Her eyes were almost crossed. "I understand what you're saying. But don't ever say that in front of a grammarian. That's the most twisted sentence I ever heard."
A.J. smiled, but it was a thin business. "There's one thing, though, Madeline. Joe's my best friend, and . . . dammit, don't you
play
with him."
She was genuinely shocked. "'Play'? I don't—"
He waved his hand impatiently. "I didn't say it right. I know you're not toying with him. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that I've never seen Joe get this hung up on a woman, and I've known him for a long time. And what that means is that nothing'll work unless you're willing to be as serious about it as he will. And I'm really not sure you can do that, Madeline. Or, to put it another way—being my usual crude self—will those unnamed and mysterious people you work for
let
you do that?"
"Oh." She started to make a quick response, but then forced herself to think about it.
"I don't know," she said finally. "But that's not really the issue. If I decide . . . They—he—can't really tell me what to do, and he knows it. If I decide, and he pushes me, I'll just quit."
"'He'?"
"My boss. Never mind his identity. It doesn't matter, A.J., because this has never been a job for me anyway. Not really."
"Yeah, I understand. So what you're saying is that the real issue is what
you
decide to do."
"Yes."
Suddenly, he grinned as widely as Madeline had ever seen him do. "Well. That's a relief!" Again, her eyes were almost crossed. "Why? I never said
what
I would decide, A.J. I don't know myself yet."
The grin never faded. "Sure. Of course. That's what the whole complicated business is about in the first place. So what? Whether you and Joe work anything out is between the two of you, period. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But that's all I wanted to know. That the only person inside of you is
you
. If you understand what I mean. Not somebody else, pulling the strings."
Her jaws tightened. "Nobody else
ever
pulls my strings."
"Oh, good. Well, that being the case—if you'll pardon me for taking the liberty—I guess it's okay for me to give you a push."
He reached out, planted his hands on her shoulders, turned her around, and gave her a little shove. Even as gentle as the motion was, with his much greater mass she found herself moving rather quickly down the hallway. Microgravity still seemed weird to her, sometimes.
"So go talk to him," his voice followed. "Now."
Madeline didn't quite follow his orders. First, because Joe was still on the
Nike
, so it took her several hours to get there. Second, because she made a brief stop at her own cabin.
When she left the cabin, she felt a bit like an idiot. There was something just plain ridiculous about a secret agent superspy carrying a hope chest. Of a sort.
Joe Buckley sat in his cabin, looking out at the stars, and at Phobos as the giant space rock moved in and out of view with
Nike
's rotation. The new
Gourmet Illustrated Quarterly
glowed from his cabin display. Blinking in irritation, Joe pulled his attention from the eternal circling panorama and focused on the magazine. It dawned on him that he wasn't even sure where he'd left off. "Again. Damn."
He just didn't seem to find the recipes as interesting as he used to. Granted, he had a lot less opportunity to test things out on board
Nike
, even as well-equipped as the ship was. Still, he'd never found himself bored with reading new approaches or new ways to use the old ones.
With a sigh, he started flipping through his collection of movies and series. Madeline would've liked—
As soon as that thought intruded again, he gave a sound somewhere between a growl and a snort and stood up. A bit too fast, unfortunately. He bounced nearly three feet into the air, a mistake he hadn't made for months.
He considered going down to see how things were coming in engineering analysis. Room R-17 had contained what appeared to be a sort of vehicle, maybe a runabout or shuttle for
Bemmius
. Joe, Gupta, Jackie, and A.J. had been working on analyzing the thing from an engineering standpoint, using A.J.'s sensors and the engineering expertise of the others.
He was off-shift for another six hours, but it wasn't like he was getting anything accomplished here. He'd like to see what Mayhew and Skibow were up to, but he was temporarily
persona non grata
with the linguists ever since he'd gotten distracted for a moment while salvaging some noteplaques and banged one into the wall. The sixty-five-million-year-old artifact had practically exploded into powder and fragments. A.J. was trying to reconstruct what was on that plaque from the images the suit sensors had picked up incidentally. But it was taking a while as there hadn't been an in-depth scan of that one, and in some cases he was having to piece together components from partial images in various scenes at differing ranges, resolutions, and wavelengths. This was especially annoying to the two linguists as there was fairly good reason to believe that the noteplaque in question had included a map for part of Mars.
