He also did not like to be followed. Nikolai Petrovich Che-renkov had been followed by people who wanted to kill him and by people who wanted to worship him. The two experiences were not all that different.
He had become more and more private over the past two decades. One morning in the company of Infinity Mendez and Floris Brown tired him to a startling degree. The effort
of remaining civil, pleasant, even cheerful, had drained him of the anticipatory energy he experienced before his spacewalks. Human contact affected him with a kind of sensory overload that only the emptiness and completeness of space could overcome.
Kotya entered the elevator to the outside, hoping Griffith would remain at the inner surface.
"It is boring and dark down there," Kolya said. "Unpleasant. Stay in the sunshine."
"It's all right," Marion Griffith said. "I want to see." The officer stayed with him.
Griffith made Kolya uncomfortable. He showed too much interest in Cherenkov's past. But Cherenkov did not exist anymore. Only Kolya existed. Kolya was not a pioneering cosmonaut or a heroic antiterrorist or a terrorist traitor. Kolya was an old man who loved space.
The elevator fell through the inner skin of fertile dirt, through the underground water level, through the massive radiation-slopping shell of lunar rock.
Paying Griffith no more attention, Kolya analyzed his reasons for letting Infinity persuade him to talk to Floris Brown. What did it matter to Kolya if she lived on the bottom level of his hill, or in the guesthouse, or back on earth, or out in the garden in the dew? Thanthavong never bothered him— she was no recluse, but she did spend all her time in the genetics lab. That was what she had come up here for, after all, to escape the demands of achievement and publicity and
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public adoration, to get on with her work. Like Kolya, but with more meaning to her life.
A lonely old woman living downstairs would demand attention, whether from Kolya or from others who would visit. Kolya could see nothing coming from the change but an invasion of his privacy.
He felt no obligation to offer anything to Floris, but Infinity was different. Kolya thought Infinity was far more admirable than any of the scientists, who worked in their minds, or he himself, who did not work at all anymore, except at tasks he chose, tasks that took him into space. It would have been possible to program an AS to do most of what Kolya chose to do, and an AI to do the rest. But no one had ever succeeded in programming an expert system to replicate a master gardener. To approximate, yes. Not to replicate. There was something about technological complexity, mechanical complexity, that machines could handle, and something about organic and aesthetic complexity that befuddled them. Kolya thought the gardeners, like Infinity, to be the most important people on board the starship.
The elevator stopped. Assuming a strong young military officer would be embarrassed to have his discomfort noticed, Kolya said nothing to explain the strange sensation produced
by riding an elevator through a rotating environment. If Griffith had neglected to read his introduction manual on the way to Starfarer, that was his problem.
The artificial gravity was perceptibly stronger here, nearly one g. The radius of the cylinder's outer skin was significantly longer than the distance from the axis to the inner surface.
The increased radial acceleration increased the sensation of weight.
At the outer surface of the cylinder, the corridors were solid, rough, and ugly. Few people came this far down. If they wanted to spacewalk, they went out at the axis and avoided the rotation. Kolya liked the rotation. He climbed into his pressure suit as Griffith watched.
"That doesn't look too hard," Griffith said, breaking the silence for the first time since they left the inner surface. "How long does the training take?"
Kolya had already drifted into the strange and vulnerable state to which he surrendered in space. Without a word, he
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stepped into the airiock and sealed it, leaving Griffith behind as abruptly as he had left Floris and Infinity.
The pump drew the air from the lock and back into the ship- Surrounded by vacuum, Kolya opened the outer hatch.
He let the radial acceleration press him past the skin of the cylinder and into the harder vacuum of space. With the ease of long practice, he lowered himself onto the narrow framework that crept over the cylinder's surface. He stood in the same orientation as he had inside the cylinder, with his head toward the axis of rotation. The outer skin of the cylinder lay a couple of meters above him. Nothing separated him from space except the cables of the inspection net.
Beneath him, the wild cylinder and the furled sail slipped past. Kolya sank to his knees, then inched fiat. He let his arms dangle toward the stars. Someday, he thought, he would let himself slip from the framework and be flung away into space. But not quite yet. He was not quite ready yet.
Rotation took him out from between the cylinders. Before him, the stars made a fine, spangled sheet.
He lay there, still and silent, staring at the galaxy.
The transparent skin of the sailhouse placed no barrier between the room, and space and stars and the sail outside.
People floated in zero-gravity along one side of the curved glass walclass="underline" fewer people than should have gathered to watch the first full test of Starfwer's solar sail.
Satoshi floated farther into the transparent chamber. The sensors surrounded him with melodic chords. Iphigenie DuPre, the sailmaster, drifted with eyes closed, listening to the musical reports, invisibly connected to the computers and control strands of the sail. Her long, lithe, dark limbs reacted with reflexive, minuscule motions as she ordered a strand tightened here, balanced there.
The sail, untwisting from its cable configuration, now appeared as a great sheet of silver, closely pleated.
Victoria and J.D. and Feral joined Satoshi. Still inside the access tunnel, Stephen Thomas hesitated. He pushed off gingerly, awkwardly, with one hand. In the other he carried a sack, which he had avoided explaining.
Satoshi looked around. Almost everyone in the sailhouse was faculty or staff". There were a few sponsored reporters, and Feral, and a number of remotes transmitting the event back to earth, but none of the VIP visitors the expedition had prepared for. Chancellor Blades had chosen not to attend the test, and he had not even sent his usual deputy, Gerald Hem-minge, the assistant chancellor.
Feral pushed off and started interviewing people, setting the background for his story. Starfarer navigated from one
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star system to the next via cosmic string. But once it reached a destination, it required other methods of propulsion: primarily the sail. Cosmic string provided macronavigation, the sail, micronavigation, though it sounded strange to apply Ihe term "micro" to distances measured in millions of kilometers.
The sail was slow, but near a star it was steady. It had the great benefit of operating without reaction mass or onboard fuel. It would propel the starship from its entrypoint into the star system to a point from which it could reenter the twisted space-time of a cosmic string. The alien contact team had a small, fast explorer to use in traveling between Starfarer and a new system's worlds.
Feral drifted over to the sailmaster.
Iphigenie DuPre's astonishing mathematical ability reached so deep that it appeared instinctual to anyone who overlooked her years of experience and practice. She was one of the first people to build a sail-ship and to sail it in space. She had designed most of the sail systems that racers used down around the O'Neill colonies. Once her sails started winning races, she retired from amateur competition and put her time into developing and marketing. She was probably the wealthiest person on board Starfarer, thanks to the popularity of sail-ship racing.