It was Frederick Douglass, of course. He spat on the floor to ward off evil spirits, who always crowded around the mother in the hour of a birth. I was sitting alone and in the dark by the communications console, the phosphorescent after-image of Kostas’s face fading into the surface. She smelled a little like the sourdough used on Terce to make roundbread, noticeable but not unpleasant.
The extremity of my distress was as alien to her as to them, but where they thought me mad, she read It’ll be nice to see Pinto and Samsa. The flight crew of the Aurora 6 were now being kept in more or less permanent isolation. They’re just cargo, parcels of frozen meat on their way through time.
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