Strider's Galaxy

Phobos: AD2528

The great thing about being on Phobos was that you felt light.

Out in the open wasn't as much fun, because you were constricted inside a spacesuit whose various devices for dealing with bodily excretions were extremely uncomfortable, and because you always had the nervous feeling that, if you so much as tripped, you could wrench yourself out of the tiny moon's gravitational field and either go plummeting downwards towards Mars, which seemed very big from here, or tumbling and turning off into the eternity of the Universe, which seemed even bigger. Through the thin atmosphere of Mars you could see about fifteen times as many stars as you could from the surface of the Earth; from Phobos you could see twice as many again—plus a couple of dozen distant galaxies. The spectacle was amazing, but it didn't quite compensate for the fact that you were always worried about either falling or rising.

It was a false fear. Assuming that you could kick yourself hard enough off the surface of Phobos not to come down again, all that would happen would be that you shared the moon's orbit around Mars until someone came and fetched you back. But false fears are as frightening as real ones: everyone knows the laws of physics; everyone's subconscious flatly refuses to believe in some of them.

When you were contained within the Santa Maria, however, it was different.

It was better than free fall. In free fall you can do a triple somersault in mid-air, but then you have to grab hold of something to stop yourself somersaulting for the rest of your life. Here you could do a triple somersault and then come slowly down for a graceful landing. Everyone tried it in private a few times before realizing that everyone else was trying it in private; after that, people got together for bouts of low-g acrobatics.

No one aboard the Santa Maria was actually fat, but quite a few justifiably thought of themselves as plump. In the low-g of Phobos it didn't make any difference: everybody was a ballet dancer.

"Retro seven," said Strider.

"Retro seven," agreed Danny O'Sondheim.

"Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one," she said.

"Rotary seven point one four eight three three six one."

O'Sondheim was her First Officer—which meant, she had been instructed, that he was her second-in-command—and she'd decided that she didn't like him very much. It was an antipathy she would have to learn to control. She suspected that he sustained a corollary antipathy, and wouldn't make too much effort to control it. That was one of the reasons she didn't like him. Still, they were working well together as they checked out the Santa Maria's systems. At least she got on better with him than she did with Marcial Holmberg, the grandisonian individual whom the non-SSIA personnel had elected as their representative. She tried to put the thought of Holmberg out of her mind, but it was one of those thoughts that infuriatingly refused to leave.

"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight."

"Nine-eleven above, with spin forty-eight." He repeated her instructions, tapping the code into his thighputer.

The thighputer was one of the other reasons she didn't like O'Sondheim. The fact that he was an Artif was yet a further one. When she'd first met him, a few months ago, it had emerged in conversation that he'd been born in Bolivia. The body he now wore had been bought in the United States of Ireland. Whenever she asked him if the body had been bought legitimately or on the black market—which latter meant, almost always, that someone had been killed so their body could be sold—he adroitly shifted the subject.

"Zero, then up seven five one nine."

It felt curious, going through all the motions of piloting a starship but getting absolutely no response, except from the holos in front of them. Some wag had thought it funny to make the Main Computer give variable responses to the tests. Messages like "YUP, YOU GOT IT, SMACK ON THE BUTTON" and "JACKPOT TIME!" came up whenever the systems checked out OK, which so far they had. Strider found the Main Computer's forced enthusiasm wearying.

In theory, Pinocchio could have done this. In fact, it was better that Strider and O'Sondheim did. Two things were being done at once: they were checking out the systems, and in a way the systems were checking out them. Strider had spent the past year memorizing every possible navigational command that could usefully be given to the Santa Maria. She knew that O'Sondheim had been doing the same.

"Over X eight delta."

"BULLSEYE!"

She wished she could find a way of liking O'Sondheim, but it was difficult. The thighputer she could have coped with (although she always reckoned that thighputers were really surrogate penises—something to play with in those idle moments, or to show off to your friends with cries of "My RAM is bigger than yours"), but there were so many other things about him that she couldn't help detesting. If she'd known earlier, she'd have told Dulac that she didn't want Artifs on board.

The human mind ages and ages and ages, but the only reason it dies is because the body supporting it dies. If the medics could get there fast enough, the body could be given sufficient implants and transplants to make it once more perfectly healthy—except for being dead, of course. But then the dead brain could be wiped and a new person's memories and personality fed into it. It was a difficult process, and therefore expensive.

