her modest.
“Mendoz’,” Sril said. “Go get your music-stick.”
“I left it in Matuko.”
“Damn. Why?”
She made no answer. David had demanded the flute, to keep safe until she came back. The Go set was in the cabinet under the hatch, and she took the grid out of its clamps and the box of pebbles out of the cubbyhole. She looked around for someone to play with.
“Kasuk. Play Go with me.”
Tanuojin’s son was just coming in the hatch. “What?”
“Play Go with me.”
“I don’t know how.” He scrambled across the Tank toward her, still awkward in the free fall. She dodged fluently out of his way.
“I’ll teach you.”
“It had better not take effort.” He watched her put the grid before her in the air and shake the pebble box of stones. “I don’t believe in effort.”
She taught him the game. Sril’s soft bell-like music played in her ears. Already she missed her flute. Bakan and Marus came into the Tank and threw darts. They had only reached cruising speed during the high watch, five hours before, and the crew were still settling into their routines.
“Where is
“Off our bow. You can see her from the window in the Beak.”
“Kak.” His brother Junna dove through the hatch. His hair was growing out. Sometime during the mission he would be clubbed. “Gemini says—”
Kasuk’s head turned, and the rest of his body followed, rolling straight. “Pop said you shouldn’t come in here.”
“Gemini says you’re supposed to memorize the interact codes and get on the spark to
Kasuk looked at her. “I have to go.”
“I heard him.”
The young man doubled over and swooped away to the hatch. To Junna he said, “He told you not to come in here,” and went out without waiting for a reply. Paula herded the pebbles into the box. His eyes on the posters, Junna loitered in the middle of the Tank.
Sril said, “What’s wrong? Isn’t Diddums-widdums allowed to look at cunts?” The other men laughed. Junna’s eyes flashed. He swung around toward them, rope-thin, gawky, and caught a faceful of jeers.
“You’d better leave fast, Diddums, before those cracks attack.”
She put the Go game away and went out. All down the corridor she could hear them teasing Junna and his furious replies.
Without her flute, she had nothing to fill the hours when her friends were on watch. She sat in the Beak, trying to make out the planets among the stars. Saba knew hundreds of the stars by name. The red flame of the Sun burned near the edge of the window.
When she went to the library in the high watch she found Tanuojin in there with Kasuk. In the hatchway, she said, “Do you mind if I come in?”
“No.” Tanuojin had a workboard on his knee and was writing on it and did not look up. She went past them into the back of the room. The books were all kept in niches, their tails out. She went along reading the titles written on the butt ends of the tapes.
Behind her, Tanuojin said, “So if a body absorbs energy—” his stylus scraped on the worksheet, “its mass is increased by the amount of energy, E, divided by light squared, at the rate…” He scribbled. She found an old book of legends and took it out.
“Are you listening to me?” Tanuojin said sharply.
She turned. Kasuk mumbled something. He lowered his eyes; he had been looking at her. Tanuojin knocked the workboard aside.
“Why do I waste my time on you? You’ll never amount to a half-pitch.”
She started toward the hatch. Kasuk beat her through it. The workboard floated toward her, and she caught it.
“Damned stupid brat,” Tanuojin said.
“He’s very good at Go.”
“Whenever I try to teach him something he drifts off into that dream world of his.”
She held the workboard out to him, and he took it and shoved it into a rubber clip on the wall. He avoided her eyes. “Go away, Paula.”
She left, the book of legends in her hand.
She and Saba lived in the same cabin. She slept during the high watch and he slept during the low watch. Just after one bell, while he was getting undressed and she was dressing, she said, “What kind of a sailor is Kasuk?”
“Fair. When he pays attention.”
“Why is Tanuojin so hard with him?”
“Why are you so easy with Vida?” He plunged head-first into the wetroom. The round door swung idly. His voice sounded through the open hatch of the dryer in the wall below the wetroom. “It isn’t that he’s hard, he expects too much.”
The wetroom hissed. Paula unhooked the bed from the wall and shook it out. The thick furry nap attracted dust. Glistening wet, Saba came through the dryer into the open room.
“He’s crushing him,” she said.
“Jesus,” Saba said. “Ever since the crumb was a baby, whenever he’s fallen down and scratched his knees, Tanuojin’s been right over him, giving him hell and healing him up. What do you expect?” He shook his hair back, floating in the air. Paula fastened up the front of her overalls. He said, in another voice, “I could use some help getting to sleep.”
“I’ll find you some sweet music in the library.” She went up the tubular room to the hatch into the corridor.
“What, you only fuck women now? That’s bad for you, Paula, it gives you diseases.”
“You’d know.”
“Maybe you’ve given sex up entirely, like Tajin.”
“You’ve destroyed my trust in men.” She wheeled over the latch in the round doorway, swinging her body the other way as a counter. Saba was wrapping himself in the bed.
“I’m surrounded by celibates.”
She laughed. “Dream.”
Ahead, above the hazy sprinkling of the Pleiades, which the Styths also called the Net, great Jupiter was slowly becoming visible. The Sun lit only a crescent shape along her flank. Every few watches Paula went into the Beak to see the giant planet and the little pearls of her moons. They would swing around Jupiter for the energy to reach the Earth.
When they had gone nearly two hundred watches from Uranus,
