Ivo had wanted to do the talking in Kestrel. Suri said no. Everybody had just spent a day moving out of rooms; they could fasten themselves at a table with space for all eight to face each other.
They gathered at a secured table on Traverse. The eight from the trial, including Nessa. He was glad she'd come and wished she hadn't. Her leaving made his sentences less comfortable.
“The commons can't come with us,” he said.
Dev glanced up. Alma stopped working a loose thread between her fingers. Nobody looked astonished. Ivo understood that he had been the last person still being spared his own news.
“I've talked like we'd keep it. Like we'd go on doing what we did, only somewhere else. That was careless.”
Alma looked at him steadily. “Hopeful, too.”
“Yes. But you shouldn't have had to decide based on my hope.”
He wanted to keep speaking until the apology became eloquent enough to forgive him. He stopped instead.
Oren said he would leave on Traverse. Sleeping weightless frightened him. He could bear it for a journey. He didn't want to make it his home.
Lida wanted to see her grown family without putting every visit inside a question about ships. Bess had brought a pouch of seed and spent the trial trying to find a place where a plant could be a garden.
“I want land,” she said. “Actual land. I thought if I took these it would be enough.”
Ivo looked at the pouch. He had encouraged that hope. He wanted to give her something larger than an apology, and didn't have it.
Nessa leaned forward. “I'm still going. But I'll help with dinner before we leave. Not after. Please learn which list is which.”
He smiled. “I have a qualified instructor.”
“You have three days.”
The four who wanted Kestrel were Ivo, Suri, Alma and Dev.
Suri held up her hand before he could start making this smaller group sound simple.
“I haven't committed,” she said. “I'll commit when all of you can do your own parts. And mine in a pinch. I don't want to discover I've bought a town with fewer people to complain at me.”
“I can do—” Ivo began.
“Show. Don't reassure.”
That afternoon he found out how much there was to show.
In Kestrel, Suri gave him a routine check and did not stand beside him to perform it through his body. The familiar display became an arrangement of facts he could no longer pretend were somebody else's natural language. He read it, compared, looked at the wrong reading, corrected himself, and had to begin again because he had forgotten which condition the check assumed.
Dev floated over, caught his attention and pointed, without touching the control.
“I see it,” Ivo said.
“Compare it with the previous cycle too. I missed that the first time.”
Ivo breathed out. “Thanks.”
There were duties he could learn. That was almost humiliating. For years he had let his admiration for Suri's competence do the work of helping her.
Alma had spread fabric in the sleeping corner. Without a floor, it insisted on covering her face. She clipped one edge, then another, and made a temporary small wall.
“Now,” she said, drawing the edge across her shoulder, “I can change my clothes without asking you all to turn round.”
“Will there be hours?” Dev asked.
“Disagreeable hours?”
“Quiet ones.”
Ivo glanced at the fabric. The little rooms were already reducing the shared place he had pictured.
“We could have dinner together,” he said.
“Some dinners,” Dev said.
Ivo nearly turned that into a discussion of loneliness. Dev fastened his listening kit inside the corner, put in an earphone, and closed his eyes. Ivo pulled his own foot away from the fabric.
Alma touched Ivo's wrist. “He'll still like your food when you learn to make it.”
“Everybody's very encouraging today.”
“Well, I'd like the man who feeds me to finish learning his checks.”
He laughed and went back to the routine.
Later Dev opened a link to Earth. The reply came back plainly, a distant person asking whether he could hear. They could. Dev described the hardware work he might take on remotely. The distant person said she'd send details when she had them.
“Not a contract yet,” he told the room after the connection ended. “Don't celebrate me.”
“Send us the terms before you agree,” Suri said.
“I'll send the details round when I get them.”
Suri made him repeat the backup check. Dev performed it, then asked Alma to show him how to tie away a loose tool without becoming its captor forever. She taught him with exact tenderness, like a woman fitting a sleeve.
By the end of the day, Ivo could do his routine without help. He was not particularly good at it. He was learning how to let that be a beginning.
He went to the ship kitchen and followed Nessa's upper sheet. The first batch was too thick. He altered the second, asked her to taste it, and was rewarded with a thoughtful silence.
“What?” he said.
“It's food.”
“I was aiming higher.”
“That's tomorrow.”
He put aside portions for the four. Dev took his to his quiet corner in Kestrel. Alma sat in a loop of fabric she'd already changed twice. Suri ate while the meal was hot, with nothing needing her hand for the length of a bowl.
Ivo looked at them through the small room and felt grief strike him in a new place. This was not the commons. He had said so that morning. Now he was eating in it.
Alma handed him a spoon she had kept out of the packing.
“Don't make a face,” she said. “Some things are still lent.”