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talking quietly at the table. Downstairs, two people were playing chess while two others watched. I took the copy of Seventeen from my chair and walked over to the bike machine. Might as well get started on saving my bones.
    The machine was set on a hill-climbing program, but I really didn't want to be the first person aboard to work up a sweat. So I clicked it to “easy” and pedaled along while reading the magazine.
    So little of it was going to be useful or even meaningful for the next five years. Hot fashion tips! ("Get used to blue jumpsuits.") Lose that winter flab! ("Don't eat the space crap they put in front of you.") How to communicate with your boyfriend! ("E-mail him from 250 million miles away.")
    I hadn't really had a boyfriend since Sean, more than a year ago. Knowing that I was going to be on another planet for five years put a damper on that.
    It wasn't that simple. The thing with Sean, the way he left, hurt me badly enough that the idea of leaving the planet was pretty attractive. No love life, none of that kind of pain.
    Did that make me cold? I should have fallen helplessly in love with someone and pined away for him constantly, bursting into tears whenever I saw the Earth rise over the morning horizon. Or did I see that in a bad movie?
    There weren't any obviously great prospects aboard the carrier. They might start to look better as the years stretched on.
    I did start to cry a little and the tears just stayed in my eyes. Not enough gravity for them to roll down your cheek. After pedaling blind for a minute, I wiped my eyes on a nonabsorbent sleeve and cranked on. There was an article on Sal the Sal, a hot new cube star that everyone but me had heard of; I decided to read every word of that and then quit.
    He was so sag beyond sag it was disgusting. Fascinating, too. Like if you can care little enough about everything you automatically become famous. You ask him for an autograph and he pulls out a rubber stamp, and everybody just comes because it's so sag. Forgive me for not joining in. I bet Card knows his birth date and favorite color.
    Pedaling through all that responsible journalism did put me on the verge of sweating, so I quit and went back to my seat. Card had put aside the helmet and was doing a word puzzle.
    "Card,” I asked, “what's Sal the Sal's favorite color?"
    He didn't even look up. “Everybody knows it's black. Makes him look 190 pounds instead of 200."
    Fair enough. I handed him the magazine. “Article on him if you want to read it."
    He grunted thanks. “Five letter word meaning ‘courage'? Second letter P, last letter K?"
    I thought for a couple of seconds. “Spunk."
    He frowned. “You sure?"
    "It's old fashioned.” Made me think of the pilot, who seemed to have “spunk,” Space Force and all, but was scared by an elevator incident.
    I sat down and buckled in and got scared all over again myself. He had a point, after all. Accidents could happen on the way to Mars, but nothing that would send us hurtling to a flaming death in Earth's atmosphere.
    Don't be a drama queen, Dad would say. But the idea of dying that way made my eyes feel hot and dry.
    * * * *
    10. Social climbing
    The fear faded as we fell into routine, climbing up toward the Hilton midpoint. We grew imperceptibly lighter every hour, obviously so day by day. By the sixth day, we'd lost 90 percent of our gravity. You could go upstairs without touching the ladder, or cross the room with a single step. There were a lot of collisions, getting used to that.
    It was getting close to what we'd live with on the way to Mars. We wore gecko slippers that lightly stuck to the floor surface, and there were gray spots on the wall where they would also adhere.
    The zero-gee toilet wasn't bad once you got used to it. It uses flowing air instead of water and you have to pee into a kind of funnel, which is different. The crapper is only four inches in diameter and it uses a little camera to make sure you're centered. A little