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He listened listlessly while Brisby explained. He woke up a little when he understood that he was being offered status -- not much, he gathered. But status. The fraki had status among themselves. It had never occurred to him that fraki status could matter even to fraki.
"You don't have to," Colonel Brisby concluded, "but it will make simpler the thing Colonel Baslim wanted me to do -- find your family, I mean. You would like that, wouldn't you?"
Thorby almost said that he knew where his Family was. But he knew what the Colonel meant: his own sib, whose existence he had never quite been able to imagine. Did he really have blood relatives somewhere?
"I suppose so," he answered slowly. "I don't know."
"Mmm . . ." Brisby wondered what it was like to have no frame to your picture. "Colonel Baslim was anxious to have me locate your family. I can handle it easier if you are officially one of us. Well? It's Guardsman third class . . . thirty credits a month, all you can eat and not enough sleep. And glory. A meager amount."
Thorby looked up. "This is the same Fam -- service my Pop -- Colonel Baslim, you call him -- was in? He really was?"
"Yes. Senior to what you will be. But the same service. I think you started to say 'family.' We like to think of the Service as one enormous family. Colonel Baslim was one of the more distinguished members of it."
"Then I want to be adopted
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