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Swan would now have to try to get around her own blocker, or knock it back into the jack, so that hopefully the jack would bounce away. Four bowls per end, and with three to go they were already looking at a crowded space around the jack. Swan considered it for a while, then decided to try to use the bias of the bowl to roll one back against the C-force and see if she could get around her blocker and tap the jack. It would require a very fine touch, and the moment she made the shot she could see that she had put too much on it. “Ah damn,” she said, and was vexed enough to add, “I’m not making any excuses or anything, but I have an excuse for that.”

“Of course. Have you seen that shirt with all the excuses printed on it?”

“They made that shirt by listening to me and writing things down.”

“Ha-ha. Which one this time?”

“Well, I’ve just spent almost a year on Earth. I’m throwing everything long.”

“I bet. What were you doing there?”

“Working on animal stuff.”

“The invasion, you mean?”

“The rewilding.”

“Huh. What was that like?”

“It was interesting.” She didn’t want to talk about it right now, and she suspected the youth knew that and only wanted to distract her. “Your shot.”

“Yes.” The youth’s waist-to-hips ratio was sort of girlish, the shoulder-to-waist-to-ground lengths sort of boyish. Possibly a gynandromorph. The youth’s shot ran almost true and flopped right beside the jack. This end was looking bad for Swan. Her only recourse now was to try to knock her own blocker into the jack and hope the jack went into the ditch, which would make for a dead end. It could be done if she could throw fast and straight on the right heading. She put her little finger on the big circle of the bias, and concentrated on keeping an upright form with a straight follow-through. She rolled, and again on release knew she had missed. “Damn.”

The youth was again amused. “You have to have every finger on it when you let go.”

“Some people do,” she said.

The youth shrugged in reply. Quite young; perhaps thirty years old; a spacer.

“Is this your home?” Swan asked.

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

The youth made a shot, which was a nicely placed blocker that meant it would be harder than ever for Swan to hit the jack with her final roll. The only chance was that same backhand.

She made her last shot and was pleased to see it roll down, take a late turn in, and bang the jack right out of the rink.

“Dead end,” the youth said calmly. Swan nodded.

They played several more ends, and the youth never made a shot that was anything less than superb. Swan lost every time.

“You’re some kind of ringer,” Swan said, feeling irritated.

“But we’re not betting.”

“Lucky for me.” She managed again to knock out the jack.

On they played. Neither seemed in any hurry to do anything else; space voyages could be like that. It felt to Swan like shuffleboard on an Atlantic ocean liner. They were rich in time-they had time to kill. The youth made several shots that were simply perfect. Swan kept throwing long, and losing. It occurred to her that this must be how Virginia Woolf had felt when she played with her husband Leonard, an expert lawn bowler from his years administering Ceylon. Virginia too had lost almost every time. The youth seemed not to care one way or the other. Leonard had probably been much the same. Well, but quite a few people played sports mostly against themselves, their opponents no more than random shifters of the problems they faced in their own performance. Still, this young person began to bother her. The neat picking up of the mat. The final flick of the fingertips at the end of a throw. The exquisite final fern tips of the Coriolised curves.

Only much later that night, as she was lying in her ramada, did it occur to Swan that the pebbles thrown at Terminator had been like a kind of lawn bowling. The thought made her sit up in bed. Set up a mat, launch a bowl-that jack would be covered.

Quantum Walk (2)