The vision of the books struck me again, and I saw the double ship floating out there empty, light years away, the skeleton of a failed idea.

I could prevent them from leaving. The thought made me glance furtively at the silent figures sitting at the ship’s controls. They ignored me.

I couldn’t do anything to the starship. But if I disabled Rust Eagle, they would be forced to — to what? They wouldn’t kill us, and so perhaps all would be saved… There were key codes in Davydov’s cabin, that would open the cocks in the deuterium holds.

Without really thinking about it I drifted out of the bridge, and, still floating about like a disembodied spirit, I came to Davydov’s room off in a corner bend of the upper hall. The door was about a quarter open. It was light inside.

I tapped the door, holding the jamb beside it for support. No reply. I stuck my head in and looked around. Empty? A single desk lamp lit the room. I was about to put my feet to the velcro strip on the floor, but thought better of it — too noisy. I pushed the door open a little farther and slipped in.

He was asleep. He had put two chairs together, and was draped across them head and shoulders on one, knees on the other. His mouth hung open, and he breathed easily. Under the lamp I noticed that his hair had the same kinked texture as the velcro carpet below him.

For a long time I coasted through the air, watching his dark face, darker still in the shadows. He looked so ordinary.

On the desk, in the lamp’s gleam under a clamp, were a few scattered papers. I was already intruding; I tiptoed off a wall and floated over to look at them.

They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing. Under one sheet lay a compass and straight-edge. The diagrams were all circular, or near it: constructions made with several arcs of the compass, that resulted in circles flattened slightly on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil. I looked at a faint scrawl, written under a long series of numbers. “Something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all—” The penciling was smeared, as if by the back of a hand. The final dash trailed off across the page.

I stared at the little black rectangles for a long time, looking over at Davydov once or twice. Plans for a monument to themselves, to a group leaving all that humans knew and shared together. “Something to show we were here at all…” Floating in the dark room, no sound but the airy hooooooo of the vents, the desolation began to fill me, the vacuum. We all will die. It was the first time in my life I had had that thought and truly believed it. The postponements we have devised make it easy not to think of, for it might be a millennium away. But it will come. The diagrams below me seemed like circles of gravestones. Designs for a tomb. That’s how we show we were here; that’s all we can do.

I floated over the sleeping man, stretched out horizontally above him. Even the exile wants to be remembered. This poor ragged group, with their stupid dream… I wished I were a succubus, and could possess him without his full awakening, without his becoming conscious and human. He breathed on. With a convulsive shudder I drifted away, touched off a wall to the door, slipped out and down the hall, my plan to disable the Eagle abandoned. It was not my part to interfere with anyone else’s method of dying, or of leaving their mark before.

Soon they all would be gone.

Back in my room I drifted off into a troubled sleep. Once I half woke and found myself wedged in a corner, lying upright beside the bed. I groped about until my hand hit a velcro strap, stuck it against the stick-strips on either side of me, and fell asleep again. It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped. I slept and slept, sleepfloated down to the toilet and back, slept yet again. I didn’t want to wake up. I was tired.

Many hours later I was awakened by a knock on the door. I burst out of my velcro strapping, landed on the far wall. I collected myself and answered the door.

It was Davydov. I blinked, confusing this moment with the last time I had seen him. Still dreaming.

“We’d like everybody to come over to the starship for a final meeting. It’ll be in a couple of hours.”

“Is it time?”

He nodded. “Would you like to go over there with me? I’m crossing in a little while.”

“Uh. Sure. Let me get myself together.”

After I had cleaned up I joined him in the boat bay, and we crossed the space separating the two ships. The starship looked the same, a work in progress.

Lermontov was emptier than I remembered. Davydov took me through the rough tunnel of the lock-tube connecting the two ships, and showed me the living quarters of Hidalgo: walls had been knocked out, and all of the bedrooms were twice as big as before. The hospital had been extended, mostly for storage space. We passed stacks of plastic boxes, one nearly blocking a hallway. “Still moving in,” Davydov said. He seemed full of quiet pride, the captain of a bright new spaceship, all of his doubts vanished in the night while mine had accumulated.

“I’m tired,” I complained.

We returned to the bridge of Lermontov, There was still some time before the meeting. After that, those of us returning would cross to Rust Eagle. It was time for the parting.

They were going to leave Rust Eagle one boat, and just enough fuel to accelerate to about fifty km/sec and decelerate again — that meant a weightless coast around the sun, for most of the return, in fact. I cursed when Davydov told me that. So sick of no-gee!

“I’m sorry about what we’ve done to you,” he said from the window. “All the impositions — the danger we’ve put you in.”

“Eh,” I said.

He stayed with his back to me. “Everything should be calm by the time you get back.”

“Hope so.” I didn’t want to think of it. We deserved to return to calmness.

“I’m sorry you’re not coming with us, Emma.”

That woke me up. I looked at his back. “Why is that?”

“You… were the last outsider. And I hadn’t talked with any outsiders for years — not really talked, I mean. If… if you had decided to join us, it would have meant a lot to me.”

“You wouldn’t have to feel guilty about sending me back to whatever’s happening on Mars,” I said cruelly.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I suppose that’s true. And — and I wouldn’t have to consider what happened between us so long ago finished…” Finally he turned and faced me, rip-ripped over to me. “I would have enjoyed your company,” he said slowly.

“And if I were going,” I said, “I would have enjoyed your company too. But I’m not going.” I clung to that.

“I know.” He looked away, searching for words, it seemed. “Your approval has become important to me.”

Wearily I said, “Not all that important.” Which was true.

He winced. I watched his mouth tighten unhappily. Somewhere in me a tide turned, my mood began to lighten. After a long silence I stood up carefully (I had been leaning on the navigator’s chair, I noticed), approached him, reached up on tiptoe (hand on his shoulder) and kissed him, lightly on the lips. A thousand phrases jammed on my tongue. “I like you, Oleg Davydov,” I said inadequately. I stepped away as he reached for me. “Come on, let’s go down to that soccer field. The meeting can’t start without you.” I led the way to the door, quite certain that I didn’t want the conversation to continue any longer.

At the doorway he stopped me, and without a word pulled me into his arms, into one of those big Russian bear hugs that let you know that you are not the only consciousness in the world, because of the intensity of the flesh. I hugged back, remembering when we were young. Then we pulled our way down the jump tube to the enlarged recreation field… And so we parted.