On my second trip down, for the Admiral's fifteenth wedding anniversary, I decided to look up my grandparents. We had never communicated. My parents always said that they all disapproved of them going out to the Big, and thought it a crime to bear a child out there with all the medical problems during gestation and, lord, how would the child turn out? Well, I was fine, if a little brittle and prone to a mild form of spacer's arthritis.

My paternal grandfather was dead. Mina Barker still lived on the farm where my father was born and raised. I called her first, identified myself and asked if I could meet her. She said 'yes' and 'right now' and then cried for fifteen minutes. That made me a little gun-shy about calling elderly Earthlings, so it was a few hours before I called my maternal grandparents.

My grandfather Robert Joyes answered on his cell and said "Mina just called us! We're already on our way." I was floored. In one gee.

I took a helibus to the town of Kirkfield, near Lake Simcoe, and then a groundcar from there to the farm. It was a large-scale freshwater fish raising concern in an old flooded gravel quarry. They also ran a tourist marina on the Trent Canal, since the quarry was only a few meters away.

The highlight for tourists and visitors was the canal liftlocks, that carried boat traffic up and down a high cliff that would have otherwise prevented the canal construction. It was a solution to a problem that reminded me of how us spacers faced an unusual problem; with a unique solution.

My grandmother Barker and Robert and Eva Joyes were standing on the porch of the house with glasses in their hands. There were a few other people there too. Cousins, as it turned out.

I didn't know what to say to start things off, but didn't have to worry.

"You're taller than your father, David!" said Grandmother Barker. She threw her arms around me, then jumped back, obviously afraid she'd break something. Then Grandmother Joyes hugged me too. Grandfather Joyes shook my hand, then so did everybody else.

I met a dozen more relatives whose names I only half remember, even though I was recording everything. Almost all employees of the farm and marina, they were Wilsons, Stewarts, Lytles and, to my surprise, Sherpas. I commented on being related to immigrant Tibetans and the entire party broke up in laughter. A Barker cousin explained that they were Chirpaughs, an old Irish surname in the area. I was reminded that my heritage did not begin when my parents left for the Big.

I was offered sushi (trout and some other local delicacies), salads, interesting adaptations of the vat-cloned meats that were first being marketed then, and a very nice local beer.

Finally the grandparents shooed everybody back to work and we retired to a sitting room overlooking the quarry. The open sky above was, thankfully, obscured by a partial dome to keep the harmful sunlight off the water and the workers. That and the flat surface of the water, with all the rafts and pens, and the meters high cliffs helped calm my initial but mild agoraphobia. And, as we all know, there is really no such thing as a 'sky'; it's an illusion, like rainbows and 'red sun at night.'

"Call me Gramma," said Mina Barker. She gestured outside. "They all do. My God. Eva, look at him. Looks just like Lillian."

"Norm's hair, though, Minie," said Robert. "So you saw one of those aliens, did you, David? Dave? Davey? What do you like?"

"Dave's fine, sir."

"Listen to you! Sir! I'm your grandfather, Dave. Some of your cousins call me Gramps, some call me Grandda." He pointed to Eva. "She's Ayesha."

"I am not. You shut yourself up, Rob. Now, David. Please tell us. Do you speak to them? Write? Anything?" She meant my parents.

"Ma'am. Grandma." She smiled. "I haven't heard anything from them since they left." Nearly twenty years ago,then. And I didn't want to give them any illusions. "There is no colony that has them on file. And no -uh- abandoned settlements on record. I've checked." A hundred times.

Eva sighed and cleared her throat. "But they could be -"

"Sure. People are still settling the Jovian Trojans and we don't get much data from them at all," I said. I was afraid they'd ask what the Jovian Trojans were.

Robert shook his head slowly. "They were such a pair a goofs. My god." I thought he was going to cry.

