The fourth floor was where most of the aquaculture was, so there was theoretical danger of drowning. All the tanks were shallow enough for adults to stand in with their heads above water, but most of the children were small enough for it to be a potential hazard. All the families with children lived on the first floor, but of course the kids would be roaming everywhere. The DON'T FEED THE FISH sign gave me an idea. I found Waldo Everest, who confirmed that the fish were fed a measured amount each day, and he agreed to go along with my plan: make the children responsible for actually scattering the feed. So the aquaculture pools would be their workplace, rather than a forbidden 'attractive nuisance.'

I'd never heard of that phrase until Cat used it. Describes some people well.

There were three shallow rice paddies which also were home to thousands of crayfish, not quite big enough for the menu yet. About half the floor area was given over to fast-growing grains, fish food. This floor smelled best to me, a whiff of the sea along with green growing things.

Not many safety hazards other than the fish ponds and some of the harvesting machinery. This was the stairwell where Ami fell and broke her arm, but it wasn't uniquely dangerous.

The elevator was right across from the stairs, 120 meters away, but you couldn't just walk across. The narrow path between the various hydroponic fields zigged and zagged. So we just walked around the sidewalk in front of the living quarters, which on this floor made up half a circumference of apartments, identical in size but with slightly different layouts.

The apartment where Marygay and I lived was right next to the elevator, a privilege of rank that was also a necessary convenience: the control room was directly overhead. I invited Cat in for tea. One apartment was as good as any other, to look over for safety hazards.

Compared to military quarters, the apartments were large. The ship was originally configured to hold 205 people, each one having one room four meters square. So our 150 were well spread out. Twenty-eight couples planned on having one or two children during the voyage, but even so, it wouldn't be especially crowded.

It did feel claustrophobic after our big house in Paxton, with the windows looking out on forest on one side and the broad lake behind. I put holo windows of the lake on the wall of our bedroom, but was thinking we ought to reset them. It looked real but felt false.

'Fire hazard,' I said, putting the kettle on for tea. 'Burn hazard, anyhow.' The two burners were induction heaters, so you'd have to be really trying, to injure yourself.

'You have knives and things,' Cat said. By choice, she didn't have a cooking area in her own place. Marygay and I had brought along enough kitchenware to cook and serve a meal for six, and a cabinet of precious spices and herbs. Up to a certain hour, by our tentative rules, you could go to the kitchen and get a meal's worth of raw materials, rather than show up for chow and have what everyone else was having.

'They say the bathroom's the most dangerous room in the house,' she said. 'Not much to worry about there.' We had a toilet and small sink. Each floor had a shower room and a schedule, and there was a shower by the pool on the common floor.

The teapot chimed and I poured us each a cup, and sat next to her on the couch. I looked around the room critically. Not much to worry about anywhere. You think about accidents at home falls, cuts, burns, exposure to dangerous substances and most of them involve things we don't have here.'

She nodded. 'Balanced by dangers we don't have at home. Like meteorites and life-support failures and the idea of standing on top of tonnes of antimatter.'

'I'll make a note.' We sipped in silence for an awkward minute. 'Did you come along just to ... just because of Marygay?'

She stared at me for a moment. 'Partly. Partly because I knew Aldo wouldn't. It was an unembarrassing way to end the marriage.' She set down her cup. 'I also like the idea of running away, finding a new world. We weren't drafted, you know, in my time. I joined up to see new worlds. Middle Finger was getting pretty small.' She made a wry smile. 'Aldo really liked that. He fell in love with the farm.'

'You're farming here, part time.'

'Exercise. And I do know my root vegetables.'

'I'm glad you came.'

'You are.' It was a question. 'Aldo thought I was chasing after Marygay. Did he talk to you about that?'

'Not in so many words.' But a lot of unsubtle innuendo.

'We do ... I do love her.' Cat was trying to keep a tremble out of her voice. 'But I've been, we've been, sixteen years this way. Just neighbors, close neighbors. I'm content with that.'

'I understand.'

'I don't think you do. I don't think men can.' She picked up her cup with both hands, as if to warm them. 'Maybe that's not fair. I never met a het man until I was on Heaven, my mid-twenties. But the normal men and boys I grew up with always had to do each other. It wasn't serious if you weren't doing. Girls and women, it was different. You loved someone or you didn't. Whether you did each other was not a big deal.'

