Robert left in 1977. Max sent him away. He assigned Robert to San Francisco, to start a group with a woman named Kell, and after Kell allowed sex Robert wanted to marry her. She refused marriage but permitted sex as long as they ran the group.

Max couldn’t stay at Sunrise without disciples. The place was supported by the small sums people brought with them and by their group efforts at agriculture and handcrafts. It was a subsistence income in the good years, and nonexistent by 1978. Max moved farther up the valley and landed in Grass Valley. He got a job at a junior college.

The original members were inconsistently anti-technological. They liked science fiction but disdained appliances, gadgets, and electronic devices. Ironically the Internet and e-mail got them back together.

Max established a website. Within a year, Philip and Maggie and Bill and Keith checked in. All the true captains of the old Starship Sunrise, except Robert. He wasn’t connected until he met Guen who was, and then the six of them planned the reunion.

Max had visited Sunrise regularly in the intervening decades, but he hadn’t often been able to afford any work on the property. He camped there at least once a year. Scrub and brush ranged out of control.

The inevitable fire was more cathartic than catastrophic. It oxidized the outbuildings and additions, but the original stone structure survived. So did the stand of old California live oaks. The ground was scoured to a fine golden brown. Seasons passed.

It was over 22 years since the communards had been together. Philip came from his place in Oregon, with his fifth wife and four of his nine children. He looked as worn out as if he had borne the babies himself.

Maggie had been a stout girl at 28 and was a barrelhouse at 50. A gay woman who disliked lesbians for being, in general, too poor and too rigid, she hadn’t managed a relationship of longer than a few months, ever.

Maggie flew from San Francisco to Bakersfield and then rented a car to get to Sunrise. She and Philip arrived at the same time. They were standing on the front porch with Max when Robert arrived. As soon as Guen and Max saw one another, according to both Philip and Maggie, the ambient energy rose. It was like a taut wire formed between Max and Guen, and a current began zapping both ways along it. Or maybe zapping from her to him, because everyone said that Max looked shook, and Guen had a satisfied expression on her face.

“Like Lilith,” Max exhaled. Guen immediately replied with something Maggie called a hiss and Philip described as a hum.

Then she said she had to talk to Mr. Goldberg, which mystified Robert, and she walked off at an angle away from the house and the vehicles, but Max followed her, and they conversed with vehement gestures. Philip and Maggie and Robert had no idea what was happening, and the mystery wasn’t resolved when Bill and Keith drove into their midst a few minutes later.

Bill and Keith were mystery enough in themselves.