free-fall before; she hasn’t.”
Moira, holding to Ravi, felt his body against hers, looked with pleasure at the contrast of his coffee-colored hands against her own pallid ones. She twisted a little and their lips met; she felt his kiss with a shock of recognition, a familiar thing among all the new strangenesses. They floated together, their lips just touching, entangled, her hair floating around him, streaming, intermingled with his own dark curls. She fancied Ching’s look down at them both was one of disapproval, and defiantly prolonged the kiss.
Peake pushed through the sphincter into the next module, which was the main cabin they had first entered. He went to the food machine, Ching joining him there a moment later.
Ching said, “They didn’t lose any time, did they — Moira and Ravi?”
Peake shrugged. He said, “Does it matter that much?” The sight of the two, intertwined and kissing, lost in each other, roused painful memories. Every scrap of his being longed for Jimson; even during the excitement of pulling away from the Space Station, he had had to keep remembering, I can’t share it with him, is he watching me go, I’ll never be able to share it with him again. Was Jimson suffering like this, too, at the other end of that lengthening string which separated them? Part of him wanted Jimson to share even this suffering, part of him quailed at the thought of Jimson, tender, sweet, vulnerable, undergoing this monstrous pain that seemed to eat him up inside.
Alone, and I will be alone all the rest of my life. There is no one here for me. Both Ravi and Teague are obviously heterosexual, and as for the women…. I don’t want them, they don’t want me… alone. Always alone, a lifetime alone….
Ching, standing beside him at the console, thought that he looked lost; it was so strange to see Peake without the fair-haired Jimson trailing him.
I know what it is to be alone. I went through twelve years of it. But he at least has known what it is like to be loved and wanted, she thought disconsolately. I never will.
She said, “Do you suppose we could manage a steak dinner out of the console, Peake?”
“Can’t hurt to try,” he said, “it may not actually be steak, but it will probably be too good an imitation for me to tell the difference.”
“We might have a little more trouble with the fried potatoes and onion rings,” she said, smiling. “And I suspect fresh salads are always going to be beyond our reach. Oh, well, Vitamin C is Vitamin C, I suppose.”
Watching her hands move on the consoles, as surely as they had moved upon the computer, Peake envied her self-sufficiency.
She doesn’t need anybody. She has never had this sense of being only half a person, only half alive, the rest of the self moving away at nine point eight meters per second per second… it overwhelmed him to think how far apart he was already from Jimson, separated already by time as well as distance.
Ching slid open a panel; a savory smell emerged from the inside. She said, “I hope you like your steak well done.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, chagrined, “I like it rare, but I’ll eat it any way it comes, Ching.”
“I like it well done,” Teague said, somersaulting down from the spincter lock. “Ouch! Someday I’ll have to get used to where the gravity is in the different modules! Can I have that one, Ching, and you fix a rare one for Peake? Don’t tell me your friend the computer mixed up the orders? I thought computers were infallible!”
Ching shook her head, handing him the plate of well-charred “steak.”
“A computer,” she said, glad to have something else to think about, “is an idiot savant. It does just exactly what it is told, and absolutely nothing it is not told to do. It’s only as intelligent as the person who programs it — and the person who uses it. It could have all the knowledge of the universe inside—” she waved at the console of the food processor, “and it wouldn’t be a bit of good unless somebody knew exactly the right instructions to give it, put into the computer in exactly the right way. I must have put in the wrong input — I thought I had it marked for rare, because I tend to digest proteins better when they’re somewhat under-coagulated — but it came out well done. But the computer isn’t at fault, only the instructions I gave it. A computer is exactly like an idiot savant. Remember the little boy they had on one of the training films we saw? He was blind, autistic, and couldn’t be toilet-trained, but at the age of nine he could add a column of ninety figures in his head. He didn’t know how he did it — in fact, he couldn’t be asked how he did it, because he seemed to understand numbers, but not verbal speech concepts. But you put in numbers and he would come up with the right answer.” As Ravi came in, still interlaced with Moira, handing her carefully down into the change of gravity in the DeMag units, she asked, “Is that how you do your lightning-calculation, Ravi? I can understand an autistic idiot doing that — he has nothing else to occupy his mind — but you’re highly intelligent and verbal too. Yet you compute automatically, in the same way as that autistic idiot-savant.”
