The Q was pretty crowded—perhaps that figured into the delay. The Eye had, in the last couple of weeks, swept westward across the oldest, most densely populated regions of the Greenwich segment, headed for the Cape Verde boneyard and the Rio segment beyond. At such a location, close to a boneyard where the habitats were big and new, the Q would expect to see a large volume of “in transit” passengers: emigrants from older and more crowded places bound for big new habitats like Akureyri. It took decades to fully populate one of those things; their population was ramped up gradually as new housing was constructed and the life-supporting ecosystem was cultivated and tuned. In a short while the Eye would reach the Cape Verde boneyard and the census in this place would drop to near zero: just a few workers going to jobs on new habitats, and some patient long-range travelers. But for now the facilities in the no-man’s-land were operating at capacity and there were queues for food and drink, especially at places that catered to families. For people often emigrated when they had small children who they thought would benefit from being planted in a clean new place where they could run around.
So Kath Two told herself, for a while, that the delay was purely bureaucratic in nature, a result of too many emigrants and not enough Q staff on hand. But on the second day she noticed Beled in the recreation center, operating a resistance training device at some insane power level only usable by young male Teklans. Later, after he had showered, she caught up with him in a bar and he mentioned that he had seen Rhys headed for the exit with his bracelet flashing green.
“When was this?” she asked.
“Yesterday,” Beled said. “Eight hours and twenty minutes after we docked.”
A few hours later, Kath Two and Beled vacated their single rooms and moved into a slightly larger double. They began sleeping together without having sex, which was a fairly common behavior pattern for Moiran/Teklan couples who scarcely knew each other. When Beled got an erection, which was fairly often, he would go into the tiny en suite bathroom and masturbate. This way of dealing with it was sufficiently common that for him to have behaved in any other way would have been noteworthy. She knew that she could rely on him to show impeccable discipline, and he knew that this was her expectation, and so it could go on indefinitely until one of them signaled a change.
Unable to sleep, not as proficient as Beled at masturbation, she heaved his massive arm off her chest, a project akin to dragging an unconscious ten-year-old boy to the other side of the bed, and slipped out, looking for a place to kill time until she felt drowsy.
At the cafeteria, waiting in line for chocolate, she found herself standing next to a small, lithe Julian woman in her sixties. The woman had been reading a book, or pretending to. As the wait stretched on she seemed to lose interest. She closed the book, stifled a yawn, and fixed her gaze on Kath Two. “Back from the surface?”
This was obvious from the color of Kath Two’s wristband. But Kath Two understood that the woman was just trying to strike up a conversation. “Yes.”
“Home for you?” the woman asked, referring to the Eye.
“I’m sort of between homes at the moment. Survey duty makes it hard to settle down.”
“Ah, taking a little R & R on the Great Chain. Good for you.”
Kath Two understood perfectly well that this woman was a Quarantine agent.
This was how the Q operated: not by interrogating you in a windowless room but by striking up a casual conversation. The purpose of these common areas was to supply a range of venues and opportunities.
It was important not to be seen as dissimulating, so Kath Two said: “I expect some R & R might happen, but really I’m bound for Stromness.”
“Ah, visiting a friend at university?”
Was it telling the truth to call Doc a friend? “More of a mentor. A teacher,” she said.
“Well, I’ve heard Stromness is lovely. Never been.”
Many, perhaps most, who were probed in this way never even realized that they were talking to a Quarantine agent. That was because most people passed through the Q rarely, if at all; and when they did, they tended to be jumbled together with large groups of travelers in settings where this sort of conversation might easily be mistaken for idle chitchat.
Kath Two was a sufficiently experienced traveler to know exactly what was going on. And the other woman knew that she knew. They would carry on with the charade anyway. Kath Two resisted the temptation to make trouble by asking the Julian where she had come from and where she was going. The woman would no doubt have some plausible story cued up. Obliging her to rattle it off would only waste time.