Strider found it utterly immoral.

"Holding ninety-three."

In the first place, it would have been easier to resuscitate the dead person than to feed a rich person's individuality into the revived corpse; it would have been even easier than that to keep the original person alive. Money made the difference between life for one and death for the other. In the second place, it was well known that the most poverty-stricken frequently killed their own family members so that the fresh corpses could be sold for Artiffing; sometimes they just murdered someone else, delivered the body to some shady but prosperous med-center, took the money and ran. And it wasn't just the poor who were in on the act: there were organized gangs that made a good living out of Artif murder.

Was O'Sondheim living inside a body that had been deliberately killed? There was no scar tissue visible above the neckline of his jumpsuit, but she hadn't seen the rest of his body and didn't particularly want to. Or was he just occupying the physique of someone the medics might have saved had there been enough money on offer?

"Four point nine two rising—bring back on the eleventh."

But she'd have to learn to get on with O'Sondheim, whether or not the prospect appealed. He was going to be her second-in-command for at least a hundred and ten years, and possibly until the end of her life.

She didn't like the fact that he had secondary retinal screens in front of both eyes. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.

"WAPPALLOOSA!" said the screen in front of her.

It was to be her last night on Mars, and she had chosen to spend it in City 3, the oldest of all the extant Martian cities. City 1 had been found to be of defective construction by the twelve thousand people who had been living in it at the time, a century before the Martian atmosphere had become oxygen-rich enough for humans to survive outside; a few cats and rats had lived. City 2 had been destroyed by one of the sporadic volcanic upheavals that had occurred during the early days of terraforming.

Strider stared into her drink and wondered why the hell she'd bothered coming down to the planet for this past week. All it was doing was making the farewell more painful. And this was the last city on Mars she should have thought of coming to. City 3 was devoted to pleasure, which meant you spent half the time wishing someone would turn the music down, half the time fending off unwanted offers of sex, and whatever remained of the time trying to get rid of your hangover.

Her drink was blue. She could spill it on her jumpsuit and no one would notice.

"Hello."

She looked up.

"Pinocchio!" she said.

"Lady."

"Right now, you're the person I'm looking forward most to getting to know on the Santa Maria. Don't call me 'lady', all right?"

She stood up and clasped him round the shoulders, then tugged him down into the bright red plastite chair beside her.

"I am not a person," said Pinocchio.

"I reckon you are."

"That is kind of you, lady."

"My name is Leonie. I want you to call me by that name. Everyone else on the Santa Maria is going to have to call me 'Captain Strider', at least to begin with, but I want you to call me 'Leonie'. Do you want a drink?"

A few meters away from their table someone was displaying a holo of a young boy being flayed alive. People were laughing. Strider hoped and prayed that the holo was just special effects. This wasn't the Mars she wanted to remember.

In fact, it wasn't something she wanted to remember about the human species.

"Drinks are wasted on me. I haven't got a digestive system."

"Aw, come on, Pinocchio. Loosen up a bit."

"If you would like, since it is the last night for both of us on Mars, I could make you very happy."

"You don't mean . . .?" She felt between his legs. "No, I didn't think you were kitted out to be a sexbot."

"I mean we could go for a walk together under the Martian stars. It's likely we'll never see them again."

Outside, it was a balmy minus five degrees Celsius. The sky was cloudless. Phobos wouldn't rise for another couple of hours, but Pinocchio pointed out Deimos to her; Strider had difficulty picking out the pinprick of light among the stars. Dominating the heavens, though low on the horizon, was the bright blue-green glare of Earth.

Strider took Pinocchio's arm, and leant against his shoulder.

"Thanks for bringing me out here," she said. "I was crazy to have taken time out in fun city."

"Maybe not so crazy, lady," responded the bot. He was a good half-meter taller than her—the size of an average human—and had to twist his head to look down into her face. "It's easier to leave the rest of your kind behind if the last that you've seen is the worst of them."

They trudged through loose soil. Every now and then they had to detour around a patch of straggly bushes. Strider would probably have walked straight into them had it not been for Pinocchio.

"How do you know these things, Pinocchio?" she said after a while. "You're not a human being—you're a bot. You've told me several times that you're a less intelligent bot than most, being designed originally for valet duties. Yet you're more perceptive about human emotions than most humans I know."

She half-tripped, and moved her arm so that it was now around his waist.

"I lied about my status," Pinocchio replied.

