Chapter 28

Something hot and rough and stinking swiped across his face. For a moment he was a child again, being kissed by the dogs. But he was choking, blind and strangling, his mouth stopped with taffy. He spat out the mouthful and dragged in a double lungful of razor-like air, air that was both scalding and frosty at the same time and freighted with the stench of chemicals and bad meat.

He pawed at his obstructed eyes, and something seemed to fall away. A tiny dark face swam blurrily into view. “How do you feel, Titus?” Captain Agadja demanded in cheerful carillon tones.

“Dam’ fuckin’ horrible.” His tongue felt thick and wide as a boot sole. But once loosened, the billingsgate seemed to flow more easily. He swore steadily, without heat and without thought, as the room teetered around him.

“That’s right, up like this while I take the tube out,” Gin said. The tall doctor looked just like he remembered her, plain Jane and no nonsense with her long chestnut braids. Her large strong hands in their surgical gloves probed him intimately. “What’s he saying, El? I can’t recognize half the words.”

Captain Agadja supported his lolling head with one gloved hand and her black machine with the other. “Wasn’t I forethoughty, to have Dr. Lash’s old vocabulary list loaded on? They aren’t over and above profane, just old. Have a look.”

“Holy gee!” Gin glanced from the screen to his face, rolling her eyes with not entirely mock respect. “I’m warning you, pal. That had better be nothing cognitive, but just the initial loosening of inhibitions. Now up we go...”

They hoisted him painfully up, the two women staggering and slipping under his greater weight. The squelching and squishing as his legs worked loose was like a water buffalo wallowing out of a mudhole. And Christ alive, he was stark naked. He only had to reel a step or two, and then they lowered him onto a seat in a small space. “Drink this.” Gin pushed a straw between his cracked lips. The rush of sweet fluid into his throat was like the surge of some drug into his veins. The world steadied and focused palpably.

Then a hard jet of hot water hit him on the crown of the head. It was like red-hot talons digging into his scalp. He sputtered and cursed, too weak to fight them off as they scrubbed him down all over with bath mitts and loofah, and then hosed him off like a puppy under the pump. But he forgot his ire when Gin gave him another sip of drink. “Jesus bleeding Christ,” he slurred, “you needn’t be so stingy!”

“Yes I do, unless I want you to puke. You just let your Aunt Ginny manage everything. Now, can you stand?”

He could, with support on either side. They tied a towel around his middle and sat him at a familiar table, the galley table in the Cloudy Sun. Then he had made it — survived the months of coldsleep and the inconceivable journey faster than light to Tau Ceti. He could have shouted for joy, except that he was so abominably hungry and thirsty. The sight of Captain Agadja taking a steaming bowl out of the microwave made him grin so broadly the skin on his cheeks cracked and flaked.

“A good appetite is a healthy sign at this stage,” Gin said. “And while El works you through the feeding timetable I’ll take care of this.”

She hoisted his left foot up into her trousered lap and began to trim the nails, which were more than an inch long and probably accounted for some of his difficulty in walking. Titus had no time to be uncomfortable with these attentions, because the Captain thrust a spoonful of grey pap into his mouth. It was the nectar of the gods. Strength and will seemed to flow into his body. He swallowed it down and looked for more. To his dismay she set the bowl aside. “Okay, let’s run through some of the cognitive tests.”

“The devil you say! On nothing but a single scrappy spoonful of nourishment?”

“Don’t you remember your training?” Gin said. “Revving your system up too fast will make you sick.”

 Titus dimly recalled that bit. There was a timetable for nourishment. But surely such petty rules were a concession to weakness, and ought not to apply to him. The Captain put a little machine before him and demanded, “Who’s this?”

Titus curbed his raging appetite and reluctantly focused on the antique black-and-white photograph on the screen. “My sister Lilian, of course. Damn silly hat.”

“And this?”

“Mag and Miranda. She’s got that costumed historical photography look down a fair treat, wouldn’t you say? It looks just as old as Lilian’s. I could do with another drink.”

