There the other spacecraft were, looking like strange silvery flowers planted in the dark fields of space. There was South America’s Santa Maria, Ron Olsos at the helm, only eighty kilometers away. Santa Maria bore a close resemblance to a boy’s kite, though a kite that measured more than a kilometer on a side. Beyond Santa Maria was the Russian Cosmo-dyne Corporation’s Lebedev, looking like a Maltese cross; the theory, Natasha knew, was that the sails that formed its four fat arms could be used for steering purposes. In contrast, the Australian Woomera was a simple old-fashioned round parachute, though one that was five kilometers in circumference. General Spacecraft’s Arachne, as its name suggested, looked like a spider’s web—and had been built on the same principles, by robot shuttles spiraling out from a central point. Eurospace’s Gossamer was an identical design, though slightly smaller. And the People’s Republic of China’s Sunbeam was a flat ring, with a kilometer-wide hole in the center, spinning slowly so that it was stiffened by centrifugal force. That was an old idea, Natasha knew, but no one had ever made it work well. She was fairly sure the Asian vessel would have trouble when Sunbeam started to turn.
That, of course, would not be for another six hours, after all seven of the solar yachts had moved through the first quarter of their twenty-four-hour geosynchronous orbit. Here, at the beginning of the race, they were all headed directly away from the sun—running, as it were, before the solar wind. Each of them had to make the most of that first lap, before the laws of orbital motion swung them around Earth. When that point was reached, they would suddenly be heading directly back toward the sun. That was when expert pilotage would really count.
Not now, though. Now Natasha had no navigational worries. With the periscope she made a careful examination of her sail, checking each attachment point for the rigging. The shroud lines, narrow bands of unsilvered plastic film, would have been quite invisible had they not been coated with fluorescent dye. Now, in Natasha’s periscope, they were taut lines of colored light, dwindling away for hundreds of meters toward the gigantic span of the sail. Each line had its own little electric windlass, not much bigger than the reel on a fly fisherman’s rod. The windlasses, computer-controlled, were constantly turning, playing lines in or out as the autopilot kept the sail trimmed to the correct angle to the sun.
To Natasha, the play of sunlight on her great mirrored sail was beautiful to watch. The sail undulated in stately oscillations, sending multiple images of the sun marching across it until they faded at the edges. Those oscillations, of course, were not a problem. Such leisurely vibrations were inevitable in so vast and flimsy a structure, and usually quite harmless. Nevertheless, Natasha watched them carefully, alert for signs that they might ultimately build up to the catastrophic waves that were known as “wriggles.” Those could tear a sail to pieces, but her computer reassured her that the present pattern posed no danger.
When she was satisfied that everything was shipshape—and not before!—she allowed herself to access her personal screen. Since everything passed through the command craft before it got to her, and they were careful to pass on only messages from an approved list, she was spared the endless flood of good luck wishes and begging pleas for some favor or other. There was one message from her family, one from Gamini, and one from Joris Vorhulst. No more. She was glad to get them. None required any answer.
Natasha thought for a moment of going to sleep. Of course, the race had just started, but sleeping was something she needed to ration adequately to herself. All the other yachts had two-person crews. They could take turns asleep, but Natasha Subramanian had no one to relieve her.
That had been her own decision, of course—remembering that other solitary sailer, Joshua Slocum, who long ago had single-handedly taken his tiny sailboat, Spray, around the world. If Slocum could do it, she maintained, she could. There was a good reason to try it, too. The performance of a sun yacht depended inversely on the mass it had to move. A second person, with all her supplies, would have meant adding another three hundred kilos, and that could easily have been the difference between winning and losing.
So Natasha snapped the elastic bands of the cabin seat around her waist and legs. She hesitated for a moment. It might be interesting, she thought, to look in on some of the news broadcasts, particularly to see if any astronomer had yet made any sense of that peculiar not-a-supernova that had blossomed astonishingly bright in the southern sky and then simply disappeared….
Discipline won out over curiosity. She placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer onto her forehead, set the time for three hours, and relaxed. Very gently, the hypnotic pulses throbbed in the frontal lobes of her brain. Colored spirals of light expanded beneath her closed eyelids, widening outward to infinity.
Then nothing.
What dragged Natasha back from her dreamless sleep was the brazen clamor of the alarm. Instantly she was awake, her eyes scanning the instrument board. Only two hours had passed… but above the accelerometer a red light was flashing.
Thrust was failing. The Diana was losing power.
Training brought discipline. Discipline prevented panic. Nevertheless, Natasha’s heart was in her mouth as she cast off her restraining straps to act. Her first thought was that something had happened to the sail. Perhaps the anti-spin devices had failed and the rigging was twisting itself up. But as she checked the meters that read out the tensions of the shroud lines, what they told her was strange. On one side of the sail the meters were reading normally. On the other the value was dropping slowly before her eyes.
Then understanding came. Natasha grabbed the periscope for a wide-angle scan of the edges of the sail. Yes! There was the trouble…and it could have come from only one cause.
The huge sharp-edged shadow that had begun to slide across the gleaming silver of Diana’s sail told the story. Darkness was spreading over one edge of Natasha’s ship as though a cloud had passed between her and the sun, cutting off light, putting a stop to the tiny pressure that drove the craft.
There were no such clouds in space.
Natasha grinned as she swung the periscope sunward. Optical filters clicked automatically into position to save her from instant blindness, and what she saw was precisely what she had expected to see. It looked as though a giant boy’s kite were sliding across the face of the sun.
Natasha recognized the shape at once. Thirty kilometers astern, South America’s Santa Maria was trying to produce an artificial eclipse for Natasha.
“Ha, Senhor Ronaldinho Olsos,” Natasha whispered, “that’s the oldest trick in the book!”
So it was, and a perfectly legal one, too. Back in the days of ocean racing, skippers had done their best to rob opponents of their wind.
But only the incompetents were caught that way, and incompetent, Natasha de Soyza Subramanian was not. Her tiny computer—the size of a matchbook but the equivalent of a thousand human number-crunching experts—considered the problem for a brief fraction of a moment and quickly spat out course corrections.
Two could play at that game. Grinning, Natasha reached out to disable the autopilot and make the adjustments to the trim in her rigging….