“Yes. Yes, I do.” He surged up from his hammock chair and winced at sudden pain. He had not yet acquired all the habits of the elderly, the perception of unbalanced forces acting through fragile, brittle axes, in ankles, knees, elbows, spine. Carlotta studied him and sighed.

“Monitoring systems are better now,” she said. “The programs and data bases trigger decision algorithms fairly high up in the sentience pyramid. I would have to …”

He hung on her next words. She bit her lip. “Look, I’m not saying it’ll work. I can get close, but—”

“I appreciate that, luv. But close counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. I need to get out from under them for sure. Something they can’t trace.”

She sighed. “The things you ask for, Jesus, I didn’t know you were this bad off. Thought you were skimming a fra-poff, sure, but real cancer—Lord, that’s supposed to be fixable.”

He blinked wearily. “The older the body, the more rickety the immune response gets. That’s what all the aging diseases are, I suppose. Inappropriate response. The easiest way to kill a living thing is to get it to do most of the damage to itself. Merely add the right outside irritant …” His voice trailed off. Silently Carlotta rose to embrace him.

“Y’know, you said once that intelligence is the ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Carlotta studied him gravely. “You sure as hell aren’t. Why not pack it in, eh?”

He smiled defiantly. “I paid my admission. I want to see how the movie ends.”

Seven

He went for long walks through Lancer, seeing little of it. Instead, he tried to recall Earth, to forget the rumors of influence peddling and maneuverings on shipboard that might, finally, decide his fate. He remembered the last place he had gone before boarding Lancer: Venice. Nikka was visiting her family so he was left alone, ambling down gray flagstone streets with no footpaths. Men charged along them, pushing barrows and shouting. “Le gambe!”—which Nigel dutifully looked up in his dictionary and found meant “Legs!” a rather abrupt warning. It reminded him of the American “Heads up!” which was used when the appropriate response was precisely the opposite.

He let himself be tugged by crowds into Saint Mark’s Square, amid their chatter and dark round eyes. At the height of Venetian power the square had been named II Broglio, intrigue, because from 10:00 A.M. to noon only the nobles were allowed to meet there and hatch their plots. He thought of Ted and Bob, bland names which hid riddles.

He went inside the vast, hollow spaces of the basilica. From the high bulbous domes gold saints stared down at the masses of working, breathing carbon chemistry below. He climbed. The upper walkways brought these spiritual heroes closer, revealing them to be made of chips of blue and rose and white, a millimeter deep.

The rising spaces reminded him of the small cylinder worlds, just big enough to make a man feel dwarfed. Architects had been trying for that effect for millennia. He remembered that originally the pyramids outside Alexandria—she was lying sprawled, unconscious, the life draining—he cut off the thought.

The basilica walls were encrusted with Constantinople sculptures and Holy Land jewels. Booty of the Crusades. The desire for huge surroundings seemed to run in parallel with the lust for vast voyages, for causes, and for stacks of stone to remember them by. Look, see what I did! Future schoolchildren would goggle, to be sure—and then bow their reverent heads back to their ice creams.

Outside, waves slapped against the quay, playful, throwing spray in his eyes to remind him of how big they had been farther out where the ocean was still deep and blue. He wondered, What drew such crowds to this place? Then, seeing the marble standing luminous before the sea, it was suddenly clear. Here men had come, fleeing barbarism. Once they had tamed the sea and traded on it, they built stone statements, denying that the outcome was ever in doubt. These mobs knew that he saw, and preferred the cool stone, tight streets, and arched bridges that asserted the rule of geometry over the waves. These carved boxes of marble should, must, would, outlast the sea’s random rub.

On Ascension Day the Doge, the Venetian ruler, would sail out from the city in his gilded state galley, to throw a ring overboard, symbolizing the wedding of Venice to the waters. But in the end the marriage was not valid, because it lacked the consent of the bride. Venice clung to its carved rock and waned.

He still did as much manual work as he could, but the jobs seemed harder and the weakness came on him earlier in the day. He did analysis and routine jobs of maintenance, to keep busy and justify his presence, if only to himself. His digestion got worse. His muscles were always sore in the mornings and he felt a general unsteadiness. The worsening was blissfully gradual. He saw, ruefully, that he had reacted to it as most do. First you blame minor illnesses rather than age, and claim that pretty soon you will be up and about and back to tending the crops. He made this observation to Nikka many times and finally, afterward, she would become silent, and he would spend a restless night. He was going to the stars, but evolution’s need for mortality reached him even here.

Slowly he gathered, from slight elevations of eyelashes and side glances of friends, that his birthdays were not seen now as accomplishments, but as postponements. He looked for some weariness with life, with the doing of things, that would make the end less fearsome.

Surprisingly, perhaps gladly, he couldn’t find any.

Nigel looked from the prelim photos of Ross 128. “Pretty blurred,” he said to Nikka.

They’re from the gravitational telescope. Years old, of course—they’re working as fast as they can, but the light-travel delay—”

“Right.” He studied the hazy blobs. “Some Jovians, two terrestrials. Not bad.” Because Lancer had boosted to 0.98 light speed, these images were only a few months older than the first ones they had received, years ago, back at Isis. “Carlotta’s working on reprocessing this stuff, isn’t she? When will we get better—”

“She’s in the Slots.”

“What? I didn’t—How long?”

“Two weeks now.”

Nigel was startled. He hadn’t even noticed her absence. And he disliked abrupt changes like this, friends suddenly disappearing. “When do they uncork her?”

“Six months, I think.”

“We’ll be nearly at landfall then!”

Nikka looked up from her workpad. “Slots are R and R. She’ll come out refreshed, able to relieve somebody who’s been hustling to get ready for Ross.”

“Ummm.” He frowned. “Seems reasonable … but … I don’t like it.” He shook his head and went back to mulling over the prints. But he could not concentrate.

Eight

Warning gongs rang throughout Lancer. Nigel crossed his legs and ignored them. The ship was striking a dense dust cloud, and the ramscoop would either work or not, nothing he could do would matter. He slid a stick into the spine of a book and opened it. The stick overfilled the book, so he thumbed for the second projection and started reading on page 287. And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain’t got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn’t get none from home—

“Nigel!” his comm cried. He tapped his fingernail in answer. “Cut into shipspeak—fast.” It was Nikka, gone before he could reply. He punched into his flatscreen and overvocal and listened.