On the positive side, A.J. had pointed out, he and the rest of the physical sciences and engineering crew now had pieces of noteplaque to analyze without having to decide if they could afford to damage one. "You did that for us, Joe. Good work."
The door chimed.
Muttering something which was probably rude enough that it was a good thing no one else was there to hear it, Joe went to the door and opened it.
Madeline stood there, looking up at him with huge blue eyes. For a moment he just stared at her. Then he turned away. "Look, I'm not ready to talk right now. Please go."
After a moment, the door shut. He sighed and turned back to the case near the door, where he kept his spacesuit—and nearly ran over Madeline, who was standing just inside the door. "Madeline, what the hell—?"
The blonde security agent still hadn't said a word, but from behind her back she produced an enormous bouquet of flowers— roses, irises, daisies—and a box of chocolates.
The ironic inversion of the approach did not immediately strike Joe, as he was focused more on the utter impossibility of fresh flowers on board a ship nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.
"Where in the universe did those come from?" He reached out and took the bouquet.
Immediately he recognized that—as he should have assumed— the flowers were artificial. Yet he was still pretty sure that artificial flowers weren't among the cargo manifest for
Nike
. Atomic powered or not, every ounce of her cargo space had been allotted to useful things; even the decorative items brought on board had been selected for flexibility and long term use, not for casual ornamentation.
There was a faint perfume to the flowers, though not, as far as he could tell, that of any one flower. A scent Madeline sometimes wore, now that he thought of it. He studied the flowers more closely, still trying to make sense of their presence. At very close range, he could see they were handmade, and from the oddest things. Stems from sections of tie-down cable, petals from various types of shrink-wrap and packing seals . . .
He looked up slowly, incredulously. "You
made
these?"
"Yes," she said softly, almost shyly. "I know it's kind of silly, but— "
"How long did it take you to do this?"
"Not all that long. Well, about a week. I spent my off hours working on them."
"A week?" He glanced down at the chocolates. Those he knew were real, as he'd selected them himself. He also knew that on the Dessert Points scale that the crew had to abide by, that box represented about a full week's worth of desserts for Madeline—and she was someone who doted on chocolate.
He looked from the box to the flowers to her face. Her gaze was calm, serious . . . yet very intense.
"Why?" he asked, finally.
"There isn't a standard ritual to make amends to a man that I know of. Some things haven't changed much in a hundred years, despite all the other advances. But this gets my point across. Can I talk to you now?"
He gestured her further inside. "Sure, sure. Sit down. Um, have a chocolate."
"Not right now, thanks."
If she was turning down chocolate, she was serious. "Okay. Well . . . go ahead, talk. I'm kinda bad at this, and I wasn't ready."
Madeline settled herself into one of the chairs across from Joe's sofa, where Joe had sat down, and then looked into his eyes. "Joe, you've always known that I was an intelligence agent. This job was given to me the day A.J. discovered this base, and that job was to control information. An agent doesn't allow her personal feelings to affect her work. In fact, smart agents don't allow themselves to have personal feelings at all during a mission."
She gazed down at her hands, "I did, anyway, even though I knew it wasn't a good idea. But . . . oh, let's just say that mine is a lonely life. That didn't bother me for years. I'm still not sure why it started bothering me now. I think it's because all this time on the
Nike
project, especially since we left Earth, made me feel like I had something of a family. For the first time in my life, really."
Her shoulders seemed to twitch. "But whatever the reason, I did start having feelings for you that went way beyond anything an agent should have, for one of the people she is—I'll be blunt—assigned to watch over. I guess I'd hoped, somehow, I wouldn't have to do anything, so it would never get to be a problem." She shook her head. "A stupid hope. Either way it would have had a bad result—I have to intervene, and become the enemy, or I don't, because the entire mission finds nothing worthwhile.
