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the head, Emma. What you need is to come out of your shell. Mix with your shipmates. Care about them. Get out of your cabin for a while and into a man's."
    Glassgold flushed. "I don't hold with those practices."
    Chi-Yuen's brows lifted. "Are you a virgin? We can't afford that, if we're to start a new race on Beta Three. The genetic material is scarce at best."
    "I want a decent marriage," Glassgold said with a flick of anger, "and as many children as God gives me. But they will know who their father is. It doesn't hurt if I don't play any ridiculous game of musical beds while we travel. We have enough girls aboard who do."
    "Like me." Chi-Yuen was unruffled. "No doubt stable relationships will evolve. Meanwhile, now and then, why not give and get a few moments of pleasure?"
    "I'm sorry," Glassgold said. "I shouldn't criticize private matters. Especially when lives have been as different as yours and mine."
    "True. I don't agree that mine was less fortunate than yours. On the contrary."
    "What?" Glassgold's mouth fell open. "You can't be serious!"
    Chi-Yuen smiled. "You have only learned the surface of my past, Emma, if that. I can guess what you're thinking. My country divided, impoverished, spastic from the aftermath of revolutions and civil wars. My family cultured and tradition-minded but poor with the desperate poverty that none except aristocrats fallen on evil times know. Their sacrifices to keep me in the Sorbonne, when the chance came. After I got my degree, the hard work and sacrifice I made in return, helping them get back on their feet." She turned her face to the ebbing light of Sol and added most quietly: "About my man. We, too, were students together, in Paris. Later, as I said, I must often be away from him because of work. Finally he went to visit my parents in Peking. I was to join him as soon as possible, and we would be married, in law and sacrament as well as in fact. A riot happened. He was killed."
    "Oh, my dear—" Glassgold began.
    "That's the surface," Chi-Yuen interrupted. "The surface. Don't you see, I also had a loving home, perhaps more than you did, because at the end they understood me so well that they didn't resist my leaving them forever. I saw a lot of the world, more than can be seen traveling carefully by first class. I had my Jacques. And others, before,

    afterward, as he would have wanted. I'm outward bound with no regrets and no pain that won't heal. The luck is mine, Emma."
    Glassgold did not respond with words.
    Chi-Yuen took her by the hand and stood up. "You must break free of yourself," the planetologist said. "In the long run, only you can teach you how to do that. But maybe I can help a little. Come down to my cabin. We'll make you a gown that does you justice. The Covenant Day party will be soon, and I intend for you to have fun."
    Consider: a single light-year is an inconceivable abyss. Denumerable but inconceivable. At an ordinary speed—say, a reasonable pace for a car in megalopolitan traffic, two kilometers per minute—you would consume almost nine million years in crossing it. And in Sol's neighborhood, the stars averaged some nine light-years apart. Beta Virginis was thirty-two distant.
    Nevertheless, such spaces could be conquered. A ship accelerating continuously at one gravity would have traveled half a light-year in slightly less than one year of time. And she would be moving very near the ultimate velocity, three hundred thousand kilometers per second.
    Practical problems arose. Where was the mass-energy to do this coming from? Even in a Newtonian universe, the thought of a rocket, carrying that much fuel along from the start, would be ludicrous. Still more so was it in the true, Einsteinian cosmos, where the mass of ship and payload increased with speed, climbing toward infinity as that speed approached light's.
    But fuel and reaction mass were there in space! It was pervaded with hydrogen. Granted, the concentration was not great by terrestrial standards: about