Carlotta: “Look, I think you ought to consider what you’re doing with, or doing to Nikka. She isn’t the same person now that she was when we left Earthside. She doesn’t respond to people, to me, the way she did then and I think it’s—”

Nikka turned to Carlotta. “Why don’t you just do what you want? What you really feel, instead of echoing and reacting to us, to me, to—”

Nigel said slowly, “Yes, I should think—”

“And you—!” Nikka cried. “We’re supposed to tiptoe softly around you while you’re muttering deep thoughts about who knows what!”

Carlotta began, “Look—”

Nikka whirled to her. “We each have to have our own lives. Don’t you see that? Three-sided things are harder. They only work if one pair is no more important than the other.”

Carlotta said, “But you and Nigel are more important than you and me, or Nigel and me.”

Nigel: “Give it time.” Though he didn’t really feel that way.

Nikka sighed. She said quietly to Carlotta, “Do what you really want. That’s the answer. It’s the only way you’ll be happy.”

Nigel nodded, a bit dazed. The storm of the two women had washed over him suddenly and he was not sure what it meant. “And I, in turn, shall try not to withdraw so much,” he said formally. He was damned if he could see how, though.

He was doing therapy when Bob came by, sweating from running.

“Still gettin’ inna box, uh?” Bob asked. He thumped the gray metal. “This’s the neurotiming one?”

“Right.” Nigel grimaced. “Not my favorite. Sends prickly feelings up your nerves, like chilled mice running toward your heart.”

Bob shuddered. “Me, I stay away from this stuff.”

“Do, yes.”

“Ever’ time I have to come in for some med work I feel like I’m puttin’ my balls in a grinder. Somethin’ goes wrong—poof.”

“No choices left for me. Afraid I won’t be working for you again. In fact, I was surprised when you let me onto the throat-scraping team.”

Bob leaned against the massive cabinet and mopped sweat from his face, grimacing. “Wasn’t me. Ted overrode my judgment. Wish I haddna let him.”

“Not your fault. My medical was good, after all.”

“Marginal. Just marginal.”

“Oh.”

“Thing was, I rejected you right off. Ted came and leaned on me—really leaned. Called in some obligations, had Sanchez over in Medical sweet-talk me. The works. I finally caved in.”

“Ah.”

“Wish I haddna.”

It was, of course, the sort of thing you could never be sure of. Still, from Ted’s point of view; the calculation was simple enough: How could Ted lose? If Nigel did well in the job, things would have gone on as before. When he failed, instead, his long recovery reduced his political effectiveness.

Or was this paranoia? Hard to tell. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself. After all, there was always the possibility that this was merely an opening move.

Carlotta said, “I still don’t buy it,” and sipped at her drink. It was another fizzing orange thing, filling the air with a tingling sweetness.

Nigel persisted. “Machines can evolve, just as animals do.”

“Look—those things we’ve found, orbiting god-awful messed-up worlds. Sure, they’re automated artifacts. But intelligent? Self-reproducing, okay. The time needed to make a really smart entity is—”

“Enormous. Granted. We haven’t dated most of those worlds—can’t, with just one flyby. They could be billions of years older than Earth.”

There was the rub. It was difficult to think of what the galaxy might be like if organically derived intelligence was a mere passing glimmer, if machine evolution dominated in the long run. The ruins Lancer and the probes were finding seemed to say that even societies which had colonized other worlds could still be vulnerable to species suicide. Complex systems in orbit would have the best chance to live. A war would be a powerful selection pressure for survival among machines which had, in whatever weak form, a desire for survival. Given time …

That was the point. Events on a galactic scale were slow, majestic. That fact had been written into the structure of the universe, from the beginning. In order for galaxies to form at all, the expansion energy of the Big Bang had to be just the right amount. To make stars coalesce from dust clouds, certain physical constants had to be the correct size. Otherwise, ordinary hydrogen would not be so widespread, and stellar evolution would be quite different. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker than they are, no complex chemical elements would be possible. Planets would be dull places, without a variety of elements to cook into life.

The size of stars, and their distances from each other, were not arbitrary. If they were not thinly spread, collisions between them would have soon disrupted the planetary systems orbiting them. The size of the galaxy was set, among other things, by the strength of gravity. The fact that gravity was relatively weak, compared to electromagnetism and other forces, allowed the galaxy to have a hundred billion stars in it. This same weakness let living entities evolve which were bigger than microbes, without being crushed by their planet’s gravity. That meant they could be big enough, and complex enough, to dream of voyaging to the distant dots of light in a black sky.

Those organic dreamers were doomed to a poignant end. Evolution worked remorselessly in a cycle of birth, begetting, and death. Each life-form had to make room for its children, or else the weight of the past would bear down on any mutation, smothering change. So death was written into the genetic code. Evolution’s judicial indifference selected for death as well as life.

The coming of intelligent entities meant the birth of tragedy, the dawning realization of personal finiteness. Given the distance of habitable planets from a star, deducing the surface temperature, factoring in the physical constants that predicated chemistry—it was not hard to work out the approximate lifetime that evolution would ordain for human-sized intelligent life: a century or so. Which meant there was barely time to look around, understand, and work for a few frantic decades, before the darkness closed in. At best, an intelligent organism could make its mark in one or two areas of thought. It came and vanished in a flicker. Through its lifetime the night sky would not appear to move at all. The galaxy seemed frozen, unchanging.

Unmoving stars, distant targets. The organic beings, knowing of their own coming deaths, could still dream of going there. Yet on their voyages they were subject to the speed limit set by light. If light’s velocity had been higher, allowing rapid flight between stars, there would have been a huge price to pay. Nuclear forces would be different; the stars’ slow percolating of the heavy elements would not work. The long march upward that led to human-sized creatures would never have gotten started.

So it all knitted together: To arise naturally out of this universe meant a sure knowledge of impending death. That foreshortened all perspectives, forcing a creature to think on short time scales—times so truncated that a journey between stars was a life-devouring odyssey.

“—doesn’t explain the Swarmers, doesn’t account for the EMs adequately,” Carlotta was saving. “Your explanation has too many holes. Too many unjustified assumptions.”

“He hasn’t had help with a detailed analysis, remember that,” Nikka put in.

“No,” Nigel said, “Carlotta’s right. It needs work. Conceptual work.”

He sat back while the women discussed the latest gravlens images, his mind still wandering. He watched Carlotta’s quick, deft movements. She spent a lot of time on her dress, making artful concoctions from the skimpy supplies available. He was losing touch with her. She saw more of Nikka than of him, and knew a lot of the crewmen who were multisocketed now. Those people spent not only their working hours but their recreation as well, plugged in, taking part in—what was the phrase?—“computer-assisted socialization.” Meanwhile, Theory Section was producing no new hypotheses, nothing beyond a bland compiling of data. As the light-years piled up, the crew was turning inward, away from the awful emptiness that lay beyond Lancer’s stone buffers. Few went outside anymore, to gaze upon the relativistically Dopplered rainbow unaided. Weeks went by without his hearing even a mention of Earthside in casual conversation. In the face of immensity, something ingrained in humans made them reduce matters to the local, the present, the specific.