She has never felt a keener sense of her own mortality, but she isn’t terrified. Astronauts circled the globe without their pulse or blood pressure changing. Shell read all the telemetry from the Apollo missions as a child, and she knows Neil Armstrong’s pulse better than her own. Her IFC glows with her own vital signs. She cycles through the rest of her crew and sees Fin struggling with tachycardia. She wonders if they’re going to have to sedate him.

Finally, exhausted, she sleeps.

Chapter Fifteen

Ragtime: Fin

“We’re due a fifteen-minute break,” says Fin. “Right about now.”

“Mmm,” says Joké.

Fin and Joké have merged tasks. They are inventorying the dry-food packages which are stowed on the walls. She stops, hand hooked into one of the net holes, and she turns to him. They are inches apart and Fin can smell her.

“Are you going to stop?”

Joké wags a finger from side to side. No.

“Why not?”

“Do you know what a zeitgeber is?” she asks. She hasn’t bound her hair, so her braids float about in the microgravity. Each braid seems an independent, living thing and Fin can’t stop staring. Free-floating long hair doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, but what does he know?

“The cutting edge?”

“Uh-uh, that’s zeitgeist. Zeitgeber is what helps humans maintain circadian rhythms. Biorhythms. Light-dark, sleep-wake cycles. Cortisol and shit. You follow?”

“Not really. Sort of.”

She checks something off the list she has. “When you’re planetside, the sun helps you do that. In space, it’s not so reliable. Work schedules help maintain those rhythms and stop us from going nuts. Without proper rhythms, the crew is prone to mistakes. That’s why she’s giving us this work.”

“So Shell’s wasting our time?”

“It’s not a waste of time. She’s being a good captain.”

“But you don’t want to obey her schedule.”

“That’s different. This is a worksheet for humans. I’m not entirely that. I require less sleep.”

“You like her,” says Fin.

“I like everybody,” says Joké. “Shell gets those cute little creases on her forehead when she disagrees with you. Sure, I like her.”

“Nobody likes everybody,” says Fin. “Some people are shitty.”

She sucks her teeth. “Some people are just more difficult to accept than others, and you shouldn’t dislike someone because of their weakness, rather enjoy them for their strengths. Now, Rasheed Fin, what shall we do with your fifteen minutes?”

Fin isn’t exactly sure how it becomes lovemaking, but it does. Fifteen minutes is not quite enough. The logistics and contortions required are considerable but overcome.

Standing room only.

“What do you do on Lagos?” asks Fin. He can’t stop looking at her.

“Um, anything I want. My father’s the governor, don’t you know?” She laughs.

“And so…?”