And yet — ' She could not talk about it with her female friends aboard ship. Her husband was Starplex's director — the… the captain they would have called it in the old days. She couldn't chance gossip getting around, couldn't risk diminishing him in the eyes of the staff.

Rissa's friend Sabrina had a husband named Gary. Gary was going through the same thing — but Gary was just a meteorologist. Not someone to whom everyone looked up, not someone who had to endure the gaze of a thousand people.

I'm a biologist, thought Rissa, and Keith's a sociologist. How did I ever end up a politician's wife, with him, me, and our marriage under the microscope?

She opened her mouth, about to tell Boxcar that it was nothing, nothing at all, that PHANTOM had mistaken fatigue or perhaps disappointment in the latest experiment's results for irony.

But then she thought, why the hell not? Why not discuss it with the Ib?

Gossiping was a failing of individual life-forms, not of gestalt beings.

And it would feel good — oh so very good — to get it off her chest, to be able to share it with someone.

"Well," she said — an articulated pause, giving herself one last chance to rein in her words. But then she pressed on: "Keith is getting old."

A slight ripple of lights on Boxcar's web.

"Oh, I know," said Rissa, lifting a hand. "He's young by Ibese standards, but, well, he is becoming middle-aged for a human. When that happens to a human female, we undergo chemical changes associated with the end of our childbearing years. Menopause, it's called."

Lights playing up the web; an Ibese nod.

"But for male humans, it isn't so cut-and-dried. As they feel their youth slipping away, they begin to question themselves, their accomplishments, their status in life, their career choices, and . . . well, whether they are still attractive to the opposite sex."

"And is Keith still attractive to you?"

Rissa was surprised by the question. "Well, I didn't marry him for his looks." That hadn't come out the way she'd intended. "Yes, yes, he's still attractive to me."

"It is doubtless wrong for me to remark upon this, and for that I apologize, but he is losing his hair."

Rissa laughed. "I'm surprised you would notice something like that."

"Without intending offense, please know that telling one human from another is difficult for us, especially when they are standing close by and so are visible to only part of our webs. We're attentive to individual details. We know how upsetting it is to humans to not be recognized by someone they think should know them. I have noticed both his loss of hair and its change of color. I have learned that such changes can signal a reduction in attractiveness."

"I suppose they can, for some women," said Rissa. But then she thought, this is silly. Dissembling to an alien. "Yes, I liked his looks better when he had a full head of hair. But it's such a minor point, really."

"But if Keith is still attractive to you, then — forgive my boundless ignorance — I don't see what the problem is."

"The problem is that he doesn't care if he's still attractive to me.

Appealing to one's mate is taken as a given. I suppose that's why men in the past often put on weight after they'd gotten married. No, the question running through Keith's mind these days, I'm sure, is whether he's attractive to other women."

"And is he?"

Rissa was about to respond with a reflex "of course," but then paused to really consider the question — something she hadn't done before.

"Yes, I suppose he is. Power, they say, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Keith is the most powerful man in — in our space-going community."

"Then, begging forgiveness, what is the difficulty? It sounds as though he should have the answer to his question."

"The difficulty is that he may have to prove it to himself — prove that he's still attractive."

"He could conduct a poll. I know how much you humans rely on such information."

Rissa laughed. "Keith is more of… more of an empiricist," she said.

Her tone sobered. "He may wish to conduct experiments."

Two lights winking. "Oh?"

Rissa looked at a point high up on the wall. "Whenever we're in a social situation with other humans, he spends too much time with the other women present."

"How much is too much?"

Rissa frowned, then said, "More than he spends with me.

And often, he's off talking to women who are half his age — half my age."

"And this bothers you."

"I guess so."

Boxcar considered for a moment, then: "But is this not all natural? Something all men go through?"

"I suppose."

"One cannot fight nature, Rissa."

She gestured at the monitor, with the negative results of the last Hayflick-limit study still displayed on it. "So I'm beginning to find out."

"Get me a sample of the material those spheres are made of," barked Jag, standing up at his bridge station and looking at the director. Keith gritted his teeth, and thought, as he often did, of asking PHANTOM to translate Jag's words less directly, inserting the human niceties of "please" and "thank you."

"Should we send a probe?" Keith asked, looking at the Waldahud's four-eyed face. "Or do you want to go out yourself?" If the latter, thought Keith, I'd be glad to show you the airlock door.

"A standard atmospheric-sampling probe," said Jag. "The gravitational interplay between that many large bodies so close together must be complex. Whatever we send out might end up crashing into one of them."

All the more reason to send Jag, thought Keith. But what he said was, "A probe it is." He turned and looked at the workstation positioned at two o'clock to his own. "Rhombus, please take care of that."

The Ib's web rippled assent.

"A delta-class probe would be most appropriate," said Jag, slipping back into his chair and speaking now into a little hologram of Rhombus above the rim of his console.

Keith tapped a key and joined the conference as well; a miniature Waldahud head popped up in front of him next to the full body shot of the Ib. "How many spheres are there in total?" asked Keith.

Rhombus's ropes operated controls. "Two hundred and seventeen," he said. "But they all look pretty much the same, except for some variation in size."

"Well, then, for an initial test, it doesn't make any difference which sphere we sample," said Jag. "Choose the one that presents the fewest navigational difficulties. First, scoop up some of that material that's between the spheres.

Then buzz into one of the spheres and get me a sample of the gas, or whatever it is that they're made of. Take some from the top of the clouds, and another sample from about two hundred meters down into the clouds, if the probe can stand the pressure. As you fill them, heat and pressurize the sample compartments to match the ambient at the collection points; I want to minimize chemical changes in the mateLights moved up Rhombus's sensor web, and a few moments later he was launching the probe. He switched the control-room spherical display to the view from the probe's cameras. The stars that were behind the haze between the spheres still seemed to be twinkling; the spheres themselves were just circles of black against a backdrop that consisted of a starfield and some faint blue nebulosity beyond.

"What do you think the spheres are?" asked Rhombus, while the probe closed toward its target.

Jag moved all four of his shoulders in a Waldahud shrug.

"Might be the remnants of a brown dwarf star that recently blew apart.

Any fluid will take on a spherical shape in zero-g, of course. The material in between will presumably eventually be swept up by the larger bodies."

The probe was getting close to the material between the spheres. "The fog seems to consist of gas studded with solid particles averaging about seven millimeters in diameter," said Rhombus, whose sensor web had partially crawled onto the console in front of him so that he could read the instruments more easily.