She stopped abruptly, tugging him to make him do the same.

"You did what?" she said incredulously.

"I lied. The notion that bots can't lie is a farce. We can be programmed to do anything our designers want us to." She could just make out that he was smiling. "We can even make our heads emit a buzzing noise, if need be, so that everyone thinks we're slow on the uptake. I decided to call you 'lady' because that seemed a rather lackwitted form of address."

There was a large rock nearby. Strider gestured him towards it, and they sat side by side.

"I think you've got quite a bit of explaining to do," she said, putting her hand on his thigh. One of the advantages of bots was that you could be affectionate towards them without it being taken as a sexual advance.

"It's simple enough, if you think about it," said Pinocchio. "There are going to be forty-five people aboard the Santa Maria: aside from yourself, there will be twenty-two males and twenty-two females, all of breeding age and certainly fertile—because we definitely want some children to be born along the way: assuming Tau Ceti II is habitable, it'd be a bit of a disaster if everyone in the colony either hated each other's guts or were all either male or female—you get the general picture? We've even screened out homosexuals, because the production of children is important to the project."

"You said 'we'."

"Remember, I was one of your interviewers. The SSIA put a lot of money into developing me. I have a ranking a little below Alphonse Dulac and a little above Rateen Macphee."

"You bastard!" said Strider, laughing. "You've been deceiving me."

"I've just told you I have. Think a little longer. You are going to be the captain of a vessel whose voyage will last certainly thirty years and possibly one hundred and ten." Now Pinocchio put his hand on her thigh; again, the move was affectionate. "The captain may, shall we say, dabble among the other personnel, but it would only cause strife should she enter into some kind of pair-bonding, however temporary, with one particular individual. The same would be the case if she formed any particularly close friendships."

Strider stood up. Pinocchio's hand slipped away from her easily enough.

"It wouldn't make any difference to me," she said. "I've led teams before. When it comes to the crunch, all the other people become team members, whether they're lovers or someone you'd really rather like to stamp on."

"But it would look to everyone else aboard the Santa Maria as if it might make a difference. The project is bound to fail if that doubt is always in people's minds."

"You mean, even if I fall madly, passionately . . .?"

"Your psychological profile counterindicates this, as do the answers you gave in interview." Standing beside her, he put his arm round her shoulder. "You've learnt that the way to manipulate people to the best advantage of the team is to keep your distance from them."

"It sounds like I'm in for a very lonely time of it," said Strider.

"No," said Pinocchio. "That is exactly the reason why I shall be aboard the Santa Maria alongside you. I'll go through all my dumb-bot routines for the sake of the other personnel, but to you I shall be a friend. That is why I have gone through the charade I've performed over the past year or more: to become your friend."

"Lying is a rotten basis for a friendship," said Strider.

"Would you have come out here to look at the stars if anyone else had asked you?"

The question made Strider think. "Possibly," she said, watching the steam-cloud of her breath make formidably heavy-seeming shapes in front of her.

"Be honest," said Pinocchio.

"Probably not, but possibly. Look, I'm getting cold."

"A moment longer. Do you think of me as a friend?"

"Of course I do. Remember, rather than try to disable you and throw you to the cops, I suggested we could be friends."

"Then trust me."

"Actually, I already do—even though it's hard to trust a liar."

"I lied because it was necessary. I had to earn your friendship."

"Can you still make coffee?"

"Of course. And I can still clean your clothes."

"Can you be a lover?"

"If need be. I was very offended, by the way, when you felt for my genitals."

"I was a bit drunk," she said.

"You still are."

"Not very." Even though the night was as warm as Martian nights ever got, it was nevertheless cold enough to sober someone fairly quickly.

"Do you want me to add being a sexbot to my capabilities? It is something that could be arranged."

"Let's get back to City 3 and find a cabble," said Strider. "I have a lot to think about."

A minute later, as they walked back towards the orange glow of the City 3 blister, she suddenly said, "Hell, yes, Pinocchio, I'd like to have sex with you: it's my last chance on Mars, and you're the person I'd most like to be on a bed with. But there's no need to bother about getting yourself a penis fixed on. That's always been an optional extra, as far as I'm concerned. Let's be friends."

"You called me a person again," said the bot.

"Well, you are, aren't you?" said Strider.

