Free Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford Page A

could be dealt with and a consensus reached, in the middle of a multifass. And all with a disarming casualness. The analysts had discovered that most matters were in fact settled this way. The formal apparatus only confirmed what was already worked out. Electronic democracy with your shirt unbuttoned. A disarming notion, for those reared in the days of management pyramids.
    Here at the door were three people he scarcely knew, bubbling with good spirits and ready to add to the steadily rising murmur that he could hear welling up in the corridor, more coming, the eternal primate chatter and bark, the voices of the ship—
    Toke on this, Nebraska Red, high, angular momentum stuff—
    Those microbes, never
seen
anythin’ like ’em. Dust huggers. Little fellas, no bigger’n paramecia.
    He said if she didn’t like it what the hell she could change her whole jawline, he didn’t care. She lost it when that lug bolt fractured, you remember that godawful malf down C Bay, killed Jake Sutherland and her, it clean blew away her bone right up to the eye, they got the frags out of the cornea—
    —they’re the same chem patterns repeated thousands of times over in the Isis biosphere, just like our left- and right-handedness in the sugars and long chains, y’know. I mean, you’ve got only so many atoms to work with in the whole universe anyway, right? So shouldn’t be a big surprise that the basic Isis chem combos—a five-carbon sugar, with one more phosphate in the carrier, whereas we get by with only three in ATP—are similar, I mean, no big shock there. Got a base tacked on, too. Obvious, simple alteration from our scheme, damn near Earthlike but you can spot the differences.
    Christ I thought she’d wet herself when the A4 rating didn’t come through from the cell, she screamed bloody murder at the next confab but shit we weren’t havin’ any you can’t put one past us so she’s back on the auto-lathes. Hates it. Ruby’s got the A4 and
good
says I ’cause that bitch was—
    —that stuff clutches onto the dust in the air like it was free lunch. Dust eaters. Backbone of the ecology. The flagella dig in and
zip
they take the sulfates straight out of the mineral state. No fluid solution needed!
    So much for that life-needs-water crap.
    Yeah, why should it when a martini doesn’t?
    So these fellas, they go their whole
lives
without a drink. There’s water, sure, but not near the Eye. So the biosphere’s tapped this way to get energy out of the sulfates, poor bastards, livin’ on
dust
—
    Li’l suckers got to hump like bejeezus to make an erg.
    —in the wash of technical talk he steps back and studies Carlotta, sees pinched lines at her eyes and wishes he could unblock it. Easier, much easier, if the three of them could collapse into a comfortable, old-shoe life, each satisfied by a dimming echo of the initial passion they all had felt. She turns, visibly collecting words for a burst of talk—eyebrows knit, mouth purses, blunt tip of her nose dips a millimeter—and Nikka approaches, quicksilver changes ripple across Carlotta’s face, they touch casually, and Nigel remembers how they had been instinctively close from the beginning, sharing jobs, living together while Nigel was in the Sleepslots. They exchange a word, Carlotta glances at him, she makes the familiar stretching motion, the one she taught him to ease knotted muscles, and Nigel feels in her liquid grace why he has through the years narrowed his ability to see into others. It is simply too hard now, too involving. For Nikka and Carlotta, yes, but the thought of reaching this way into Ted or Alex or others—it is too dense and wearying. He had gotten it from the
Marginis
wreck and used it to get through the ISA Byzantium: chatting up power brokers, sensing what
Lancer
engineers meant as opposed to what they said, giving them the appearance of seasoned astronaut that they wanted. And he had liked it, been good at it. For years afterward he had remembered