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whined away, the air has seemed soundlessly light. The absence of machine hum recalls the beach at Utama Bay on Guam; this kind of stillness is unnerving. I pick out the possible sound of wind in the taller trees, insects, and the faint songs of birds. The sun is a sun of late earth afternoon, bright but hazed over; its light falls into the woods in patches the size of children. In the woods the greenery collides, tumbles over itself. I feel both tranquil here and apprehensive—how can that be?
    Collette and I drink champagne and pick at a whole salmon, poached, cold. The salmon is delicate and clean-tasting, the champagne light. She knows of a strawberry patch just downhill, we are going to pick dessert.
    *    *    *
     
    The strawberries grow near the edge of the sparser woods to our left, downhill. Small strawberries, but they are exceptional: bright red, tantalizing in texture, ripe, sweet, firm. We eat them out of our hands, propped up against a thick tree, sitting on the soft loam.
    "Perfect," I say. "Paradise."
    "To me," Collette says, putting strawberries in a ceramic can to take back to the ship, "this is as perfect as a place can be. We'll stop again at a tropical reserve, but there's too much to do there to actually relax. This place... There aren't many people who get the chance to be here, you know. I have a plant room at home, a small one. I wish I had this. It's so peaceful—you're right, perfect."
    "Just like my last twenty-four hours," I say. "Everything's seemed... to click into place. Spooky. The first music I heard in the cabin? My space music, Bartok, I wore out a tape of it once. I must have wanted just that breakfast for a year. And a woman like you. It's as if you remember things I've forgotten I really wanted..."
    Collette smiles, passes me a strawberry. "You're a pleasure," she says. "There's something about you, it's your tan, the way you look at me. I'd like to do you any time."
    I bite into the fruit and feel its juices pique my tongue. Sweet, sticky, almost tart enough to be dry, but sweet nonetheless. "Mmmm. And that blonde woman. Yet... something about her is familiar."
    I lean back on my elbows in the softness of the earth, layers of decaying leaves and loam among thinning vines along the shady edge of the woods, at the foot of this tree. "There are moments," I tell her, "when I don't feel very far from the screening committee that kept me on Guam. Taylor and Knuth; then Birnbaum, Lodge.... They think I know something I know I don't."
    "A
SciCom
screening committee?' Collette asks, sitting up straight.
    "Yes."
    "Are you in trouble?"
    "Am I?" I ask after a moment. "You tell me."
    Collette is reading my face, I am trying to read hers, she sets down the half-filled container. "Not that I'm aware of," she says, moving forward onto her knees. "Well, you're not in any trouble with me."
    I shrug and suggest that what data there is on me, she's probably seen.
    "I saw the program we retrieved," she says, "and I sure can't recall any screening-committee report." Collette pauses. "But I'll guess. Something happened to you on the expedition, didn't it?"
    "To the ship," I tell her after a moment. "We blew part of the ship. Three people died—then there was a suicide."
    "My God," Collette says. Could she have known? Her expression denies it utterly; she sees my own pain, I think. No, I've never met her before. I want to tell her what happened; I can feel her sympathy.
    "We were tracking energy source off the entry horizon of a black hole, near the Crab. We went as far as anyone's gone. Did you know that?"
    "No," she says, blushing a little. "The Crab nebula? That's some way. And a black hole? I'm not really sure..."
    "A black hole is an old star that's fallen in on itself, collapsed," I tell her. "It's so dense its own light doesn't escape, so dense its gravity attracts light. The physics is still speculation—one theory has it that within a black hole the laws of physics are reversed, and a