ambition, I’d hardly have made it in the Academy, would I?” she said, answering the last question first. “I don’t think I ever knew your real name, did I, Peake?”
“David Akami,” he said, “and I’m from South Africa. And you—”
“Ellen Finlayson,” she said, “and I was born in Scotland, or so they tell me — I don’t remember, so it’s hearsay evidence, after all.” She chuckled again. “Do you mind if I turn the DeMags off again? I had some training in free-fall when Teague and I installed the drives, and I’ve always wanted to try free-fall acrobatics — I watched the telecast from the Lunar Dome the last three Earth Days.”
“Fine with me,” Peake replied, and Moira turned off the stud, feeling the gravity slowly, slowly go off; at first they felt faintly light-headed, a brief flash of dis-orientation, then the exhilaration of floating. Moira bounded up into midair, turning a rapid series of somersaults, spinning on her own center like a top; came to rest laughing and flushed, stretching back and turning on her own momentum, arms splayed out.
“I wonder why Ching got sick? There doesn’t seem to be anything sickening about it,” she said, “I actually like the sensation of weightlessness.”
“Her inner-ear channels may not be as stable as yours.”
“Oh, come,” Moira scoffed, “she’s a G-N.”
“In that case,” Peake said, “it’s only a matter of acclimatization; she’ll get used to it very quickly. Don’t make fun of her, Moira.”
“I wasn’t making fun of her, Peake,” Moira said soberly, “I felt sorry for her. She’s always been so perfect and self-controlled. Maybe that’s it — it scares her to be out of control, because that’s just one of the givens of her life. Being perfect. Like a computer. Any G-N takes it for granted — being perfect, I mean. You, and I, and all the rest of us, have to live with the fact that we’re just conglomerations of random genes; if we made it into the Academy, that means that we’re the end product of natural selection. You, more than me, because in your country the weaker ones die out in famines and so forth. So we know, if we get this far, it’s because we, or our ancestors, had some superior stuff inside us, body and brain. Ching doesn’t have that to lean on — whatever there is that’s superior about her, she knows it’s just that some scientist tinkered around with her parents’ germ plasm. No roots.”
All this was true, Peake thought; but he was surprised that it should be the tough-minded Moira who said it. He had not thought her sensitive enough to be aware of that. He discovered that he was looking at Moira in a new way; she too could be sympathetic, where, always before, she had intimidated him a little.
She pulled him up beside her; he felt himself bounce a little on the cushiony air. “As I remember, you’re a fair acrobat yourself,” she said. “Come on, let’s try double-spins around a common center—”
Seizing her hands, spinning, Peake felt the curious sensation that the world, not himself, was spinning while he remained wholly stationary at the center of the module which was dancing, somersaulting around them; that the absolute center of the universe was located somewhere in the small, lessening space between Moira’s curled body and his own as the module whirled round them as the whirling stars moved… at the end of a long spin they slowly came to rest, almost in each other’s arms. Slowly, holding each other, they drifted down.
Moira had felt it too, as if the universe centered to the location in the narrowing space between their bodies; she was reluctant to break the contact.
Peake said, laughing, “You’re good at that for a woman!”
“That’s nonsense,” she laughed, without rancor, “That’s like saying, you play the violin pretty well for a man! Do you really think skill at acrobatics is gender-linked?”
He shook his head. “Women have a higher percentage of body fat to muscle; their center of gravity is lower,” he said, “and so, in general, men are somewhat better athletes. Or at least, so I understood, as a medical man — I’m not claiming to be an expert on athletics. If women are men’s equals in that field, I apologize — I spoke out of ignorance, Moira, not male chauvinism.”
“Apology accepted,” she said, giving him a little hug. Then, as he spontaneously returned it, she came to rest, perfectly still, her eyes meeting his, straightforward and clear.
“Do you want to go to bed with me? If you do, it’s all right.”
Shock flooded through Peake; he felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his universe, the centering closeness suddenly replaced by empty cold. That had never occurred to him, it had been the last thing on his mind. The split second of panic was followed by a split second of cynicism, Maybe I ought to try it, find out what it’s like… but panic, emptiness, and shock were all drowned in a sudden, uncontrollable wave of hostility.
