Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Hyperion. Far beyond those orbits was a
tenth one, visibly tilted. That was Iapetus. Phoebe, the most distant, could not be shown on the
scale they were using.
Now another circle was drawn in. It was an eccentric ellipse, almost tangent to the orbits of Rhea
and Hyperion, cutting right across the circle that represented Titan. Cirocco studied it, then
straightened. Looking up, she saw deep lines etched on Gaby's forehead as her fingers flew over
the keyboard. With each pro- gram she called up, the numbers on her screen changed.
"It had a very close call with Rhea about three million years ago," she noted. "It's safely above
Titan's orbit, though perturbations must be a factor. It's far from stabilized."
"Meaning what?" Cirocco asked.
"Captured asteroid?" Gaby suggested, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.
"The proximity to the equatorial plane would make that un- likely," one of the Polo sisters said.
April or August? Cirocco wondered. After eighteen months together she still couldn't tell them
apart.
"I was afraid you'd see that." Gaby chewed a knuckle. "Yet if it was formed with the others, it
ought to be less eccentric."
The Polo shrugged. '"There are ways to explain it. A catastrophic event in the recent past. It
would be easy to move it."
Cirocco frowned. "Just how big is it, then?"
The Polo--August, she was almost sure it was August- looked at her with that calm, strangely
unsettling face. "I should say about two or three kilometers. Possibly less."
"Is that all?"
Gene grinned. "You give me the numbers, I'll land on it." "What do you mean, 'Is that all'?" Gaby
said. "It couldn't have
been very much bigger, not to have been sighted by the Lunar scopes. We would have known about it
thirty years ago."
"All right. But you interrupted my bath for a damn pebble. It hardly seems worth it."
Gaby looked smug. "Maybe not to you, but if it was a tenth that size, I'd still get to name it.
Discovering a comet or an asteroid is one thing but only a couple people each century get to name
a moon."
Cirocco released her toehold on the holo tank strut and twisted toward the corridor entrance. just
before she left she glanced back at the two tiny dots still flashing on the screen overhead.
Bill's tongue had started at Cirocco's toes and was now exploring her left car. She liked that. It
had been a memorable journey. Cirocco had loved every centimeter of it; some of the stops along
the way had been outrageous. Now he was worrying her earlobe with his lips and teeth, tugging
gently to turn her around. She let it happen.
He nudged her shoulder with his chin and nose to get her turning faster. She began to rotate. She
felt like a big, soft asteroid. The analogy pleased her. Extending it, she watched the terminator
line crawl around her to bring the hills and valleys of her front into sunlight.
Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to
satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.
New games were possible in free-fall, like the one they had been playing, "no hands." They could
use feet, mouths, knees, or shoulders to position each other. One had to be gentle and careful,
but with slow bites and nips anything could be done, and in such an interesting way.
All of them came to the hydroponics room from time to time. Ringmaster had seven private rooms,
and they were as necessary as oxygen. But even Cirocco's cabin was crowded when two people were in
it, and it *as at the bottom of the carousel. It took one act of love in free-fall to make a bed
seem as limiting as the back scat of a Chevrolet.
'Why don't you turn this way a little?" Bill asked. "Can you give me a good reason?"
He showed her one, and she gave him a little more than he had asked for. Then she found herself
with a little more than she had .asked for, but as usual, he knew what he was doing. She locked
her legs around his hips and let him do the moving.
Bill was forty, the oldest of the crew, and had a face dominated by a lumpy nose and jowls that
could have graced a bassett hound. He was balding and his teeth were not pretty. But his body was
lean and hard, ten years younger than his face. His hands were neat and clean, precise in their
movements. He was good with machinery, but not the greasy, noisy kind. His tool kit would fit in
his shirt pocket, tools so tiny that Cirocco wouldn't dare handle them.
His delicate touch paid off when he made love. It was matched
by his gentle disposition. Cirocco wondered why it had taken her so long to find him.
There were three men aboard Ringmaster, and Cirocco had made love to them all. So had Gaby
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