“In another minute. Oh, here’s a pretty one — what a glorious animal!”

“Diablo, my trail horse. Ripping brute, huge deep chest and any amount of leg bone — goes all day. I chose him myself, but Nat boards him in the winters.”

The Captain passed over the drink packet, and gave the doctor a nod. “He’s going to do great, Gin, you think?”

“A perfect recovery,” Gin agreed. “Have a look at yourself, Titus. You want me to take a stab at cutting your hair and beard, or do we stand pat?”

She nodded at the highly-polished metal door of the food storage module on the other side of the table. Titus stared at his reflection with revulsion. He was blanched like an almond and peeling like a sycamore, large flakes of dead skin curling and crackling all over his scarecrow body. He must have lost a stone in weight, and his dark hair and beard hung wet and lank, so long that the threads of grey at temples and chin were distressingly noticeable. “Christ! Carry on straight away.”

Gin obligingly produced a shaver and a hand vac. “I got in plenty of VR practice with haircuts during the trip.” The Captain’s machine peeped a reminder, and she spooned another gob of the ambrosial gruel into his mouth.

“‘m I the first?”

“The first revenant? You sure are,” the captain said. “You were the marginally the riskiest coldsleep candidate, with all that cloning work. We wanted to know the worst right away.”

“Angels!” Again the rush of food entering the system was narcotic. He beamed at the two women. Beautiful creatures, both of them, nosegays of every virtue. Supremely competent explorers too, since the two of them had lived through every day of the eighteen-month FTL voyage so far without fuss. Scott and Amundsen could do no better. Resurrection always made him even more bloody susceptible than usual. If only El wasn’t so close-fisted with that bowl!

Gin was clipping near the nape of his neck, filling the air with the burnt smell of lasered hair and the whoosh of the little vac that picked up the shorn bits. The captain was scrolling her machine to the next item in the revival programme with one hand, and using the other to unseal another drink packet. No one would baulk him. Titus had always had a fine boarding-house reach. In one lightning lunge he hooked the bowl and wolfed down three spoonfuls. Gin yelped, “Hey!”

“Titus, stop that!” The captain snatched the spoon away. “You idiot, you’re going to give yourself a bellyache!”

Titus didn’t care, but it would not do to say so to one’s commanding officer. Instead he grinned idiotically down at his bare limbs. The difference between the cloned replacements and the standard-issue equipment was quite visible. His hands and forearms peeled up in swatches the size of playing cards, while his shoulders and chest merely flaked like snow. He worried free a piece of abused epidermis from the back of one wrist and held it up to the light. It was nearly transparent and when released drifted amusingly on the draft from the ventilation grille.

Gin crossly inhaled it into the nozzle of her vac. “We had better get him into a bunk. In ten minutes he won’t be able to walk, from cramps.”

“What a damn stupid thing to do,” the Captain growled. “You were warned about this!”

“Dashed if I can recall, after all these months,” Titus said jauntily, as they jockeyed him to his feet. The bunk area had been a storeroom during the voyage, the narrow bunks folded up into the wall. The Captain kicked one free and it sighed downwards into place, all made up and ready for him.

“In you go, sweetie.” Gin lifted his feet up.

The Captain dragged the covers up to his chin. “Tomorrow you can harness some of that effervescence, and help us uncork the others.”

Titus considered demanding a good-night kiss. Then a dull knife seemed to twist in his middle. “Christ on a crutch,” he groaned.

Gin had a heat pack ready. She broke it open, remarking, “I know it seems crazy to wake up from coldsleep and then go right back to bed again, but you’ll feel miles better afterwards. Now drink this.”

If only it was brandy! But it was just more sugary fluid. He couldn’t remember whether he’d brought a flask. Surely if one could learn anything from the debacle in Antarctica, it was to always carry brandy! He’d look into it tomorrow...

