When she arrived there, of course, she spent the star stuff she found to force herself still closer to the ultimate speed.

“No— don’t— look out!”

Margarita Jimenes missed the handhold that would have checked her flight. Scrabbling for it, she struck the bulkhead, caromed, and floundered in air.

“Ad i chawrti!” Boris Fedoroff snorted.

He gauged vectors and launched himself to intercept her. It was not a conscious calculation; that would have been impossibly cumbersome. Like a hunter who aimed for a moving target, he used the skills and multiple senses of his body— angular diameters and shifts, muscle pressures and tensions, kinesthesia, the unseen but exactly known configuration of every joint, the several time derivatives of each of these factors and many more— his organism, a machine created with incomprehensible complexity and precision and, as it soared, beauty.

He had a ways to fly. They were on Number Two deck, well aft near the engine rooms. It was devoted to storage; but a major part of the materials it had held were now fashioned into objects. Where the cargo had been was a cavernous, echoing space, coldly lit, seldom visited. Fedoroff had brought his woman there for some private instruction in free-fall techniques. She was doing miserably in the classes that Lindgren had decreed for groundlubbers.

She spun before him, head lost among loose ringlets, arms and legs and breasts flopping. Sweat oiled her bare skin and broke off in globules that glittered around her like midges. “Relax, I tell you,” Fedoroff called. “The first damn thing you must learn is, ‘Relax.’ ”

He passed within reach and grabbed her at the waist. Linked, the two of them formed a new system that spun on a crazy axis as it drifted toward the opposite bulkhead. Vestibular processes registered their outrage in giddiness and nausea. He knew how to suppress that reaction; and he had given her an antispacesickness pill before the lesson started.

Nevertheless she vomited.

He could do nothing except hold her through their trajectory. The first upheaval caught him by surprise and struck him in the face. Thereafter he clasped her back against belly. His free hand swatted at stinking yellow liquid and gobbets. Inhaled under these conditions, the stuff could choke a person.

When they hit metal, he snatched the nearest support, an empty rack. Hooking an elbow joint in it, he could use both arms to keep her and soothe her. Eventually the dry phase passed too.

“Are you better?” he asked.

She shivered and mumbled, “I want to be clean.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll find a bath. Waithere. Hang on, don’tlet go. I’ll come in a few minutes.” Fedoroff shoved free again.

He must close the ventilators before the splashed foulness got drawn into the ship’s general air system. Afterward he could see about catching it with a vacuum cleaner. He would do that himself. If he detailed another man to this mess, the fellow might do more than resent it. He might start a rumor about—