There’s a kind of art to situating yourself in weightlessness. The cheese, crackers, wine, and book were all hovering within an arm’s length. As long as I was careful in picking things up and replacing them, I wouldn’t have to chase them down. Carmen and Paul did it automatically, with months of experience, but I still had to think things through and move with caution.

While I hovered contemplating this and Vermeer’s faces, I gently collided with the bookcase. The cheese and wine and book all inched toward me. I was disoriented for a moment, then realized that Paul had begun turning the iceberg around. My satellite objects and I weren’t attached to anything, but our frame of reference was moving fast enough to go through a half circle in, what, thirty hours? This seemed faster than that. I’d ask the notebook later.

The cheese wasn’t bad, considering. The “wine” was pure plonk, but better than nothing.

So we were one- quarter of the way to the next wine shop or liquor store. That put the trip into a certain perspective. Or maybe halfway to dying, which put it into another.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Carmen had drifted up behind me, stopped herself with a toe to the wall. “We’ve started moving,” she said, her face at my level but sideways.

“Just noticed.” I handed her the wine bottle, and she squeezed a dash of it into her mouth, from an impressive distance.

“Owe you one. What about our silent partner?”

I looked over toward the other lounge, and he wasn’t there anymore. “I’ll wait and see. One swallow does not make a spring.”

I offered her the cheese and crackers, but she waved them away. “I gain weight in zero gee just thinking about food.”

That made me smile. “Weight?”

“Mass, inertia, whatever. Turns into weight.” She looked back to where Moonboy had been. “You’re not . . . not too sympathetic.”

“Aside from the fact that he broke my wife’s nose? That he’s acting like a sullen child?” She made a helpless shrug. I tried to choose my words carefully. “His madness, or behavior, is not his fault; I understand and agree with that. He was treated abominably as a child, and I wish his father could be punished for that.”

“Stepfather.”

“If this were a military operation, he would no longer be part of it. We can’t leave him behind or send him back—”

“Or kill him,” she said quietly.

“No. But we could lock him up. Take him out of the equation.”

“That would destroy him, Namir.”

“I believe it would. But his is one life versus billions.”

She shook her head. “If I could wave a magic wand and make him disappear, I would. But imprisoning him would affect us as well as him.”