The light was very dim. Far beyond the spinning cylinders of the starship, the moon lay shadowed with starlight, craters black at the rim, fuliginous inside. On the other side of the sailhouse, Victoria could see the sail only as a shadow against the starfield. But she knew that without Iphigenie's control, without the solar wind to stabilize it, it would collapse, tangle, destroy itself.
The starship plunged toward the surface of the moon. The illusion of stillness changed abruptly into the reality of tremendous velocity.
The harmony of the control chords collapsed into dissonance. Victoria heard the other people in the sailhouse, all shadows, shouting in confusion, moaning in pain. They, too, had been hooked in.
Awkward with shock, she dog-paddled toward Iphigenie, who tumbled, rigid and quivering, through the air.
"Iphigenie!"
She had a pulse, but she did not respond to Victoria's voice or touch. She had taken the brunt of Arachne's abrupt withdrawal. Outside, the sail began to collapse upon itself. Iphigenie's eyelids nickered.
"Hard connection . . -" the sailmaster murmured.
Victoria grabbed her shirt and towed her toward the backup console at the edge of the sailhouse. She had never seen anyone use it, for the interface with Arachne made it obsolete. Unthinking, Victoria sent Arachne a signal to enliven the console. Of course nothing happened. Victoria felt foolish, and crippled. Losing her connection with the webworks was
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like losing a limb- Its phantom remained, perceptible but useless.
Victoria slapped the controls of the console. It registered activity. It connected with the starship's computer. Victoria let out her breath. If it had been Arachne itself that was damaged, rather than the computer's connections to the outside worid, the expedition would have ended right there.
"Iphigenie, are you all right? It's on, it's here, what should
I do?"
"Just . . . feed in the numbers . . ."
Iphigenie reached for the interface, but her long slender hands trembled. Her eyes rolled back and she fainted.
"Iphigenie!"
First Victoria had to remember her password, which she had not used in months. With the direct connection, the web recognized the pattern of her brain waves. At the first try she mistyped it. Whoever had to type anything anymore? Victoria never typed. On the second desperate try she got it right.
Then she had to search for the files in which she had so easily immersed herself under the sailmaster's tutelage. All Victoria could do was change Starfarer's path by rote, without the minute alterations Iphigenie would have made as she flew.
The other people in the sailhouse, recovering, paddled toward her through the dissonant notes of chaos.
"What happened? Is she all right?"
"I hope so," Victoria said. "She talked. Get her to the health center. Anne, please, would you log in and try to keep the tension even on the lines? Maybe there's a control program here somewhere, I don't know."
She heard at the edge of her hearing and saw at the comers of her vision that others were helping, working, taking Iphigenie to aid. Letting them go, she disappeared into the mathematical space that controlled the starship, seeing only the strange dimensions and hearing only a cacophony that she urged toward harmony.
The moon's gravity drew the starship out of the plane of the moon's orbit. In the original plan, Starfarer spent the next six months in a shakedown cruise. The alternate path drove the ship immediately to the nearer but more complex transition point.
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If the new plan succeeded, Starfarer would escape before the military carrier arrived with its nuclear arms.
The tones blended. To Victoria's ear the music lacked the simple beauty of Iphigenie's solutions.
The moon passed beneath the starship. The moon's sunlit limb changed from a bright flaring line, to a bow, to a crescent: dark of the moon to new moon to half-moon in the space of a few minutes.
The sail caught the sunlight again, silver, shimmering. The wrinkled center filled; the edges straightened.
Starfarer passed beyond the moon.
Within the cylinder, J.D, paused when the moon's shadow cut off the light to the sun tubes. She looked out the window of her house to watch the eerie midday eclipse pass over the land. It lasted too brief a time for the auxiliary power to kick in and illuminate the campus.
The light returned. Everything had, J.D. assumed, gone smoothly.
She glanced around the main room of her house. Mats given to her at the welcoming party remained rolled up and stacked. She had put off laying them out till she finished building her shelves. Slabs of rock foam lay just inside the door, unused, perhaps never to be used. Her books remained in their boxes. She could not take them back with her, for the transport would be too crowded. Many of the people leaving felt like refugees, forced to abandon everything. J.D. had heard the sadness and distress and anger in their voices. She sympathized with them, and knew she should feel lucky, if she had to leave, to be leaving before she could put her roots down very far.
Nevertheless, she felt uprooted.
Though the transport would not dock for an hour, J.D. left her house, empty-handed, and trudged down the path toward the cylinder's end.
Victoria crept silently into Iphigenie's room in the health center. The sailmaster lay bundled in a blanket with the edge pulled close around her face. Victoria sat nearby, prepared for a long wait.
"What happened?" Iphigenie whispered.
24 0 vonda N. Mclntyre
"Somebody crashed the web. Turned off the safeguards and crashed it. It was deliberate. It . . ." About to say that it blasted the web to shreds, she stopped herself. It scared her to think what the crash might have done to Iphigenie. "It caused a lot of disruption. But things are getting back together. How are you feeling?"
"I mean the orbit."
"It's pretty close to what you planned. But without any refinements."
"Did it work, Victoria? I want to know if it worked."
Victoria drew in a long breath and let it out. "I don't know yet. We won't know till we outrun the carrier ... or get caught."
Iphigenie moved weakly, rising from the bed, wrapping the blanket around herself.
"I'm going back out."
"Do you feel up to it?" "I don't like being in gravity, I've got to get out of here."
Though everyone else in the sailhouse had been hooked into Arachne through Iphigenie, and had felt the web's disintegration only secondhand, many other members of the faculty and staff had been routinely hooked in on the web during the crash. The overworked health center staff were treating everything from headache and nausea to coma. No one even noticed when Iphigenie and Victoria left.
Victoria helped Iphigenie out of the center. The sailmaster looked gray beneath her dark skin, and her hands were cold and clammy. But if she could improve the course by a fraction of a percent, it might make the difference between the continuation of the expedition, and its complete, permanent failure. They had gone too far now to back off from risk.
Once more in the crystal bubble of the sailhouse, Iphigenie glanced at the sail, at the moon, the earth, the sun, as if she could plot out the best course without any technical support at all. She gazed across at the hard-link, warily.
"Is Arachne back yet?" she asked.
A strange question; easy enough to check for herself. Victoria had been querying every couple of minutes, to no avail.
"No. No answer yet."
Iphigenie pushed herself toward the console. Drifting in STARFARERS 241
weightlessness with the blue blanket wrapped around her, she looked like a forlorn baby-blue ghost. She reached the console and worked over it for a few minutes, every so often reaching up to pull a drifting comer of the blanket closer.