"Okay," says Linya evenly. "How does this work, should I take the most important boxes with us and the rest are locked up in a cargo hold or will they be accessible regardless?"

"They'll be accessible, but less conveniently. Anything you expect to be opening up regularly should come with us to the cabin, but probably you'll have to tuck at least half your stuff away in storage, and it won't be much of a hassle if you misfile something and need to go get it halfway through the trip."

"Okay." Linya pulls out about a third of her boxes and puts them on a separate luggage cart and follows Miles to their cabin.

Linya puts down her stuff, and investigates how she's holding up to all this travel in the mirror (hair up in a relatively simple coil contained in a bejeweled cage-for-hair-coils, various layers of shades of green with some yellow and black accents) and then sits on the edge of the bed and resumes pen-ing. "Now I wonder if this ship has a decent library; if so I can get started on Russian."

"I don't know what you consider decent, but it has a library," says Miles.

"Well, in this case, decency means 'contains introductory Russian material." She switches her pen's mode; is is now in full color again. She starts looking. "Here we go... yes, excellent."

"Oh good."

"Mm-hm." She peers at the bed. "I have never tried to sleep in a bed with another person before. I don't think I toss and turn, but I have no way of knowing - you aren't, I hope, fragile enough that it's a safety concern?"

"Um... I also haven't tried to sleep in a bed with another person before," Miles confesses. "You could certainly break my bones if you tried - I have no idea if you're likely to do it in your sleep by accident."

"I'm not going to try, I'm just wondering what constitutes reasonable precautions. I probably need a lot less sleep than you do, so if necessary I suppose there could be shifts, but that seems inconvenient."

"Yes, it does, doesn't it? Um. I really don't know," he says. "I suspect 'try it and see what happens' is the best information-gathering method we're going to come up with. I at least don't think you're going to break anything that can't be fixed."

"...Yes," he says.

"Okay. That will be fine, then."

"Um? Yes," he says. "Fine. I'm fine."

"Okay." Woggle woggle. "Do you want a pen? I'm going to see about making a consumer version and they probably shouldn't be exact copies of mine."

"Ooh. Yes," he says.

"Any requests for what you want it to do?"

"Well, I don't know, what does yours do?"

"Comconsole functions, it can patch into most standard networks, that's how I'm accessing the library now. It's DNA locked, the consumer version probably won't do that, there are shortcuts I could take locking it to myself because I borrowed from the way the chairs only react to specific haut-ladies. It can pick up sound, but not project it - there wasn't a good way to get any reasonable acoustic quality without making it bulkier. It can take pictures as well as display them, though. It can do flat midair screens like this, or three-dimensional projections, although I don't have any way for it to project around corners so if I cover up both of its ends," she demonstrates, the projection winks out, "it's no good - that makes the three-d option less useful than it otherwise might be. It'll draw freehand, or recognize a library of gestures - alphabets and software shortcuts. It's got okay data capacity on its own, but its charger and external storage unit is where I keep anything I don't expect to need in the next week or so - again, didn't want it too bulky. And the white projection you've seen is another feature the consumer version probably won't have because most people aren't tetrachromats, but I find it a useful privacy screen."

"...Tetrachromat?"

"I can see more colors than you can. The white screen looks the equivalent of greyscale to me. It's only been standard for haut designed within the last couple of decades - anyone my own age could still read over my shoulder, but if it was only people older than me, they wouldn't be able to."