 How do you think Meredith feels about the rest of the crew?
In repose, Taphetta the Ribboneer resembled a fancy giant bow on a package. "It's more than a legend," said Sam Halden, biologist. "There are at least a hundred kinds of humans, each supposedly originating in strict seclusion on as many widely scattered planets. Obviously there was no contact throughout the ages before space travel— and yet each planetary race can interbreed with a minimum of ten others ! "Outside of your own world, there's nothing like your species, except superficially, and that's true of all other creatures, intelligent or not, with the sole exception of mankind. Actually, the four of us here, though it's accidental, very nearly represent the biological spectrum of human development. There's a corresponding span of fertility. Emmer just misses being able to breed with my kind, but there's a fair chance that I'd be fertile with Meredith and a similar though lesser chance that her fertility may extend to Kelburn." It's reasonable to assume that, if men were set down on a hundred such worlds, they'd seem to fit in with native life-forms on a few of them. "But there are other worlds in which humans who were there before the Stone Age aren't related to anything else there. "Something had to distribute one species so widely and it's not the result of parallel evolution—not when a hundred human races are involved, and only the human race." Man was the most numerous though not always the most advanced—Ribboneers had a civilization as high as anything in the known section of the Milky Way, and there were others—and humans were more than a little feared. "We've got new data and are able to interpret it better. The theory is that humans who can mate with each other were once physically close. This is one arm of it as it is today and here are the human systems." And while stars in a given region tend to remain together, there's also a random motion. They were spaced at fairly equal intervals along a regular curve, a horseshoe loop that didn't close, though if the ends were extended, the lines would have crossed. "And whereas there are humans who are relatively near and not fertile, they can always mate with those they were adjacent to two hundred thousand years ago !" And, of course, if it were a fast-moving star, it might be completely out of the field of our exploration. The Ribboneer glanced out the visionport, where another ship hung motionless in space beside them.
 She respects one person the most and loves another person the most
 She has a close bond of respect and (platonic) love for the rest of the members  She respects and loves one person the most  She's become friends with them slowly over time and appreciates them all  She respects one person the most and loves another person the most