It had occurred to her, in spite of efforts to keep such thoughts at bay, that Tekla would be an altogether different style of partner, and she had to admit that she found this pretty interesting. There was an entire story about Tekla’s sexuality that had begun a few weeks after her rescue with some kind of elaborate soap opera, a love triangle or quadrangle involving both men and women, loosely enshrined in the oral history of Izzy but not something Moira had ever cared to learn more about. The gist of it was that after a few months Tekla had begun openly sleeping with other women, eliciting vast amounts of analysis and commentary and drama. The analysis had tended to come from gender theorists talking about the somewhat uncomfortable fact that Tekla was an athlete who had looked kind of butch even when she had been glammed up for the Olympics and looked a hell of a lot more so now. Her coming out (though she had never formally done so) thus tended to reinforce existing stereotypes about female athletes. The commentary came from millions of idiots on the Internet. And the drama occurred in Tekla’s relationships with the other Russians, who constituted a powerful bloc on the space station. This had faded as they’d gotten used to it, as more people of various nationalities and sexualities had joined the Cloud Ark, and as everyone had focused their attentions on larger problems. But it had turned Tekla into a curious, solitary creature, socially distant from the only people with whom she could carry on a fluent conversation. The expectation among politically correct academic-leftist observers had been that she would undergo a personal transformation and become like an academic leftist, but she seemed to have retained the same basic attitude about order and discipline that had made her a Scout in the first place and that had led her to putting Sean Probst in an arm lock and offering to choke him out. Sitting across the table from her, drinking her coffee and picking at her oatmeal, Moira idly wondered whether Tekla was aware of the fact that there was a whole genre of Internet fan pornography devoted to imaginary couplings, more or less sadomasochistic, between her and Sean Probst.