On an alien world colonised by humans long ago, a bold and clever young woman named Daya has decided at last to have a child. Her people reproduce biologically, with one mother taking several male lovers and combining their sperm to produce a child who bears traits of all the parents involved in the ritual. Daya has delayed this decision for years, and has been especially distracted since posthuman scientists have come from the stars to study Daya's people and their quaint biological mating ritual. Daya's people are resistant to the scientists, believing that they wish to control all reproduction and eliminate the biological variety. Daya visits the three fathers she has chosen for her child one by one. After sex, each of them asks her why someone of her courage and imagination hasn't left the village for the much larger Blue City. Each time, she avoids the question, and speaks as though she intends to stay in their small village forever, though she does ask the last father if he would be willing to raise the child if she decided to leave. He refuses, as this is not in keeping with the traditions of their people. As her combined conception takes place inside her, Daya finally leaves the village - a decision she has kept from herself as much as from her lovers - and joins her actual lover, one of the posthuman scientists, a woman who thanks Daya for the anthropological contribution she is making by sharing valuable information about how their pregnancies work. Daya plans to go much further than the blue city: she plans to accompany the scientists to the stars. But in doing so, and giving the scientists so much, she may be betraying her people.