'Yeah, I guess we were different. It's not het versus home. Women were more sexually aggressive in my time, too. But you were born, what, nine hundred years after I was?'

She nodded. 'I think it was 2880, your style.'

'I don't want to sound like a jealous husband,' I said. 'I know you and Marygay still love each other. It's obvious to anyone who cares.'

'Then let's not worry about it. The lack of Aldo in my life is not going to drive me into her arms. Somebody's, maybe. But I'm as het as you are, remember?'

'Sure.' I did wonder about that how effective or permanent Man's technique actually was. I trusted Cat but did wonder. 'More tea?'

'No, we ought to move along.' She smiled. 'People will start talking about us.'

The third floor, the commons, did have safety problems that hadn't been obvious in zero gee. The carpeting in the cafeteria was old and loose, inviting people with their hands full to trip. There was nothing to replace it with, of course. We pried up a corner and decided the metal deck would be preferable; the dried adhesive was easy to peel off. I'd assemble a work crew in a few days.

We tested most of the apparatus in the fitness room, weight machines and stationary rowing, skiing, and pedaling ones. We looked at the rings and ropes and parallel bars and decided someone else could be the first to have an injury on them.

There were a lot of people already in the pool, including nine of the children. I knew the ship was watching that all day and night. The only people who lived on the commons floor were Lucio and Elena Monet, both expert swimmers with an apartment that overlooked the pool. One of them was always there, and could get to the pool in seconds if the ship sounded an alarm.

The first and second floors were drier versions of the fourth: 95 percent farm, ringed by apartments. The only water hazard was an oyster bed, so shallow you could only drown there in a prone position. (I had resisted activating the bed, which took six months to produce a crop, but was overridden by people who can actually look at an oyster without feeling ill.) Unlike the fourth floor, all of the apartments were one-story, so we didn't even have stairs to worry about.

The area under the first floor was the most dangerous part of the ship, but it was beyond the jurisdiction of the safety inspector and his trusty civil engineer. Seven tonnes of antiprotons seethed there in a glowing ball, held in place by a huge pressor field. If anything happened to the pressors, we would all have about one nanosecond to prepare ourselves for a new existence as highly energetic gamma rays.

Cat volunteered to take charge of the carpet demolition project, and I let her lead it, though I'd become accustomed to the role myself. For ten months, I'd been at the center of everything arguing, coordinating, deciding and now I was just another passenger. With a title and an amorphous job, but not in charge anymore. I had to get used to watching other people do it.

Fifteen.

Marygay was theoretically on duty all the time, but in fact she only spent one eight-hour shift each day actually in the control room. Jerrod and Puiil took the other two shifts.

Their physical presence in the control room was more a psychological, or social, need than an actual one. The ship always knew where all three were and if there was a need for a quick decision, the ship would make it without consulting the humans. Human thought was too slow for emergencies, anyhow. Most of us passengers knew this, but it was comforting to have humans up there anyhow.

She liked studying the controls, a complex maze of readouts, buttons, dials, and so forth, arrayed along a four-meter panel with two two-meter wings. She knew what everything was and did through her ALSC training, the way I knew how to fly a shuttle, but it was good to reinforce that crammed-in expertise with experience and observation in real time.

(One evening I asked her how many bells and whistles she thought there were on those eight meters of control board. She closed her eyes for about five minutes and then said, 'One thousand two hundred thirty-eight.') She chose to be on from 0400 to 1200, so we always met for lunch when she got off. We'd usually throw something together at our place, rather than go down to the 'zoo,' the cafeteria. Sometimes we'd have company. Back on MF we always had lunch with Charlie and Diana on Tuesdays, and saw no reason to change that ritual.

The second week out, I made potato and leek soup, for the first but not the last time we'd be limited, for several months, to the vegetables Teresa and her crew had been able to grow in zero gee. So no tomatoes or lettuce for a few months.

Charlie showed up first, and we sat down to our ongoing chess game. One move apiece, and Marygay and Diana came in together.

Marygay looked at the board. 'You ought to dust that every now and then.'

I gave Diana a kiss. 'How's the doctor business?'

'God, you don't want to know. I spent most of the morning exploring the rectum of one of your favorite people.'

'Eloy?' I knew he had a problem.

