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for John to refuse some excellent offers from them.”
    “So you think he’ll refuse them again?”
    A synthesized snort. “Hard to say. You see, the only other contract he’s likely to get right now is for something rather mundane and boring, such as ore hauls. But both he and Evangeline have a very low tolerance for repetitious tasks and routine schedules. It’s one reason why I keep John, in spite of all his flaws. He harmonizes very well with Evangeline. He usually manages to get us unusual contracts that involve long-distance hauls and new places. She likes those, and so does he. John can spend the years dreaming in Waitsleep while Evangeline gets to see new places. So, I expect he’ll negotiate with Earth Affirmed rather than take anything stable and normal.” There was a trace of derision in the Arthroplana’s voice.
    “I see,” Connie said softly. “Long runs.” She thought of the run they had just completed. She’d come aboard at Delta Station, thirty-seven years ago, newly hired. On the run out to Rabby and on the trip back, she’d chosen the minimum Wakeup routine. For her, a matter of days had passed. But for Delta Station and everyone on it, thirty-seven years hadpassed. She felt a sinking in her belly as she mused on it. Tug was mercifully silent. Thirty-seven years. The longest she’d ever been gone before had been five years, and she’d taken maximum Wakeups on that trip, so it had seemed like a year’s trip. This time, while she’d slept and then docked at Rabby and supervised the unloading of the Human-manufactured textiles and ceremonial robes that the Rabby Geltehan queen had ordered for her trouba’s rejuvenation ceremonies, and then slept and waked again, thirty-seven years had passed on Delta.
    She’d chosen Waitsleep, and she told herself firmly that she didn’t regret it. “Time is a greater distance than space.” So the saying went, and she hoped she’d prove it true. She had seen her generation slowly aging away from her, two and three years at a stretch, until most of them had been twenty-seven years older than she was when she’d last left Delta. But this time, when she got off the ship, they’d be sixty-four years older than she was. They’d be ninety-seven years old now. Sexually mature. Physical adults. They might recognize her if they saw her, but she probably wouldn’t know them. And that was how she had decided she wanted it. Not to know them anymore. Not to have any contemporaries, not to have anyone who came up and looked searchingly into her eyes and complimented her on how much more relaxed she seemed since she’d gone through Readjustment. Too damn many of them had heard about her Readjustment. It would be better to go on with her life, to make new connections and friends, ones that didn’t look curiously at her and wonder just what had been wrong with her to require Readjustment.
     
    John frowned around the cluttered walls of his awake quarters. Dammit, he was running out of room again. He thought he could fit one more restrainer shelf against the bulkhead by his lounge, as long as he always remembered it when he was sitting up. It wouldn’t leave him much head space. But the only other option was eliminating some of his reader tape collection, and he’d long passed the point in his collecting where that was really an option. Sometimes he felt he treasured the minor works of the ancient authors more than the major ones. The major ones stood a chance of survival on their own. The minor ones by the lesser thinkers would survive the Conservancy’s strict policies on information hoarding only in pirate collections like his own.
    Once more his eyes roved his cluttered stateroom, so unlike the bare austerity that characterized the rest of Evangeline’s gondola chambers. There were gaps in the shelves that only his eyes could see, gaps that would never be filled: spaces for Kipling’s second Jungle Book , for Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet , for the myriad