“Unbending intelligence and integrity.” Antonio smiled. “My mother always thought I was a natural.”
He was easy to like. Especially when he asked whether she wasn’t the woman who’d saved everybody’s ass at that Deepsix thing, when that entire world had been swallowed? She really couldn’t take credit for that, and she suspected he knew that, but it was nice to hear him say it anyhow.
Jon took her back to the engine room to look at the Locarno. It was just a pair of black boxes, much smaller than the Hazeltine enabler. He explained how it worked. She’d listened to the explanation before, hadn’t understood it then and didn’t understand it now. But the reality was she’d never figured out how the Hazeltine had worked either. You punched a button, and you slipped between the dimensions. That was about as clear as it got.
When they returned to the common room, she could hear Matt going through his preps with Phyllis, the AI. “You miss being up front?” Antonio asked.
“I’ve been away from it too long,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to ride in this thing if I were at the controls.”
Antonio grinned at her, and at Jon. “These things don’t really need pilots anyhow, do they? I mean, don’t the AI’s handle everything?”
“The AIs handle everything,” she said, “as long as there’s no problem. If something goes wrong, you’ll be glad you have Matt up there.”
“Well, yeah.” He made a face as if she were running an old story past him. “How often does something go wrong?”
He offered her a grape juice. She took it and sat back. “It happens all the time. Research missions, particularly. The physicists like to go in close. Usually as close as they can until something blows up. And there are unexplained bursts of energy in hyperspace that sometimes penetrate the shielding and knock out equipment.”
“But of course”—Jon looked in on them from the bridge—“we won’t be traveling in hyperspace anymore. Not with the Locarno.”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The dimension we’ll be traveling through. What’s its name?”
“We haven’t given it one yet.”
“You’ll want to do that before we get home, or Antonio here will do it for you. Won’t you, Antonio?”
“I already have a name for it,” he said. “I suggest we call it Giannotti space.”
Matt announced over the allcom they were ready to go. “Priscilla,” he added, “would you like to sit up front?”
She looked at Antonio and Jon. “Anybody else want to do it?”
“Go ahead,” said Jon. “Enjoy yourself.”
She took a long pull from the grape juice and strode onto the bridge, feeling young again, feeling as if she could do anything. She took the right-hand seat, the observer’s seat, and, while Matt talked to Union Ops, she activated the harness. It slid down around her.
Matt finished and looked her way. “Welcome back,” he said.
Yes. At that moment, Hutch was in love with the world.
Matt activated the allcom. “Everybody belt down,” he said. “Phyl, start the engines.” Then to the allcom again: “We are three minutes from departure.”
She felt the familiar vibration as additional power came online. “How does the Locarno work?” she asked him. “We still need a running start, right?”
Matt was a good-looking guy, with red hair and a mischievous smile offset by intense eyes. He reminded her of Tor, but she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the innocence. Matt was a guy who still believed in things. In a decaying society, wracked by too much leisure, corruption in high places, a crippled environment, and God knew what else, there weren’t too many like that. The assumption had always been that if people are well fed, feel secure, and have decent homes, everything will be fine. But they needed something else as well. Call it self-respect or a sense of purpose. Whatever, it was missing now. Maybe spreading out through the galaxy would provide it, maybe not. But she was convinced that if the human race simply settled onto its collective front porch, as it seemed to be doing, it had no future.
She didn’t think it was a coincidence that nobody was producing great holos anymore. The ones that everyone remembered, Barcelona, Bugles at Dusk, Icelandik, and all the rest were from the previous century. The same was true of drama, the novel, architecture, sculpture. Civilization as a whole seemed to be in decline.
She had loved Tor, and missed him every day. He’d made his living as an artist, but she knew his ability was only moderate. Nobody was going to be naming museums and schools after him. That hadn’t mattered: She hadn’t loved him for his talent. But the hard truth was there weren’t any great artists anymore. She didn’t know why, and couldn’t connect it to the general malaise that had settled across the planet. Maybe somebody somewhere knew what was happening. She didn’t. Maybe life had become too easy in too many places, and too pointless in too many others. Maybe it was just that old business that you had to wait a century to sort out who was great and who wasn’t. Whatever it was, her instincts screamed that it was the same process. That humans were designed to do what they’d always done: climb into their canoes and move out across uncharted seas. Whether those seas were philosophical or physical, she thought they had to do it.
“Yes,” Matt said, “we still need a running start. Not as long as we did with the Hazeltine. Maybe twenty minutes or so to build up a charge.”
“It feels good to be back, Matt.”
He looked at her. Nodded and smiled. Union Ops broke in with information about solar activity. It wouldn’t affect them, but they shouldn’t linger insystem.
They were at two minutes. Support lines began disconnecting, withdrawing into the dock. She felt a mild jar as the magnetic locks turned them loose.
Matt eased the ship into its exit lane, adjusted the artificial gravity, took them past the series of docks, and moved out through the launch doors. “Still a nice feeling,” she said.
“Yeah, it is. Beats hustling condominiums.”
Earth, blue and white and endlessly lovely, spread out below them. A sliver of moon floated off to port. Toward the end of her piloting career, she hadn’t much noticed such things. Stars and worlds had become navigational objects, markers in the night and not much more. That was when she’d realized it was time to do something else. But seated on the bridge, as Matt increased thrust and they began to move out, she felt she’d come home at last.
As the Preston accelerated, they traded a few quips. You’re sure the drive works? We’re not going to come out of it with our brains scrambled, are we? “If the monkey could make it,” Matt said, “we should be fine.”
Matt had a taste for music, and he asked whether she objected, then brought up Beethoven. The Pathétique. It was pleasant, and fit the mood.
“What happens during the jump?” she asked.
“Not much. It’s not like hyperspace. The mists are gone. The sensors pick up nothing. It’s just unbroken darkness.”
Hutch looked out through the viewport. No moving lights anywhere. There was a time that something was always coming or going at Union. The station had been the center of traffic to a dozen regular ports of call and literally hundreds of star systems. It had been filled with tourists, some coming simply to see the station itself, others boarding one of the tour liners for the voyage of a lifetime.
People still came to look on Earth from orbit, and to spend a weekend, to give their kids a completely different experience. And maybe they came, most of all, so they could say they’d been there. Gone to the top of the world.