* * * * *

Life for Titus had fallen into a regular if rather fraught rhythm. It began when he selected a difficult and dangerous task and had at it — fighting Boers, or sledging to the South Pole, or learning the ropes in the 21^st century. Sooner or later the danger ratcheted to a point where disaster struck. Physical calamity never failed to ensue, but cost what it might he always won through. And once through the agony of recovery, it was blissful sailing, the world alive with light. Until the next project hove into view, of course.

He had now come to this happy stage of the process. After eleven refreshing hours of sleep, he rose as hungry as wolves. Another packet of juice waited for him on the little shelf beside the bunk. Draining this gave him the strength to stagger down the hallway into the common room. Horrified, Captain Agadja set her cup of coffee down. “You aren’t supposed to be up!”

“Can’t sleep — I’m starving. Am I still on this sodding revenant diet, or may I have bacon and eggs?”

“Start in on this, and I’ll ask Gin when she wakes up.”

It was a different gruel this time, chunkier and studded with bits of fruit. He scraped the entirely inadequate bowl clean and demanded tea. “And toast. And marmalade. That’s an invalid diet!”

“The food constituter doesn’t have marmalade in its program. Give it half an hour, Titus, please? Let your body adapt. If you have so much vim, go start your physical regimen, and walk down the corridor.”

This pathetic activity seemed hardly worthy of the name, but Titus found that his unused limbs could scarcely bear him that far. The corridor wound helically round the inside skin of the cylindrical ship, canted at an angle so that it always felt ‘down.’ As a result the end of the corridor seemed to retreat tantalizingly around the curve. Titus set his teeth and slogged on, forcing his shaky legs to drive forwards against the artificial gravity induced by the ship’s spin. It was perhaps two hundred yards to the control room at the far end. He collapsed into one of the console chairs with voiceless relief, turning away from the incomprehensible controls of the FTL drive and the weird black blankness outside the viewports. Of their own accord his eyelids drooped. He was brought forcibly out of his exhausted doze by the sputter of the speaker: “Titus! Are you there? Are you all right?”

This bit of tech he knew. He hit the button. “Yes, right as a trivet. I’m just resting before hiking back.”

“You weren’t supposed to go so far! Don’t move — Gin’s on the way.”

Carefully he released the button before snarling, “Nursemaids!” But when Gin appeared with more food and drink he did not disdain it. “When is this bit over? I despise being an invalid.”

Gin held a medical sensor to his wrist. “That’s obvious, the way you push yourself. But your metabolism’s doing great. You can start in on regular food, and just progress at your own breakneck pace. Not that you weren’t going to anyway.”

“Thank you.” Dropping the sardonic tone, he added, “Your medical science is so dazzling, one begins to expect continual miracles.”

“It’s no miracle any more. The odds of an uneventful coldsleep revival are better than a hundred to one. You think you’d be up for helping to unzip another crewmate this afternoon?”

“Delighted to. I’m anxious to pull my weight.”

“So am I. El is a bit too short to be any good at hauling wet bodies over to the shower.”

The prospect of useful labour was so attractive that Titus surged to his feet. “When do we start?”

His strength returned with every meal and every step. Titus felt nearly himself again when they crowded into the narrow coldsleep bay. This space was an alcove off the common room, not much wider than a big bathtub. The coldsleep pods were cycled out one by one, extruding from the chilly dark like crusted old tawny rising on a dumbwaiter from the wine cellar. “Who’s next?”

“Lin, then Dio, then Freddy.” Gin consulted her machine. “And here he comes. How’s the readout looking, El?”

The captain frowned at the display panel. “Thought you initiated the revival sequence.”

“I did — you were watching me. Why? What do the numbers say?”

“They haven’t budged.”

“Funny...Well, his metabolism should be coming back up. Once we unzip him we can run the diagnostic program.”

The hydraulics hummed as the pod rose up and slid out. Titus had seen this process before on the training videos. It struck him now how clever the moderns were, calling them pods. To call the clear plastic trays coffins would never do, nor the thick plastic bag within a shroud. In the film the bag had been clear too, the sleeper within dimly visible inside the matrix of gel. This one was darker, nearly black —

“Oh my God, no!” Gin cried, at the same moment that the captain said, “Quick, get him out of there!”