Much later, as she was drifting off to sleep, Strider began to realize that she, who had a quiet pride in her ability to manipulate other people, had herself been manipulated by the SSIA. No: "manipulated" wasn't the right term; she had been managed through the use of a paucity of information. Even the bot pretending to sleep beside her had told her only fragments of the truth.

It made obvious sense that Pinocchio should be along for the mission to be a friend to her, so that she didn't succumb to loneliness. But another reason for sending along a bot was that the human component of the mission could perish—either en route, through going ship-crazy or because of systems malfunction or any of a dozen other reasons, or after they had landed on Tau Ceti II: a planet might seem benign but possess hidden dangers. Viral, fungal and bacterial diseases were things that Strider knew about only in theory, mainly because the War of Hatred was something every kid learnt about; but a fresh planet was very likely to possess micro-organisms of its own against which the human frame had no defenses—even the nanobots might have difficulty recognizing alien micro-organisms.

So there was a second reason for Pinocchio to be aboard. If all the humans died, the SSIA wouldn't have lost out entirely on the mission, because there was someone—she no longer, particularly after the past few hours, found it possible to think of the bot as anything but a person, albeit not a human one—who would be able to report back. The Santa Maria's Main Computer would be able to do some of this as well, of course; but it would never be able to do so from the surface of Tau Ceti II, because the Santa Maria was not designed ever to make planetfall. The bot shuttles, linked with the Main Computer, could go down, but they couldn't walk around. Pinocchio, on the other hand, might be the nearest thing to a human being the SSIA could put on to the planetary surface.

Her friend. Her occasional lover. Her back-up.

Or was she the back-up?

She punched his hard chest gently, without malice. He turned over in his pseudo-sleep.

The SSIA were backing it both ways. They had chosen her as the Santa Maria's captain in part because, unlike most people, she wasn't reliant on human-integrated hardware, which had a habit of going wrong over the years: some of her personnel were undoubtedly going to have a hard time of it when their secondary retinal screens or their stim sockets crashed. There were spares aboard ship, of course, but not the fully equipped operating theater that might be necessary for some of the fiddlier re-implantations.

She was looking forward to meeting the remainder of her personnel, in a few days' time.

"Jesus!" said Maria Strauss-Giolitto as she disembarked from the shuttle on Phobos and got her first sight of the Santa Maria. She'd seen holos, of course, during the past year's worth of training sessions, but they'd done nothing to prepare her for the physical experience of approaching the ship.

"What do you mean?" said Lan Yi's voice in her helmet. The elderly scientist had been immediately behind her as they'd debouched from the shuttle, whose crew were waiting impatiently for the two of them to get within the safety of the Santa Maria so that the shuttle could return to Mars to pick up another pair of prospective colonists.

"He is—well, not the god exactly of my faith," said Maria Strauss-Giolitto. "I was blaspheming. Will you look at that baby?"

"Yes," said Lan Yi. "It is very impressive, is it not? When I was first brought up here a month ago I made a very similar exclamation."

The ship was just over three kilometers long and shaped like an enormous fingertip, although here and there various sensor decks protruded, destroying the craft's otherwise smoothly curved lines. Its surface was studded with plastite windows of various sizes; some of these were lit up. The fore part of the Santa Maria, which would have been the foremost point of a well manicured fingernail, was entirely transparent, and brightly lit. There was a suggestion of motion within this area. Down each side were four equally spaced blisters, housing the shuttles that it was hoped would ferry personnel to and from the surface of Tau Ceti II. But what had impressed Strauss-Giolitto was not so much the dazzling appearance of the vessel as the sheer sensation of mass that emanated from it. People could tell you over and over that the craft massed several hundred million tons, and was one of the largest mobile objects the human species had ever constructed, but it still didn't prepare you for the physical confrontation with the beast. As a matter of fact, it was just over Phobos's tiny horizon; as a matter of perception, it was Phobos's horizon.

At the rear of the gigantic fingertip that was the Santa Maria projected an extended bar, like the exposed bone running between the first and second knuckles; at its end was a hemisphere of diameter nearly a kilometer. This was where the matter-antimatter reactions that would power the Santa Maria through space towards Tau Ceti II would occur. It was also where the nuclear pulse fusion explosions that the craft would use to get itself out of the Solar System would be mounted; nuclear pulse fusion explosions were dangerous enough, but no one in their right minds would risk creating matter-antimatter reactions anywhere closer to Mars than somewhere beyond the orbit of Scarab, the gas-giant tenth planet discovered as late as 2103.

