"I thought you were with Prope," Festina said, not quite meeting my eye.
"Prope was with me. Not vice versa. She was acting kind of funny."
Festina glanced at the clock on the gym’s wall. All of a sudden, I got the strangest feeling: that she was figuring out how long I’d been with Prope, and trying to decide if we’d had time to… you know.
Embarrassed, I said, "There were more Balrog spores in my cabin. Like a booby trap. I was lucky I smelled something odd."
"Oh?" She gave her arms a bit of a stretch across her chest. She must have been starting to cool down. "I’ve never noticed the Balrog had a smell." She still wasn’t meeting my eye. "Maybe you’ve got a better nose than I do."
I shrugged. "Being three percent Mandasar has to be good for something."
"Does that bother you?"
"I like Mandasars," I said. "It’s just weird, thinking I’m not all human."
"You’ll get used to it," she replied. "Feeling not all human is an Explorer’s natural state."
"You’re human," I told her. "One hundred percent."
She looked up at me for the first time since I’d come in — met my gaze no more than half a second, then shied away and slammed a fist into the bag in front of her. "Christ," she muttered, "there must be something in the water."
"What do you mean?"
She hit the bag with another punch. "At this second, Edward, I want to chew your clothes off. It’s so amazingly powerful…" She leaned forward and planted her face against the bag’s hard leather. "Maybe you should go away before I embarrass myself completely. If I haven’t already."
I just stared at her. After a few seconds, she said, "I notice you aren’t going away." Her voice was muffled up against the bag; from that position she couldn’t notice anything.
"Do you really want me to go?" I asked.
"Of course not. I want you to throw me onto the nearest judo mat and fuck my brains out. Which is so entirely unlike me, I don’t…" She stopped and shook her head. "I can barely speak in completely sentences. I’ve been horny plenty of times before, but I have never…" She broke off laughing — the sort of laugh when you’re afraid that otherwise you might cry. "This is so completely pathetic," she said. "Do you know how blind-raging jealous I was when I thought you and Prope were going to—"
"We didn’t," I put in quickly.
"Good for you," she answered, "and tough on Prope. God, the woman was ready to undress you right at the dinner table. Like it was the first time in her life she’d ever truly wanted to get naked and rub up against every beautiful dimple on your…" Festina gave another strangled laugh. "And I dearly wanted to smash her face so I could have you all to myself. If it hadn’t been for the Mandasars going catatonic… and I wanted to tell them, ‘Friends, I know what you’re going through, I’m a basket case myself.’ " She broke off. "Am I babbling? I’m babbling, aren’t I? I’m truly babbling. I have never talked to a man like this. And the appalling thing is, I’m only doing it because I desperately hope you’ll get aroused. A man wants women to throw themselves at his feet, right? Right? Because if you want something different, just tell me and I’ll probably do it. I lost all shame three minutes ago."
She might have lost all shame, but I hadn’t. My cheeks were burning. First Prope, now Festina… like both women were drunk or drugged. But that was crazy. Who would…
Festina shoved herself away from the bag and turned straight toward me. Her face was flushed; there were tears dribbling down her cheeks. "Edward," she said, swallowing hard, "please leave now. Go and forget you were ever here. Christ knows I’ll probably forget it myself — my head is spinning like a son of a bitch. Just… get out before I do something unforgivable. Please."
I wondered what she thought would be unforgivable. Throwing herself on me? Why did she think that would be awful? Because it would be taking advantage of a… someone like me?
All of a sudden, I thought of Counselor the previous night: her offering herself, and me turning her down. Because I thought she was just a kid who couldn’t possibly think for herself, someone I had to protect because she was really stupid. As if going to bed with her would be raping a mental defective.
Now Festina was protecting me.
For one brief second, I wanted to shout, "Why do you think I wouldn’t like throwing you onto a judo mat? Maybe I’ve dreamed of getting naked and rubbing dimples too. Why would you see it as committing some terrible sin?"
Did Festina think she’d be raping a mental defective? I didn’t want her protecting me. But I had to protect her. She was drugged or something.
Turning quietly, I walked from the gym. Outside the door, I stopped and waited. I could hear her sobbing softly. After a while, she began hitting the bag again. Really really hard.
I was so sleepy I felt like I was going to drop. Too bad my cabin was infested with Balrogs.
The Mandasars weren’t using four of their five rooms, but the ship-soul wouldn’t let me inside when they weren’t there. Maybe the computer thought I might steal something.
The way things were going, I probably could have walked into the cabin of any female crew member and got an invitation to stay the night. Maybe the male crew members too. But I didn’t want to find out if that was true.
Up to the front of the ship. A door just this side of the bridge.
Prope was still awake. When she answered my knock, I could see she’d been crying. I don’t think she’d done much crying before. And in the whole rest of the ship, she had no one who’d hold her till the crying stopped.
Oh well. She was right about having a great big bed.
Waking up, smelling my own sweat. And Prope’s. She lay sprawled behind me on the great big bed, her hair slick and damp from exertion. She was deep deep asleep, drawing in loud lungfuls of air and letting them out again heavily. In stories, women always sleep with a little smile afterward, but thank heaven that’s not true in real life. I don’t think I could have stood it, her looking all smug.
Me, I found myself sitting naked at the captain’s own computer terminal. No memory of how I got there. My skin felt really cold, like I’d been sitting out a long time.
The screen in front of me showed a list of files stored on bubble with the ship-soul. My own personal files, almost nothing in them — just official navy records, and my pathetically small personal address book. (Containing only my father’s name. It used to have Sam’s name too, but a woman I knew on the moonbase made me erase it.)
I stared at the screen blearily, not paying attention to the file names… till I realized something was missing.
Search. Search. But the file I was looking for had disappeared: the file containing the backdoor access code Samantha gave me. Vanished in the night.
And I was sitting at Prope’s official terminal, with no memory of the past few hours. Shivering, I wondered what I’d done.
Part 4
ENTERING THE CATHEDRAL
28
SAILING THROUGH SPACE
I left Prope’s cabin before she woke. Spent the rest of the night in the lounge. In the morning, two female life-support techs woke me and said I looked terrible. They were nice to me, in a spend-time-with-the-cute-stranger way, but they weren’t voracious or anything. Whatever I’d had the night before must have worn off.
Later in the day, Festina and Prope tried to act like nothing had happened… but for a long time, Festina wouldn’t look me in the eye, and Prope was always staring at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice.