Moore laughed. “If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t-”
“Oh, shut up.” She threw the empty capsule at him playfully.
“But it’s perfectly natural,” I protested.
“So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major, progress.”
“Anyway,” Moore said, “it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable.. .”
“Dysfunction,” Alsever said.
“Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare. .. I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.”
“Just an eccentricity,” Diana said, magnanimously. “Not as if you ate babies.”
“That’s right, Mandella,” Hilleboe said. “I don’t feel any differently toward you because of it.”
“I-I’m glad.” That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my “normal” behavior was based on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I suppose to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.
I finished off my glass and set it down. “Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about. . . I’m sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don’t let me hold you prisoner.”
They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officer’s club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s muster.
The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite-but figured I’d be getting lots of practice.
3
UNEF’s first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you’d tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK ii, stenciled in dull blue letters across the. obsidian hull.
Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull. With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).
That didn’t mean there was going to be plenty of elbowroom. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.
We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.
Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk if’s coffee.
“Rhinoceros bile,” he said.
“At least it isn’t soya,” I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.
The officers’ lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.
“Jolly place, isn’t it?” He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. “Lots of military theory.”
“That’s good. Refresh our memories.”
“Sign up for officer training?”
“Me? No. Orders.”
“At least you have an excuse.” He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. “I signed up. They didn’t tell me it’d feel like this.”
“Yeah.” He wasn’t talking about any subtle problem: burden of responsibility or anything. “They say it wears off, a little at a time.” All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.