“What’s your favorite dish?” Besen asked.
“Huh? Oh—the nearest.” Toby noticed that he was shoveling in cauliflower with yellow cheese melted over it. Not his favorite dish, but then he hadn’t been tasting it anyway.
“Some gourmet you are.” She wrinkled her nose at him.
“Look, I don’t want to have good taste, I just want things that taste good.”
He finished the cauliflower and looked for anything that might be left. The best thing about communal eating was that at the end of the meal extras got passed around. A quick eater got more, and Toby was always hungry. Even when they were zooming down toward a huge disk of white-hot fire, he responded to the rumble in his stomach.
“You don’t look concerned,” Besen said.
Toby studied her face. The deaths only hours before had been acknowledged in a ship-wide ceremony. Now, by necessity, they got back to business, teams repairing the damage, a bustle of purpose. Besen was not one to give a lot away, but he could read the tightening around the edges of her mouth, the slight high-strung cant of her head.
“No point in worrying.” He took her hand across the table and squeezed. “Bigger heads than ours are working on this thing.”
Besen bit nervously at her lip. He leaned across the table and gave her a light kiss on the brow. “Ummmm,” she said, but didn’t stop chewing.
“We’re going to make it. I can feel it in my bones.” He could do no such thing, but he had to cheer her up.
“Do you really think so?”
“Sure. Uh, could you reach me those potatoes?”
“What an animal! Facing death, and he wants to eat.”
“Only smart thing to do, seems to me.”
“My stomach feels tight. I can’t get anything down.” She lifted a pea pod with her chopsticks, bit off a fraction, and put it back.
“Well, maybe some other recreation will take your mind off things.” He gave her a blank face.
“Some other—oh. You beast!”
“I hear it’s good for the circulation.”
“First food, then—no, I will not jump into the sack with you while we are flying into the teeth of, of—”
“No need to throw a duck fit.”
“Well—I mean—it’s so totally inappropriate.”
He pretended to consider the question deeply, complete with a profound scowl. “Ummm. What’s a better way to vote in favor of there being a future? That’s what the whole thing points toward, after all.”
She snorted. “I thought it was about love.”
“That, too. But when we’re all candidates for the bone orchard—only who’s going to bury us here, when there’s no dirt for a cemetery anyway?—the oldest human ritual is a, well, a gesture of faith. Faith in the future.”
“So sex is faith now?” She was starting to grin, which had been his aim. “You have an odd religion.”
“I worship at the altar of my choosing,” he said with a staged haughty air.
“And what’s that about the oldest ritual? I can think of some more uplifting ones.”
Toby consulted with Isaac, who was a gold mine of ancient terms, in the space of a heartbeat. “They used to call it ‘the beast with two backs’—so maybe you have a point.”
Besen gave him a grin that began wickedly and slid into a tentative shyness. “You were really just joshing me out of my mood, weren’t you?”
“Um.”
“You don’t like to admit it, but you are very kind, in your own way, behind that fake toughness.”
“You have unmasked me, madam.”
“Ummm.” She eyed him speculatively. “How much time is it, until we get really close to the disk?”
“I can’t tell. The Bridge is too busy to give out details, and we’re swooping in along a complicated kind of spiral, so—say, why do you want to know?”
“Well, if there really is enough time . . .”
“You hussy! Here I was just trying to cheer you up—”
“Oh, forget it. You can’t take a little ribbing yourself.” She poked him in the chest with a finger. “Come on, Romeo, let’s see what the wall screens tell us. I guess you’ve used up your supply of romance for the week.”
“Then I’ll have to stop off and pick up my next allotment. Where do I go?”
“Don’t think I can’t tell you where to go—get moving.”
He had managed to kid her out of her jittery depression, but the raging cauldron visible on the big Assembly Hall screen was enough to bring it all back. He put his arm around her as they stood with a large crowd of the Family, watching the harsh glare of the disk seem to spread and wriggle as they drew nearer.
