“How old are you now?”
“Twenty-four. Oh—” She looked pleased.
“Madame Poet, do you want to go to dinner with me?”
“Oh, food, oh yes!” She bounced, caught him grinning, froze. “I would love to. Can we go to Good Eats?”
“It closed right after you left.”
“Oh… the music was wild. Well, how about that seafood place, with the fish name—?”
He shook his head. “The owner died. It’s been twenty-five years.”
“Damn, we can never keep anything.” She sighed. “Why don’t I just make us a dinner—I’m still here. And I’d like that.”
That night, and every other night, he stood at the bar and watched her go out, with a Tail or a laughing knot of partiers. Once she waved to him; the stem of a shatterproof glass snapped in his hand; he kicked it under the counter, confused and angry.
But three nights in the two weeks she came home early. This time, pointedly, he asked her no questions. Gratefully, she told him no lies, sleeping on his couch and sharing the afternoon…
They returned to the flyer, moving in step along the cool jade sand of the beach. Maris looked toward the sea’s edge, where frothy fingers reached, withdrew, and reached again. “You leave tomorrow, huh?”
Brandy nodded. “Uh-huh.”
He sighed.
“Maris, if—”
“What?”
“Oh—nothing.” She brushed sand from her boot.
He watched the sea reach, and withdraw, and reach—
“Have you ever wanted to see a ship? Inside, I mean.” She pulled open the flyer door, her body strangely intent.
He followed her. “Yes.”
“Would you like to see mine—the Who Got Her?”
“I thought that was illegal?”
“ ‘No waking man shall set foot on a ship of the space-ways.’ It is a League regulation… but it’s based on a superstition that’s at least a thousand years old—‘Men on ships is bad luck.’ Which is silly here. Your presence on board in port isn’t going to bring us disaster.”
He looked incredulous.
“I’d like you to see our life, Maris, as I see yours. There’s nothing wrong with that. And besides”—she shrugged—“no one will know; because nobody’s there right now.”
He faced a wicked grin, and did his best to match it. “I will if you will.”
They got in, the flyer drifted silently from the cove. New Piraeus rose to meet them from beyond the ridge; the late sun struck gold from hidden windows.
“I wish it wouldn’t change—oh… there’s another new one. It’s a skyscraper!”
He glanced across the bay. “Just finished; maybe New Piraeus is growing up—thanks to Oro Mines. It hardly changed over a century; after all those years, it’s a little scary.”
“Even after three… or twenty-five?” She pointed. “Right down there, Maris—there’s our airlock.”
The flyer settled on the water below the looming semi-transparent hull of the WGH—709.
Maris gazed up and back. “It’s a lot bigger than I ever realized.”
“It masses twenty thousand tons, empty.” Brandy caught hold of the hanging ladder. “I guess we’ll have to go up this… okay?” She looked over at him.
“Sure. Slow, maybe, but sure.”
They slipped in through the lock, moved soft-footed down hallways past dim cavernous storerooms.
“Is the whole ship transparent?” He touched a wall, plastic met plastic. “How do you get any privacy?”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I’m no—I’m not. Why are you?”
“Shhh! Because it’s so quiet.” She stopped, pride beginning to show on her face. “The whole ship can be almost transparent, like now; but usually it’s not. All the walls and the hull are polarized; you can opaque them. These are just holds, anyway, they’re most of the ship. The passenger stasis cubicles are up there. Here’s the lift. We’ll go up to the control room.”
“Brandy!” A girl in red with a clipboard turned on them outraged, as they stepped from the lift. “Brandy, what the hell do you mean by— Oh. Is that you, Soldier? God, I thought she’d brought a man on board.”
Maris flinched. “Hi, Nilgiri.”
Brandy was very pale beside him. “We just came out to —uh, look in on Mactav, she’s been kind of moody lately, you know. I thought we could read to her… What are you doing here?” And a whispered, “Bitch.”
“Just that—checking up on Mactav. Harkané sent me out.” Nilgiri glanced at the panels behind her, back at Maris, suddenly awkward. “Uh—look, since I’m already here don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll go down and play some music for her. Why don’t you—uh, show Soldier around the ship, or something…” Her round face was reddening like an apple. “Bye?” She slipped past them and into the lift, and disappeared.
“Damn, sometimes she’s such an ass.”
“She didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, I should have—”
“—done just what you did; she way sorry. And at least we’re not trespassing.”
“God, Maris, how do you stand it? They must do it to you all the time. Don’t you resent it?”
“Hell, yes, I resent it. Who wouldn’t? I just got tired of getting mad… And besides”—he glanced at the closed doors—“besides, nobody needs a mean bartender. Come on, show me around the ship.”
Her knotted fingers uncurled, took his hand. “This way, please; straight ahead of you is our control room.” She pulled him forward beneath the daybright dome. He saw a handprinted sign above the central panel, NO-MAN’S LAND. “From here we program our computer; this area here is for the AAFAL drive, first devised by Ursula, an early spacer who—”
“What’s awful about it?”
“What?”
“Every spacer I know calls the ship’s drive ‘awful.’”
“Oh— Not ‘awful,’ AAFAL: Almost As Fast As Light. Which it is. That’s what we call it; there’s a technical name too.”
“Um.” He looked vaguely disappointed. “Guess I’m used to—” He made it into curiosity again, as he watched her smiling with delight. “I—suppose it’s different from anti-gravity?” Seventy years before she was born, he had taught himself the principles of starship technology.
“Very.” She giggled suddenly. “The ‘awfuls’ and the ’aghs,‘ hmm… We do use an AG unit to leave and enter solar systems; it operates like the ones in flyers, it throws us away from the planet, and finally the entire system, until we reach AAFAL ignition speeds. With the AG you can only get fractions of the speed of light, but it’s enough to concentrate interstellar gases and dust. Our force nets feed them through the drive unit, where they’re converted to energy, which increases our speed, which makes the unit more efficient… until we’re moving almost as fast as light.
“We use the AG to protect us from acceleration forces, and after deceleration to guide us into port. The start and finish can take up most of our trip times; the farther out in space you are, the less AG feedback you get from the system’s mass, and the less your velocity changes. It’s a beautiful time, though—you can see the AG forces through the polarized hull, wrapping you in shifting rainbow…
“And you are isolate”—she leaned against a silent panel and punched buttons; the room began to grow dark—“in absolute night… and stars.” And stars appeared, in the darkness of a planetarium show; fire-gnats lighting her face and shoulders and his own. “How do you like our stars?”
“Are we in here?”
Four streaks of blue joined lights in the air. “Here… in space by this corner of the Quadrangle. This is our navigation chart for the Quadrangle run; see the bowed leg and brightness, that’s the Pleiades. Patris… Sanalareta… Treone… back to Oro. The other lines zigzag too, but it doesn’t show. Now come with me… With a flare of energy, we open our AAFAL nets in space—”