The challenge of a starship's esoteric combination of propulsions had brought her to EarthSpace, and to Starfarer.
"Ms. DuPre—** Feral said.
"Hush, now," she said quietly. The tempo of the sensor melodies quickened.
Everyone fell silent, and the change began.
Tension eased at the ends of the pieated surface. The folds
turned to close-set ripples.
The sail opened.
Liquid silver spread over blackness, widened, flowed like a flooding lake across the path of the Milky Way, and cut off the stars. One edge quivered. A vibration shimmered through the satin film. The shivering threatened to twist the surface out of shape, but control strands shifted and tightened and eased away the oscillation.
The sail grew.
Its complex harmonies filled the sailhouse. No one spoke. STARFARERS 12 7
The sail shivered with one final ripple, then lay quiet, stretched out across space. Satoshi imagined that he could see a slight curve in the surface, as the sail filled with the invisible solar wind. He imagined he could already feel the acceleration, already detect the most infinitesimal widening of the starship's orbit.
The sensor melody decreased to a whisper.
"Full deployment."
Iphigenie's quiet statement filled the sailhouse like a shout. Her voice held suppressed laughter and excitement. She opened her unusual cinnamon-brown eyes. For a few seconds, no one else made a sound. Satoshi released the breath he had been holding.
"Watch it!"
The shout and an explosive "pop!" broke the silence. It sounded like damage, like decompression, like a breach of the sailhouse wall into the vacuum of space. Satoshi tensed, forcing himself not to jerk toward the noise. Any quick movement in freefall would send him tumbling.
A projectile shot past.
The champagne cork slammed into the transparent wall beyond him. It rebounded nearly as fast, hit the glass on the other side, and bounced again. It narrowly missed Satoshi and several other faculty members.
Somersaulting slowly backward, Stephen Thomas laughed
as the cork flung itself around the glass cylinder until it used
up its momentum. Champagne pressed itself out of the bottle
he held. Without gravity, the bubbles formed on the sides
and bottom of the bottle instead of exploding upward; their
pressure pushed the champagne out. As Stephen Thomas
tumbled he left a liquid rope twisting in his wake. It fizzed
softly.
Stephen Thomas looked like the star of some weird zero-gravity sport, celebrating a championship by trying to spray his teammates with champagne, but being defeated by weightlessness.
He'd have to be the star of something yet to be invented, Satoshi thought. He's wrong for the most popular earth sports:
too slender for football, not tall enough for basketball, and far too beautiful for hockey.
Stephen Thomas spoiled the effect by bumping into the 128 Vonda N. Mclntyre
wall and snatching awkwardly at a glass handhold to stop his tumble. He came to a hall, still laughing, still holding the bottle. The twisting stream of champagne broke itself into spherical globules that drifted among the spectators.
"I was wondering how to split it up," Stephen Thomas said. The pressure of the bubbles slowly pushed the last of the champagne into the air.
The cork tumbled lazily, having lost most of its momentum without hitting anyone in the eye. Everyone was looking at Stephen Thomas rather than at the sail.
He tossed his head. His long blond hair nipped back for a second, then fell forward again to drift in front of his eyes. He tucked it behind one ear.
"Congratulations, Iphigenie," he said.
"Yes," Victoria said. "Iphigenie, the sail's beautiful."
"Thank you." She reached out and waved a rippling sphere of champagne toward her, placed her lips against it, and drank it with a kiss. Unlike most zero-g workers, she kept her hair long, but she wore it in a smooth mass of thin, heavy braids caught up at the back of her neck.
Iphigenie's action broke the tension of waiting for deployment, and the fright of Stephen Thomas's exploding champagne cork. Everyone clustered around Iphigenie, sphering her with their congratulations, surrounding her like the bubbles surrounding the wine; people caught and drank the fizzing globules of champagne that drifted and trembled in the air currents. Satoshi kissed one and let it flow between his lips. It dissolved against his tongue, dry and gentle and ephemeral.
Nearby, J.D. floated alone, watching the sail, occasionally glancing at the celebration with a slight smile on her lips. Satoshi waved a bubble of champagne in her direction.
"J.D., catch!"
Instead of reaching for the rippling bubble, she pushed her hand toward it to create a counterdraft in Satoshi's direction.
"Thank you," she said. "It's very kind of you, but I don't drink. I quit when I started diving."
Stephen Thomas paddled awkwardly toward them.
"Are you guys playing tennis with my good champagne?"
He tried to capture it with the air pressure of a gesture, and
succeeded only in breaking it into several smaller drops. Sa-STARFARERS 12 9
toshi caught one in his mouth and pushed one toward Stephen Thomas.
"Victoria! Feral!"
They joined him. Together, they drank the last bubbles.
"I knew I'd think of something good to drink this with," Stephen Thomas said.
Satoshi chuckled. Victoria smiled and drifted close enough to brush her lips against his cheek.
In one direction, the sail lay taut. In the other, the twin cylinders of the campus rotated, one clockwise, one counterclockwise, toward each other, and away. Beyond campus, at a great distance, the earth hung in space, one limb bright and the rest of its face dark, a new earth.
Most of the spectators had left the sailhouse. Stephen Thomas floated near the transparent wall. For once he felt almost comfortable in freefail.
Maybe, he thought, I ought to combine it with champagne more often.
"Are you coming?" Victoria asked.
"I'll be along in a little while."
Satoshi passed the sailmaster. "Thanks for the show, Iphi-genie."
"My pleasure," she replied, too experienced in zero-g to disturb her equilibrium by turning.
Stephen Thomas watched his partners glide out of the sailhouse. He envied their grace. He knew he would get the hang of navigating in weightlessness soon enough—it had better be soon, because he hated feeling physically incompetent and off balance, baffled and awkward.
Stephen Thomas was the last spectator. Intent on the sail, Iphigenie paid him no attention.
The sail lay almost motionless in space, but every now and again the silver surface shimmied. When it did that it looked alive, like some huge aether-breathing animal, twitching its flank to drive off a fly.
Stephen Thomas wondered if a space-living creature would have an aura. Idly, he narrowed his eyes and focused his vision beyond the center of the sail. He had never thought of seeking the aura of an inanimate object. The idea amused him. He did not expect to find anything.
13 0 vonda N. Mcintyre
He looked.
Gradually, as if the act of searching for i( caused it to appear and grow. a pale violet light glimmered along the edges of the sail. It flowed down the feedback lines and crept across the sail's face.
Stephen Thomas gazed at the lavender light until it swept all the way to the sailhouse, surrounded the transparent cylinder, and wrapped it in a transparent gauze of illumination.
Iphigenie did not react to it, though every now and again she glanced out at the sail as if her eyes and her instincts could tell her more than the feedbacks and computers and musical sensors. Stephen Thomas said nothing of the aura.