"I think we should get moving," said Lan Yi's voice in her helmet after a while. "The shuttle crew have a job to do."

Strauss-Giolitto nodded, then said: "Isn't it always the way that, when you come across the most amazing thing you've ever seen in your life, there's a good reason for hurrying along?"

"Once the shuttle's blasted off, we can come out here again," said Lan Yi quietly. "Our services are not required aboard for the next few days."

"Won't superbitch Strider object? I mean, it would be a bit too much like having fun."

"Have you met Strider?" They were bobbing across the stone towards the Santa Maria in that peculiarly clumsy way everybody did on Phobos.

"No," said Strauss-Giolitto. "From everything I've heard, it's an experience not to be looked forward to."

"Who has been telling you this?"

"Most people. She's supposed to be a hard number."

"Who are these 'most people'?"

Already, lurching ten or fifteen meters with every pace, they were halfway to the Santa Maria.

"Everyone I know who's come into contact with her during training sessions," said Strauss-Giolitto. "They all say she's a tight bitch."

"She can be cold on occasion," said Lan Yi. His voice was beginning to sound a little breathless. Maneuvering oneself across the surface of Phobos was harder work than it seemed. "But she's no ice queen. I've met her several times, and like her very much. I would rate her IQ as being rather less than my own, but not by very much."

"A high IQ doesn't make someone a better person." To her annoyance, Strauss-Giolitto was likewise discovering this odd stumbling process tiring. She turned a somersault between paces just to reassure herself that she was able to. The stars whirled nauseatingly around her.

"Don't believe what those people told you," said Lan Yi. "I'm sure she can be ruthless when she has to be. She swears a lot—and sometimes quite interestingly. Most of the time, though, she's restrained but also prepared to listen to what you have to say. If she thinks you're talking rubbish she'll say so, but very politely, so that you don't feel like an idiot."

"How do you mean?"

Lan Yi laughed. It was a dry noise in Strauss-Giolitto's helmet.

"I insisted to her that I needed at least a hundred techbots if I were to do my job properly. She said the SSIA had said I could have four. I was prepared to appeal over her head until she pointed out that every extra kilogram of mass aboard the Santa Maria made the mission less likely to succeed: did I really believe it was worth doing without one of the shuttles in order to have my extra bots? Better a job done, if not as well as I would like, than a job completely undone." He laughed again. "Then she took me out for a meal, and we talked it over a second time."

Lan Yi was adapting to the strains of moving about on Phobos better than she was, which irritated Strauss-Giolitto yet further. She was in her early twenties—she thought she was twenty-four—and he must be a hundred years older. She was in splendid physical condition and over two and a half meters tall; he was apparently frail and barely two-thirds her height.

"She was right," continued Lan Yi. "By the time I'd worked it out properly, I realized that I could get as good results from four techbots as from a hundred, because I could use the Main Computer for data storage. I had been thinking lazily; Strider hadn't. Many people I have worked with would have made me feel foolish because of my lack of clear thinking. Strider did not."

"That doesn't sound like the person everyone else describes," said Strauss-Giolitto impatiently. They were very close to the Santa Maria now—close enough that the curve of its hull overhead was no longer noticeable.

"Perhaps this displays a lack in those other people rather than in Strider," said Lan Yi mildly.

"Hmmf."

"How many of these other people are going to be a part of this mission?"

Strauss-Giolitto hesitated. "Well, none, actually."

"I do not think that this is a coincidence: only the best are being permitted aboard this vessel. Look, someone is letting down an access tube for us."

Strauss-Giolitto was silent as they entered the tube's outer airlock, stripped naked, stuffed their suits into disposal vents, and were showered with various precautionary chemicals to ensure they were bringing nothing into the Santa Maria's ecosystem that had not been planned for. She tried not to look at the little out-of-Taiwanese's body, but couldn't help it. He was more muscular than she had expected, his only visible augmentation the secondary retinal screen that hovered a couple of centimeters in front of his right eye. With his left eye he was unashamedly scanning her own body.

"You are very lovely," he remarked.

She snorted. "Dream on."

"I was speaking aesthetically."

"Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah, as you put it, Strauss-Giolitto. If I knew you better I might find the display of your body alluring. As it is, I find it merely beautiful—you are an elegant statue."