Gin stared in horror at the control panel. “Wait, El, until I — “

But the captain’s small dark hands were too quick, darting to the zipper fastening. The bag split open like a baked potato, and greenish-black slurry gushed out over the table, the floor, and their feet. A thick hot miasma of liquefying meat steamed up into their faces. As the rotting gel slumped away, a bloated pallid hand was revealed, lying limply on top of a grotesquely distorted torso.

The women screamed. Titus jumped back swearing, his stomach turning right over with a flop in his belly. They all three clapped their hands over nose and mouth against the stench, and with one accord retreated to the far end of the room by the holo wall. “What the hell, what the hell went wrong?”

Gin pushed her braids behind her ears and wiped tears and sweat from her face, without result since she continued weeping. “Oh Jesus. Poor Lin. Oh Jesus.”

Captain Agadja shuddered like an overdriven engine, with rage more than horror. “Was it the coldsleep unit? Could they have put him under wrong? Why the hell didn’t the system warn us something was going sour? Heads are going to roll for this! Gin, you’re the medical officer! You should have been able to prevent this!”

Titus curled up in the corner around his nausea and swallowed convulsively. Jesus, he had known Lin! He had got into the condescending habit of assuming that exploration in this era was safe. Certainly nothing had been easier than traveling this far, dreaming snugly in his plastic sleeping bag. Now the journey was revealed to be as perilous as any sledge trek across the sea ice. The past came back to him in a rush: their close windowless quarters the sole haven from peril, the inescapable intimacy with one’s fellows, even to some extent the fuggy atmosphere.

Yes, even the sound of quarreling! The cat-fight Gin and the captain were now embroiled in was exactly the sort of pointless and unproductive brangle that sprang up between people immured together for years on end. And, good God! Suppose the entire hibernation apparatus was on the fritz, and he was the only survivor of coldsleep? He had made the transition from the all-male expeditions of his day to mixed groups, but to spend half a decade or so alone with two women would be impossible from every point of view. Time to intervene — tuppence worth from a third party frequently spun a timeworn quarrel into a more useful direction. “Captain,” he cut in. “What about the other sleepers?”

“Dear god.” Captain Agadja’s eyes grew wide.

“The readout says they’re fine,” Gin said.

“The readout has lied like Ananias,” Titus pointed out.

“We have to check,” the captain agreed. “But first...”

There was no need to discuss it. The grotesque remains of poor Lin had to be tidied up, the rotting gel scraped up and the entire revival apparatus scrubbed down before any other crew member could be thawed. Gin issued gloves and masks, the captain turned the air circulators on full blast, and they set to it. The grisly work took the rest of the day. Titus told himself that he’d seen worse in war, but was unable to persuade himself. If he’d survived Antarctica to go with his regiment into the trenches of the First World War, perhaps it might be so. Strange to have left at least two certain deaths in his past! He had caught up on the history books, and knew that, in common with almost the entire British officer corps of the time, once in the Great War, former explorer Major L.E.G. Oates would have been gassed or blown to glory by 1918.

When cleanup was done, the three of them agreed that no more tragedy could be faced today. “One more day won’t make any difference now,” Captain Agadja said. “We’re all exhausted emotionally and physically. And Titus has got to eat something.”

His gorge rose at the idea, but Titus knew she was right. And it would do the other two good too — women found comfort in feeding people. “Let’s get out of this fug and picnic in the control room,” he suggested. They gathered up some meals and decamped. Hardly any miasma of decay had penetrated down the long corridor. There were three pilot chairs, but they were bolted in front of each console, and it was cozier to sit in a corner on the floor. Somehow it was important to be close, knee to trousered knee, within reach of each other — Titus found the military flavour of their standard-issue trousers, blue with a white side stripe, particularly soothing. Appetites were poor, but everyone pretended to eat.

“Talk to us, Titus, for God’s sake,” the captain said. “Gin and I have said everything there is to say to one another. We’ve been dying for a fresh face.”

