Acts of Conscience by William Barton

narrow bed by Callisto’s absurd point-oh-five gee, dorm room air cool on slightly night-sweaty skin and... Wind of cold wonder striking my back just then, smarmy cramp of unresolvable horniness abruptly forgotten. I’m here .
    When my feet hit the thin, velvety carpet, I heard the shower start up, dorm AI setting it for the temperature it knew I liked, numbers picked from my memory, I suppose, or maybe even cross-loaded from L1(SE). A friendly voice, a familiar feel to the thing. A lot like the old apartment AI. Flatter affect, of course, it not having had time to grow accustomed to my ways...
    Chatter from the stock ticker, already comfortable in its new compspace, updating me on how it was handling the measly 278,413 livres of my diminished account. Angry at me, little one? Is that possible? Probability table spawning, showing me the very low likelihood it would ever be able to build me another three-million-livre fortune...
    After breakfast, full orange Jupiter high in a black, moon-pocked sky, Sun somewhere below Callisto’s dark gray horizon, Gordy Lassiter had the sense to be quiet while I stood on the edge of the drydock platform and looked at my ship.
    Torus X-3 .
    Well. No. I... I’ll think of something when the time comes.
    Finally: “Might as well go inside, Gae.”
    I turned and looked at him. No urge to tell him my name wasn’t Gae ? No. I cold see the fire of naked envy in his eyes. My ship . I smiled and said, “I guess so.”
    Nothing before us now but a shining silver disk, the mirror brightness of chrome rather than the duller burnish of real silver. A flattish silver disk with the cross section of a spiral galaxy, complete with spherical hub. At a guess, I thought the thing measured a hundred meters across the plane of the disk, maybe twenty meters through the central bulge. For a starship, an itty bitty thing. As we walked closer, I could see the silver finish was faintly tarnished here and there, irregular blotches of faint bronze, gold, bits of rainbow glimmer. Tarnished by the energies of hyperspace? I don’t know.
    We went under the rim, into shadow, where four stubby landing legs, unfolded from pods attached to the southern hemisphere of the ship’s central bulge stood spraddle-legged on the pavement. Lassiter said, “We haven’t really started pulling her down yet, so when we get inside, you won’t see much at first besides her public face.” We walked around the curve of the hull to where a long ramp of stairs had dropped down on two curved supports from its recess against the underside of the disk, leading up to an open door in the side of the sphere.
    He said, “Central bulge is all pressurized habitable space, control rooms, staterooms, whatnot.” A gesture overhead. “Since our modified gravity polarizer and the new hyperdrive components had to be toroidal, we built the life support system into the doughnut hole, then hung the rest of the flight hardware, avionics and whatnot, around the rim. This is the main gangway, of course, and there’s an airlock door on the bottom, between the landing legs, an escape trunk hatch on top, mounted in the upper bulkhead of the control room...”
    Listening, of course, listening to his blather, as I put my hand on the gangway railing, put my feet on the risers, which some idiot had engineered for one-gee... Even on Earth, I’d’ve taken them two-at-a-time, I think. As it was...
    “Watch your head,” said Lassiter.
    Me, powering up the stairs, toes barely touching, mainly just hauling myself up the handrail, excitement a tight nervousness in my chest, touched by a matching flutter of joy from the spacesuit.
    o0o
    Then school days. Taking me back, I suppose, to my mother’s useless architectural school on Luna, much more to Syrtis Major, which I chose for myself and loved after a fashion. Strange way to look at it. Loved? I suppose so. If it’s true that I actually...
    These new friends were a mixed bag, the first class made up for the