no one in the partnership found much attraction in one-night stands. It would be uncharacteristic of Stephen Thomas to start something that would have to end so soon, with Feral leaving on the transport.
"The satellite relay is currently overloaded. Please wait. then try again."
Impatiently, Victoria complied with the unusual request.
"We'll get to the cosmic string before the carrier gets to us," Feral said.
"How the hell do you know that?" Stephen Thomas said.
"Because it wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing the other way around," Feral replied. "And besides, if the carrier gets here before we hit the string ... I won't be allowed to report the story."
"Feral," Victoria said, "do you know the old joke where the punch line is 'What do you mean "we," white man?' "
"You're right," Feral said, grinning, "That is an old joke."
"So, what do you mean, 'we'?"
"You don't think I could leave now, do you? This is the
best story I'll ever get the chance to cover! I'm one of you."
"You can't sign on at the last minute—"
"The last minute! I only applied about eight hundred times!"
"And you were turned down. I'm sorry, but—"
Feral laughed. Stephen Thomas started to chuckle.
"It isn't funny!"
"But it is, love. I'm sorry, it is."
"You're trying to pull off the biggest theft in the history of 232 Vonda N. Mcintyre
humanity," Feral said, "and you want me to worry about application rules?"
That brought her up short.
"Yes," she said. "I do. Maybe it sounds nuts, but if we use this rebellion as an excuse to throw out our laws and customs, we'll be in worse trouble than if we'd let Starfarer be taken over."
Returning to Arachne, she tried once more to make the connection. Once more she received the "Ail lines busy" message.
Stephen Thomas and Feral, both made somber by her comment. looked over her shoulder.
"What's going on?"
"Everybody calling out, just like me. Explaining why they're going. Or why they'll be back sooner than they expected."
All the members of the team, and everyone else on the faculty, had spent the whole morning making sure that everyone knew that they had to decide, immediately, whether to go or stay. Satoshi was off trying to reason with his graduate student. Fox, who had to leave and did not want to.
It was only a few hours till lunar transit, a few more hours till intersection with the cosmic string ... or takeover by the military carrier.
Victoria made a third attempt to connect with the web.
"Your communication request is in the queue. Please be patient."
Victoria frowned. "This is weird, eh?"
"Yeah." Stephen Thomas said. "Even if everybody up here called at the same time, Arachne's got plenty of channels."
They looked at each other.
"We're being cut off," Feral said.
"I don't ... " Victoria let her voice trail away,
"It's easy. Just interfere with our access to the relay satellite. Damn' I got two stories out, but the third—and the one I haven't done yet, the live report on reaching transition ... " He tangled his fingers in his thick hair and turned away with a shout of anguish.
Victoria stared at the blank screen. Not to be able to talk to Grangrana, maybe ever again . . . She slumped on the bench.
STARFARERS 233
Stephen Thomas knelt behind her, put his arms around her, and enfolded her.
"She'll understand," he whispered. "She'll know you tried. She'll understand."
Victoria put her hands over his and held him tight. A tear splashed down and caught where their fingers meshed, between his fair skin, her dark skin.
Victoria kicked off from the mouth of the entry tunnel and swam into the sailhouse. Iphigenie, entranced in Arachne's web, drifted in the center of the crystalline cylinder, in the midst of the eerie harmonies of the sail's controls. Only a few other people floated, scattered, within the sailhouse. This should have been a celebration. The changes made a celebration impossible.
The moon's shadow sped toward Starfarer as the moon caught up with the starship. With Starfarer's orbit widening, the moon would pass below. By then the enormous solar sail would have deflected the starship from its original course, setting it to skim the surface of the moon and arc out of the plane of the solar system, straight to the nearest point of the local strand of cosmic string.
Observers on earth saw the full moon about to occlude a bright new star.
Victoria waited in silence until Iphigenie's eyelids fluttered. The sailmaster gazed around, disoriented.
"Victoria ... "
"All set?"
Iphigenie's mouth quirked up at one comer, a wry smile.
"I sure wish I had some ground support."
"You can do it without."
"Of course I can," Iphigenie said.
She let herself spin, visually checking the starship cylinders, the sail, the moon, and beautiful blue-white earth in the distance.
235
236 vonda N. Mclntyre
"I keep imagining I can see the carrier already," Iphigenie said. "And the bombs . . ."
"Soon."
"Too soon. It's going to be close. And the transport, Vic-toria—the pilot's got to take on reaction mass and undock as soon as she can. Otherwise we'll have a civilian transport along for the ride. The last thing we need is a ship full of kidnapping victims." She pressed her hands against her tight, smooth braids. "Can we even communicate with the transport? Or are their systems 'overloaded,' too?"
"We're realigning an antenna," Victoria said. "The transport will hear us. We might get one voice link to earth. But that's it."
"I wanted a test," Iphigenie said- Her eyelids fluttered.
"How close do we have to cut things?"
"I won't know until after lunar passage. We won't have more than a couple of hours. Everybody who's leaving is going to have to cram themselves onto the transport fast. Are there a lot?"
"Not as many as I was afraid there would be."
"They'll all fit on one transport?"
"It will be crowded." Victoria shrugged- "They'll manage." She did not want to think about who was leaving. It made her too unhappy, too angry.
"I've got to concentrate," Iphigenie said. "Do you want to link in?"
"Yes!"
She slipped into Iphigenie's multidimensional mathematical space. Images poured through her connection with Arachne. Starfarer fell behind the moon.
Iphigenie drifted in her accustomed position, all her senses focused on the sail and the connection between Arachne and the sail, measuring control in micrometers.
The craters and maria on the sunlit limb of the moon vanished abruptly into darkness at the terminator.
The sun disappeared behind the earth; the earth disappeared behind the dark limb of the moon. Darkness overtook the starship. The bright sail dimmed. In starlight, it began to collapse. In the illumination of Iphigenie's instructions, Victoria felt the slackening sail's control strands tighten and shift and move.
STARFARERS 237
The dark moon looked huge, a great black shadow in space.
Starfarer plunged toward it.
Then the ship passed over it, as if over the dark depths of a sea. For a strange, unsettling time Victoria felt as if she were traversing the airless surface in a hot-air balloon, impossibly high.
As Victoria's eyes grew accustomed to the change in contrast, she saw features in the shadows, faintly illuminated by starlight.
Suddenly Iphigenie shouted in anger and in pain. An instant later Arachne jerked the web's connections from Victoria, flinging her into darkness and emptiness. Victoria gasped for breath and fought for consciousness.