Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

not seem to be quite enough. As if he had memorized the answer, only to discover the question had been changed.
    Yet what more could be demanded of him? What more could he be expected to give? What, after all, could one man do?
    A spasm of vague fear made him blink, the hard-edged stars in the viewport smeared, as the looming shadow of the dilemma clouded on the horizon of his conscience. More . . .
    He shivered, and turned his back to the vastness. It could swallow a man, surely.
    Ti, the freight shuttle co-pilot, had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was natural at times like this, Silver thought, studying his face from a distance of ten centimeters. At this range her eyes could no longer superimpose their stereoscopic images, so his twinned face overlapped itself. If she squinted just right, she could make himappear to have three eyes. Men really were rather alien. Yet the metal contact implanted in his forehead, echoed at both temples, did not have that effect, seeming more a decoration or a mark of rank. She blinked one eye closed, then the other, causing his face to shift back and forth in her vision.
    Ti opened his eyes a moment, and Silver quickly flinched into action. She smiled, half-closed her own eyes, picked up the rhythm of her flexing hips. Oooh,she murmured, as Van Atta had taught her. Let's hear some feedback, honey, Van Atta had demanded, so she'd hit on a collection of noises that seemed to please him. They worked on the pilot, too, when she remembered to make them.
    Ti's eyes squeezed shut, his lips parting as his breath came faster, and Silver's face relaxed into pensive stillness once again, grateful for the privacy. Anyway, Ti's gaze didn't make her as uncomfortable as Mr.
    Van Atta's, that always seemed to suggest that she ought to be doing something else, or more, or differently.
    The pilot's forehead was damp with sweat, plastering down one curl of brown hair around the shiny plug. Mechanical mutant, biological mutant, equally touched by differing technologies; perhaps that was why Ti had first seen her as approachable, being an odd man out himself. Both freaks together. On the other hand, maybe the Jump pilot just wasn't very fussy.
    He shivered, gasped convulsively, clutched her tightly to his body. Actually, he looked—rather vulnerable. Mr. Van Atta never looked vulnerable at this moment. Silver was not sure just what it was he did look like.
    What's he getting out of this that I'm not? Silver wondered. What's wrong with me? Maybe she really was, as Van Atta had once accused, frigid—an unpleasant word, it reminded her of machinery, and the trash dumps locked outside the Habitat—so she had learned to make noises for him,and twitch pleasingly, and he had commended her for loosening up.
    Silver reminded herself that she had another reason for keeping her eyes open. She glanced again past the pilot's head. The observation window of the darkened control booth where theytry sted overlooked the freight loading bay. The staging area between the bay's control booth and the entrance to the freight shuttle's hatch remained dimly lit and empty of movement. Hurry up Tony, Claire, Silver thought Page 25

    worriedly. I can't keep this guy occupied all shift.
    Wow,breathed Ti, coming out of his trance and opening his eyes and grinning. When they designed you folks for free fall they thought of everything. He released his own clutch on the wings of Silver's shoulderblades to slide his hands down her back, around her hips, and along her lower arms, ending with an approving pat on her hands locked around his muscular downsider flanks. Truly functional.
    How do downsiders keep from, um, bouncing apart? Silver inquired curiously, taking practical advantage of having cornered an apparent expert on the subject.
    His grin widened. Gravity keeps us together.
    How strange. I always thought of gravity as something you had to fight all the time.
    No, only half the time. The other half, it works for you,he assured her.
    He