Book Two: And the Thing Became, Chapter 9-Chapter 10 Summary

Ten years later, the Bahía de Darwin sinks, and by that time, the castaways call her the Walloping Window Blind, after a poem by Charles Carryl that is disparaging of the captain and his reliance on the ship's technology. Hisako's daughter Akiko and the Kanka-bonos all use the nickname, although the Kanka-bonos don't understand it and Akiko cannot translate it.

Soon after the ship sinks, when Mary is sixty-one, she begins the artificial inseminations. The captain does not want to reproduce and pass on Huntington's chorea. He also is a racist and so stays away from the other women on the island. No one on the island knows that humanity is going extinct, and they still expect rescue. Mary, however, begins to wonder about impregnating the other women...