Helene sipped from the siphon of her liquitube. “Yes, all that’s part of it. Also more fems appear to be more immune to Jump-sickness. But you know those differences aren’t all that big. Not enough to make up for the fact that more males volunteer for spaceflight than females.
“Besides, more than half of the crewmen on in-system ships are male, and seven out of ten on military craft.”
“Well, I don’t know about commercial or research ships, but I’d think that the military selects for an aptitude for fighting. I know it’s still not proven, but I’d guess that…”
Helene laughed. “Oh, you don’t have to be so diplomatic, Jacob. Of course mels make better fighters than fems… statistically that is. Amazons like me are the exception. Actually, that is one factor in the selection. We don’t want too many warrior types aboard a star-ship.”
“But that doesn’t make sense! The crews on starship go out into an immense galaxy that hasn’t even been fully explored by the Library. You have to face a wild variety of alien races, most of them temperamental as hell. And the Institutes don’t forbid fighting among the races. They couldn’t even if they tried, judging by what Fagin says. They only try to make it tidy.”
“So a starship with humans aboard should be ready for a fracas?” Helene smiled as she rested her shoulder against the wall of the dome. In the mottled red light of the upper chromosphere in hydrogen alpha, her blonde hair looked like a close fitted ping cap. “Well you’re right, of course. We do have to be ready to fight. But think for a moment about the situation we face out there.
“We have to deal with literally hundreds of species whose only thing in common is the one thing we lack, a chain of tradition and uplift stretching back two billion years. They’ve all been using the Library for aeons, adding to it, albeit slowly, all of the time.
“Most of them are cranky, hyper-mindful of their privileges, and dubious of that silly ‘wolfling’ race from Sol.
“And what can we do, when we are challenged by some two-bit species whose extinct patrons uplifted them as talking; obedient riding steeds, who now own two little terraformed planets that sit right astride our only route to the colony on Omnivarium? What can we do when these creatures with no ambition or sense of humor stop our ship and demand an incredible forty whale songs as a toll?”
Helene shook her head and her eyebrows knotted.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to fight, at a time like that! A great beauty such as Calypso, filled to the brim with things badly needed by a struggling little community, and with an even more precious cargo of… stopped dead in space by a pair of tiny, ancient hulks that were obviously bought, not built, by the “intelligent” camels aboard!” The woman’s voice thickened, as she remembered.
“Picture it. New and beautiful, yet primitive, using only the tiny portion of Galactic science we’d been able to absorb when she was refitted, mostly in the drives… stopped by hulks older than Caesar but made by someone who used the Library all his life.”
Helene stopped for a moment and turned away.
Jacob was moved, but even more he felt honored. He knew Helene well enough, now, to know what an act of trust it was for her to open up like this.
She’s been doing most of the work too, he realized. She asks most of the questions — about my past, about my family, about my feelings — for some reason I’ve been reluctant to ask about her, the person inside. I wonder what’s been stopping me? There must be so much in there!
“So I suppose the idea is not to fight, because we’d probably lose,” he said quietly.
She looked back and nodded. She coughed twice, behind a closed fist.
“Oh, -we’ve a couple of tricks we think we might surprise somebody with sometime, simply because we haven’t had the Library and it’s all they’ve known. But those tricks have got to be saved for a rainy day.
“Instead, we flatter, fawn, bribe, sing spirituals… tap dance… and when that fails, we run.”
Jacob imagined meeting a shipload of Pila.
“Running must be awful hard at times.”
“Yes, but we have a secret way of keeping cool,” Helene brightened slightly. For a moment those appealing recesses reappeared at the corners of her smile. “It’s one of the biggest reasons why the crew is mostly women.”
“Now come on. A fem is just about as likely as a mel to take a poke at someone who insulted her. I don’t see that as much of a guarantee.”
“Nooo, not normally.” She eyed him again with that “appraising” expression. For an instant she seemed about to go on. Then she shrugged.
“Let’s sit,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
She led him around the dome and across the deck to a part of the ship where none of the crew or passengers were, where the circular deck floated two meters away from the shell of the ship…
The sparkling glow of the chromosphere refracted eerily where the stasis screen curved away below their feet. The narrow suspension field allowed light to pass, but twisted it slightly. From where they stood, part of the Big Spot could be seen, its configuration changed considerably since the last dive. Where the field intervened, the sunspot shimmered and rippled with new pulsations, added to its own.
Slowly, Helene lowered herself to the deck and then approached the edge. For a moment she sat with” her feet inches from the shimmering, holding her knees under her chin. Then she placed her hands behind her on the deck and allowed her legs to drop into the field.
Jacob swallowed.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.
He watched as she swung her legs languidly. They moved as if in a thick syrup, the snug sheathing of her shipsuit rippling like something animate.
She lifted her legs straight out and up above the level of the deck, with apparent ease.
“Hmmm, they seem to be all right. I can’t push them down very deep, though. I guess the mass of my legs shoves a dimple into the suspension field. At least they don’t feel upside down when I do it.” She let them drop again.
Jacob felt weak in the knees. “You mean you’ve never done that before?”
She looked up at him and grinned.
“Am I showing off? Yes I guess I was trying to impress you. I’m not crazy though. After you told us about Bubbacub and the vacuum cleaner I went over the equations carefully. It’s perfectly safe, so why don’t you join me?”
Jacob nodded numbly. After so many other miracles and unexplainable things since he left Earth, this was rather small, after all. The secret, he decided, was not to think at all.
It did feel like a thick syrup that increased in viscosity as he pushed downwards. It was rubbery and pushed back.
And the legs of Jacob’s shipsuit felt almost, disconcertingly, alive.
Helene said nothing for a time. Jacob respected her silence. Something was “obviously on her mind.
“Was that story about the Finnila Needle really true?” she asked at last, without looking up.
“Yes.”
“She must have been quite a woman.”
“Yes, she was.”
“I mean in addition to being brave. She had to be brave to jump from one balloon to another, twenty miles up in the air, but…”
“She was trying to distract them while I defused the Torcher. I shouldn’t have let her,” Jacob heard his own voice, remote and faded. “But I thought I could protect her at the same time… I had a device, you see „…”
“…but she must have been quite a person in other ways as well. I wish I could have met her.”
Jacob realized that he hadn’t said a word aloud.
“Um, yes, Helene. Tania would have liked you.” He shook himself. This was getting no one anywhere.