Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: "Everything is different in a closed system," as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intertribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. "We are not a tribe," Arkady said. "We are the world."

And it was spring. And there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations, in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet. Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.

But she could feel it. No doubt others did as well. Quiet conversations between couples; changes in dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happening. It made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.

And for Maya there were additional problems. She was even more wary than usual of Russian men, because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it herself. Besides, none of them... well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did not like him; and he seemed uninterested. Yeli she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she didn't care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady's. . . on and on like that.