“I’ll make a note.” We sipped in silence for an awkward minute. “Did you come along just to…just because of Marygay?”
She stared at me for a moment. “Partly. Partly because I knew Aldo wouldn’t. It was an unembarrassing way to end the marriage.” She set down her cup. “I also like the idea of running away, finding a new world. We weren’t drafted, you know, in my time. I joined up to see new worlds. Middle Finger was getting pretty small.” She made a wry smile. “Aldo really liked that. He fell in love with the farm.”
“You’re farming here, part time.”
“Exercise. And I do know my root vegetables.”
“I’m glad you came.”
“You are.” It was a question. “Aldo thought I was chasing after Marygay. Did he talk to you about that?”
“Not in so many words.” But a lot of unsubtle innuendo. “We do…I do love her.” Cat was trying to keep a tremble out of her voice. “But I’ve been, we’ve been, sixteen years this way. Just neighbors, close neighbors. I’m content with that.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. I don’t think men can.” She picked up her cup with both hands, as if to warm them. “Maybe that’s not fair. I never met a het man until I was on Heaven, my mid-twenties. But the normal men and boys I grew up with always had to do each other. It wasn’t serious if you weren’t doing. Girls and women, it was different. You loved someone or you didn’t. Whether you did each other was not a big deal.”
“Yeah, I guess we were different. It’s not het versus home. Women were more sexually aggressive in my time, too. But you were born, what, nine hundred years after I was?”
She nodded. “I think it was 2880, your style.”
“I don’t want to sound like a jealous husband,” I said. “I know you and Marygay still love each other. It’s obvious to anyone who cares.”
“Then let’s not worry about it. The lack of Aldo in my life is not going to drive me into her arms. Somebody’s, maybe. But I’m as het as you are, remember?”
“Sure.” I did wonder about that–how effective or permanent Man’s technique actually was. I trusted Cat but did wonder. “More tea?”
“No, we ought to move along.” She smiled. “People will start talking about us.”
The third floor, the commons, did have safety problems that hadn’t been obvious in zerogee. The carpeting in the cafeteria was old and loose, inviting people with their hands full to trip. There was nothing to replace it with, of course. We pried up a corner and decided the metal deck would be preferable; the dried adhesive was easy to peel off. I’d assemble a work crew in a few days.
We tested most of the apparatus in the fitness room, weight machines and stationary rowing, skiing, and pedaling ones. We looked at the rings and ropes and parallel bars and decided someone else could be the first to have an injury on them.
There were a lot of people already in the pool, including nine of the children. I knew the ship was watching that all day and night. The only people who lived on the commons floor were Lucio and Elena Monet, both expert swimmers with an apartment that overlooked the pool. One of them was always there, and could get to the pool in seconds if the ship sounded an alarm.
The first and second floors were drier versions of the fourth: 95 percent farm, ringed by apartments. The only water hazard was an oyster bed, so shallow you could only drown there in a prone position. (I had resisted activating the bed, which took six months to produce a crop, but was overridden by people who can actually look at an oyster without feeling ill.) Unlike the fourth floor, all of the apartments were one-story, so we didn’t even have stairs to worry about.
The area under the first floor was the most dangerous part of the ship, but it was beyond the jurisdiction of the safety inspector and his trusty civil engineer. Seven tonnes of antiprotons seethed there in a glowing ball, held in place by a huge pressor field. If anything happened to the pressors, we would all have about one nanosecond to prepare ourselves for a new existence as highly energetic gamma rays.