She found him in an equipment bay on the aft hull, a tiny niche with a real window on the stars. It was a place that Pham had appropriated several years earlier.
There was tap on the light plastic cover. He slipped it aside.
"Hello, Pham." Sura had a strange smile on her face.She looked strange. So young. In fact, she simply hadn't aged. And now Pham Nuwen had lived twenty-four years. He waved her into the tiny room. She floated close past him, and turned. Her eyes were solemn above the smile. "You've grown up, friend."
Pham started to shake his head. "Yes. But I—you are still ahead of me."
"Maybe. In some ways. But you're twice the programmer I will ever be. I saw the solutions you worked out for Ceng this last Watch."
They sat, and she asked him about Ceng's problems and his solutions. All the glib speeches and bravado he'd spent the last year planning were swept from his mind, his conversation reduced to awkward starts and stops. Sura didn't seem to notice.Damn. How does a Qeng Ho man take a woman? On Canberra, he had grown up believing in chivalry and sacrifice...and had gradually learned that the true method was very different: a gentleman simply grabbed what he wanted, assuming a more powerful gentleman did not already own it. Pham's own personal experience was limited and surely untypical: poor Cindi had grabbedhim. At the beginning of the last Watch, he had tried the true Canberra method on one of the female crew. Xina Rao had broken his wrist and made a formal complaint. It was something Sura would surely hear about sooner or later.
The thought blew away Pham's tenuous hold on the conversation. He stared at Sura in embarrassed silence, then blurted out the announcement he had been holding secret for some special moment. "I...I'm going to go off-Watch, Sura. I'll finally start coldsleep."
She nodded solemnly, as if she had never guessed.
"You know what really did it for me, Sura? The dustmote that broke me? It was three years ago. You were off-Watch,"and I realized how longit would be until next I saw you. "I was trying to make that second-level celestial mech stuff work. You really have to understand some math to do that. For a while, I was stumped. For the hell of it, I moved up here, just started staring at the sky. I've done that before. Every year, my sun is dimmer; it's scary."
"I'll bet," said Sura, "but I didn't know you could see directly aft, even from here." She slid near the forty-centimeter port, and killed the lights.
"Yes you can," said Pham, "at least when your eyes adjust." The room was dark as pitch now. This was areal window, not some enhancing display device. He moved close behind her. "See, there's the four bright stars of the Pikeman. Now Canberra's star just makes his pole one tong longer."Silly. She doesn't know the Canberran sky. He babbled on, a mindless cover for what he was feeling. "But even that is not what got me; my sun is another star, so what? The thing is, the constellations: the Pikeman, the Wild Goose, the Plow. I can still recognize them, but even their shapes have changed. I know, I should have expected that. I'd been doing the math behind much harder things. But...it struck me. In eleven years, we have moved so far that the whole sky has changed. It gave me a gut feeling of how far we've come, how very far we still have to go."
He gestured in the dark, and his palm slapped lightly on the smooth swell of her rear. His voice died in a little squeak, and for a measurable instant his hand sat motionless on her pants, his fingers touching her bare flesh just above the hip line. Somehow he hadn't noticed before; her blouse wasn't even tucked in. His hand swept around her waist and upward across the smooth curve of her belly, kept moving till he touched the undersides of her breasts. The move was a grab, modified and tentative perhaps, but a definite grab.
Sura's reaction was almost as swift as Xina Rao's had been. She twisted beneath him, her breast centering in the palm of his other hand. Before Pham could get out of her way, her arm was behind his neck, levering him down...for a long, hard kiss. He felt multiple shocks where his lips touched hers, where his hand rested, where her leg slid up between his.
And now she was pulling his shirt from his pants, forcing their bodies into a single long touch. She leaned her head back from his lips and laughed softly. "Lord! I've been wanting to get my hands on you ever since you were fifteen years old."
But why didn't you? I was in your power.It was the last coherent thought he had for some time. In the dark, there loomed more wonderful questions. How to get leverage, how to join the smooth endpoints of softness and hard. They bounced randomly from wall to wall, and poor Pham might never have found his way if not for his partner and guide.