Mina, sitting beside me, took my hand. "Do you know anything about them, Dave? Did they tell you anything about us or here?" I shook my head. "Do you want us to tell you anything?" I nodded, because I realized that I did. "Ask us anything. Oh! I'm going to cry! I am so happy right now. We were so afraid we'd never meet you, and then we heard your name after the battles out at Saturn and we hoped it was you!" She wiped her nose. "I'm sorry. Good God. No, I am not." She leaned over and hugged me again.

"They always seemed so intense, even when I was little. Like I was important not because I was their kid, but because I was the seventeenth human child born in the Big. Like they needed to learn everything about space so that they could write the book on it." I surprised myself with that because I had never actually thought about it that way before.

"Norm and Lillian," said Eva. "Do you know what a moby is, Dave?"

"A fish? A golden calf idol from an old movie?"

"Mobies were from the first groups of kids to grow up in the mall cities and arcologies. You've seen them, I'm sure. Small apartments, shared public spaces, parks, playing fields, everything. Moby means 'My Own Back Yard'. It was what they wanted to have. They were hippies of a sort." Ah, some kind of Utopian. "Norm grew up here, and worked here summers when he went down to Toronto to Ryerson. Lillian grew up in Parkdale Village, under the first Toronto dome, in the Roncesvalles Mall. They met at school. She came out here to work one summer, they fell in love and were married right out back in the arbour garden."

I was a little flustered. My parents had always seemed very efficient and all-business in our various flats in Clavius, L5 and a couple of different geosynchs. "But if Mum wanted more space, more room, and Dad was perfectly happy here, why did they - "

"Go out?" asked Mina. "Propaganda, I guess. Lillian was already used to limited spaces, and Norm's type of experience and training here was exactly what the UN wanted on the moon and Mars, too."

"They were so serious all the time," I said. Everything was mission critiical for them. "Who wrote who off? They said you didn't want to contact them."

All three gasped, startled. Eva looked at Mina, and both started to cry. "I'm sorry," I said. "Please. I -"

"Leave them, Dave," said Robert. "When we asked them about you, about Lillian getting pregnant when even the UN doctors disrecommended it, they both got mad. It was like having one of the first babies born in space was their destiny." They'd treated me like a project sometimes.

Eva was wiping her eyes. "We sent you books and toys and pictures. We told them to come back for a vacation, but they said they couldn't due to health problems. Norman even hinted once that they could never return to Earth or they'd die, and we knew that was a crock. Once, when you were about four, I told them I was coming up and they said they were moving to Mars." I remembered that move, although we just moved to Giordano Bruno on Farside.

Mina looked at me woefully. "When they posted the announcement that they were immigrating out to the Asteroids, I cried for days. We thought you'd gone too. When we got the updates from the front, it made sense to us that David Barker would be on the front lines. We didn't know they'd just left you behind." I was at school the day they left. "You should have called us then."

"I didn't know you'd - I didn't think of it." I do not get easily moved, but that day, well.

"Are you happy up there, David?" asked Robert. "Do you like it?"

"It's home. It's my home." I looked around at this house that first my father and later both my parents had called home. Large rooms and wide halls, ancient furniture and static paintings and hangings, an antique television with a fish-tank in it, rugs and windows and a view from here to the edge of the world. But no further. Not even an negative exponential fraction of the view from Farside back almost to the beginning of time.

"You're welcome here anytime. I know you don't belong here like Aaron or Elizabeth out there, but we're family, you know. Put us in your address book, your distribution lists. I know you have work to do while you're down here, but could you visit us again, sometime? Maybe call? Let us give you our addresses and websites. Well, you have those. So put a star beside them."

Mina looked into my face, into my eyes. "You have a second cousin or something. I can never keep these things straight. He's at the UN training school for immigrants in Sudbury. Can we ask him to call you when he gets up there?"

I believe I was near to tears myself. "Of course. Certainly."

I included this story for two main reasons. One to brag about the fact that after a great many years without, I found I had a family again. The second is to let you in a little on why I am the way I am. Until I met my grandparents, I had no idea that being this way was genetic.