She stirred the silky drink. “Chem section, I guess.”

“Fine old Ted could stop such diversions if he wanted, never mind Earth. No, he’s in favor of a holiday air, a regression into—”

“Regression! Look, You may think—”

“Yes, I do. Surely we needn’t go into it?”

“It’s hard for me to see how you can deny a person a right to, a chance to … to find new definitions of themselves.”

“I’m simply trying to understand friend Ted. I’m aware that sex change became common Earthside as a method of helping adolescents with their sexual adjustments. And that the pursuit of variety has made it much the fashion back there. But here—”

“I think it’s pretty great of Ted and the others to allow use of ship’s resources for it. That certainly shows him in a, a fair-minded light.”

“Or alternatively, in an engagingly frank and surprisingly open-minded light. It’s always one light or another with him, you’ll find.”

“You’re just being cynical,”

“Um. ‘Cynical’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Um. Usually.”

A month passed without his particularly noticing it. One evening when Carlotta came by he muttered a greeting and went back to watching a three-dimensional color-factored Fourier picture of the EMs signals. They still remained damned nearly opaque to him. He was getting a hint of some earlier history, of their brief flirtation with spaceships and astronomy. There was something like poetry here, a suggestion of a fractured time, glimmers of the beings who had mustered the strength to remake themselves.

“How do you think we should vote on this case coming up?” Nikka asked.

—fragmented sprockets in the signal there— “Uh, what?”

“This woman who stole all those shipcredits.”

“How?”

“False indexing, of course.”

“What do you say, Carlotta?”

“She’s guilty as sin.”

“Um. Always wondered what that meant. What’s sin supposed to be guilty of?”

—made one wonder if the pre-EM culture had ever gotten out of its own solar system, these images here, could mean outward-stretching limbs or tracers to other stars or a whacking great blowoff of dandelion seed for that matter—

“Take it from me, she did it.”

“Um. So the tribunal said.”

“The whole crew has to decide what to do about her, though,” Nikka said.

—crew’s rattled more than they know with this continual stream of bad news from Earth, Swarmers everywhere, even the chemicals don’t seem to work on them, and meanwhile the work goes on in orbit above the blighted oceans, building the starships, using self-programmed machines to do the scutwork, mankind getting ready to burst out like dandelion seeds among the stars, a runaway effect—

Carlotta said, “I think she should be stored away in the Slots.”

“That’s no punishment,” Nikka said.

“Course it is,” Nigel mumbled. “She’ll wake up Earth-side, discredited, having accomplished nothing.”

—an unstoppable exodus now, at just the right moment—

“I think she should be ostracized,” Carlotta put in.

“A collective solution?” Nikka pursed her lips. “I wonder …”

—which might just be what leaving the ancient Mare Marginis wreck was meant to accomplish, a vault of the ages lying there in lunar pumice, and the Snark had “accidentally” activated it, ol’ boojum renegade Snark, too long gone from its masters, traitor to the lathe that bore it, knew there were only decades left to us once it had relayed what it found, knew something was up the sleeve of its Lords of Antiquity and gave us a slim chance of getting round it, if we could only understand—

They were having a fight.

Nigel realized this slowly. It began with Carlotta saying, “You know, it’s been weeks since I’ve been over here,” just casually in the flow of conversation. But Nikka took something in it wrong and sat up stiffly in the couch and replied, “What do you mean?”

“Well, only that I haven’t seen very much of you two, that’s all.”

“We’ve been busy.”

Carlotta was not going to be put off with a bland generality. “You two don’t have me over the way we once did.”

“Well, you don’t have us over at all.”

“My apartment is crowded and, you know, yours is so much better.”

Nigel spoke up. “True enough.”

“One of my roomos has rotated, Doris, and this Lydia, the new one, isn’t cooperative at all. I think that’s why she was put in with us by the Block Council. She needs some socializing after her blowup with some lover, I don’t know who, but—”

“Carlotta, that’s not what you wanted to talk about,” Nikka said with an edge in her voice.

“It wasn’t?”

“You’ve been coming up to me at work, leaving messages—plucking at my sleeve, nagging me for attention.”

“Well, I need it.”

Nigel said, “Don’t we all.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

Nikka observed, “The one who doesn’t understand is over there.”

Nigel raised his head. He had just finished the damned dishes and felt he deserved a moment’s break. Apparently it was not to be. “What?”

“Well, at least he’s said something germane,” Nikka said.

Nigel murmured, “Sorry, fresh out of gossip.”

“Gossip? Not gossip! I want you to say something, not sit there and pore over those goddamn transcripts.”

“Not transcripts. Logs. Of—”

“Yes, yes, Alex dutifully points our deployed antennas backward each day, so you can get your ration of EM gabble-gabble. But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore me.”

Stiffly: “I didn’t realize I was.”

Carlotta: “Look, of course you are.”

Defensively: “I work hard. My concentration isn’t that good anymore. Things slip by me. I—”

Carlotta: “You’re not responding.”

Nigel: “What is this, groupthink?”

Nikka: “If this is a threesome we have to talk.”

Nigel: “Of course. But I’m explaining—”

Carlotta: “How you’ve been neglecting the relationship.”

Nigel: “That’s how you see it?”

Nikka: “Unfortunately, yes.”

Nigel: “It’s harder to keep three balls in the air than two.”

Carlotta: “That’s a cliché. What’s that mean?”

Nigel: “I’m dead pushed and fagged, that’s what.”

Nikka: “No, it’s deeper than that.”

Nigel: “To borrow a phrase, what’s that bloody mean?”

Nikka: “It means I don’t like being treated like an old shoe.”

Carlotta: “You’re aren’t tuned in here.”

Nikka: “Three-way relationships are hard, but each member must give as much of themselves as—”

Nigel: “Sounds like a flamin’ sociology textbook.”

Carlotta: “Empathize.”

Nigel: “I am. I really am.”

Nikka: “You sit around, reading the astrophysical updates, but I never hear you as an ordinary man anymore.”

Nigel: “There’s the possibility that I’m not.”

Carlotta: “Don’t go all stiff on us again.”

Nigel: “Am I imagining this, or have we gone from Carlotta to me?”

Carlotta: “Maybe it’s the same problem.”

Nikka: “No, it’s not. We all help each other. But Nigel has been burrowing into these neuro-anthropological matrix studies of his and, and shutting the world out.”

Nigel: “Admittedly.”

Carlotta: “Not so fast. My feeling is that you two are revolving around each other so much that I can’t get in edgewise.”

Nikka: “I admit that I’ve been concerned with him. Perhaps less easy to, to reach, for you. But he is getting more distant from me. And from you.”

Carlotta: “Sometimes I think it’s just a tactic.”

Nigel: “Winning through withdrawal?”

Carlotta: “Not exactly, but—”

Nigel: “Then what? I’m a renegade, I’ve admitted that. And I sop up great gouts of time plugging away at my obsessions. But they’re my obsessions. Haven’t I buggering well earned the right to—”

Nikka: “Not in this relationship, you haven’t. You’ve got to participate.”