She was limber as a snake. What was left of her could wriggle through a hole twenty centimeters in diameter.
"Do what?" Javelin asked, innocently.
"...that. What you did. I don't like people coming up on me that fast."
"I'll bear it in mind. Now will you lend a hand?"
They got the items moved into the scooter. It might have gone faster, but all three were fascinated by Javelin's movements. She would grab a handle at the side of the lock with one hand, reach out with her leg and use the hand on that end to snatch a piece of furniture, pull, and bend like an eel as she guided it through the hatch.
"This way," she said, when it was done. They followed her out the door, all of them moving awkwardly in zero-gee. There was a long hallway, two walls carpeted and two paneled in oak, with ornamental brass rails on each of the paneled walls.
"Life-support equipment back here," she said, indicating the walls. "Living quarters are forward." She started off, hand over hand, which in her case meant grabbing the rail and swinging her body in an arc until she could make contact with the other hand on the end of her ankle. Three swings like that and she was arrowing down the center of the corridor, leg first, looking back at them with a broad smile on her face. She hit the far end, soaked up momentum with her leg, and vanished around the corner.
"What will modern science think of next?" Cathay said.
"Don't knock it," Lilo said. "It seems to work pretty well. She makes me feel almost... outmoded, you know?"
"Yeah. But she'd be a real sight in a gravity field."
"I gather she never goes down. Never."
Javelin was waiting for them at the end of the corridor, at the first of two locks. She ushered them through, with comments about the ship's air-integrity routines that she expected them to follow with no nonsense. Then they were into the living quarters.
"Sorry about the size," Javelin said, opening the doors to two small rooms. "This isn't the Queen Mary. As it was, I had to move out my stamp collection. So two of you will have to room together, unless one of you bunks on the couch in the solarium. Go ahead, stow your luggage. Now come this way."
Lilo was dazzled. She was not sure how much Javelin was underplaying, whether she actually regretted that there were only two "guest rooms" on a ship that by all economic laws should have had none at all. The rooms were small, but lavishly furnished, paneled, and carpeted, like everything else she had seen. They passed two more facing doors, one leading to a workshop and another to a medical laboratory. Lilo got only a glimpse of each.
The solarium was the biggest part of the living area. Javelin led them in, and kept going forward.
"I'll be right back," she said. "Make yourselves at home. Coffee bulbs over there, drinks in the bottles against that wall." She darted through a small hole in the forward bulkhead.
"This place is crazy," Cathay said. "Absolutely crazy."
Lilo agreed with him. She had been in all types of ships, and had seen nothing like the Cavorite.
"What do you call this?" she asked. "Early Victorian? Late Captain Nemo?" But Cathay had no answer, and Javelin was gone.
The solarium was about ten meters in length, and four meters across. Unlike the rest of the ship, it had a definite floor, which made no sense at all to Lilo. Things can be done so much more economically in free-fall. Not only that, but the floor was parallel to the axis of thrust. Under boost, the room would stand on end. At no time would down be in the direction of the floor. Vaffa pointed this out.
"Well, when you think of it, she spends such a tiny part of her trip boosting..." But it still didn't make sense.
The ceiling was curved, following the cylindrical shape of the outer hull. Twelve great panes of glass, six on each side of the room, curved overhead to meet at an ornate wooden beam that ran the length of the room. It was obvious why she called it the solarium.
The room was festooned with plants, vines, and flowers. It featured a two-keyboard pipe organ at one end, and a slowly spinning toroidal aquarium at the other; tiny angel-fish gaped at Lilo when she put her face close to their revolving world. In between, the motif was plush velvet-upholstered chairs and sofas, carved wood, and lots of brass trim. Lilo felt swamped with detail; everything was infested with curlicues.
Lilo stuck her head through the hole where Javelin had gone, and she got a surprise. As she had suspected, the room beyond was the control center for the ship—though again, it was very different, with its brass-ringed instruments, its lack of digital readouts, and several things that looked like manual controls. Beside the narrow pilot's chair there was one long lever, capped with a crystal knob, that was plainly marked STOP and GO. But the real surprise was that the room was empty. Since it was at the nose of the ship with nothing beyond it but space, Lilo thought it odd.
She backed out in time to see Javelin enter the solarium from the aft corridor. So she had her own ways of getting around.
"This is an astounding ship," Cathay said to her.
"Do you think so? Thank you. I like it. I should—it's been home for nearly three hundred years. I lifted the basic design—the outside, that is—from an old magazine cover. Pre-Invasion. Pre-space, for that matter."
"That's crazy," Vaffa said, flatly.
"Do you think so? I don't. Obviously the artist who thought up the design knew nothing about spaceships. He was trying to sell magazines, so he made it sexy instead of logical. I liked that."
"But the weight penalties," Lilo said, feeling baffled. "If form doesn't follow function, don't you lose efficiency?"
"It's funny you should say that. It's true, mostly, but don't you have any poetry in your soul? I've been battling hard-assed engineers since the first moon colony. We've become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it's time to railroad, there's time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency. But deep-space ships still look like a hat rack fucking a Christmas tree."
"Pardon me?"
"Copping. Sorry, it was an archaic word. Come to think of it, all the concepts in that metaphor were archaic. But Cavorite is less inefficient than you'd think. Once I'd made the one extravagant decision—to go out alone in a ship five times bigger than what I need for the bare necessities—the rest of it was virtually free. A little thin metal for the false shell outside. Some furniture that looks massive but really isn't; the wood is a thin veneer over standard structural foam. The organ doubles as input to the ship's computer and library, which is out of sight. The aquarium is part of the recycling system, and if the fish are okay, so am I. You'll see. It works."
Lilo still had her doubts. But Quince had spoken of her with awe. She was said to be the most successful hunter of all time.
"If you're about ready to go, I should start on the final countdown. Still some things to do. I searched your luggage, and studied the X rays I took of you as—"
"You what?" It was Vaffa. Her face was quickly turning red.
Javelin looked her up and down. "Yes, I'm not surprised at your reaction," she said, dryly. "You had several crystals and several other components in your things. With a little spit and bubble gum, you might have turned them into a pair of hand lasers. I ditched them, in the interest of a safe, calm voyage."
Vaffa had planted her feet against the aft bulkhead. She launched herself across the room, toward Javelin. Her arms were extended, her mouth open in a snarl. Lilo didn't want to watch. Javelin was so tiny, so fragile-looking. Vaffa started to twist in the air, coming around for a blow at Javelin's midsection.