“Whenever I try to teach him something he drifts off into that dream world of his.”
She held the workboard out to him, and he took it and shoved it into a rubber clip on the wall. He avoided her eyes. “Go away, Paula.”
She left, the book of legends in her hand.
She and Saba lived in the same cabin. She slept during the high watch and he slept during the low watch. Just after one bell, while he was getting undressed and she was dressing, she said, “What kind of a sailor is Kasuk?”
“Fair. When he pays attention.”
“Why is Tanuojin so hard with him?”
“Why are you so easy with Vida?” He plunged head-first into the wetroom. The round door swung idly. His voice sounded through the open hatch of the dryer in the wall below the wetroom. “It isn’t that he’s hard, he expects too much.”
The wetroom hissed. Paula unhooked the bed from the wall and shook it out. The thick furry nap attracted dust. Glistening wet, Saba came through the dryer into the open room.
“He’s crushing him,” she said.
“Jesus,” Saba said. “Ever since the crumb was a baby, whenever he’s fallen down and scratched his knees, Tanuojin’s been right over him, giving him hell and healing him up. What do you expect?” He shook his hair back, floating in the air. Paula fastened up the front of her overalls. He said, in another voice, “I could use some help getting to sleep.”
“I’ll find you some sweet music in the library.” She went up the tubular room to the hatch into the corridor.
“What, you only fuck women now? That’s bad for you, Paula, it gives you diseases.”
“You’d know.”
“Maybe you’ve given sex up entirely, like Tajin.”
“You’ve destroyed my trust in men.” She wheeled over the latch in the round doorway, swinging her body the other way as a counter. Saba was wrapping himself in the bed.
“I’m surrounded by celibates.”
She laughed. “Dream.”
Ahead, above the hazy sprinkling of the Pleiades, which the Styths also called the Net, great Jupiter was slowly becoming visible. The Sun lit only a crescent shape along her flank. Every few watches Paula went into the Beak to see the giant planet and the little pearls of her moons. They would swing around Jupiter for the energy to reach the Earth.
When they had gone nearly two hundred watches from Uranus, Ebelos split a crystal in her heart engine, and both ships decelerated back to spacepoint. Paula spent the time in the wetroom, being sick. Ebelos’s engines were built in a single train. When one failed, they all failed, and in the course of slowing down, three more crystals cracked. Ybix coupled with her, belly to belly, sealed together in an elastic web. Leno’s crew was brought into Ybix, and Saba, Tanuojin, Leno, and his second officer crowded into Saba’s cabin and spread out charts of Ebelos’s engines.
The lights were so dim Paula saw the men only as vague shapes. The cold made her shiver. They had turned the life systems down to save energy. Someone lit a crystal lamp. Saba turned, his face white in its light.
“That’s my wife, who does not clean up.” He batted a floating book tape away from him.
They put the lamp under the chart and leaned over it. Paula moved along the curved wall. The chart of lines and circles and colored dots looked like a choreograph.
Tanuojin said, “We’re falling into Jupiter’s influence. How long will this take?”
“Six hours,” Leno said. He wore a pressure suit; his arm was ham-sized. His finger moved over the drawing between him and Saba. “We’ll have to start here. Unscrew the hood and the hood mounting, set the ancillary crystal, take out this coupling, set the two behind it, and replace the coupling and set the crystal in its head. Reset the timing. It needs two engineers and someone to hold the lamp and the tools.”
Saba’s head bobbed. The light shone on the curve of his cheekbone. “You and I can do it.”
Leno turned to his second officer. “You’re dismissed. Go get some sleep.”
“Yes, Akellar.”
Another man had come in behind the others. She could not see who it was. He gave something to Tanuojin. The tall man swung around, his face turning into the light. “You’d better do this a little faster than six hours. We’ll reach primary Jupiter in five.” He left.
Leno was rolling up the chart. Paula went down the room, into the warmth of the crystal lamp. Saba said, “I need a volunteer from my watch, to go in with us.”
Near the hatch, in the dark, the other man said, “I’ll go.” It was Kasuk.
“Good,” Saba said. “Get into your suit.”
Leno clipped down the ends of his chart and fit it into a tube. When Kasuk had gone, he said, “You know, Saba, I wouldn’t expect this even of you.”
“Expect what?”
“If Ybix were Yekka’s, he would have run behind me, when my engine failed, until I blew out my ship, or paid his ransom, or turned my ship over to him—whatever he wanted.”
“Tanuojin is one of the best officers in the fleet.”
“I didn’t deny that. One of my own friends wouldn’t jeopardize his ship for my sake.”
Saba said, “Are you coming to your point?”
In the pressure suit Leno looked two times Saba’s size. He said, “I think I’ve passed it.”
“Let’s go.” Saba turned toward Paula, above him in the dark. “Tell Tanuojin I’m taking Kasuk with me.”
“Hurry, will you? I’m freezing.”
“Don’t worry. If we don’t do this right, we’ll pretty soon be as hot you want.” He laughed.
Jupiter made the space around her seethe. The two ships slipped deeper into the turbulence. The seal between them cracked and broke, and they drifted apart. Saba, Leno, and Kasuk were stranded in Ebelos, floating away toward the giant Planet. Paula went to Ybix’s bridge. It was mobbed with men. The radiation from Jupiter jammed the communicators. There was no way to reach the men in Ebelos.
Tanuojin, in the cage, sent Ybix chasing the other ship. When he tried to couple with her, Ebelos wobbled and rolled away. He pursued, and the bigger ship sheared toward Ybix, and he had to pull Ybix up so hard Paula ran her head into the wall.
“We can’t do it,” someone said, behind her: one of Ebelos’s crew. “The old dragon’s burned a couple more.”
Paula shook her head, dazed. Sril’s arm slipped around her waist. “Hold on, Mendoz’.”
The darkened bridge was faintly lit by the green cube of the holograph. The images of the two ships were bright yellow. The radiant Planet was interfering with the sensors and the images began to flutter. She put her hand on Sril’s arm. Ebelos broke into three separate pieces in the map and each piece shivered into a dozen outlines, out of register.
Tanuojin put his hand out of the cage. “Bakan. Throw a schema of the Jovian fields into the holograph.”
Sril muttered in his throat. In the holograph the images of the ships had dissolved into hazy blurs. Suddenly Ybix’s kite shape was surrounded by a ring of identical images. If Ebelos hit her, she would break Ybix in half. But now Ebelos was sailing in her own crowd of ghosts. Paula rubbed her eyes. Junna had come in beside her.
Bakan said, “I have the field schema.” A three-color diagram appeared in the holograph, showing the curving blue and orange space of Jupiter. The multiplying images of the ships sailed through it. A blue curl brushed one of Ebelos’s ghosts, without effect, and touched another in the ring. The ship rolled over, and the seven different pictures of her blurred and ran in confusion.