Henderson gasped for air after the third bounce and pushed off from his chairbeast, grateful for the microgravity. He would have been shaking in any kind of gravity. He knew he stank of nervous sweat and didn't care. While this last bounce hadn't been as bad as the first two, he knew that it was the last one. Papa had promised.



He laughed, a little, that they had made it. He stopped abruptly, disgusted at the uneven timber of the sound. It wasn't over yet.



Devereaux's voice piped into the biolab. "Need you down here Henderson, inner staging area, now."



He grimaced and kicked off into the ring.

An acrid, sharp scent assaulted Henderson when he arrived. He instantly took in the scene: Devereaux floated with two twitching, burnt and bleeding mobiles. "Did they finish?"

Devereaux looked upset with him. He didn't know why. "Yeah, they finished. The Karamojo is fixed."

Henderson let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding and his fingers tingled. It was going to be fine then. "Why did you summon me? These mobiles are hopeless. Best thing now is to redirect extra fish in here to clean up."

Cocked forty-five degrees from his orientation to better examine the pair of mobiles returned from their repair mission, Devereaux rolled her eyes at Henderson. "But they looked fine up until a few minutes ago. They finished the lion's share of repairs wonderfully, and we don't have back-ups of these. They're the back-ups for the automatic systems. Until we grow more, the only remaining back-ups are us."



Crisis had stirred his blood, and Henderson couldn't help himself from noticing the way the sweat made Devereaux's grimy T-shirt stick to her curves. He thought of giving her a congratulatory kiss. "Everything you say is true, but they must have taken a huge radiation dose. You don't see that right away although it devastates a body."



"What if we have to go out?" she asked.



He shrugged. It would never come to that. "I have some pharmaceuticals I can give us, but I suggest staying behind the nanoskin, our mass, and the e-m fields."

A tinkling shudder vibrated through the ship, and gradually Henderson began to fall. The ruglings flattened as his snakeskin boots touched the deck, cushioning the slow fall. He could feel the gravity continue to increase. "You're right. We've got the rail drive restored," he said as nonchalantly as he could.

"Yee-uck," Devereaux said. She had landed chest first on one of the mobiles.

The thing groped weakly at her, red blood seeping from swollen, broken hide and staining the charred patches of reflection skin that hadn't yet sloughed off.

Normally Henderson would have laughed, but not today. He stepped to her, carefully in the light gravity, and lifted a wincing Devereaux out of the mess by her T-shirt.

The mobile hemorrhaged over its entire body, shook, and died. The other would die momentarily, its short useful life complete.

"Put me down," Devereaux said.

Henderson swung around like a crane and deposited Devereaux beside him.

"Papa should have warned us," she said as she flipped bits of mobile off her shirt. "You said you had him operational again."

"Hardly." Henderson watched her fingers touching her shirt. He hoped she would take it off. "I said that the regrowth operation was underway, and that there was nothing else I could do."

"Whatever."

Henderson shuffled over to the viewport and scanned the hydroponics. He saw only blackened diamond over the gardens where no doubt the light-filtering mechanisms had burned out. Not good. If the plants had been zapped, dinner would be nothing but recycled fish sticks for the next few days, and the nutrient reserves needed to regrow the gardens would tax their short-term resources.

"You there, Papa?" Devereaux asked.

"Of course we are," Papa said.

"Well then," she said, giving up on the shirt and stripping it off over her head, "What's next on the repair list?"

She was fine looking, but he realized the moment for a congratulatory kiss had passed, and a look was all he would get. It wasn't fair that he'd lost his colony to the crisis.

"All critical systems are now repaired or are being repaired by automatic systems. Captain Fang recommends that everyone take a couple hours off."

Devereaux turned to Henderson. She held the shirt away from her body. "Want to grab a bite in the galley? I'm famished."

Stearn was a lucky man. Henderson would console himself with his own fantasies, which were, he admitted now that the emergency was over, more perfect than the flesh before him. Devereaux projected an earthy physical quality that was more than attractive, but she didn't take the time to keep her form perfect, the way he preferred. He was noticing tiny flaws as the seconds passed. And besides, in an infinite universe how could one woman be enough? "No thanks." He thought of a little white lie, "I'm not hungry after seeing mobiles disintegrate."

"I work hard, I get hungry." She cracked a smile. "And after an ordeal like this, well, I usually like some company, but Stearn will have a million things to do and I bet the captain isn't letting him have more than a few minutes off. You sure you're not hungry?" She kept her smile, although it showed signs of wavering. Was the stress getting to her? Even though her shirt was off leaving her topless, she wasn't being provocative. This was the first genuinely warm overture she had made to him since he'd made an ass of himself in the observation blister.

There was something creeping in the back of his brain, an instinctual emotion that he didn't yet wish to acknowledge. The creeping thing was not about Devereaux. It might come out soon, and he preferred to be alone if that happened. He said, "No thanks."

She shrugged and went off one way down the ring, he the other.

