She might have lost all shame, but I hadn’t. My cheeks were burning. First Prope, now Festina… like both women were drunk or drugged. But that was crazy. Who would…

Festina shoved herself away from the bag and turned straight toward me. Her face was flushed; there were tears dribbling down her cheeks. "Edward," she said, swallowing hard, "please leave now. Go and forget you were ever here. Christ knows I’ll probably forget it myself — my head is spinning like a son of a bitch. Just… get out before I do something unforgivable. Please."

I wondered what she thought would be unforgivable. Throwing herself on me? Why did she think that would be awful? Because it would be taking advantage of a… someone like me?

All of a sudden, I thought of Counselor the previous night: her offering herself, and me turning her down. Because I thought she was just a kid who couldn’t possibly think for herself, someone I had to protect because she was really stupid. As if going to bed with her would be raping a mental defective.

Now Festina was protecting me.

For one brief second, I wanted to shout, "Why do you think I wouldn’t like throwing you onto a judo mat? Maybe I’ve dreamed of getting naked and rubbing dimples too. Why would you see it as committing some terrible sin?"

Did Festina think she’d be raping a mental defective? I didn’t want her protecting me. But I had to protect her. She was drugged or something.

Turning quietly, I walked from the gym. Outside the door, I stopped and waited. I could hear her sobbing softly. After a while, she began hitting the bag again. Really really hard.

I was so sleepy I felt like I was going to drop. Too bad my cabin was infested with Balrogs.

The Mandasars weren’t using four of their five rooms, but the ship-soul wouldn’t let me inside when they weren’t there. Maybe the computer thought I might steal something.

The way things were going, I probably could have walked into the cabin of any female crew member and got an invitation to stay the night. Maybe the male crew members too. But I didn’t want to find out if that was true.

Up to the front of the ship. A door just this side of the bridge.

Prope was still awake. When she answered my knock, I could see she’d been crying. I don’t think she’d done much crying before. And in the whole rest of the ship, she had no one who’d hold her till the crying stopped.

Oh well. She was right about having a great big bed.

Waking up, smelling my own sweat. And Prope’s. She lay sprawled behind me on the great big bed, her hair slick and damp from exertion. She was deep deep asleep, drawing in loud lungfuls of air and letting them out again heavily. In stories, women always sleep with a little smile afterward, but thank heaven that’s not true in real life. I don’t think I could have stood it, her looking all smug.

Me, I found myself sitting naked at the captain’s own computer terminal. No memory of how I got there. My skin felt really cold, like I’d been sitting out a long time.

The screen in front of me showed a list of files stored on bubble with the ship-soul. My own personal files, almost nothing in them — just official navy records, and my pathetically small personal address book. (Containing only my father’s name. It used to have Sam’s name too, but a woman I knew on the moonbase made me erase it.)

I stared at the screen blearily, not paying attention to the file names… till I realized something was missing.

Search. Search. But the file I was looking for had disappeared: the file containing the backdoor access code Samantha gave me. Vanished in the night.

And I was sitting at Prope’s official terminal, with no memory of the past few hours. Shivering, I wondered what I’d done.

I left Prope’s cabin before she woke. Spent the rest of the night in the lounge. In the morning, two female life-support techs woke me and said I looked terrible. They were nice to me, in a spend-time-with-the-cute-stranger way, but they weren’t voracious or anything. Whatever I’d had the night before must have worn off.

Later in the day, Festina and Prope tried to act like nothing had happened… but for a long time, Festina wouldn’t look me in the eye, and Prope was always staring at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice.

Wrapped in its Sperm-tail, Jacaranda sped its milky way through the silence of space. Nothing happened as we crossed the line out of Celestia’s system… nothing beyond a few tense faces easing up, and people suddenly remembering gossip or jokes they’d been meaning to tell each other. We’d all survived another one. Life goes on.

As Tobit predicted, Kaisho claimed she’d put the spores outside my door and in my bed just as a joke. "To see the look on your face, Teelu" she said; which was kind of scary in itself, if she could see the look on my face when she was nowhere in sight. She swore the Balrog had always known I’d find the spores without stepping on them… so where was the harm?

Festina still gave her a real good chewing out, and Kaisho promised not to play such tricks again. None of us really trusted her; but Festina was reluctant to lock her up or invent some other punishment. Explorers liked to keep things in the family — it was one thing to yell at a fellow Explorer in private, but nobody wanted to take measures that might be noticed by the crew. Anyway, leaning on the Balrog too hard might backfire: if we got it mad, there was no telling what it might do… or what we could do to stop it.

So we pretended everything was all patched up. I spent my mornings with the Explorers — Festina, Kaisho, Tobit, and Benjamin — answering their questions about Troyen. They soon saw I knew nothing about the twenty years of war (nothing specific enough to be useful), so we turned to subjects like how to incapacitate a warrior without killing him, and the personalities of Queens Fortitude, Honor, and Clemency. Since they were the longest-established queens, maybe one of them had come out on top… except they were also the most obvious targets for the outlaw queens, so maybe they’d been eliminated early on.

No way to know. All those records kept by observers on my moonbase were marked TOP SECRET, and even Festina couldn’t get at them. Some higher admiral didn’t want us learning useful stuff about Troyen — likely the admiral who sponsored the recruiters, and Willow’s mission. Or my father, trying to hide how badly Samantha had failed.

About Samantha’s failure — in those days on Jacaranda, I finally realized how crazy it was to put an inexperienced twenty-year-old in charge of a diplomatic mission… then to leave her in charge for fifteen whole years, as things went from bad to worse. What the heck had Dad been thinking? And why had the other admirals allowed it? The way I figured it, Dad must have given the council doctored-up reports, so they wouldn’t know Sam was doing a bad job. Dad wanted to protect his daughter, and protect himself too; after all, he was the one who put her into a position she couldn’t handle.

I’d never had such thoughts before: recognizing that Sam had screwed up her mission. Screwed it up really badly. Why hadn’t that ever occurred to me before?

Maybe I was getting smarter. Festina kind of hinted at that after we’d been together a few days — she thought I should take an intelligence test, because she couldn’t believe the low scores in my official records. "You’re better than those scores," she told me. "You may not think you are, but it’s true."

I knew it was the other way around — Dad had fudged my real scores upward to put me over the navy’s required minimum. Anyway, if I had got smarter I didn’t want to know; all my life, I’d been who I was, and I hated the idea of changing.