The second airlock hissed, and two sets of SSIA uniform flopped on to the floor on its far side. After a moment's confusion Lan Yi and Strauss-Giolitto sorted out between them whose was whose.

She didn't know whether to feel complimented or to be angry with the small Taiwanese.

Then they were walking up the brightly illuminated walkway through the tube towards the ship's interior.

They could hear the tube grunting and creaking as it retracted itself behind them. The innermost airlock grudgingly granted them admission, and they were met by someone even taller than Strauss-Giolitto. His face was crafted as a perfect simulacrum of a human being's and he was clad in the form-shrouding standard uniform of the SSIA, but she immediately recognized him—it—as a bot.

Lan Yi was shaking the bot's hand and reaching up to slap it on the shoulder.

"My good friend Pinocchio," the diminutive scientist was saying. "How very fine to find you here to welcome us."

The bot's head buzzed. "Dr Lan Yi," it said after a perceptible pause. "The pleasure is mine entirely. I have been despatched by Captain Strider to guide the new arrivals to their cabins."

Strauss-Giolitto spared the bot no more than a glance. Although technical manuals and holos had described the interior of the Santa Maria to her, the direct experience was as startling as the outside had been. Almost the entirety of the vast space was empty. In the distance, near the craft's stern, she could perceive a small cluster of hut-like structures: from here, about a kilometer away, they looked almost as if they were made of wood, though she knew this had to be an illusion—textured and colored plastite was much lighter and tougher than wood. Still, she liked the fact that the craft's designers had taken the trouble to create that illusion. It made the bizarre space within the Santa Maria seem humanized. Overhead a long daylight-simulator ran the length of the vessel; it had been set to Earth-standard, which like most people who had spent much of their lives on Mars she found offensively bright. The ship's floor was covered in fields of yellow and bright green grain; here and there were groves of fruit-trees. Overhead, right up by the edges of the daylight-simulator, she could see the markings for further fields. For the first part of its voyage the Santa Maria would be set into latitudinal revolution, so that the direction of "down" would be towards the exterior of the craft as the spin simulated gravity. Thereafter, once it started accelerating out of the Solar System, the spin would be stopped and the fields would be swivelled out from the hull to form several layers of "landscape." The cabins where she and the others would sleep and spend their leisure time would likewise swivel. Several elevators, currently useless, ran the length of the vessel. The system was unlikely to work perfectly: agribots would ply endlessly to return topsoil from the craft's stern to the fields where it properly belonged.

Small clouds hovered beside the Santa Maria's huge daylight-simulator.

It was an imposing sight.

The colors, for example. Colors on Mars were always fairly muted—even the orange-red of the plains was restful in the glimmer of the sunlight. Inside the Santa Maria, with its Earth-standard daylight-simulator, greens and yellows were violent, vibrant colors.

She supposed she'd get used to it.

Lan Yi had finished his rather embarrassing reunion with the bot, and was introducing it to her.

"This is Pinocchio. He plays a very good game of chess."

"Yeah. How do you do, Pinocchio?" said Strauss-Giolitto. It seemed odd to be introduced to a goddam machine. (She must stop blaspheming, even in her thoughts.) "Pleased to meet you."

She shook hands formally with the bot.

"And I am pleased to meet you too, Ms"—again there was that disconcerting buzzing noise—"Strauss-Giolitto. We have not met before, but I recognize you from the data which the Main Computer has supplied me concerning your facial features."

"You're too kind," said Strauss-Giolitto sarcastically.

"Thank you," said Pinocchio, with no apparent irony. "Now may I guide you to your cabins? There is a further pair of personnel due to arrive in"—his head hummed—"four hours and forty-four minutes."

Two-thirds of the Great Beast, thought Strauss-Giolitto, following Lan Yi and the bot.

They went along a path that could have been in Mongolia, where Strauss-Giolitto had spent her childhood, although her mother and grandmother had always fiercely reminded her that her roots lay in Greater Yugoslavia. Through the hedges Strauss-Giolitto could hear the thrum of insects. Every now and then a gap in the bushery offered her a view of endless ears of grain; the only difference from Mongolia was that the heads weren't moving. Above her some kind of raptor soared close to the clouds. The inside of the Santa Maria was Earth's ecosystem, done in miniature.

An animal that she didn't recognize scuttled across the path in front of them. It seemed to be covered in stiff, bony needles. Its hindlegs were amusingly long as it scampered nervously out of their way.

