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Show used its handle to steady herself as she picked her way out of the garden and across the greensward to the hall, holding the gray skirt of her tucked and girdled plisson off the ground with her other hand. Dr'Anya had been troubled for some months with arthritis, most particularly in the feet. All the Needlesmiths had been troubled with arthritis down through the generations. The pain and swelling of this thrice bedamned disease generally set in at about age fifty-five with the Needlesmiths-the early prime of life on BauerWorlde where old age was not expected until the middle one-hundreds. Indeed, the male of the first Needlesmith pair on BauerWorlde-Doctor Isaac Needlesmith-found himself in a wheelchair before he'd seen his sixty-fifth TwelveMonth. Dr'Anya could trace her family tree and title straight back through ten generations to the first BauerWorlde settlement in the Caves, straight back to that same Isaac Needlesmith who, with his partner; Ida, left the EarthSolarSystem on a Bussard interstellar ramjet with an expeditionary force of two hundred wights to study and colonize the planet-the Earthski Greta Bauer's great discovery-in the year 2042. In that time before the advent of warpdrive, the colonists and their seed stock of animals and plants had all been asleep for a dozen cycles of TwelveMonths on this, the FirstSleeper, traveling through the great ocean of space that separates Earth and Earth-like BauerWorlde. The name of Needlesmith, therefore, was not only respected, it was revered. The first Needlesmith pair had been from the beginning the most cherished among the saintly two hundred who had come to prepare BauerWorlde for the five SleeperShips originally slated to follow them-one every five TwelveMonths after they landed. And, too, the Needlesmith Commendium held 16 |