He laughed. I precious near smacked him. "One more word like that," I said, "and I’m telling your mother."

Even if you’re young, some things aren’t jokes.

Though the med team pronounced us germ-free, we still got shipped to Bonaventure General and put into quarantine for a day. No one wanted to take the teeniest chance, even if the disease might already be romping through the populace. Our clothes were incinerated. Our bodies were full-immersion-baptized in three types of disinfectant, then irradiated with UV lamps hard to the edge of sunburn. ("Warm!" Festina cried. "I’m finally warm!" Easy for her to say — with that gorgeous cocoa-cream skin, she didn’t have to worry about freckles.)

And, of course, we drank so much olive oil our pores oozed with it. Pustulated with it. Like bodybuilders slathered in lotion.

Tic and Yunupur were singled out for special attention: led off to some Ooloms-only section of Bonaventure’s isolation unit and subjected to unknown indignities over the following 26.1 hours. The next time I saw Tic, he had sticky-plasters patched over his arms, legs, and torso; his only comment was, "No comment."

We humans got off lucky — no one considered us susceptible to the plague, even if the Peacock had worried about me touching Iranu’s corpse. A disease-jump from Oolom to Freep wasn’t a big step; they were different breeds of the same species, not much farther apart than Chihuahuas and Great Danes. Homo saps were utterly different, with biochemistries so alien we were closer kin to terrestrial amoebas than Divian lifeforms. Three different doctors told me the quarantine was only because we might carry the microbes, not that we could be affected by them.

I wondered who to trust: the doctors or the Peacock.

We all had to give statements: full-scale interrogation by investigators in disease-resistant tightsuits. I gave my report four times, to teams from four different agencies… and each team was shadowed by proctors from outside the city, seeing everything, hearing everything, scrutinizing everything. The Vigil was in high gear now, pulling in proctors from the Oolom playground communities to make sure nothing got missed or messed.

When the questions were over, Festina and I retired to her room in the isolation unit. She had a new uniform, a new stunner, a new Bumbler, all flown in from Snug Harbor when her old equipment got impounded by health authorities; so naturally she had to field-strip the gadgets, clean them, program her favorite settings into the Bumbler, and generally fuss to get everything just so.

"This plague is a wimp-ass disease," she told me as she worked. "A latency period of six months? In the Explorer Corps, anything that doesn’t kill within twelve hours is a low-grade nuisance. The med-techs hand you a tube of salve, then send you back to work."

Words saying one thing, eyes the opposite. I could tell she knew the enormity of death. The absences it made. How it got into your eyes and ears and head, so that everything you saw of the world was shaded darker, crueler, bitter indifferent.

Christ Almighty, I didn’t want to go through that again.

Time on our hands and we talked, Festina and me… about true things and trite, present business, past desperations, where we were and who we’d once been.

What it was like to have a link-seed in the brain.

What it was like to have a flaming red birthmark on the face. Being considered "expendable" because of it. The Explorer Corps called themselves ECMs — Expendable Crew Members. And their rallying cry, if you could call it that, was the thing they said whenever one of their number died: "That’s what ‘expendable’ means."

Festina told me she’d once killed her best friend. So I showed her my freckle scars. And my scalpel. Which had been returned to me, unlike everything else I’d been carrying. Hospitals are good at baking scalpels clean… especially as a favor to a woman who fondly keeps a memento of her sainted doctor father.

Festina wanted to touch my scars. So I let her. And she let me touch her cheek… which felt precious soft…

But mostly we just talked. Doctors and nurses right outside the door.

I didn’t understand Sperm-tubes. Festina explained what she knew.

"Each one is a spacetime outside spacetime. A self-contained pocket universe that can travel through the real universe faster than light, without relativistic or inertial effects. The colored tube is the region where the two universes touch each other… where you get spontaneous generation of photons and other particles because of boundary effects. And don’t ask me to explain boundary effects, because it’s all just double-talk for something we don’t understand. Four hundred years since the League of Peoples gave us star drives, and we still know fuck-all about them.

"If you want another boundary effect," she went on, "it’s that weird-shit hallucination you get as you pass down a Sperm-tube. Supposedly the sensation only happens when you pass from the outside universe into the tube universe and when you go back out again; but it sure as hell feels like you’re experiencing every twist of the tail as you travel along, not just at beginning and end." She gave me a curious look. "What did you feel when your arm went in one end and your hand came out the other?"

"Not much," I replied. "Like everything was connected normally, except my fingers were on the far side of the room."

Festina shook her head in wonder. "Admiralty manuals say that once you start entering a tube universe, you have to go all the way inside before you can try to leave again. You aren’t allowed to straddle universes for more than a quantum second. There’s some sort of exclusion principle… which probably means as much as ‘boundary effect,’ considering what you did this morning."

"I didn’t do it," I said. "The Peacock did."

"Who’s the Peacock? Whoever generated the Sperm-tube?"

"I’m pretty sure the tube itself is intelligent… which probably means the universe inside. It’s a conscious entity. It, uhh…"

I stopped myself from saying the Peacock had talked to me. Festina was looking dubious already.

"Sentient universes make nice stories," she said. "There’s a tradition of such tales going back centuries: sentient stars, sentient planets, sentient galaxies of dark matter… but that’s all crap for the fic-chips. It’s dangerous to believe in fictions, Faye. Stupid beliefs get people killed."

"So if you were in a haunted house," I said, "you’d be the one who goes into the attic to prove there aren’t ghosts?"

"No," she answered. "I’d be the one on the front lawn with a flamethrower. Shouting, ‘Anything sentient better come out fast, cuz I’m burning this place to cinders.’ I don’t believe in ghosts… but I really don’t believe in taking chances."

An attendant came to the door — a human female in her late twenties, who should have been a woman but was still dragging her heels back at girl. Too goddamned chirpy by half. "Lights out in fifteen minutes, ladies! And here, your last olive oil for the day."

"It doesn’t even taste like olive oil," Festina grumbled. "There’s a strange aftertaste. You put something extra in it, right? Antibiotics or immunoboosts."

"What a sourpuss!" the attendant said. "This oil came straight from the synthesizer. I poured it myself. And before you go making harsh remarks about hospital food, all our synthesizers download their recipes straight from the world-soul’s databanks. This is one hundred percent pure olive oil. Extra virgin." She tittered at the word. She would.

Festina muttered, "Your world-soul doesn’t know dick about olive oil." She glanced at me. "Your people were originally colonists from Come-By-Chance, right? How much do you use olive oil in your cooking?"