An unlucky choice of words — Titus forced from mind the image of poor Lin’s leaden face. “I can’t converse,” he said in dismay. “Give me something to talk about.”

“I found your personal kit,” Gin said. “Here.” She passed him the box.

Both women watched with unabashed curiosity as he opened it. “Ah, my pipe!”

“You’re not going to smoke that thing?”

“Why not? The cabin circulation is going full blast. Not only shall I smoke, I’ll teach you ladies. Nothing like tobacco smoke to kill odour, you know.”

“And you did bring a gun! I didn’t really believe you’d do it.”

“The others had better have as well, or we’ll be damned short of firepower. And my watch.” He put the revolver back and slid the timepiece out of its velveteen bag. Of course it was silent, having gone unwound for eighteen months, but when he set it to ship’s time and wound it the fat comfortable tick commenced again.

Gin touched the gold chain with a reverent finger. “This is the watch. You have your nerve, not leaving it in a museum.”

The captain weighed the timepiece in her hand. “It’s downright eerie. I’m holding a watch that Scott held. What would he think if he could see it now!”

For an eyeblink Titus saw the entire tableau as Scott would have viewed it — two indecent females roistering with the sadly-degenerate captain of a smart cavalry regiment in a steel and black glass room! The picture made him laugh. “Well, if you care to be pedantic, I don’t believe Scott ever touched the thing — it’s mine, after all. I’ve traveled so far with the watch that leaving it behind seemed a pity. It’s the only item I brought for pure sentiment. Look now, smoking works like this.” It was his favorite briar, the London one with the amber mouthpiece, and he had taken care to bring a good supply of pipe tobacco and matches. He packed tobacco into the bowl and struck a match one-handed. “You can’t think, the queer places I’ve smoked.”

“This has to be one of the oddest.” Captain Agadja sniffed the large plastic-wrapped packet of tobacco. “What a bale you’ve brought.”

He drew on the pipe, pressing the ball of his heat-calloused thumb down into the bowl until the tobacco should be well lit. “I calculate I have five years’ worth, at one pipeful a day. All right Ginny, it’s caught nicely. Your turn.”

Gin took the pipe reluctantly. “Won’t it make me sick, like Huck Finn? I already barfed twice today.” She took too deep a puff and began to cough.

“Then you shall have some brandy. I’ll wager there’s none in your medical supplies, so I brought my own.”

“Is that the bottle? What a demon of corruption you are, Titus. Absolutely dissolute.” With the tips of her fingers the captain balanced the pipe between her lips and drew in a fastidious sip of smoke.

“What PTICA doesn’t know will never hurt it.” He felt like a schoolboy at Eton again, experimenting with cigarettes and booze out behind the boathouse.

Gin waved the pipe away. “That’s really too antique. And so unhealthy! You should see Shell’s reports.”

“May I indeed?”

He had never glimpsed those records, the accounts of his thawing and rehabilitation, and today was not going to be the day. “That’s the only way we can keep the upper hand on you,” Gin said, grinning. “Like the way she tipped us off about your danger word.”

“A danger word — I? I’m meek as a mouse and gentle as a dove. What is it?”

Both women hooted at the idea. “It’s your word,” the captain said. “You figure it out. Smoking’s not for me either. I’m more interested in that flask. How much brandy did you bring?”

“Nowhere near enough, I’m certain. Find some cups, and we’ll see how it survived the trip.” Damn it, another unfortunate turn of phrase. In another moment he’d be talking of adipocere! He took the bull by the horns. “We can drink a toast to poor Lin.”

The captain stared sadly into her drink when he passed it over. “Lin was going to be First Officer,” she sighed.

Gin said, “I’ve been thinking about that. If it was just him — if Lin had a heart attack or something — the rest of the crew should come up smiling. After all we have Titus here, to prove that the coldsleep systems are go.”

“A comforting thought. To Lin then, and no heeltaps.”

Gin whispered across to the captain, “What’s a heeltap?”