She wagged a finger. 'Confidentiality. I noticed a lot of vowels in his name, though.'

Eloy Macabee was a strange abrasive man who called me almost every afternoon with some complaint or suggestion. He was the keeper of the chickens, though, so you had to give him some leeway. (Fish and chickens were the only animals we'd had aboard in zero gee. Fish can't tell the difference and chickens are too dumb to care.) 'Actually, you should know. Both of you,' she said to Marygay as they both sat down at the table. 'We have a small epidemic on our hands.'

I turned up the heat on the soup and stirred it. 'A virus?'

'I wish. A virus would be easy.' Marygay poured coffee. 'Thanks. It's depression. I've treated twenty-some people the last three days.'

'That is an epidemic,' Charlie said.

'Well, people do catch it from each other. And it can be deadly; suicide.'

'But we expected it. Allowed for it,' Marygay said.

'Not so soon, though, nor so many.' She shrugged. 'I'm not worried about it yet. Just puzzled.'

I ladled the soup into bowls. 'Do the victims have anything in common?'

'Unsurprisingly, it's mostly people who don't have real jobs, who aren't involved in the day-to-day running of things.' She took a notebook out of her pocket and tapped a few numbers. 'Just occurred to me ... none of them are veterans, either.'

'Not too surprising either,' Charlie said. 'At least we know what it's like, being cooped up together for years at a time.'

'Yeah,' I said, 'but not ten years. You'll be seeing some of us before long.'

'Good soup,' Marygay said. 'I don't know. I'm feeling more and more comfortable, now that I'm used to...'

'Bill,' I said.

'Yes. Shipboard wasn't the worst part of the war. This is like "old home week," as we used to say. But without Taurans to worry about.'

'One,' Diana said. 'But it's really no problem, not yet.'

'Keeps to itself.' I hadn't seen it five times.

'It must be lonely,' Marygay said. 'Separated from its group mind.'

'Who knows what goes through their heads.'

'Throats,' Diana said.

I knew that. 'Just an expression.' I made the kissing sound for the ship. 'Continue Mozart.' Soft strains of a lute being chased by woodwinds.

'He was German?' Diana said.

I nodded. 'Maybe Prussian.'

'He was still being played in our time. It sounds strange to my ear, though.'

I called the ship again. 'How much of your music comes from before the twentieth century?'

'In playing time, about seven percent. In titles, about five percent.' 'Good grief. Only one out of twenty I can listen to.'

'You ought to sample the others,' Charlie said. 'Classicism and romanticism return in cycles.'

I nodded, but kept my opinion to myself. I had sampled a few centuries. 'Maybe we should switch jobs around. Give the depressed people something significant to do.'

'Could help. We wouldn't want to be too obvious about it.'

'Sure,' Marygay said. 'Put dysfunctional people in all the important positions.'

'Or put them in suspended animation,' Charlie said. 'Table the problem for forty thousand years.'

'Don't think I haven't considered asking for that.'

'We couldn't just tell everybody there's a problem?' I said. 'They're intelligent adults.'

'In fact, two of the patients are children. But no; I think that would cause even more depression and anxiety.

'The problem is that depression, and anxiety for that matter, are both behavioral problems and biochemical ones. But you don't want to treat a short-term problem by altering a person's brain chemistry. We'd wind up with a ship full of addicts. Including the four of us.'

'The mad leading the mad,' Charlie said.

'Ship of fools,' Marygay said.

I kissed for the ship and asked, 'If we all went insane, would you be able to carry out the mission?'

'Some of you are already insane, though perhaps my standards are too high. Yes, if the captain so ordered, I could lock the controls and conduct the mission without human mediation.'

'And if the captain were insane?' Marygay asked. 'And the two co-captains?'

'You know the answer to that, Captain.'

'I do,' she said quietly, and took a sip of wine. 'And you know what? I find it depressing.'

Sixteen.

The next day, we had something more depressing to worry about than depression.

I was in my office on the common floor, doing the flunky job of tallying people's requests for various movies for afternoon and evening showings. Most of them I'd never heard of. Two people asked for A Night to Remember and Titanic, which would do wonders for morale. Space icebergs. Hadn't worried about them in days.

The Tauran appeared at my door. I croaked a greeting at it, and glanced at my watch. Five minutes later and I would have escaped to lunch.