“I wish I knew, Ching,” Ravi said. “All I can say is that old cliche from psychology — a normal person uses five per cent of his brain cells, the greatest geniuses maybe five per cent more than that. The other ninety per cent — well, who knows what’s inside it? Wild talents like Moira’s ESP, or mine, or the idiot-savant’s. Maybe anything, maybe nothing. Who knows? Who cares? Thank you, Ching,“ he added, taking a plate with a sizzling chunk of rare meat on it, “this is perfect.”
“I’ll have one just like it for you in five seconds, Peake,” Ching promised. “Is yours done well enough, Teague? How would you like yours cooked, Fontana?” She felt a surge of pleasure; they might not like her, but at this moment she was catering to their enjoyment, she was useful to them.
Ravi and Moira, still entwined loosely, ate, feeding each other choice bites from their plates. Teague and Fontana chatted, smiling.
“You’re a harpsichordist, a pianist, Fontana. And of course the weight problem, lifting a piano or harpsichord from Earth, would be impossible. But you have an electronic keyboard, don’t you?”
She nodded. “They warned me about that when I decided to specialize in keyboard music,” she said, “that any career off-planet would mean abandoning almost everything I’d done in music.”
“It should be possible to build a harpsichord,” Teague mused. “We’ve certainly got time enough, and we can machine any parts we want to very precise tolerances. Building here on shipboard, we can synthesize the materials…”
She shrugged. “I can play recorder and flute some, and an electronic keyboard will do for accompaniment,” she said, “and I never had any serious ambitions as a solo instrumentalist. It isn’t as if I’d had a talent like Zora’s. That kind of talent sweeps away everything else. Nobody with that much musical talent would have cared whether they made Ship or not, and of course they wouldn’t—”
“I don’t think it’s a question of talent,” Moira said, “Mei Mei had a voice as good as Zora’s. What she didn’t have was the drive, the ambition if you like. It isn’t talent that makes a performer. It’s desire — what a person wants more than anything in the world. I think all six of us wanted to make the Ship more than anything else, and we had more drive and ambition than the ones who turned up second to us.”
“I’m not so sure,” Fontana demurred, “at least half the class never wanted anything else but to be on the Ship, and at least thirty of them got cut out. I think there’s a certain amount of luck involved—”
“Luck!” Ching scoffed, “luck has nothing to do with it! We’re here because, basically, we worked harder than the others at what it takes…”
“Compatibility, too,” Teague said, “I think they tried mixing different combinations and we just came up as the ones who were most likely to be able to adjust…”
“I suspect,” said Peake, “that we’ll be debating that point for the next nine years or so! Why it was us, and not some other members of our class. But does it matter?” He yawned. “I’m tired. Excuse me — I want to explore the sleep cubicles. It’s your on-shift in navigation, Ravi, if anything should come up—”
“It won’t,” Ravi said, “as far as I can imagine, we could probably get along without any of us going to the Bridge for the next nine years or so.” His arm was still around Moira’s waist. He made a small, interrogative sound, tightening his arm around her. For a moment she was abashed; there was a momentary silence in the cabin, and she felt as if everyone was looking at them where they sat. Then, defiantly, she tossed her head. In this crowded ship everybody was going to know what everybody else was doing, and she had no reason to be ashamed of it. She might as well start the way she intended to go on, doing what she chose.
I’m not like Ching, I can’t be as self-sufficient as she is. I need people, I’m frightened…. The very thought of the vast window on the stars made her feel dizzy and weak, the steak curdling her stomach; she clutched at Ravi, hungry for reassurance.
Fontana said, “I think we all need a break. Suppose we all meet in four hours, here, for the first of those
