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“All right, then. Are you ready to go?”
“Whenever you are.”
He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing perso
There. Let them chew on that for a while.
Noelle tires quickly as she pumps his words across the universe to Yvo
“What does she say?”
“That she’s very sorry about Marcus. That she wishes us all better luck on Planet B.”
Is Noelle telling him the truth? For one wild moment the year-captain finds himself thinking that this whole business of instantaneous mental contact between two sisters scores of light-years apart is nothing more than a fantasy and a fraud, that Noelle has merely been pretending to be sending his communiqués to Earth and is inventing all of Yvo
No. No. No. No.
An idiotic thought. He banishes it angrily from his mind. Noelle is incapable of such duplicity. And even if she were, she simply could not have managed to invent — to improvise, yet — all of Yvo
Assuming Noelle will want her usual nap after this demanding transmission, he starts to leave her cabin. “Wait,” she says. “Where are you going?”
“The baths, I think.” Spur of the moment: he hadn’t been pla
“I’ll go with you, all right? And then afterward, perhaps, we could go to the gaming lounge.”
He is puzzled by this. “You don’t want to get some sleep now?”
“Not this time, no.” Indeed, despite her show of fatigue a few minutes before, she seems strangely full of energy now, not at all depleted as she normally is when she has finished transmitting to Yvo
But a good soak in the baths right now strikes him as a welcome notion, and if Noelle doesn’t feel like napping today, that’s entirely her own affair. She drops her clothing quite casually, with seeming i
He waits just a moment, an oddly tense one, to see what she will do next. Take him by the hand, lead him to the bed? No. Nothing at all like that. She reallyis an i
They go down the corridor to the baths together.
Sieglinde, Huw, and Imogen are there when they arrive. The brawny Sieglinde is in the tepid tub by herself; beefy Huw and petite, golden-haired Imogen are sharing the hot tank. Huw and Imogen are a couple these days, apparently, at least some of the time, and this seems to be one of the times. She is stretched full length in the tub, all but submerged, her head against Huw’s shoulder, her shining hair outspread in the water, the pink tips of her small breasts rising above the surface. He is so much more massive than she is that she seems like a doll beside him.
Huw lifts an eyebrow as Noelle and the year-captain enter, one naked, one not. Public nudity is not an extraordinary thing aboard the starship, and people sometimes come to the baths already undressed, but it is not a widespread custom. The year-captain wonders whether Huw is assuming an intimacy between him and Noelle that does not at all exist. The thought a
“May we join you?” the year-captain asks, sliding out of his clothes. The question is routine politeness. Huw gestures grandly, and the year-captain and Noelle slip into the tub on the side opposite from Imogen and Huw. There’s no need for helping Noelle; she makes her way over the side of the tub as easily as if she were sighted. As they settle into the warm water the side of Noelle’s thigh presses up against the year-captain’s, though, which he assumes is accidental, the tub being as small and as crowded as it is, and Noelle’s sense of spatial perception not as accurate in water as it is where sound waves travel unimpeded. The year-captain automatically moves a couple of centimeters to his left; but a few moments later, as further positional adjustments are made by the occupants of the tub, he feels Noelle coming in contact with him again. It is hard now not to believe that this is deliberate, that all of this is, the suggestion that they go to the baths together, the casual stripping in her cabin, the nude promenade through the corridor. But why? Noelle is a beautiful woman, yes; highly attractive, even, and fascinating in her enigmatic cool dignity; but after all this time she still has played no role that he knows of in the pattern of sexual entanglements aboard the starship, and though she certainly seems to be offering herself to him now, the year-captain finds it difficult to accept the belief that she actually is. He prefers to look upon her as guileless and her present behavior as i