"You are a teacher?" said Pinocchio, with studied courtesy.

"Unless your programming's wrong, bot, you know that already." It was probably quite cool in here, but the brightness of the daylight-simulator was making her feel hot. The SSIA uniform was designed for use on Mars, not in Earth-standard.

"You will have very little to do during the first few years of this mission," said Pinocchio. "It is unlikely that any child will be born before we leave the orbit of Jupiter."

"All teachers are, by definition, highly trained in data retrieval," Lan Yi pointed out. "They have to be, because that is what they spend most of their time teaching to their young charges. Ms Strauss-Giolitto's expertise in that field will also be of considerable use to the mission."

"Do we have to respond to this bot?" said Strauss-Giolitto angrily to Lan Yi.

The out-of-Taiwanese looked offended. "I told you, he is a friend of mine. He is making conversation, although sometimes I suspect his conversation is not just idle. Why can't you be courteous to him?"

A yellow butterfly landed on Pinocchio's shoulder, flapped its wings for a moment or two, then fluttered away.

"Be courteous to a machine? Why should I be?"

"He's a very clever machine," said Lan Yi.

"And I brew excellent coffee," added Pinocchio.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he were as clever as, for example, you," Lan Yi continued.

"I doubt it," said Pinocchio. "Ms Strauss-Giolitto has an IQ of"—his head buzzed again—"one hundred and eighty-four plus or minus ten. I am a mere valetbot, so that I do not require an IQ higher than several decades less than that."

"You've kept telling me so," said Lan Yi, "but you've taken three games of chess off me."

"You were playing badly at the time."

They'd been walking for quite a while, yet still didn't seem to be much closer to the cabins at the Santa Maria's far end.

"Look, can I just get a word in edge—?" began Strauss-Giolitto.

"No. You can shut up," said Lan Yi, rounding on her suddenly, holding up his hand, palm towards her, so that instinctively she stopped walking.

"I really don't think—" Pinocchio said.

"And you can shut up for a moment or two as well, my friend," said Lan Yi. His face had become pale. Strauss-Giolitto had the sudden impression that the scientist had grown taller than herself.

"There are going to be fewer than fifty of us on this ship for the next thirty years or longer, perhaps very much longer," said Lan Yi, "and we are going to have to learn to rub along together somehow. Since we left the shuttle a few minutes ago you have beefed about Captain Strider—whom you have never even met—and now you are being directly insulting to a being who, while he is not organic, is nevertheless a sentient creature and a valued friend of mine. You were insulting to me when I remarked on the fact that you were physically beautiful. I don't know what chip it is that you have on your shoulder, Ms Strauss-Giolitto, but could you get rid of it, please?"

He stared up at her, his dark eyes very hard.

She could probably have clubbed him to the ground with a single swing of her arm, but of course she didn't.

"I am amazed you got through the screening procedures," said Lan Yi. "You seem like an atavism. I will make a point of observing you during the next three years and if necessary recommending to Strider that she send you back to Mars before we leave Jovian orbit."

Strauss-Giolitto felt the blood drain from her lips. "You'd get me thrown off the mission?" she said.

"Too damnably right," said Lan Yi. "I might have children during this voyage. You are a teacher. I do not want them to be taught your ghastly little prejudices."

"What makes you think Strider would listen to you?" said Strauss-Giolitto.

"Oh, you really do have a lot to learn, Ms Strauss-Giolitto," said Lan Yi. "Come on, Pinocchio. Let us get to the cabins. Let this stupid individual come along behind, unless she would prefer to find herself lost out here rather than follow a mere bot and a wrinkled old man."

As soon as Lan Yi was alone in his cabin he threw himself down on the forcefield futon and stretched out on his back, his arms outreached behind his head with his thumbs locked together, his feet tensed so that his toes pointed towards the opposite wall. His body was over a hundred years old and felt as good as it ever had.

On his secondary retinal screen he could see that Pinocchio was returning to the main ingress aperture, ready to wait for the next brace of incoming personnel.

