Peake said, lapsing into a dialect long forgotten, “We paying for it, man. With out lives. With losing everybody.”
Ravi thought, What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul… and he thought, our souls have been taken from us by the Academy training, and I am being sent where I have no chance to find mine… and he remembered that a scant few hours ago he had been blocking all of this out by frantic sex with Moira. Somehow he would have to retrace his steps, think about what and who he was… what had Moira, and sex, to do with this struggle in his mind? Or were he and Moira both a part of a Cosmic whole, all part of God… he had read something of Tantra, where the sexual partner was loved and worshipped in the place of God. The idea, and the juxtaposition of the two ideas, confused and annoyed him. He had been brought up to be very casual and guilt-free about sex, and now he wondered if this was simply a part of the altogether soulless and atheistic Academy training.
Peake, at least, had not known casual sex, but a deep and intense love. Perhaps Peake, at least, knew what it was to love and revere a partner as if that partner were a part of God. Like many strongly heterosexual men, Ravi found it difficult to understand the impulse which had brought Peake and Jimson together. He began, with a mental shyness strange to him, to think about it. No one who had watched them together could doubt that it was a stronger impulse than most of the easy and casual heterosexuality in the Academy. It showed most strongly when they were playing together, violin and piano; whatever was between them, perhaps they had been able to achieve that ideal of finding God in one another, without even the physical lure of opposite sexes.
I envy them, he thought, surprised at himself.
And then he began to think about Peake; the one of them who had known that kind of love, and the one of them who, because of what he was, was alone, with no chance of finding that kind of partnering again.
He will be alone, all during this voyage, and after having known a kind of love none of us has equaled.
Peake was one of them, and it occurred to Ravi, suddenly, to wonder if he could endure to see Peake completely alone all during this voyage. Did he and Teague have some kind of responsibility, since all of them were close as in — Moira had said it — one of these arranged marriages, to lessen Peake’s loneliness?
I am his friend; his partner, even, in navigating the Ship. Could I, if he needed me, be his lover too? The thought scared Ravi a little, and he turned and looked surreptitiously at Peake, who was studying the vast view beyond the lenticular window.
“Doesn’t it make you dizzy?” he asked.
Peake shook his head. “No,” he said, “I like it.”
Moira raised her head from studying the sails (a taut and twitching triangular corner against the stars], and said with a flick of sarcasm, “I am sure the Universe is happy at your approval.”
Peake was too dark to display a blush, but he lowered his head with a sheepish grin, and Ravi felt a sudden deep tenderness. He knew, suddenly, that he loved Peake too, and whatever happened, he wasn’t going to let him suffer in the years to come.
But he knew, too, that he was going to go on having sex with Moira just as long as she was in the mood!
During the next twenty-four hours, the crew explored the last comers of the Ship that they had not seen; the modules controlling the light-drives and the sails, the converter mechanisms which worked to recycle and re-molecularize materials into food, clothing and the other materials they needed for life abroad; although only Teague, in a special radiation suit, went into the main converter area. Moira explored the light-drives which she had helped to assemble, remaining there so long that Fontana became a little frightened and went in after her. Ching refused to allow anyone else inside the computer center under any conditions; she wore anti-static clothing, and stayed in only a few minutes.
“Just long enough to get the general layout in my mind, in case anything should go wrong — and let’s hope it won’t — and I have to go in and actually do something to the hardware,” she said, coming out and shucking the anti-static suit, “and I’m not giving any conducted tours. Some time in the next year or two, if anybody would like to learn what I know about computers, I’d be delighted to have a second-in-command-of-computers, or a backup technician. But not until I’m absolutely sure I know every inch of the thing myself!” She stretched, cramped — the interior of the computer module was somewhat smaller than she was, although she was not very large. “Not you, Peake — you’d never fit in there. You’d feel like that old torture — the box where you can neither sit, stand, nor lie down! I’m tempted to go and work out the kinks in the gym — none of us has been in there yet!”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Peake agreed. “Moira’s fussing around the sails again, but when she finishes, we can all go.”
They had to pass through two of the free-fall corridors to get to the module tagged as a gymnasium. Teague, who went through just behind them, noticed that Ching’s clinging to the crawl bar was a little less desperate, that for the last few seconds she actually let go and floated. So his efforts hadn’t been entirely wasted, after all.
“How do you want me to set the DeMags?” he asked Peake, who was immediately behind them.
“Full gravity,” Peake said, “at least for the first hour. One hour workout at full gravity, plus a four-hour sleep period at full gravity, will keep muscles and internal organs in tone. After that, if you want to experiment with low-gravity acrobatics, that’s up to you. But as the medical officer, I make it a professional recommendation with all necessary force — no less than one hour of full-gravity exercise per crew member per twenty-four hour ship’s day!”
“My, how solemn,” Moira laughed, coming in behind him. “We ought to have chosen you for captain, Peake, you have the right accent and the proper authoritarian manner!”
“I’m a doctor,” he replied. “This isn’t an opinion, this is a medical necessity. Just a simple fact. Ignore it at your body’s peril.”
“Gravity set,” Teague said, and went to an anchored rowing machine, where he sat down and began to pull against it with his powerful muscles. Fontana, standing at one edge of the cubical module, looked appreciatively at his bare shoulders, then began a slow jog around the room. After a few seconds, in spite of the fact that she was an extremely healthy young woman, she felt her heart pounding, let herself collapse for a moment to the floor.
Peake went and bent over her. “Trouble, Fontana?” He felt for her pulse and frowned.
“Tell me, did you sleep at full gravity last sleep period?”
Fontana felt the color rising in her cheeks, and looked quickly, guiltily at Teague. They had kept the DeMag units just high enough to keep them from drifting apart as they made love; afterward they had slept in zero gravity, floating. She shook her head.
“Now you see why you have to,” Peake said soberly. “It doesn’t take the heart very long to adapt to zero-gravity, and the heart’s like any other muscle, it gets lazy when it isn’t working; the muscles in the human body were made to operate at one gee. You’ll need to work out twice as long today, and don’t try that again.”
She stared at him rebelliously, but the thumping of her heart had frightened her. Could they really lose fitness so swiftly outside the familiar gravity of Earth? “All right,” she said soberly, “I’ll remember, Peake.”