“Beats me!”

“Watch, then.” The plastic cups were a little bigger than shot glasses. Titus knocked his back in one gulp.

“To Lin, poor dear.”

“Yes, to Lin.”

“You’ll make cavalry officers yet.” The warmth of the spirit spread pleasantly through his middle and threaded its heat into each vein. How inconceivable it would have been in 1912, for a gentleman to teach a pair of respectable women to drink and smoke!

He leaned back pipe in hand, watching the brandy make its impact. The deep parentheses round the captain’s lilac-blossom mouth eased a little, while Gin’s fresh complexion flushed even pinker. Surely she was not going to become maudlin on two fingers of brandy. She was saying, “ — he was marginally a risk. Childhood episode of asthma. If only we could get the cadaver to the coldsleep research center in Beijing! I’d feel so much less guilty if I knew what caused it.”

The captain said, “He’s in the deep freeze now, and eventually we’ll get him home and they’ll deal with it. Remember, Gin, it’s still one out of a hundred that doesn’t revive. Do you remember his wife? Poor woman. She was at the Christmas party. She had the cutest shoes...”

Girl talk! Titus topped off everyone’s cup. A pity to sink the entire flask in one evening, but he had never held with half measures. And he liked the way the tension and grief was easing. An argument for stocking every starship with potable spirits...

“I want to know!” Gin was saying. One of her thick chestnut-brown braids was undoing itself, and her colour was deepening from pink to scarlet. “Cycle one pod up, just to look. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the color of Lin’s bag.”

“I’d sleep better myself, knowing,” the captain admitted. “Well, why not? We don’t have to initiate the revival sequence until tomorrow. Come on, Titus. Bring your pipe, and we’ll find out about that odor-killing idea too.”

“Isn’t it a little late to — “ But the two of them were off, back down the helical corridor. Dutch courage! He scrambled to his feet and followed. At least he was well-seasoned enough to be steady on his pins — wasn’t he? The floor seemed oddly uneven, as if the mechanisms that kept it exactly perpendicular to the thrust of gravity were askew. “You two are a little squiffy for meddling with coldsleepers!”

“We’re just going to look,” Gin repeated. “I won’t be able to sleep unless we do.”

“With the brandy you’ve drunk, you’ll sleep like a top,” Titus argued, to no avail. He was a little well-sprung himself, dash it!

The common room still stank horribly of mortality. He had half-expected it to be dark, because it was night. But of course in this starship perpetual day reigned, and night came only if one turned out the lights. All the lights here blazed like noon. Flushed but only a little unsteady, Gin fussed with the control panel. Captain Agadja blinked muzzily at Titus. “Is your pipe still lit?”

“Here. I’ve corrupted you.”

She drew on it. “We won’t tell, if you won’t. Here it comes. Who you got, Gin?”

“My good buddy Dio. Oh God, I hope he’s all right. That everyone’s all right. We can only look for a moment.”

The hydraulics murmured, and the pod slid out onto the table. It had not gone through the warming and reviving cycle, so a biting cold radiated from box and bag. The color of the bag contents was blessedly pale, not dark. And there, pressed upwards against the milky clear plastic, was a grayish-pink bulge. “His arse,” Titus exclaimed with relief, before he could catch the vulgarity back.

“Yow!” The captain jumped with joy — had the gravity allowed she would certainly have turned a somersault.

“Oh, thank heaven!” Gin hit the controls, and the pod slid back into the cool dark until tomorrow. She burst into noisy tears. “It’s all right. They’re all going to be all right.”

“I couldn’t have borne it, being alone with you two,” Titus admitted magnanimously. His handkerchief was back in the kit, so he offered Gin his sleeve. Without ceremony she hugged him instead, so hard that his ribs creaked. She topped him by three inches, which allowed her to blot her nose on his head and envelop him in the cloud of her falling hair. Captain Agadja startled him stupid by leaping on him from the other side, and shinning up his body like a cat. Firmly she seized his chin and kissed him full on the mouth. It seemed only reasonable to take some of her weight with his arm.

