Jeremy chattered about what he’d seen in Pell’s garden. And segued nonstop to what he wanted to do after they got the patches stitched on. Jeremy wanted him to go to rec with him tonight: there was a rec hall, with games and a canteen, Jeremy said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh, come on. What are you going to do, else?”

It was a point. He’d be alone in this closet of a room. He was tired, but he’d get to thinking about things he didn’t want to think about.

He went. It was the same huge compartment they’d all been in during undock, only now there were no railings. There were game machines. A vid area. Tables and chairs, senior as well as junior crew playing cards, playing games, watching vids. He suffered a moment of dislocation, and almost balked at the transformation alone.

But the entertainments offered were very much like at the Base. Familiar situation. You mixed with senior staff and techs and all. They just generally didn’t talk with junior staff.

“What do you play?” Jeremy asked him.

Dangerous question. He’d already lost ten hours to Jeremy at cards; but when he glumly decided on vids, and looked through the available cards in the bin to the side of the machines, he found an Attack game he hadn’t seen since he was a small kid. The card itself when he pulled it out was old, showing a lot of use; but he remembered that game with real pleasure, and recalled he’d been pretty good at it—for a seven-year-old. He might have a chance at this one.

He appropriated a machine. Meanwhile Vince and Linda had shown up, and thought they’d join him and Jeremy.

He wasn’t delighted, but he kept the expression off his face; he linked up with the three of them, a little suspecting ambush. He didn’t play vids, not for the last four years, being short of opportunity and short of time, and he dropped into the semi-world of state-of-the-art interactives with a little caution.

Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn’t come out of the drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.

“This is enough,” he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they’d play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station hall block before he blew up.

He just wasn’t very good at it. Or the point was, they were very, very good and their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they’d forced him to. They were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn’t know the Jeremy he was dealing with. Jeremy’s fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner, while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince, who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.

“They’re good,” he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old boy’s face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older than he was.

And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who was, he’d found out, Vince’s fairly close cousin and year-mate.

He didn’t react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he’d never seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads who’d haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said dangerous , and something said alien . Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.

Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He’d heard the word, and knew the association. Tigerish . Predatory, low brain function, and fast.

Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these weren’t ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn’t duck out on rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody could score.

He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn’t walk like a normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn’t discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn’t relaxed until he’d spent a long time in the shower.

“You all right?” he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress for bed.

“Yeah.” Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in. But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.

Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight he’d just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a hype-head. That was what it reminded him of. He had seen people react that way. On drugs.

He didn’t remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space she didn’t need a visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for something, and her face would be—

He couldn’t remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he’d come in years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around him today. They looked like her. All the people on this ship looked like her in some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked like to him.

And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she’d been as scarily hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she’d prowl the apartment and bump into walls that weren’t there for her. She’d held him in her arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she’d say she saw the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she’d ask him if he could see them, too.

He couldn’t. Aged five, he’d thought there was something wrong with him, and that he was stupid, because he hadn’t been able to see the stars the way she could. Thank God she hadn’t given him any of what she was taking. She’d never gone that far down.

He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath, abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn’t give him more than a glance, so he guessed it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.

Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.

He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn’t sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he’d known, just said, well, he was improving, and dealt another hand.

He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on fight. But he wasn’t sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn’t figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being out here, dealing with space. He’d known no spacers intimately but his mother and Quen. All his life, he’d heard people say spacers were different or strange , usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or his quirks.