“What do you want, Bebe?” she asked warily.

“I need you to tell Eric something for me,” Bebe said.

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“Haven’t you been listening?” the botanist exploded. “He won’t talk to me. Don’t you listen?”

Park said nothing. Bebe, perhaps sensing her displeasure, calmed herself down a little; in meeker tones she said, “Please, could you calm him down? You’re the only one who can.”

Park held back a noise. She was tempted to send Bebe packing, or at least over to Dr. Keller, but from what she could glean from the weeping, it did seem that Holt was agitated about something. And that did fall into the realm of her responsibility—even if matchmaking didn’t. God damn Bebe, she thought. God damn the lies that faces told.

“All right,” she said after a few more minutes of listening to Bebe cry. “Let me go and check on Holt. Stay here.” She pulled on her boots and parka, laboriously worked her gloves onto her fingers.

“He’s in his tent,” Bebe sniffled.

Where else would he be? Park thought irritably. The HERCULES was waiting outside her tent; it straightened its back as she came out, like a soldier saluting a superior. “Come along,” she said, not trusting it to refrain from interrogating Bebe. When they had trudged some distance away, the HERCULES asked, “What’s wrong with her?”

Love, Park thought; or infatuation, or fear of dying in space alone. “She’s just upset,” she said, hoping it would leave it at that. The HERCULES nodded, as if it knew what it meant to be upset, and clunked after her through the snow. Its limbs jerked and twitched like a wind-up toy’s; through the aching rush of arctic air, Park could hear the rotors in its joints squealing and complaining. It needs maintenance, she thought vaguely—she would have to remember who the mechanical engineer in the biodome was. Sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight in her head. That girl Reimi Kisaragi was supposed to be good with robots, wasn’t she?

She reached Holt’s tent, a standard-issue cosmonaut’s shelter stationed at the end of a long row of tents. She paused before the entrance—there was no real way to knock on a tent flap—and said, trying for briskness: “Holt, are you awake?”

“Uh,” he said. “Who is it?”

“It’s Dr. Park. I’d like to speak to you, if you’re free.”

“Oh,” Holt said. Park thought she heard footsteps crunching through the snow behind her; it seemed to her that the HERCULES was pacing in little circles at her back. Holt twitched aside his tent flap and said in a sheepish whisper, “Sorry, Park, but now’s not really a good time . . .”