And there he was, three sheets in the wind and clasping a tipsy female snugly in each arm. So inconceivably far from civilization, there was nothing to bind or hold him. Lurid and fiery paths seemed to open out before his feet: passion, seduction, even rape. Who could tell with modern women? They might applaud the idea, perhaps even propose a threesome, so luscious were they, so different, so — the only word was fuckable! Though the mind had slept months away, the body knew well that it had gone years without food — or sex. Desire made his breath short and drew a dark blood-coloured veil over his vision.

He released both women, sliding the captain to the ground and allowing the taller Gin to collapse cross-legged onto the floor. “Bloody hell, it’s impossible,” he growled. If there was anything he’d learned, it was that a man carried his self with him, history and past and culture and yes, standards, through time and space. Some things were bred in the bone. Iron self-control was as natural to him as breathing.

Besides, these were not casual acquaintances, but companions, fellow explorers, and the captain was his superior officer to boot. A dash up the Channel was simply not on. Women were a perpetual cause of trouble! “It’s all this sodding equality nonsense to blame. We never had these problems on the Polar Expedition.” Gin blinked at him, and he noticed he was sitting on the floor beside her. He added hastily, “We froze to death fair and square in the traditional manner on glaciers, instead of in coldsleep.”

Gin began to giggle immoderately. “How much brandy have you had, Titus?”

He was fairly confident Gin had swallowed the whisker, but Captain Agadja was cursedly observant. “Maybe it’s time to call it a night,” she said. “A lot to do, tomorrow.”

Her voice sounded like woodwinds, or harps, or whatever those musical instruments were — jolly attractive. “Sleeping it off is just the ticket. Do we have to help you to your bunk, Ginny?”

“Yup,” she said cheerily.

“It’s not done, to loose your moorings on a mere two glasses of brandy.” But when he tried to help haul her upright Titus reeled himself. That coldsleep completely thrashed one’s tolerance for brandy was possibly an entirely new discovery, to be noted in the annals of science. In the end they all three tottered down the corridor arm in arm. Gin was half-cut and well into the rubbery-limbed stage now, and was easily crammed into her bunk where she rolled over and began to snore.

This left him alone with his commanding officer. He was dimly horrified to hear himself asking, “Are there regulations these days, about fraternization?”

She frowned. “Huh? I left my palmtop in the other room. Could you explain?”

The devil was in it, that he absolutely could not — that is, if he had the right word and fraternization really did refer to inter-crew sex. He was sufficiently hot-blooded, and yet also sufficiently defective at reading the modern woman’s availability, that all females not decidedly unavailable hovered in an ill-defined and shifting cloud of possibility. How much easier it had been when all a man had to do was look for the wedding ring! Modern life was a continuous haze of sexual confusion — he had married Elizabeth to get out of it. And he had never learnt the elaborate ins and outs of pursuit. From Shell onwards, the role of the pursued had fully met his needs — masterful, indeed! Where did they find this codswallop? In fact in this uninhibited era, more often than not he’d been forced to carve his way through a thundering horde of women flinging themselves at his head.

This was as close as he had ever come to asking — brandy applied to a constitution undermined by coldsleep was obviously to blame. Instantly he sheered off, sputtering. “Monogamy, that’s the ticket. Not going to lay a finger on any of you. Those knights of the Round Table, you know — love one only, and jolly well cleave to her.”

She laughed. “You have plenty of reasons to keep your screen clear right now. But a girl can dream.”

Good god, she had seen how nearly he’d slipped off the leash! Before he could think of anything to say to ameliorate the horrible situation they had arrived at his bunk. She bundled him into it with expert strength, evidently expecting no reply. On the whole it seemed easier not to try and make any. He sighed and closed his eyes. While an Edwardian purity had inevitable frustrations attendant upon it, at least it did not pitchfork one into horrendous social dilemmas. And it was certainly a comfort, to know that that every bit of his body had survived coldsleep and was ready for service...

©  2008 Brenda W. Clough