“What’s that mean?”

“You’re on maintenance detail today.”

“So? Okay, I’ll check the biotanks, the usual.”

“Today’s not usual.” Again the sly grin.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sewage seals broke.”

“Again? No fair! They went out last time I was on maintenance, too.”

“Well then, you’re an expert.” Cermo handed Toby a mop. “Apply your know-how.”

The seals were always popping, because the pressure regulators had to be tuned just exactly right. Human waste was a vital ingredient in the biotanks. It had to be pressurized, filtered, and the final product flattened into squishy mats—which the farm teams spread around among the big bowl-shaped crop zones. The Argo was a long-voyage ship, designed to keep every drop of water, every sigh of air sealed tight inside its skin.

Easy to understand, hard to do. Most of the Argo crew were relatives, all that remained of Family Bishop. They came from Snowglade, a bleak world Toby remembered rather fondly. Toby was of the youngest generation of Family Bishop. That gave him the flexibility of being fresh and green, but the sour fact of the matter was that Bishops had few skills to help them run the Argo.

All Families had been techno-nomads, learning just enough to survive while they were on the move. Always running, dodging, staying ahead of mechs. Not that most mechs paid them any special attention. Humans at Galactic Center were more like rats in the walls, not major players in anything.

Argo was as friendly to its passengers as a ship could be, a fine artifact from the High Arcology Era. Trouble was, its systems assumed the passengers had educations that Family Bishop could only guess at.

Example: the sewage. Neither Cap’n Killeen nor Cermo nor anybody else had been able to make head or tail of the instructions for the pressure system.

It assumed something called the Perfect Gas Law, the instructions said. The foul stuff that actually flowed through the smooth, clear pipes was certainly not perfect, and it obeyed no law anybody ever heard of. It spewed out without provocation and often with what seemed to be insulting timing. Last week, a howling brown leak sprayed the Family when it was assembled for a wedding. That took a certain fine edge off the celebration.

Toby joined the other poor souls who had drawn maintenance this week. He breathed through his mouth but that helped only a while, until the smell got up into his head. His teacher Aspect, Isaac, spoke to him in his mind while he bent over, pushing the foul stuff with a sponge brush.

I have conferred with the most ancient records you carry in your chip-library. Interestingly, the term you use is actually derived from the name of the man on Old Earth who invented the flush toilet. An Englishman, legend has it, he made a fortune and benefited all humankind. His name, Thomas Crapper, has come to be—

“Hey, give me a break.”

I thought perhaps some distraction would make your task easier.

“Look, I want distraction, I’ll play one of the old Mose Art musics.”

You mistake the name, I fear. That should be Wolfgang Ama—

Toby mentally pushed the sputtering Aspect back into its storage hole. Aspects were recorded personalities out of Family Bishop’s past, some quite old, like Isaac. They were really interactive information bases written on small chips, which Toby carried in his neck slots. Isaac was only a shrunken slice of a real, long-dead human personality, of course, mostly just old lore that might come in handy. Isaac had tried and tried to explain that Perfect Gas Law, but Toby never really got it.

Knowing about Thomas Crapper wasn’t going to be any use to Toby, but he got a smile out of it; so maybe that was some purpose, after all. The Family used Aspects to help them get through troubles, carrying the masses of knowledge they needed to survive while living amid technology that was far beyond them.

“Hey, you sleepwalking?”

Toby came alert. Besen was standing beside him, neat and trim, her part of the cleanup done. Toby still had half a hallway to sponge up. “Uh, I was thinking deep thoughts.”

Besen rolled her eyes. “Oh sure.”

He gestured with his mop at the brown-stained deck. “Bet you don’t know who this stuff is named for.”

Besen looked skeptical when he told her. “Honest truth,” he said.

Besen gave him a grin and he marveled at how wonderful she looked lately. Fitted out in overalls, auburn hair tied back, spattered and grimy, to his eyes she still had a radiance. Girls bloomed just once, like flowers, before turning into women—but that was enough. Besen seemed impossibly fresh, alive, fun.

“I was just remembering some of those plays we had to listen to,” he said. “They apply here.”

“Oh?” she said skeptically.

“Sure, you recall. ‘Good night, good night! Farting is such sweet sorrow.’ Great romantic stuff.”

“That’s ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow.’ Some romantic you are!”

One of their private games came from a truly ancient chip that Besen carried. It had actual texts from Old Earth, including a gray geezer named Shake-Spear. A great poet from some kind of primitive hunter-gatherer society, Besen thought. This Shake-Spear was one of the scraps humans had retained across the Great Gulf that separated them from the Old Earth cultures, and Besen liked to quote frags of such stuff, just to show off.

“Well, I got it nearly right.” He grinned. “Wait’ll I finish here, we’ll go have some fun in the weightless gym.”

Toby liked the zones of Argo at zero-g. Most of the ship’s sections spun, creating an artificial centrifugal “gravity.” In the weightless gym, they could bounce off trampoline-walls, make carom shots, cannonball into shimmering spheres of water.

Besen shook her head. “That’s what I came to get you for. There’s another seal break.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes. And we’re elected to help tidy up.”

“Where?” He hoped it wasn’t in a weightless zone. What made them fun also made them horrible to clean up. Gunk stuck to every conceivable surface, and some inconceivable ones.

“The Bridge. Come on, hustle!”

When they got to the ample, softly lighted Bridge, Toby was appalled at the sewage leak. Thick scum ran down one whole wall—luckily, one bare of electronics or display screens. It stank. He knew all the uniformed officers by first name, of course, as Family members—but they carefully ignored him, Besen, and the fragrant brown stain. They stood with hands firmly clasped behind their backs, frowning sternly, concentrating on tasks that did not offend their lofty officers’ dignity.

The Bridge was a hallowed part of Argo, where momentous decisions about the whole future of Family Bishop were made, often in split seconds. To have it invaded by smelly waste seemed a deliberate affront of the mocking Sewage God.

The Bridge data screens flickered and swam with views, sliding slabs of information, estimates and four-color projections made automatically by the Argo’s ever-vigilant computers. Without this level of control, Family Bishop would be reduced to what it was—a gang of barely literate nomads who had lucked into a comfortable ship.

Still, even here the years they had occupied Argo showed their toll. The carpet had a big yellow stain and scuff marks. Here somebody had gouged the wall, and over there a repair team must have thought they could help by cutting a sawtooth gap and then abandoning it. Random chunks of servos and electronics gear cluttered the working surfaces. As nomads, their lifelong habits made them carve up and strip away, haul off and make do. Clearing up didn’t come naturally.

Toby and Besen tried to eavesdrop on the cross-talk conversations of the Bridge as they worked. The ship was indeed diving deeply into the molecular cloud. A low tone was gathering, a long bass note sounded by the dust of the cloud rubbing against the ship’s balloonlike lifezones. It was as though the interstellar gas outside was playing Argo like an instrument, sending through her a mournful call.