Her eyebrows lifted. "You had a girlfriend? A real one?"
I nodded. "Once."
"I mean after you showed this to her."
"Well, yes."
"Uh huh." Her eyes wandered back to the payoff matrix. "Just curious, Siri. How did she react?"
"She didn't, really. Not at first. Then—well, she laughed."
"Better woman than me." Sascha shook her head. "I'd have dumped you on the spot."
My nightly constitutional up the spine: glorious dreamy flight along a single degree of freedom. I sailed through hatches and corridors, threw my arms wide and spun in the gentle cyclonic breezes of the drum. Bates ran circles around me, bouncing her ball against bins and bulkheads, stretching to field each curving rebound in the torqued pseudograv. The toy ricocheted off a stairwell and out of reach as I passed; the major's curses followed me through the needle's eye from crypt to bridge.
I braked just short of the dome, stopped by the sound of quiet voices from ahead.
"Of course they're beautiful," Szpindel murmured. "They're stars."
"And I'm guessing I'm not your first choice to share the view," James said.
"You're a close second. But I've got a date with Meesh."
"She never mentioned it."
"She doesn't tell you everything. Ask her."
"Hey, this body's taking its antilibs. Even if yours isn't."
"Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognized four."
"Riiight." Definitely not Susan, not any more. "Figures you'd take your lead from a bunch of sodomites."
"Fuck, Sascha. All I'm asking is a few minutes alone with Meesh before the whip starts cracking again…"
"My body too, Ike. You wanna pull your eyes over my wool?"
"I just want to talk, eh? Alone. That too much to ask?"
I heard Sascha take a breath.
I heard Michelle let it out.
"Sorry, kid. You know the Gang."
"Thank God. It's like some group inspection whenever I come looking for face time."
"I guess you're lucky they like you, then."
"I still say you ought to stage a coup."
"You could always move in with us."
I heard the rustle of bodies in gentle contact. "How are you?" Szpindel asked. "You okay?"
"Pretty good. I think I'm finally used to being alive again. You?"
"Hey, I'm a spaz no matter how long I've been dead."
"You get the job done."
"Why, merci. I try."
A small silence. Theseus hummed quietly to herself.
"Mom was right," Michelle said. "They are beautiful."
"What do you see, when you look at them?" And then, catching himself: "I mean—"
"They're—prickly," Michelle told him. "When I turn my head it's like bands of very fine needles rolling across my skin in waves. But it doesn't hurt at all. It just tingles. It's almost electric. It's nice."
"Wish I could feel it that way."
"You've got the interface. Just patch a camera into your parietal lobe instead of your visual cortex."
"That'd just tell me how a machine feels vision, eh? Still wouldn't know how you do."
"Isaac Szpindel. You're a romantic."
"Nah."
"You don't want to know. You want to keep it mysterious."
"Already got more than enough mystery to deal with out here, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Yeah, but we can't do anything about that."
"That'll change. We'll be working our asses off in no time."
"You think?"
"Count on it," Szpindel said. "So far we've just been peeking from a distance, eh? Bet all kinds of interesting stuff happens when we get in there and start poking with a stick."
"Maybe for you. There's got to be a biological somewhere in the mix, with all those organics."
"Damn right. And you'll be talking to 'em while I'm giving them their physicals."
"Maybe not. I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it."
"Bet they do, though."
"Since when? You're the one who's always pointing out how inefficient language is."
"Only when I'm trying to get under your skin. Your pants—whole other thing." He laughed at his own joke. "Seriously, what are they gonna to use instead, telepathy? I say you'll be up to your elbows in hieroglyphics before you know it. And what's more, you'll decode 'em in record time."
"You're sweet, but I wonder. Half the time I can't even decode Jukka." Michelle fell silent a moment. "He actually kind of throws me sometimes."
"You and seven billion others."
"Yeah. I know it's silly, but when he's not around there's a part of me that can't stop wondering where he's hiding. And when he's right there in front of me, I feel like I should be hiding."
"Not his fault he creeps us out."
"I know. But it's hardly a big morale booster. What genius came up with the idea of putting a vampire in charge?"
"Where else you going to put them, eh? You want to be the one giving orders to him?"
"And it's not just the way he moves. It's the way he talks. It's just wrong."
"You know he—"
"I'm not talking about the present-tense thing, or all the glottals. He—well, you know how he talks. He's terse."
"It's efficient."
"It's artificial, Isaac. He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while."
"Ah. But you say that because you're a linguist, and you can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language." Szpindel harrumphed with mock pomposity. "Now me, I'm a biologist, so it makes perfect sense."
"Really. Then explain it to me, oh wise and powerful mutilator of frogs."
"Simple. Bloodsucker's a transient, not a resident."
"What are—oh, those are killer whales, right? Whistle dialects."
"I said forget the language. Think about the lifestyle. Residents are fish-eaters, eh? They hang out in big groups, don't move around much, talk all the time." I heard a whisper of motion, imagined Szpindel leaning in and laying a hand on Michelle's arm. I imagined the sensors in his gloves telling him what she felt like. "Transients, now—they eat mammals. Seals, sea lions, smart prey. Smart enough to take cover when they hear a fluke slap or a click train. So transients are sneaky, eh? Hunt in small groups, range all over the place, keep their mouths shut so nobody hears 'em coming."
"And Jukka's a transient."
"Man's instincts tell him to keep quiet around prey. Every time he opens his mouth, every time he lets us see him, he's fighting his own brain stem. Maybe we shouldn't be too harsh on the ol' guy just because he's not the world's best motivational speaker, eh?"
"He's fighting the urge to eat us every time we have a briefing? That's reassuring."