“Hi.”
Carlotta kissed him. “Had another face smoothing, I see.”
“No, I decided to skip that and go straight to embalming. How’s it look?”
“It’s you, dahling. Are those laugh lines or an irrigation project?”
Bob shook hands in his good-ole-boy persona. “You figure there’s much on fer tonight?”
Nigel fetched drinks. “The free-form sex is down the hall, second left.”
“Don’t look for him there,” Carlotta said. “Nigel gets all tired out just struggling with temptation.”
Nigel handed her a drink. “Hot-blooded kid. I suppose you’ll be playing hopscotch tonight with real Scotch?”
“Si. You’re so much wittier after I’ve had a few drinks.”
“You two!” Nikka shook her head. “One could never guess you had spent the night together.”
“Mating rituals of the higher primates,” Carlotta said, taking a long pull. She stroked Nikka’s kimono. “Madre! It’s so attractive on you.”
Nigel wondered why women spoke that way when presumably it was men who were best qualified to judge attraction, yet men seldom used the term. Curious. Though of course in this case his generalization fell on its face. In their first hand touch they reestablished a lazy, familiar sensuality.
He watched Carlotta approach Nikka, speaking rapidly and approvingly, and then move away, and then return, an unconscious push-pull to draw Nikka out. Carlotta’s heavy, springy hair flowed with these movements. In marked contrast, her large brown eyes did not share this social gavotte. He liked the rigor of those eyes and the unashamed way they locked on whatever interested her, holding it for rapt attention.
Her intensity was too much for Nikka’s mood, so soon after the reflective dressing in the kimono. Nikka escaped into the kitchen for hors d’oeuvres. Carlotta reached out a hand as if to delay her and then drew back, seeing that she had stirred up some unintended current. She turned, her long scarlet skirt flowing, and studied a sunsomi triptich nearby. Nigel watched her eyes narrow from some inner effort. There was some reservoir of emotion she was tapping that eluded him. Something deep, another fulcrum for her personality. Which proved that merely sleeping with a woman did not open her to you fully, no matter how you might try.
Bob started in about shipboard work policy and Nigel joined in, glad of the diversion. A musical theme chimed: multifass.
“Ummm,” Carlotta murmured and turned to Nikka to try again. “What are you doing under the new job rotation?” A relatively neutral subject.
“Odd jobs here and there.” Nikka retreated behind a blank mildness. He recognized this as an old habit, common to Japanese, though Nikka had returned to it only in the last few years, as a day-to-day shield aboard Lancer. In this case, she was uncomfortable because a small deception was involved. He and Nikka had agreed to collaborate, without appearing to do so, filling in each other’s weak areas. That would help keep their labor ratings above minimum. It seemed a prudent tactic for the oldest members of the crew. “And you?”
“Well, systems analysis of the microbio inventory, of course, from the first flyback probe.”
Nigel said, “Until you’re finished, we don’t go down?”
Carlotta laughed, her eyes now moving with liquid ease. “Bob has been after us for a week, panting for the green light. We’ve got lots of results—”
“More’n plenty,” Bob grunted.
Carlotta frowned. Friction between departments about setting a date for touchdown? “Anyway, we’ve got so much biochem to interrelate, I don’t see how we can understand it all in terms of relationships to Earth-side processes, when we’ve had only a few weeks to—”
Another knock. Nigel went to answer. Yes, he should now leave the door dilated. It still struck him as odd, but precisely such policy decisions as the touchdown date could be dealt with and a consensus reached, in the middle of a multifass. And all with a disarming casualness. The analysts had discovered that most matters were in fact settled this way. The formal apparatus only confirmed what was already worked out. Electronic democracy with your shirt unbuttoned. A disarming notion, for those reared in the days of management pyramids.
Here at the door were three people he scarcely knew, bubbling with good spirits and ready to add to the steadily rising murmur that he could hear welling up in the corridor, more coming, the eternal primate chatter and bark, the voices of the ship—
Toke on this, Nebraska Red, high, angular momentum stuff—
Those microbes, never seen anythin’ like ’em. Dust huggers. Little fellas, no bigger’n paramecia.
He said if she didn’t like it what the hell she could change her whole jawline, he didn’t care. She lost it when that lug bolt fractured, you remember that godawful malf down C Bay, killed Jake Sutherland and her, it clean blew away her bone right up to the eye, they got the frags out of the cornea—
—they’re the same chem patterns repeated thousands of times over in the Isis biosphere, just like our left- and right-handedness in the sugars and long chains, y’know. I mean, you’ve got only so many atoms to work with in the whole universe anyway, right? So shouldn’t be a big surprise that the basic Isis chem combos—a five-carbon sugar, with one more phosphate in the carrier, whereas we get by with only three in ATP—are similar, I mean, no big shock there. Got a base tacked on, too. Obvious, simple alteration from our scheme, damn near Earthlike but you can spot the differences.
Christ I thought she’d wet herself when the A4 rating didn’t come through from the cell, she screamed bloody murder at the next confab but shit we weren’t havin’ any you can’t put one past us so she’s back on the auto-lathes. Hates it. Ruby’s got the A4 and good says I ’cause that bitch was—
—that stuff clutches onto the dust in the air like it was free lunch. Dust eaters. Backbone of the ecology. The flagella dig in and zip they take the sulfates straight out of the mineral state. No fluid solution needed!
So much for that life-needs-water crap.
Yeah, why should it when a martini doesn’t?
So these fellas, they go their whole lives without a drink. There’s water, sure, but not near the Eye. So the biosphere’s tapped this way to get energy out of the sulfates, poor bastards, livin’ on dust—
Li’l suckers got to hump like bejeezus to make an erg.
—in the wash of technical talk he steps back and studies Carlotta, sees pinched lines at her eyes and wishes he could unblock it. Easier, much easier, if the three of them could collapse into a comfortable, old-shoe life, each satisfied by a dimming echo of the initial passion they all had felt. She turns, visibly collecting words for a burst of talk—eyebrows knit, mouth purses, blunt tip of her nose dips a millimeter—and Nikka approaches, quicksilver changes ripple across Carlotta’s face, they touch casually, and Nigel remembers how they had been instinctively close from the beginning, sharing jobs, living together while Nigel was in the Sleepslots. They exchange a word, Carlotta glances at him, she makes the familiar stretching motion, the one she taught him to ease knotted muscles, and Nigel feels in her liquid grace why he has through the years narrowed his ability to see into others. It is simply too hard now, too involving. For Nikka and Carlotta, yes, but the thought of reaching this way into Ted or Alex or others—it is too dense and wearying. He had gotten it from the Marginis wreck and used it to get through the ISA Byzantium: chatting up power brokers, sensing what Lancer engineers meant as opposed to what they said, giving them the appearance of seasoned astronaut that they wanted. And he had liked it, been good at it. For years afterward he had remembered each welding inspector’s beaming mug. But now—He feels the reserves ebbing for this; he cannot muster it for a multifass or even a seminar. Insight comes only in flashes now anyway, and the sensitivity hurts when he rubs against the abrasive mysteries people carry inside. Carlotta pats Nikka on the arm absentmindedly, her attention caught again by a passing spate of jargon, and Nikka comes toward him—
Carlotta was awfully tart when she arrived.
Miffed at something perhaps.
There’s nothing developing between her and Bob if that’s what you’re thinking.
I’m not thinking at all actually.
I don’t think she knows herself what’s bothering her; she can’t talk about it, but look at that forced way she’s laughing over there and how she keeps glancing over at us.