He took a detour through the Hall of Trophies to get an objective measure of just how seriously things had deteriorated. The corridor was lined on each side with black holes where there should have been happy animal heads. The Karamojo had sucked the Hall bone dry, just like it was supposed to do in an emergency. Only the marlin at the far end of the Hall still wiggled in its place, but as Henderson walked toward it, he saw that the creature was shrunken, and the wiggles were involuntary; the Karamojo would have even this great one, too.

As he walked toward the biolab, it dawned on him that perhaps his life had truly been in danger. Was that possible? Yes, he had to admit, it was. Those bounces were bad enough, but Papa had said they would work. And what of before, when they had been damaged? Instead of simply coming close enough to induce the massive current surge that had debilitated the Karamojo, one of those damn dragons could have hit them at kilometers per second. No way they could have taken that.

He would have died.

The creeping thing acknowledged, his sense of relief chased away, he stepped into his lab and said, "Music. Something dark and destructive."

"Would you care to be more specific?" Papa asked.

Christ. He'd have to reteach Papa all his preferences, but he was definitely not in the mood to do that now. Something from Papa's violent death-ridden era, he thought. "Night on Bald Mountain."

As the first notes struck, Henderson opened a storage locker and removed a glass bottle of his finest Merlot, carefully cultivated from grape to wine over the first part of the voyage. He popped the cork and let the bottle breathe. He half-feared Papa would smell the organic richness and order it added to the biomass reserves.

Thankfully his chairbeast had been spared the carnage wrought upon so much of the other non-critical biological systems. He sank into the warm, yielding skin perfectly tuned to his preferences. Leaning back, closing his eyes, he let the beast's vibrations soothe him. Or tried to.

The music picked up, the ghosts rising from their graves to haunt the living for the long, dark night that would only be the darker for the flashes of lightning hurled from the mountain.

Henderson fetched a diamond goblet and poured the dark liquid swirling full of mystery. Fine wine was still better grown and fermented with traditional methods rather than synthesized. The random vagaries of the grapes' nutrients and care could produce subtle masterpieces. Surely a unique human genetic sequence was still worthwhile the same way. Surely his own was still worthwhile, and would be on the Earth half a millenia hence.

Back in his chairbeast, letting it loom up around him, Henderson regarded the empty terrarium over his wine and music. His fantasy world, sucked dry in minutes by the automatics to feed the repairs to Papa's brain banks. On the monitors lining the base of the tank shimmered ghost images in black and white of tiny rooms empty save for tiny skeletons. Bone was not so quickly cannibalized.

What precautions had he taken to ensure his -- his sequence's -- survival? Sperm deposits, his code archived, that was it really. In his youth he had been promiscuous, like most. He hadn't tried to impregnate anyone then, and there had been strangely few lovers of substance in recent years. No single woman could satisfy him, so that was fine, wasn't it?

On the monitors flickered images of skeletons sleeping alone in beds, although that was an illusion. Under the sheets, they would be entangled with even tinier skeletons.

So what? Did it matter? They had been little more than monkeys that looked like people. But they had been his people, and he hadn't been able to save them. Could he do any better saving himself?

Henderson drained the warm wine in a searing, tannic gulp and launched himself from the chairbeast. The tank monitors above his desk were simple projection devices, thin films vacuum-packed under quartz. Better image quality, he had insisted, than nanotablets. Better to hit as well. The first screen gave way on the second blow of the diamond goblet.

The music crashed as the crystal shards fell into the uncannibalized ruglings below. Hundreds of tiny crystals with the same shape and structure as a large crystal caught the light in their facets. More joined them as Henderson banged away, grunting, as he smashed all the monitors. The tiny skeletons shattered, vanished.

A directional sound beam caught his ear, slicing through the music and crashing. "Can I be of assistance?"

Henderson ignored Papa, running on his unleashed impulses -- his own automatic repair system. Kra-twing! Kra-twing!

The recoil of each swing knocked Henderson back, allowing him to get plenty of forward momentum each time on the way back. Eventually he ran out of monitors and attacked the quartz of the tank itself. His boots crunched over the crystal shards. More banging then. Kra-twing! Kra-twing!



After several minutes, he tired, and leaned against the tank, hot. Then he slid down with a slow squeak to a squatting position, trailing sweat behind him. He held the unmarked goblet before him, rolling it back and forth between his hands, and watched the tiny spectra reflected from the lights. One object, but so many ways of looking at it.



His own life he had looked at in only one way in recent years, an unwavering lone arrow flying into the infinite future he had hoped to split into a billion directions and ensure his immortality.



The music finished. "Would you care for another selection?" Papa asked.



Henderson ignored the solicitous voice.

Eventually he stood, and left the lab, making his way to the galley. He paused at the threshold, and looked in at Devereaux sitting at the polished tabletree dipping a fish stick into some white sauce.

Stearn sat with her, smiling as she pushed the dripping food into his mouth.

Henderson turned on his heel and returned to the biolab. "Play anything. I don't care what."

Atonal, synthesized notes, with no particular pattern began to sound. Twenty-third century computer-generated drivel, lacking all human warmth and understanding. Lonely and alien. Henderson let it play on.

It was perfect.