People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lap pool.  Ann, tall and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and soft.  As usual, he didn't appear to be listening.  She would hit him one day if he didn't watch out.  It was strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it was changing.  She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituted it.  It must make Michel's job as their shrink almost impossible.  Not that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever met.  No doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheists.  But she still thought it was odd he hadn't come by to see her after the accident.

# # #

One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel's end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling; Frank's face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him "It was never like that," and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank's face a mask of pain.  Maya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.

Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chambers.  She went up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely did.  After a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overhead.  Maya came in and started to explain things to her:  there was nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank's mind only, he just wouldn't give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn't her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank's irrational desire, it wasn't her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.

And Nadia listened with a careful show of patience, saying "Da, da," and "I see," and the like, until Maya was lying flat on her back on the floor, crying, and Nadia was sitting on the edge of a chair staring at her, wondering how much of it was true.  And what the argument had really been about.  And whether she was a bad friend to distrust her old companion's story so completely.  But somehow the whole thing felt like Maya covering her tracks, practicing another manipulation.  It was just this:  those two distraught faces she had seen down the tunnel had been the clearest evidence possible of a fight between intimates.  So Maya's explanation was almost certainly a lie.  Nadia said something soothing to her and went off to bed, thinking you already have taken too much of my time and energy and concentration with these games, you cost me a finger with them, you bitch!