“What’s the matter? Isn’t Ravi enough for you? Or can’t you live with the notion that there’s one man in the universe who doesn’t want you? At that, I suppose I’m the only male in the Academy you haven’t slept with, and you want to round out the collection to completeness?”
Moira’s face whitened at his fury, but she did not withdraw or drop her eyes. She said, shaking her head a little, her curly hair flying out on the soft currents of air in the room, “No, Peake. I’m not ashamed of liking sex, but that wasn’t the idea. I just thought — I thought it might make you feel a little less alone, that’s all.”
And suddenly Peake was ashamed of himself. He had felt alone, most desperately alone, isolated and friendless, and then when one of his new family made an offer of ultimate sharing with him, he reacted like this! He liked Moira, he had been astonished at her sensitivity— in his experience, most women were tough realists, incapable of the kind of gentle sentiment men could display. But still… something inside him refused to take this kind of comfort quite as lightly as that, meaning no more to Moira than the hug she had given him, a purely physical kind of comfort. He wondered if that was all that sex meant to women.
He said, fumbling, “I’m sorry, Moira. I shouldn’t have said that. I — I know you meant it kindly, and I — I really do appreciate it. Honestly. But I guess I’m just not — not ready for that. Not yet.”
Another sleep period had come and gone, and Teague sat in the music room, music paper and a stylus before him, scribbling rapidly. Ching came and looked over his shoulder.
“What’s that you’re doing?” Her eyes on the line of music, she sang it slowly and correctly, in a sweet clear mezzo voice. “That’s a lovely melody, Teague, but I don’t recognize it. Is it something that isn’t in the computer? Something by Delius, perhaps? It has that feel.”
“I’m flattered,” Teague said wryly.
“You wrote that?” She looked down at him in surprise and admiration. “But Teague, it’s beautiful, I didn’t know you composed music!”
“I don’t, very often,” he said, “only when an inspiration comes to me, I guess.”
“A sonata?”
“String quartet, eventually,” Teague confessed, “and don’t tell everybody about it, Ching. They’d probably think it was foolish. Nobody composes music now, with the computer doing everything better—”
“No,” Ching said, “that’s foolish. There’s no substitute for human knowledge.”
“I’m surprised you would say that, Ching. Aren’t you the one who thinks the computer is God? Why, your very existence — it was computer technology which created the modifications in human germ plasm making the G-Ns possible, wasn’t it? One could say a computer was your real father, couldn’t we?”
Ching giggled. She said, “That brings up the funniest picture in my mind…” and for the first time it occurred to Teague that Ching’s completely plain, ordinary face, without a single feature one could notice or remember, seemed somehow pretty and individual when she was laughing like that. Not a single good feature or a bad one; but somehow her giggle was completely unlike any other one he had ever heard.
Then she sobered, and her voice, always a little tense and didactic, virtually wiped out the memory of that charming laugh. She said, “No, Teague, I don’t idolize the computer. Less than any of you, maybe, because I know more about them and what they can and can’t do. We have to rely on them, though, because the — universe is just too big. Remember what Ravi said about the mudfish and the Great Barrier Reef? The computer can only do what we order it to do, and only if we ask it in just exactly the right way. It’s like that kid game we all used to play in kindergarten — Simon says take three giant steps — and you had all the rigamarole of saying May I — Yes — and if you missed a single Simon Says, or May I, you had to go back to the beginning and wipe everything out. A computer is like that kid’s game. Anything, if you ask it exactly right, and nothing if you don’t. And speaking of computers, Teague, I did check every single tie-in for the DeMags, and I couldn’t find anything wrong. All I can think of is that somebody bumped against the stud, while we were all exercising, and turned it off, and I’d suggest a safety housing for it.”
Teague frowned, leaning back and raising his eyes and his attention from the music paper in his lap. He said, “I can’t imagine how it could have happened. If the control of the DeMag in there had been a pressure stud,
