Stabilization had blended into Propagation, the next phase generally recognized by historians, which was fairly self-explanatory: the descendants of the Seven Eves had continued to have sex with each other and make more babies. This had occupied much of the first half of the First Millennium and led to a condition of overcrowding so severe that it had made obligatory the formation of separate colonies away from Cradle. For there were other places, perhaps not quite so favored as Cleft, but still well suited for the building of new habitats. They had reached the point, by then, of being able to construct new machines for moving about in space. It was time. Or so insisted the descendants of the Four, who sensed that conditions had become inimical to them in the crowded precincts of Cradle. Camila had been frank about her strategy of making new humans well suited to life in confined spaces. She had succeeded in doing so. And once the early habitats of Cradle had grown crowded, her strategy had begun to look like a good one. Whether it was purely an expression of their own racial mythologies or a biological necessity, the Four had reached out and pioneered new habitats, at first in other locations on Cleft, later on other fragments of Peach Pit. The descendants of Aïda had done likewise, sometimes cohabiting with the Four, more often going it alone.