"And that's what I don't want my life to be, Joe. Finding nothing worthwhile."
Joe stared at the small woman, trying to put his thoughts in order. As ever, Madeline was persuasive. Sincerity seemed to drip from every word. But Joe also knew that her professional skills made her a superb liar. A master of deceit, capable of convincing anyone that she was on their side, while she calmly worked against them. Or, if not against them, certainly not for them.
Could
be a superb liar, he corrected himself. The ability to do something didn't automatically mean it was exercised. And . . . did he really think she'd been lying to him all along? Or any of them, really?
No.
He knew the answer the moment he asked himself the question.
He stood up and paced to the window, but ended up looking at her instead. "Madeline, I'm the kind of person who gets committed to things. And I guess what bothers me is that I don't know how I'd handle getting personally committed to someone who might well end up on the other side—the way I see it, anyway—of the life's work I've also committed myself to. You haven't gotten a response from your superiors yet, have you?"
She shook her head. "Nothing concrete, one way or the other yet. There must be considerable arguing going on."
"And what if they tell you to crack down?"
"Then I will. Unless what he—they—define as 'cracking down' goes beyond what I'm willing to do. In which case"—the brilliant smile came, in full flashing force—"I guess I'll be the first case of interplanetary unemployment. Maybe I can get a job washing bottles for the chemists."
The dazzling smile was a weapon, too, Joe understood. This was a woman who had devoted her life since she was a child to turning herself into a weapon—and in every way possible.
Could
be a weapon, he reminded himself again. The fact that a good kitchen knife was kept sharp didn't automatically make it a weapon for murder. The problem was simply that a good knife
had
to be sharp, or it wasn't much use. Worse than that, actually. As an experienced chef, Joe knew full well that the most dangerous knife to the user was a dull one. It could slip when you applied the extra force you needed to make it work.
He stared out the window.
Phobos came. Phobos went.
Can I live with that?
Again, the answer came to him the moment he posed it.
Don't be stupid, Joe. And stop being so self-righteous, while you're at it. Every knife in your kitchen is as sharp as a razor.
He couldn't help but chuckle softly. "Leave it to a gourmet to fall in love with a razor blade," he murmured. "Serves me right for being such a snob."
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear that," Madeline said.
"Ah . . . never mind. I was just thinking to myself that if I insisted on a woman who didn't use ketchup on steak, I had a lot of nerve whining about the rest."
He turned and smiled at Madeline. The slight frown on her face made it clear she still didn't understand what he was talking about. No way she could, of course.
"Never mind. Let's just start with the basics. What do you want, Madeline? Concretely, I mean. Sorry, I know that doesn't sound very romantic. But I think like an engineer."
Her frown cleared immediately. "Oh, that's easy. I want to go back, Joe. At least for us. I want to sit down with you and talk food, watch bad action movies, and . . . whatever else we would do together. Even though I know my job isn't going to make that easy."
He looked at the flowers, which seemed to glow in the light of the cabin. She'd spent a week making them, using her ingenuity to design it out of completely unsuitable elements. Knowing, of course—God, the woman was sharp—the emotional impact it would have on him. Manipulating him, if he wanted to think about it that way.
And so what? Naturally she'd use the same skills she'd learned for her profession on a personal matter. Did Joe pretend he wasn't an engineer—forget everything he knew—whenever he repaired a personal item?
What was important was the end, not the means. She'd spent that time for herself, and for Joe, not for her mission. She did it because it was that important to her.
Finally, he felt something inside loosening, opening up almost like a flower itself.
"You know what?" he mused out loud. "I've been in absolutely rotten shape ever since this happened. My work's been crappy, I can't concentrate on recipes—hell, I can't even watch a damn movie because they keep reminding me of you. Like being a dull knife, myself. I don't think I can function without you around any more, Madeline."