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.