“Course it is,” Nigel mumbled. “She’ll wake up Earth-side, discredited, having accomplished nothing.”
—an unstoppable exodus now, at just the right moment—
“I think she should be ostracized,” Carlotta put in.
“A collective solution?” Nikka pursed her lips. “I wonder …”
—which might just be what leaving the ancient Mare Marginis wreck was meant to accomplish, a vault of the ages lying there in lunar pumice, and the Snark had “accidentally” activated it, ol’ boojum renegade Snark, too long gone from its masters, traitor to the lathe that bore it, knew there were only decades left to us once it had relayed what it found, knew something was up the sleeve of its Lords of Antiquity and gave us a slim chance of getting round it, if we could only understand—
They were having a fight.
Nigel realized this slowly. It began with Carlotta saying, “You know, it’s been weeks since I’ve been over here,” just casually in the flow of conversation. But Nikka took something in it wrong and sat up stiffly in the couch and replied, “What do you mean?”
“Well, only that I haven’t seen very much of you two, that’s all.”
“We’ve been busy.”
Carlotta was not going to be put off with a bland generality. “You two don’t have me over the way we once did.”
“Well, you don’t have us over at all.”
“My apartment is crowded and, you know, yours is so much better.”
Nigel spoke up. “True enough.”
“One of my roomos has rotated, Doris, and this Lydia, the new one, isn’t cooperative at all. I think that’s why she was put in with us by the Block Council. She needs some socializing after her blowup with some lover, I don’t know who, but—”
“Carlotta, that’s not what you wanted to talk about,” Nikka said with an edge in her voice.
“It wasn’t?”
“You’ve been coming up to me at work, leaving messages—plucking at my sleeve, nagging me for attention.”
“Well, I need it.”
Nigel said, “Don’t we all.”
“I don’t think you understand.”
Nikka observed, “The one who doesn’t understand is over there.”
Nigel raised his head. He had just finished the damned dishes and felt he deserved a moment’s break. Apparently it was not to be. “What?”
“Well, at least he’s said something germane,” Nikka said.
Nigel murmured, “Sorry, fresh out of gossip.”
“Gossip? Not gossip! I want you to say something, not sit there and pore over those goddamn transcripts.”
“Not transcripts. Logs. Of—”
“Yes, yes, Alex dutifully points our deployed antennas backward each day, so you can get your ration of EM gabble-gabble. But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore me.”
Stiffly: “I didn’t realize I was.”
Carlotta: “Look, of course you are.”
Defensively: “I work hard. My concentration isn’t that good anymore. Things slip by me. I—”
Carlotta: “You’re not responding.”
Nigel: “What is this, groupthink?”
Nikka: “If this is a threesome we have to talk.”
Nigel: “Of course. But I’m explaining—”
Carlotta: “How you’ve been neglecting the relationship.”
Nigel: “That’s how you see it?”
Nikka: “Unfortunately, yes.”
Nigel: “It’s harder to keep three balls in the air than two.”
Carlotta: “That’s a cliché. What’s that mean?”
Nigel: “I’m dead pushed and fagged, that’s what.”
