But it made the tragedy of what had happened to her all the more poignant Jon's defects were such that it was a relief for everyone that he was in the shell. Tia, though...
But she was happy. She was as happy as any of his classmates in the Academy. So where was the tragedy? Only in his mind. Only in his mind...
CHAPTER SIX
Alex would have been perfectly happy if the past twelve hours had never happened.
He and Tia returned to Diogenes Base after an uneventful trip expecting to be sent out on another series of message-runs, only to learn that on this run, they would be carrying passengers. Those passengers were on the way from Central and the Institute by way of commercial liner and would not arrive for another couple of days.
That had given him a window of opportunity for a little shore leave, in a base-town that catered to some fairly heavy space-going traffic, and he had taken it.
Now he was sorry he had... oh, not for any serious reasons. He hadn't gotten drunk, or mugged, or into trouble. No, he'd only made a fool out of himself.
Only.
He'd gone out looking for company in the spaceport section, hanging around in the pubs and food-bars. He'd gotten more than one invitation, too, but the one he had followed up on was from a dark-haired, blue eyed, elfin little creature with an infectious laugh and a nonstop smile. 'Bet' was her name, and she was a fourth-generation spacer, following in her family's footloose tradition.
He hadn't wondered what had prompted his choice, hadn't even wondered why he had so deviated from his normal 'type' of brown-haired, brown-eyed and athletic. He and the girl, who it turned out was the crew chief of an AI-freighter, had a good time together. They hit a show, had some dinner, and by mutual agreement, wound up in the same hotel room.
He still hadn't thought about his choice of company; then came the moment of revelation.
When, in the midst of intimacy, he called her Tia.
He could have died, right then and there. Fortunately the young lady was understanding; Bet just giggled, called him 'Giorgi' back, and they went on from there. And when they parted, she kissed him, and told him that his 'Tia' was a lucky wench, and to give her Bet's regards.
Thank the spirits of space he didn't have to tell her the truth. All she'd seen was the CS uniform and the spacer habits and speech patterns; he could have been anything. She certainly wasn't thinking 'brawn' when she had picked him up, and he hadn't told her what he did for the Courier Service.
Instead of going straight back to the ship, he dawdled; visited a multi-virtual amusement park, and took five of the wildest adventures it offered. It took all five to wash the embarrassment of his slip out of his recent memory, to put it into perspective.
But nothing would erase the meaning of what he had done. And it was just his good fortune, and Tia's, that his partner hadn't known who Tia was. Brawns had undergone Counseling for a lot less. CS had a nasty reputation for dealing with slips like that one. They wouldn't risk one of their precious shell-persons in the hands of someone who might become so obsessed with her that he would try to get at the physical body.
He returned to the docks in a decidedly mixed state of mind, and with no ideas at all about what, if anything, he could do about it.
Tia greeted her brawn cheerfully as soon as he came aboard, but she left him alone for a little while he got himself organized, or as organized as Alex ever got.
'I've got the passenger roster,' she said, once he'd stowed his gear. 'Want to see them, see what we're getting for the next couple of weeks?'
'Sure,' Alex replied, perking up visibly. He had looked tired when he came in; Tia reckoned shrewdly that he had been celebrating his shore leave a little too heavily. He wasn't suffering from a hangover, but it looked to her as if he'd done his two-day pass to the max, squeezing twenty-two hours of fun into every twenty-four hour period. He dropped down into his chair and she brought up her screens for him.
'Here's our team leader, Doctor Izak Hollister-Aspen.' The Evaluation team leader was an elderly man; a quad-doc, as thin as a grass stem, clean-shaven, silver-haired, and so frail-looking. Tia was half-afraid he might break in the first high wind. 'He's got four doctorates, he's published twelve books and about two hundred papers, and he's been head of twenty-odd teams already. He also seems to have a pretty good sense of humor. Listen.'
She let the file-fragment run. 'I must admit,' Aspen said, in a cracked and quavery voice, 'there are any number of my colleagues who would say that I should sit behind my desk and let younger bodies take over this dig. Well,' he continued, cracking a smile. 'I am going to do something like that. I'm going to sit behind my desk in my
