Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

let a scrap of that kind of information slip out during the training

period, and thereafter there simply hadn7t

And all the Stars a Stage 97

been time, until now. What prompted her suddenly to volunteer what she had

so long withheld was unknown to Jorn, but it was his guess-and a good one,

he suspected on very little evidence-that she felt forced by her situation

into using it to bold her emotional “altitude,” not only over Jorn, but in

the whole hierarchy of the shipboard peck-order.

And she had been indeed highly placed back home: a scientific attach6 to a

member of the Matriarch’s cabinet, and the youngest person of either sex

ever to hold the post. She had surrendered it on her own initiative to join

The Project, which had had no such high place to offer her, though to be

sure it bad placed her as high as it could.

This was admirable, doubtless. But it was no longer of any moment: an empty

title in a discarded history, without bearing on the world of the lavelin.

That Ailiss referred to it at all now meant only that she had failed to

reconcile herself to the deprivation of power, and the reversal of status,

which she herself had engi” neered. In this, though perhaps she was an

extxeme case (or perhaps not), she was far from alone on board the ship;

the affliction was as general among the women as a low-grade contagion, and

it was ever present.

Their third major enemy, as Jorn was coming more and more to appreciate,

was time itself. The median age on board the javelin was slightly over

forty. This meant that there were a few babes-in-arms (though more were