," he said. "And now here it is. …""Tamed," Kit said. "Resting. But it remembers when it was wild, and roamed in the dark, and the Sun was its only tether. . .кNita was still for a few seconds. That sense of the Earth being a small safe "house" with a huge backyard, through which powers both benign and terri-ble moved, was what had first made her fall in love with astronomy. To have someone share the feeling with her so completely was amazing. She met Kit's eyes, and couldn't think of anything to say; just nodded. "When's the sky show?" he said. "Fifteen minutes." "Let's go."They spent the afternoon drifting from exhibit to exhibit, playing with the ones that wanted playing with, enjoying themselves and taking their time. To Nita's gratification, Dairine stayed mostly out of their way. She did attach herself to them for the sky show, which may have been lucky; for Dairine got fascinated by the big Zeiss star projector, standing under the dome like a giant lens-studded dumbbell, and only threats of violence kept her out of the open booth that contained the computer-driven controls.When the sky show was done, Dairine went off to the planetarium store to add a few more books to the several she'd already bought. Nita didn't see her again until late in the afternoon, when she and Kit were trying out the scales that told you your weight on various planets. Nita had just gotten on the scale for Jupiter, which weighed her in at twenty-one hundred pounds."Putting on a little weight, there, Neets," Dairine said behind her. "Espe-cially up front."Nita almost turned around and decked her sister. Their mom had just taken Nita to buy her first bra, and her feelings about this were decidedly mixed—a kind of pride combined with embarrassment, because none of the
