Since communicating with a starship ate up huge amounts of planetside ansible time, it was usually done only to convey navigational information and instructions. The only people permitted to send extended text messages were high officials in the government or the military. Valentine could not begin to understand how “Jane” managed to get so much ansible time for these text transmissions– and at the same time keep anyone from discovering where these subversive documents were coming from. Furthermore, “Jane” used even more ansible time transmitting back to her the published responses to her writings, reporting to her on all the arguments and strategies the government was using to counter Valentine's propaganda. Whoever “Jane” was– and Valentine suspected that “Jane” was simply the name for a clandestine organization that had penetrated the highest reaches of government– she was extraordinarily good. And extraordinarily foolhardy. Still, if Jane was willing to expose herself– themselves– to such risks, Valentine owed it to her– them– to produce as many tracts as she could, and as powerful and dangerous as she could make them.
If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.
But she was still a woman; even revolutionaries are allowed to have a life, aren't they? Moments of joy– or pleasure, or perhaps only relief– stolen here and there. She got up from her seat, ignoring the pain that came from moving after sitting so long, and twisted her way out of the door of her tiny office– a storage bin, really, before they converted the starship to their own use. She was a little ashamed of how eager she was to get to the room where Jakt would be waiting. Most of the great revolutionary propagandists in history would have been able to endure at least three weeks of physical abstinence. Or would they? She wondered if anyone had done a study of that particular question.
She was still imagining how a researcher would go about writing a grant proposal for such a project when she got to the four-bunk compartment they shared with Syfte and her husband, Lars, who had proposed to her only a few days before they left, as soon as he realized that Syfte really meant to leave Trondheim. It was hard to share a cabin with newlyweds– Valentine always felt like such an intruder, using the same room. But there was no choice. Though this starship was a luxury yacht, with all the amenities they could hope for, it simply hadn't been meant to hold so many bodies. It had been the only starship near Trondheim that was remotely suitable, so it had to do.
Their twenty-year-old daughter, Ro, and Varsam, their sixteen-year-old son, shared another compartment with Plikt, who had been their lifelong tutor and dearest family friend. The members of the yacht's staff and crew who had chosen to make this voyage with them– it would have been wrong to dismiss them all and strand them on Trondheim– used the other two.
The bridge, the dining room, the galley, the salon, the sleeping compartments– all were filled with people doing their best not to let their annoyance at the close quarters get out of hand.
None of them were in the corridor now, however, and Jakt had already taped a sign to their door:
STAY OUT OR DIE.
It was signed, “The proprietor.” Valentine opened the door. Jakt was leaning against the wall so close to the door that she was startled and gave a little gasp.
“Nice to know that the sight of me can make you cry out in pleasure.”
“In shock.”
“Come in, my sweet seditionist.”
“Technically, you know, I'm the proprietor of this starship.”
“What's yours is mine. I married you for your property.”
She was inside the compartment now. He closed the door and sealed it.
“That's all I am to you?” she asked. “Real estate?”
“A little plot of ground where I can plow and plant and harvest, all in their proper season.” He reached out to her; she stepped into his arms. His hands slid lightly up her back, cradled her shoulders. She felt contained in his embrace, never confined.
“It's late in the autumn,” she said. “Getting on toward winter.”
“Time to harrow, perhaps,” said Jakt. “Or perhaps it's already time to kindle up the fire and keep the old hut warm before the snow comes.”
He kissed her and it felt like the first time.
“If you asked me to marry you all over again today, I'd say yes,” said Valentine.
“And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.”
They had said the same words many, many times before. Yet they still smiled to hear them, because they were still true.
The two starships had almost completed their vast ballet, dancing through space in great leaps and delicate turns until at last they could meet and touch. Miro Ribeira had watched the whole process from the bridge of his starship, his shoulders hunched, his head leaned back on the headrest of the seat. To others this posture always looked awkward. Back on Lusitania, whenever Mother caught him sitting that way she would come and fuss over him, insist on bringing him a pillow so he could be comfortable. She never seemed to grasp the idea that it was only in that hunched, awkward-seeming posture that his head would remain upright without any conscious effort on his part.
He would endure her ministrations because it wasn't worth the effort to argue with her. Mother was always moving and thinking so quickly, it was almost impossible for her to slow down enough to listen to him. Since the brain damage he had suffered passing through the disruptor field that separated the human colony and the piggies' forest, his speech had been unbearably slow, painful to produce and difficult to understand. Miro's brother Quim, the religious one, had told him that he should be grateful to God that he was able to speak at all– the first few days he had been incapable of communicating except through alphabetic scanning, spelling out messages letter by letter. In some ways, though, spelling things out had been better. At least then Miro had been silent; he hadn't had to listen to his own voice. The thick, awkward sound, the agonizing slowness of it. Who in his family had the patience to listen to him? Even the ones who tried– his next-younger sister, Ela; his friend and stepfather, Andrew Wiggin, the Speaker for the Dead; and Quim, of course– he could feel their impatience. They tended to finish his sentences for him. They needed to hurry things. So even though they said they wanted to talk with him, even though they actually sat and listened as he spoke, he still couldn't speak freely to them. He couldn't talk about ideas; he couldn't speak in long, involved sentences, because by the time he got to the end his listeners would have lost track of the beginning.
The human brain, Miro had concluded, just like a computer, can only receive data at certain speeds. If you get too slow, the listener's attention wanders and the information is lost.
Not just the listeners, either. Miro had to be fair– he was as impatient with himself as they were. When he thought of the sheer effort involved in explaining a complicated idea, when he anticipated trying to form the words with lips and tongue and jaws that wouldn't obey him, when he thought of how long it would all take, he usually felt too weary to speak. His mind raced on and on, as fast as ever, thinking so many thoughts that at times Miro wanted his brain to shut down, to be silent and give him peace. But his thoughts remained his own, unshared.
Except with Jane. He could speak to Jane. She had come to him first on his terminal at home, her face taking form on the screen. “I'm a friend of the Speaker for the Dead,” she had told him. “I think we can get this computer to be a little more responsive.” From then on, Miro had found that Jane was the only person he could talk to easily. For one thing, she was infinitely patient. She never finished his sentences. She could wait for him to finish them himself, so that he never felt rushed, never felt that he was boring her.