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by civilians on Celestia, or if they were just keeping secrets from me. Maybe both.
    So I sat and stewed, staring at the Jacaranda as it floated in the blackness. The ship was shaped like a long baton, with a big round knob on the front end; that was where they kept the Sperm-tail generator. The tail itself rippled all milky around the ship’s hull and far back into space until it dwindled away to nothing. Mostly the free end of the tail just drifted…but every now and then it gave a flick, the way a fish in a quiet river sometimes comes awake for a second to dart at something too small to see.
    My sister once told me the Sperm-field created a separate little universe around the ship, and the little universe could slide through the big Outside universe faster than light, without worrying about inertial effects of acceleration. I got lost when she tried to explain how it worked. Samantha was usually pretty good at avoiding subjects that confused me, but sometimes she got extra fired-up like she was absolutely certain she could make everything clear, no matter how slow I was. “I’m a communicator, Edward,” she would say. “It’s my gift. If I can communicate with alien races, I can damned well communicate with you.”
    Well…sometimes it didn’t work with me; and I thought to myself, There at the end, it didn’t work with the aliens either.

    At last I got a call from Jacaranda’ s captain, a woman named Prope. In all the days to come, she never let on whether that was her first or last name. Maybe she came from one of those colonies where people only have one name, because they think it sounds more dramatic.
    Prope certainly was the dramatic type. Whenever you talked to her, she always made you think she was half listening for something that was really worth her attention— like assassins sneaking up behind her back, or a Mayday from a luxury liner struck by a meteorite. Now and then she’d suddenly pause, as if she’d thought of some important point that went over the head of everybody else in the room…except she never told us what these great insights were, and after a while, I wondered if maybe she was just playacting.
    As my sister’s bodyguard, I’d met a lot of diplomats. I’d seen tons of playacting.
    So Prope’s face appeared on my vidscreen. She was lit from only one side, which meant the left part of her face was swallowed up in deep dark shadow—the captain’s attempt at dazzling me with a dramatic first impression. As far as I knew, the only way she could get that effect was turning off the lights on one whole side of her ship’s bridge.
    “Captain Prope of the Jacaranda , calling for Acting Captain Edward York of Willow. Are you Explorer York?”
    “Yes, Captain.” I couldn’t help noticing how fast I got switched from acting captain to Explorer. Maybe Prope didn’t like treating me anywhere close to an equal.
    “How are you feeling, Explorer?” the captain asked. “No ill effects from the disease?”
    “I’m okay,” I said. “Are you going to send someone to help dock this ship?”
    “Sony, not yet. Because of the risk of contagion, standard operating procedure says we start by sending an Explorer team to assess the situation.”
    “There’s not much risk of contagion,” I answered. “Really.”
    “Even so, you can never go wrong following the proper protocols. Don’t you agree?”
    “Um.” In my years with the Outward Fleet, I’d seen things go wrong all over the place, protocols or no. “So after your Explorers check things out,” I said, “then can I go home?”
    “One thing at a time,” Prope replied. “Please go to your transport bay and let my people in through the main airlock. They should be there in fifteen minutes.”
    She nodded a vague good-bye and waved her hand in the general neighborhood of her forehead. Ship captains are supposed to exchange full salutes after talking to each other…even if one of you is only a lowly acting captain. I guess