"Quite a difference," J.D. said, glancing around. She held the net bags stuffed with her and Victoria's personal allowances. Her possessions were drab next to the bright colors and textures that showed through the mesh of Victoria's bag.
"There's one new transport," Victoria said. Towing J.D. by one hand, she pushed off down a corridor. "They always schedule it so it's the one that picks up the VIPs on their junkets. I never have figured that out. if we let them see the old equipment, we might gel enough money to keep it properly maintained."
"Can I try this myself?" J.D. said.
"Sure." Victoria took the two mesh bags, "Remember
that even though you haven't got any weight, you still have
mass and momentum."
J.D- planted her feet, kicked, and headed for the far wall too fast and too hard. Victoria winced and pushed off after her, but somehow J.D. managed to turn in midair, catch herself on her toes against the bulkhead, and bounce back, awkward but safe. Victoria used her arms and legs as springs to give all her momentum to the metal surface. She floated beside J.D., who hung upside down nearby, laughing. Her hair, short and limply dry from exposure, flew around her head.
"Even better than diving," she said. "And you don't need
half as much force to get you where you're going. I'll leam to compensate. I thought maybe I'd let my hair grow, but I think I'll keep it short."
They found their closet-sized cubicles, where they could rest during the trip to the starship.
STARFARERS 17
"One of Satoshi's department members says the transport reminds him of his college days," Victoria said. "He used to travel cross-country in a bus. But I think of the transport as the China Clipper. Crossing space like a prop plane crossing the Pacific." The transport was less luxurious but safer, not as unbearably romantic.
"The middle of the Pacific is scarier," J.D. said.
The transport freed itself from the spaceplane with a low clang and a vibration that trembled through the ship. J.D. started, then flushed with excitement when the gentle acceleration provided microgravity.
"We're really on our way, aren't we?"
"We really are," Victoria said.
Starfarer lay in the far distance, barely visible to the naked eye. Charge-coupled binoculars brought the ship into view, its dual cylinders spinning, the mirrors lined with light, the sailhouse an eerie glow floating among the cables, and beyond h all a silver line that soon would unfold into a tremendous solar sail.
Each house in the campus cylinder of Starfarer lay underground, partly hidden by a low hill, daylit by one whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the house where Victoria lived, her partner Satoshi Lono trudged into the main room, looking for coffee, anticipating its smell. Grass mats rustled under his bare feet. He yawned. He had stayed late at a lab meeting, with no solution in sight to the problem of one of his graduate students. Fox could not apply for a permanent position on the expedition because her twenty-first birthday fell six months after the starship's departure.
When the meeting ended, knowing he would not be able to sleep, he had spent several more hours on the web, analyzing map complexes- When he finally slept, he dreamed those maps. Bright images of stacks of contour descriptions still filled his mind.
He stopped.
A weird piece of equipment stood in the middle of the main room. The AS that cleaned the house circled the contraption, like a cat stalking a gigantic insect. The AS rolled forward, its antenna outstretched. It backed off and circled again.
19
20 Vonaa N. Mcintyre
The piece of equipment, complicated in form but primitive
in design, consisted of twisted glass tubes fastened together and supported by a metal rack. The feet of the rack dug into one of Satoshi's better grass mats.
The AS, hovering, tapped the glass tubes again.
"It's all right," Satoshi said- "Look at it and remember it and leave it alone." The AS hesitated, assimilated the information. then rotated and rolled away. When the partnership first got it, it had had the same reaction to, and the same instructions about, the shins Stephen Thomas stored on the floor. Satoshi wondered how Stephen Thomas so often contrived to leave things lying around that the cleaner could not figure out what to do with. Satoshi liked living in a 'neat environment. It irritated him to be put in the position of having the urge to pick up after one of his partners.
"It's too early for this," Satoshi muttered. Deciding to assimilate his own advice, he deloured around the mess in the middle of the main room and stopped in the kitchen nook, wondering what had happened to his coffee.
He was not at his best in the morning.
Everything did not always go exactly as planned on Star-farer. The campus was rough and new, the equipment at the shakedown stage. But the kitchen nook was hardly leading-edge technology. It should have had his coffee ready for him. Instead, the pot stood on the counter, half full of cold, malodorous dregs. He poured it out and started over.
Stephen Thomas strolled into the main room, put his arms around Satoshi from behind, and rested his chin on Satoshi's shoulder. His long blond hair tickled Satoshi's neck.
"Good morning."
"Did you drink my coffee?"
"Huh? I drank some last night when I got in, why?"
"Dammit—!" Satoshi woke up enough to be irritated.
"You could have left it the way you found it."
'*! didn't think of it. It was late and I was tired."
"It's early and I'm still asleep!"
"God, all right, I'm sorry. I'll make you some."
"It's done now." Satoshi took the cup to the table and sat in a patch of sunlight by the sliding windows. He deliberately ignored the contortion of glass tubing.
For the thousandth or the millionth time, he missed Merit. STARFARERS 21
Times like these reminded him of before the accident, when the everyday details of the partnership ran smoothly, practically unnoticeably, under Merry's management. It was weird how something as inconsequential as a cup of coffee could bring back the grief. He hunched his shoulders and sipped
the bitter coffee and tried to put the feelings away.
Satoshi loved Stephen Thomas, of course, but living with him the past couple of weeks had not been easy. Satoshi could ftot figure out why his youngest partner's idiosyncrasies and occasional blithe self-centeredness bothered him more with Victoria away.
"You're mad at me," Stephen Thomas said.
Satoshi took a gulp of coffee. "No, I'm not. Yes, I am. I don't know. It's early and I'm still tired and I just wanted some coffee."
"I offered to make you some."
"You give strangers more respect than you give the people you sleep with."
Stephen Thomas laughed and kissed him. "I respect you in the morning. Except maybe right after you wake up." He left Satoshi sitting in the sunlight, returned to the kitchen nook, and started opening drawers and cupboards looking for something for breakfast.
Satoshi made allowances for Stephen Thomas. He thought of Victoria as the strongest one in the partnership, and of himself as the calmest in a crisis, and of their younger partner as the most flighty. But only Stephen Thomas had kept his center after the accident. Satoshi doubted the partnership would have survived without him.
He wished he could get coffee to taste right. Starfarer was not yet self-sufficient for food; half of what they used they had to import, not from earth, but from the O'Neill colonies. Maybe coffee plants could grow properly only on earth, the way some types of vegetables and fruit grew properly only in certain places. Like Walla Walla onions. No amount of research or experiment ever reproduced that sort of biological synergy.
Satoshi found it some comfort to suspect the existence of unknowable secrets, like perfect coffee. Walla Walla onions, and his younger partner's lab equipment.