“Utterly black,” he said. “No stars, of course. Ship’s lights seem to lose some of their intensity.”

“Anybody ever actually been outside during hyperflight?”

“No,” Solly said. “Not that I know of.”

There was no sense of movement in this environment, which seemed more like a condition than a place. Seven weeks to Alnitak. It would be a long time to spend cooped up with a single person. Even Solly.

Vessels traveling in hyperspace were completely cut off from the outside world. They could receive no sensor information, no communications, no data of any kind. Nor could they transmit. Solly could have brought them out to satisfy their curiosity as to whether the Taratuba mission had got off okay. He thought they’d have used the Mac. And they were curious whether the theft of the Hammersmith had been made public, whether the Institute was trying to communicate with them. But it would have taken time, they’d have had to adjust the clocks, and Kim would have had to correct the program to get the calculations right for the intercept. So they let it pass.

One of the more curious aspects of hyperspace was that time seemed to run at an indifferent rate. Timekeeping devices on a transdimensional flight always had to be reset later. Sometimes forward, sometimes back. No one knew why this was so, but fortunately the differential was never more than a bare fraction of a percent, so that it did not unduly interfere with navigation. This was essential because TDI flights could navigate only by dead reckoning.

They fell quickly into a routine. They ate breakfast whenever they got up, and took their other meals at regular hours, ending with a late-night snack. Kim read through the mornings, a wide diet that included political and scientific biographies. She devoured two classics that she’d been meaning to get to since college: Blackman’s Beyond Pluto, an account of the cultural changes which flowed from the penetration of distant systems; and Runningwater’s Narrow Horizons, a history of the decline and eventual collapse of organized religion. She added some novels and some essays. And, of course, she read extensively in her specialty.

After lunch during the early days of the flight they often played chess, but Solly won all the time so they gave that up and substituted poker, with three or four virtual opponents. And they participated in virtual seminars with Julius Caesar, Isaac Newton, Mikel Kashvady, and other classic personalities. One of the highlights of the early weeks came from watching Henry Mencken and Martin Luther talking past one another.

On the sixth day out they tried a Veronica King interactive, “The Laughing Genie.” Kim’s taste ran to the King adventures because they were much more than whodunits. Rather, the emphasis was on solving puzzles in which crimes may or may not have occurred. When a victim died, she was inevitably in a locked room, or asleep under the watchful eye of a security system that detected no perpetrator. In “The Laughing Genie,” an archeologist has spent a lifetime looking for the tomb of Makarios Hunt, the second century Numian dictator and mass murderer; he finds it; but uses explosives to reseal it and refuses to tell anyone its location, or what he has seen.

They enjoyed it so much that the following night they tried “The Molecular God,” the story of a physicist who comes into possession of the lost diaries of Embry Sickel, whose work led to the development of the jump engine. The physicist, now in possession of an exceedingly valuable historical document, proceeds to burn it and apparently leaps from a seventh-floor office.

In each case, witnesses and documents are made available to the detectives, played, of course, by Kim and Solly. They switched the roles back and forth. Kim particularly enjoyed portraying the giant bodyguard Archimedes Smith.

They spent much of their time lounging in virtual environments. Kim preferred artscapes, settings that never existed and never would, where colors and images assumed impressionist designs, where fountains floated in midair and sprayed tactile light into azure skies. Solly was more conservative: he liked seascapes, mountains, and had a special taste for the Egyptians, favoring pyramids and the great temple from the Valley of the Kings. Sometimes the temple was portrayed as a rain; sometimes it was seen as it appeared during its glory days.

Neither was inclined to be alone, but since Solly tended to lose his color among Kim’s abstractions, she gave in and settled for the more mundane surroundings.

She had plenty of time to think, and she spent much of it trying to persuade herself that she’d done the right thing. She fretted over Solly, and came to realize that she desperately wanted him not to come to grief because of her.

She owed him a considerable debt. He’d helped her through some bumpy times, including the loss of the only man she’d ever thought she loved. He’d gone off with an accountant, leaving her a note wishing her a good life. Kim understood now that the relationship would never have worked, but the experience, even after several years, still gnawed at her. Solly and his then-wife Ann had almost adopted her during that period.

Later, when Ann chose not to renew, Kim had been there when he needed to talk, and had even fixed him up with friends.

They had a lot of good memories and prided themselves in thinking they were closer, in many ways, than most lovers. They’d celebrated together, supported each other, and enjoyed one another’s victories. When Kim’s wildeye team had won an amateur championship two years earlier, Solly, who was bored silly by team sports, had been in the stands.

They’d grown closer after Ann left. But there was a line between them, and they both respected it.

But Kim had begun to fantasize about Solly. And one evening, midway through the third week, she decided the time had come to make an offer.

It was her turn to choose the evening’s entertainment. She selected Raven, a historical romance set in Equatoria’s second century, when law, order, and civilization had all broken down. The Raven was a dark jewel, supposedly a relic from an unknown and possibly nonhuman technology, which falls into the hands of Clea, a young woman who must transport it through a host of perils to present it finally to its rightful owner. She is pursued by all manner of pirates, scavengers, corrupt government officials and, most feared of all, the bandit chief Aranka.

The program incorporated a nudity selector, which Kim set at a modest level. When they were ready, when the drinks had been poured and the snacks set out, she started the entertainment.

Clea of course wore Kim’s appearance. Was Kim.

She has just rented a flyer and is preparing to cross a rain forest on the last leg of a trip home when a wounded man staggers out of the trees barely ahead of a mob of pursuers.

The pursuers have guns and are blazing away. The fugitive sees her and turns in her direction. Clea is his only chance.

She hesitates and throws open the hatch. He leaps on board in a hail of lasers. The flyer bucks but lifts off and they are away.

But the man is bleeding profusely.

Clea examines him and sees quickly that he’s dying. She does what she can. In the meantime, another flyer takes off in pursuit. In a spectacular sequence, she leads it into a tunnel where an oncoming train takes it out. But the aircraft has also suffered damage and is forced to land.

“What happened?” she asks her passenger when they are on the ground. “What did they want?”

He produces the Raven. Minutes later he is dead and she detects movement in the trees around her. She hides the artifact under a seat. Nomads emerge from the woods and take her prisoner.

They talk of selling her into slavery. Clea tries to win the favor of her captors by performing a torrid torchlight dance. It is this sequence which had prompted Kim to select Raven. The viewer never quite gets a good look at the dancer: everything is firelight and shadow, tempo and drum. Passion and temptation.