It was a long time before he could think fondly of the awkwardness of that first afternoon.
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"Are you done now?" he muttered. "Enough maudlin reminiscences?" The tears dried into salty tracks, stinging his skin.
Once in a while one of his students came into his office and cried. For those times, Stephen Thomas kept a couple of clean scraps of silk, remnants of a wom-out shirt. He dug around until he found one, then scrubbed at his face. He wished he could splash cold water over his head without having to see anyone first. But that was impossible.
Now that he had stopped crying he could bring the relaxation techniques into play. He practiced until he felt certain he would not break down again.
He returned to the lab. His students worked steadily, pretending he had not been upset when he arrived and disappeared, pretending not to notice his reappearance.
He crossed to the water fountain, bent down for a drink,
and let the stream of water splash over his face. As he straightened, he ducked his head to wipe the droplets away on the shoulder of his shirt. The water plastered a cold patch of thin silk to his skin.
Now everybody in the lab was looking at him.
"They've given us some new problems from groundside," he said, as he should have said that morning. "We'd better sit down and talk about them."
Griffith wandered through the places aboard Starfarer where people congregated. Everyone expressed complaints and outrage; gossip not only flowered, but formed seeds and dispersed them to sprout anew. Ignored in his guise of Griffith of GAO, Griffith traveled among me members of the expedition, pleased with himself for the chaos his minor suggestion had already caused. Yet the chaos bothered him, too, a little: finally he realized he was disappointed in the reactions he saw. He had assumed everyone would react this way; he had assured his superiors they would. But somewhere he held a suspicion—or had it been a hope?—that they might not.
Without meaning to, he found himself near the hill where Brown and Cherenkov and Thanthavong lived. He walked into the garden. He could always claim to have come by to pay his respects to Ms. Brown. She had acted weird at her
182 vonda N. Mclntyre
party. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was senile. She must have taken health exams to be allowed to join the expedition, but maybe the stress of the trip from earth had affected her. Or maybe the exams had made a mistake in passing her. Maybe Griffith could find a use for that.
"Did you need something?"
Griffith leaped around, startled, crouching, ready to react. Immediately he knew he had threatened his cover. He pretended to stumble, catching himself awkwardly.
"Good god, you scared me," he said, forcing a petulant tone into his voice.
"Didn't mean to."
Infinity Mendez stood, brushing the dirt from his ragged kneepads. The rosebush at his feet had laid thin red scratches across his hands and wrists. He avoided looking into Griffith's eyes, and this made Griffith suspect that he had not fooled the gardener in the least. He scared Infinity far more than Infinity scared him, and he knew that if he decided to, he could terrorize the gardener into keeping secrets for him. Maybe even into working on his behalf. Griffith preferred to work alone, and though he would use a terrified ally, he would never trust one.
"I just thought I'd stop by and say hello to Ms- Brown." "There's some folks already visiting her."
Griffith could not tell if he was being invited in or warned away. He looked toward the hill-house, over Infinity's shoulder, seeking even a glimpse of Cherenkov.
"And Kolya's out," Infinity said in a flat, neutral tone.
"Kolya? You mean General Cherenkov?" He feigned disinterest.
"What are you doing up here?"
Griffith frowned at Infinity Mendez. He was not accustomed to being questioned by gardeners. Come to think of it, he was not accustomed to going to parties to which the gardeners were invited, either. It occurred to him that the starship's extreme democracy had probably gone too far. The word "anarchy" came to mind, and gave him another opening against the expedition.
"What business is it of yours?" Griffith said sharply.
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"Sorry," Infinity said, confused and scared. "Just a friendly question."
Griffith thought of saying that he was interested in more important things than whether the service staff put in all their time, but decided to withhold even that much reassurance.
Sending somebody all the way to lunar orbit to check on trivia was exactly the sort of thing one of EarthSpace's associates might decide to do.
He gave Infinity a cold, wordless glance and walked away.
Victoria crossed the courtyard and headed toward the cool " main room of her house. She hesitated on the threshold, narrowing her eyes with a twinge of annoyance. In the low light. the distillation equipment hunkered on the mats like a giant spider.
She found Stephen Thomas, bare to the waist, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a tumble of silk shirts, carefully picking y each one out of the pile, smoothing it, and folding it. He lifted the last one, the turquoise one Victoria had just given him. He stroked his fingertips across the fabric, changing the patterns of reflected light. He folded it fast, tossed it on the stack, picked the stack up and stuffed it into a cloth bag.
All Victoria's annoyance at him evaporated-"Stephen Thomas."
He jerked the ties shut and knotted them, stood up, and , threw the bag in the comer.
"No point in wearing everything out before we even go," he said. "Who knows how long it will be until I can get any more—before we come back, I mean."
f What he meant was that he could no longer afford to buy
'< new clothes- No one in the family could, but the restriction would hit Stephen Thomas worst. He looked upon clothing as decoration. It troubled Victoria to see him packing away his pretty shirts. She wished she had something to say to encourage him.
He had on regulation pants, gray twill with a Starfarer patch on the front of the thigh. EarthSpace maintained the tradition of its predecessors in designing a patch for each new space mission. Starfarer's was an eight-pointed star, flaring wide at its horizontal points, with the EarthSpace logo above and the starship's name below. Stephen Thomas picked up a
184 Vonda N. Mcintyre
gray t-shirt from his rumpled bed and dragged it on over his head. It carried the Starfarer logo across the chest.
On board the starship, a few people wore the patch, but only newcomers wore the t-shirt. She was surprised to see Stephen Thomas in it because he had been annoyed by it: the design was all right, he said, but who wanted to wear a gray t-shirt?
The real benefit of regulation clothing was that it was free.
"Stephen Thomas," she said. "About this afternoon—"
He interrupted her. "What I said was inexcusable." He reached out to her; Victoria took his hand.
*'I love you," she said. "Maybe I don't say so often enough."
"You do," he said. "You tell me, you show me ... But sometimes 1 can't hear it and I can't see it and I can't believe it."
He put his arms around her and leaned his forehead on her shoulder. She spread her fingers against his back and patted him gently.
When she stepped back, she appraised him. "I must say, you look all right in mufti."
"This isn't mufti—"
"It is for you," she said. "Who's going to recognize you, out of uniform?"
At that, he smiled.
J.D. sat in Nakamura's office, which Victoria had somehow contrived to have opened for her. She tried to work on her novel, but mostly she worried. Too many things had happened too fast; most of them scared and depressed her. She knew too much about the perversion of technology to be confident that the expedition would fend off this assault. She wished she had half Victoria's courage or Stephen Thomas's outrage or Satoshi's calm.