Ted smiled. “Lord protect me from analogies. The galaxy isn’t a cocktail party.”
Nigel smiled, too. He had no way of reversing the decision here, but he could show the flag. “Probably. But I think it’s not an open house, either.”
“Well, let’s knock on a door and see,” Ted replied.
Nigel found Nikka and Carlotta cooking an elaborate concoction at the apartment. They were peppering slivers of white meat and rolling them in scented oils. There were savories to fold in and each woman worked solemnly, deftly, the myriad small decisions provoking a phrase here, an extended deliberation there, all weaving a bond he knew well. Not the right moment to break in.
He volunteered to chop vegetables. He took out his intensity on onions and carrots and broccoli and had a cup of coffee. The first fruit of the “season” was in so he made a salad, following Carlotta’s directions, composing a light, spicy sesame oil for it. The first citrus had come ripe the day before, greeted by a little ritual. Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges had rolled over the witnessing crowd, echoing in the cavern. Someone had salted the clouds that formed on the axis, so that crimson and jade streamers coasted in ghostly straight lines overhead, up the spine of the ship.
Finally, at a lull he said, “I just heard the news.”
“Oh,” Nikka said, understanding.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d volunteered for the satellite mission?”
“Volunteer? I didn’t. I’m on the list for rotating assignments.”
“They thought it was better for morale,” Carlotta put in, “if we just let the personnel optimization program pick the mission crew. Fairer, too.”
“Oh, yes, we must be fair, mustn’t we? A fabulously stupid idea,” he said.
“Everybody’s dying to get out of the ship,” Carlotta said.
“It might well turn out precisely that way,” he said sourly.
Nikka said, “I thought it was better if I simply let the news come up as usual. I nearly told you before—”
“Well, then, nearly thank you.”
“It’s my chance to do something!”
“I don’t want you risking it.”
Nikka said defiantly, “I take my chances, just as you do.”
“You’ll be on the servo’d equipment, the manifest says.”
“Yes. Operating the mobile detectors.”
“How close to the satellite?”
“A few kilometers.”
“I don’t like it. Ted’s going ahead with this without thinking it through.”
Carlotta put down a whisk beater and said, “You can’t run Nikka’s life.”
He looked steadily at her. “And you cannot expect me not to care.”
“Madre! You really want to fight over this?” Carlotta asked.
“Diplomacy seems to have broken down.”
Nikka said mildly, “This mission is planned, there are backups, every contingency—”
“We’re blasted ignorant. Too ignorant.”
“The satellite rock looks to be about the same age as the last major craters on Isis, correct?” Nikka asked lightly, to soften matters.
“So?”
“It stands to reason they represent the last artifacts of EM technology. The two satellites, the superconductors in the village—that is all that remains.”
“Possible,” Nigel muttered. “Possible. But to understand Isis we’ve got to go carefully, start from scratch—”
“We’re scratching, that’s for sure,” Carlotta said.
“I do not want you to risk your life on an assumption.”
Carlotta’s face darkened. “God, you push things damned far. Are you really going to keep Nikka from doing the job she was born to do?”
Nigel opened his mouth to say, Look, this is a private thing between the two of us—and saw where that would lead.
“You may be a goddamn living monument,” Carlotta said, “but you can’t rule by authority. Not with us.”
Nigel blinked, thinking, She’s right. So easy to fall into that trap and
—suddenly saw how it was for Nikka, her mind shifting, restless, clotted with memories, reaching out toward him now with hands still moist from the cooking, the determined cast to the face, the firm lift in the stomach, a tight pull won from endless hours of exercise, keeping the machine ready so that she could still go out, the outstretched hands slick and webbed by age and brown liver spots, narrowing the space between them—