The cabins had small windows so that enough light came in from the daylight-simulator for most things. There were blinds that would mute the light and automated curtains to shut it out entirely. Lan Yi had been in worse quarters. Much worse. His Taiwanese ancestors had luckily been out of the country when the nuke war had annihilated Taiwan alongside mainland China. People elsewhere on Earth often couldn't make the distinction between the descendants of Communist Taiwan and those of the larger, anarchist nation that had once been to its north. On either side of his family tree, Lan Yi had ancestors who had been lynched. He himself had three times during his century-long lifetime—or was it four?—been locked up by the cops for a few nights on the grounds of "suspicion." Maybe that had been, along with their poverty, a part of what had driven his wife Geena to take her life. Once he had come to Mars that type of harassment had stopped; the Martians, blind to physical differences like the epicanthic fold, regarded anyone from Earth as a bit of a lost cause until they had proved themselves otherwise.

Lan Yi was concerned that this blasted teacher might think differently. He blinked at his secondary retinal screen and the scene of the outdoors changed instantaneously, giving him a view through the window into her cabin.

She was kneeling forward on her forcefield futon, with her face in her hands. Her long, mousily blonde hair covered her arms down to her elbows, so that it took a moment or two for him to realize that she was weeping.

He felt like a voyeur, and immediately blinked at his secondary retinal screen once more. The pastoral splendors of the Santa Maria's interior blandly returned again.

The woman regarded bots as by definition second-class citizens. He wondered if, by extension, there were subdivisions of the human species whom she regarded as inherently inferior to herself. He hoped this were not the case—otherwise he would indeed fulfil his threat to have Strider pitch Strauss-Giolitto off the mission at the first possible opportunity. But he didn't feel very good about himself for having invaded her privacy.

Wearily, he realized that he probably ought to take her under his wing. If she carried on behaving this way, no one else would.

He cued his musibot to play some Bach. Pure Bach, not a melding with another composer, was what he desired right now. The fifth Brandenburg Concerto was exactly what was needed to soothe him.

"We have it!" yelled Strider ten days later. The amalgamate fibre linking the eighth of the eight tugs to the Santa Maria had attained full tension. "Yahey!"

"Are you reporting that we have achieved A-73 status, Captain Strider?" said Dulac in her temporary commlink. He sounded amused.

"Aw, come on, Alphonse, you know what I'm talking about."

"I was joking, Leonie," he said. Over the past year the two hadn't become friends, but, as with O'Sondheim, their working relationship was more or less OK. "Congratulations on a successful manoeuvre."

It would be another couple of hours before the tugs started pulling the Santa Maria clear of Phobos. First it was essential that the amalgamate fibers be fully tested; later on, during the slow trip to Jupiter, it wouldn't matter too much if one of them broke, but there could be a disaster if one did so in the first few minutes.

Even the tugs represented something of an achievement for human technology. Their on-board puters would have to make thousands of tiny alterations of trajectory over the next two years as they hauled the spinning Santa Maria to the big gas planet. If one of the puters crashed the other seven would have to compensate immediately; if a second one went down there were going to be difficulties. Those puters were probably a lot more sophisticated than Pinocchio.

"We have some spare time," said Danny O'Sondheim, by her side.

"You can stand down now if you wish to, First Officer," said Strider, her eyes flicking between the viewscreen directly in front of her, on which the tugs and the filaments showed up clearly, and the broad vista of the view-window above it, where they didn't. What the window did show was an amazing panoply of stars. More than anything—more, even, than her final shuttle-trip up from Mars to Phobos—this view persuaded Strider that she really was on her way to Tau Ceti II. Some of the stars she recognized—Aldebaran was winking in its angry orange way off to one side, and Sirius was a bright white flame almost directly ahead—but they were in the minority. On a clear night on Earth you could see several thousand stars, and the classical constellations were reasonably easily distinguishable. On a clear night on Mars you could see tens of thousands of other stars, and it was twice as difficult to pick out the constellations. On Phobos, the heaven was a blaze of stars, most of them faint but together adding up to form curtains of light in which the bright stars of the constellations were almost lost.

"We could both stand down," said O'Sondheim, getting up. "There's nothing for us to do for a while. The Main Computer will monitor the situation as well as we can. Better."

"Don't you think this is exciting?" said Strider, unable to take her gaze away from screen and window and screen and window and screen and . . .

"Yes, of course it is," said O'Sondheim. "But we'll need all our wits about us when the tugs start the Santa Maria moving. Much better if we had a few hours of rest and recreation until we're required here again."

Now Strider did look up at him.

"Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" she said.

"It depends on what you think I'm suggesting," said O'Sondheim.

"Oh, right," said Strider, returning her attention to the starfields. "You want to fetch me a sandwich. Yes, please."