Nigel said, “Until you’re finished, we don’t go down?”

Carlotta laughed, her eyes now moving with liquid ease. “Bob has been after us for a week, panting for the green light. We’ve got lots of results—”

“More’n plenty,” Bob grunted.

Carlotta frowned. Friction between departments about setting a date for touchdown? “Anyway, we’ve got so much biochem to interrelate, I don’t see how we can understand it all in terms of relationships to Earth-side processes, when we’ve had only a few weeks to—”

Another knock. Nigel went to answer. Yes, he should now leave the door dilated. It still struck him as odd, but precisely such policy decisions as the touchdown date could be dealt with and a consensus reached, in the middle of a multifass. And all with a disarming casualness. The analysts had discovered that most matters were in fact settled this way. The formal apparatus only confirmed what was already worked out. Electronic democracy with your shirt unbuttoned. A disarming notion, for those reared in the days of management pyramids.

Here at the door were three people he scarcely knew, bubbling with good spirits and ready to add to the steadily rising murmur that he could hear welling up in the corridor, more coming, the eternal primate chatter and bark, the voices of the ship—

Toke on this, Nebraska Red, high, angular momentum stuff—

Those microbes, never seen anythin’ like ’em. Dust huggers. Little fellas, no bigger’n paramecia.

He said if she didn’t like it what the hell she could change her whole jawline, he didn’t care. She lost it when that lug bolt fractured, you remember that godawful malf down C Bay, killed Jake Sutherland and her, it clean blew away her bone right up to the eye, they got the frags out of the cornea—

—they’re the same chem patterns repeated thousands of times over in the Isis biosphere, just like our left- and right-handedness in the sugars and long chains, y’know. I mean, you’ve got only so many atoms to work with in the whole universe anyway, right? So shouldn’t be a big surprise that the basic Isis chem combos—a five-carbon sugar, with one more phosphate in the carrier, whereas we get by with only three in ATP—are similar, I mean, no big shock there. Got a base tacked on, too. Obvious, simple alteration from our scheme, damn near Earthlike but you can spot the differences.

Christ I thought she’d wet herself when the A4 rating didn’t come through from the cell, she screamed bloody murder at the next confab but shit we weren’t havin’ any you can’t put one past us so she’s back on the auto-lathes. Hates it. Ruby’s got the A4 and good says I ’cause that bitch was—

—that stuff clutches onto the dust in the air like it was free lunch. Dust eaters. Backbone of the ecology. The flagella dig in and zip they take the sulfates straight out of the mineral state. No fluid solution needed!

So much for that life-needs-water crap.

Yeah, why should it when a martini doesn’t?

So these fellas, they go their whole lives without a drink. There’s water, sure, but not near the Eye. So the biosphere’s tapped this way to get energy out of the sulfates, poor bastards, livin’ on dust—

Li’l suckers got to hump like bejeezus to make an erg.

—in the wash of technical talk he steps back and studies Carlotta, sees pinched lines at her eyes and wishes he could unblock it. Easier, much easier, if the three of them could collapse into a comfortable, old-shoe life, each satisfied by a dimming echo of the initial passion they all had felt. She turns, visibly collecting words for a burst of talk—eyebrows knit, mouth purses, blunt tip of her nose dips a millimeter—and Nikka approaches, quicksilver changes ripple across Carlotta’s face, they touch casually, and Nigel remembers how they had been instinctively close from the beginning, sharing jobs, living together while Nigel was in the Sleepslots. They exchange a word, Carlotta glances at him, she makes the familiar stretching motion, the one she taught him to ease knotted muscles, and Nigel feels in her liquid grace why he has through the years narrowed his ability to see into others. It is simply too hard now, too involving. For Nikka and Carlotta, yes, but the thought of reaching this way into Ted or Alex or others—it is too dense and wearying. He had gotten it from the Marginis wreck and used it to get through the ISA Byzantium: chatting up power brokers, sensing what Lancer engineers meant as opposed to what they said, giving them the appearance of seasoned astronaut that they wanted. And he had liked it, been good at it. For years afterward he had remembered each welding inspector’s beaming mug. But now—He feels the reserves ebbing for this; he cannot muster it for a multifass or even a seminar. Insight comes only in flashes now anyway, and the sensitivity hurts when he rubs against the abrasive mysteries people carry inside. Carlotta pats Nikka on the arm absentmindedly, her attention caught again by a passing spate of jargon, and Nikka comes toward him—

Carlotta was awfully tart when she arrived.

Miffed at something perhaps.

There’s nothing developing between her and Bob if that’s what you’re thinking.

I’m not thinking at all actually.

I don’t think she knows herself what’s bothering her; she can’t talk about it, but look at that forced way she’s laughing over there and how she keeps glancing over at us.

Well look at it her way, we two’ve been together since the Pleistocene and she’s always going to be the last in, the odd number

Funny, it’s easier to talk about her here than when we’re alone

Ye olde multifass, everything comes out here—

And you always mixing around, it looks like aimless walking—

Walking yes, aimless no

Eavesdropping?

I, I like the mix—

Thing is, they’re going such a long way around in biochem terms, using what they can get after the sunlight scatters around in all that dust. No UV gets through down at the surface to speak of. That poor li’l biosphere, they stack photons on top of each other somehow to get enough energy, then grab onto water near the ocean, split off the oxy, God what a lotta work

Petrowski calcs that the biosphere’s older than our solar system, really old, been perkin’ along over five billion years, think ’bout that, figured it from the heavy element abundance—

—dust transfers the energy to the bigger life-forms, uses mostly sulfide electron donors, quite a trick when you consider—

—riding those winds, eating the goddamn dust, little bitsy microbes on their way from the Eye to the sea—

—still think you’ve got the most beautiful ass honey of any guy who wears those maintenance overalls—

Seems to me you people got a purty good handle on the biosphere, can’t see why you don’t pass on the touchdown option an’ let us get on with it.

Bob it’s not that simple

Lissen we let the specialists chip away at the thing ferever we’re gonna turn gray up here ’fore we ever get down and movin’

Squeeze it a li’l an’ see what you get

Tough ecology, man, I mean tough. This place’d be dead as Mars with just a little less sunlight and atmosphere. Bio’s creamin’ their jeans to see what else’s under that dust

Too early to tell; we can’t see well enough to estimate the extent of the life pyramid

Shit this all there is to drink gotta be sumpin’ better down at Nguyen’s

Look at him makes you wonder how a muitifass can work with people getting carried away, drink and even drugs on a ship no less

Him? They’re self-canceling, doncha see? Keeps things loose but when votin’ time rolls around they’re too fuzzed to care—

You look at paramecia or your own sperm cells even they have this little whip,

No thanks not my kind of thing

flagella down there is your justly famous balls, my good man