In my monitor, I see Elinor’s ship. She’s taken a long chord as her first jump, crossing all that mostly empty space. It’s a shorter distance to go around, as I mentioned, but a riskier tactic.
“You like a brief life, Elinor?” I say.
“Brief and bright,” she says.
I do some quick calculations and whistle in appreciation. She’ll dive into the ring for a couple of hundred Kmeters before she’ll have the energy for her next blast. Her radar can’t penetrate that deep. Too much intervening sand.
“Going for the record?”
“Already got it,” she says.
And she does; won last year, and I pulled up a lame second.
Time for the next blast. Race like this is an art. Sort of a mix between orbital mechanics, demolition derby and pool; the whole thing done with your heart gripped firmly between your teeth so you don’t lose it.
“Going slow there, Delta Mud,” she says, but I can’t answer before I slam through the burn. Bubbles go white and glorious as they store up the energy, then release it all at once. Can’t hear it, naturally, though my music gets fuzzy during; way too much radiant activity to avoid that, and the inertia dampers don’t completely mask the thrust of it. My seat presses hard into my back. I feel every wrinkle in my shirt.
Monitors are clear. Nothing in my way, so I set up for the next chord.
“Eaten any cold dinners lately?” I say.
“No,” she says. “Have you?”
I let that question hang out there a while. It’s a friendly response, if I hear it right, and probably because she’s got an early lead. Use to be I’d go visit her for dinner pretty regular, and we never did get right to eating it. One thing lead to another, you know, and the dinner would cool off.
So an answer takes a bit of thinking. Is she opening the door here? Are all those cold, cold nights looking out at lonely stars about to come to an end?
I wish I could see her. You know, to watch her face. She’s got this way of letting the corners of her mouth twitch up when she’s making a joke. It’s real subtle. Lots of folk don’t notice. And she shakes her head sometimes, like she’s getting hair out of her eyes, though her hair is spacer-short.
How’s she looking now? What I need is a deep-imaging radar of the heart. Something to peer in there to check on those pocky rocks drifting unseen.
She’s about to end a chord, so I check her progress.
Ring racing is the hardest kind there is. Straight races… well, they’re simple. Thrust behind mass, and don’t miss. Best technology wins. Pilot might as well stay home (singing the blues). But here—whew! Faster you go, the more dangerous it is. More chances for mistakes. Less time for decisions. All the time risking spinout, missing the ring, flying off with better than escape velocity and no mass anywhere to grab.
She’s in the ring now. Gathering energy. Blasting. Her trajectory changes, and she’s shooting back out the ring to the relatively clear space beneath.
I’ve got some time. She’ll be checking the path ahead, figuring her next burn.
I make sure the transmitter is off, blow the harmonica some more—make the harp sing:
She said, “I think I can cut four chords off last year.”
I shake my head. “You’ll be sucking Saturn’s atmosphere. Not worth the speed you lose.”
She chuckles. “For you, maybe. Have you checked the competition?”
I hadn’t bothered. She’s the only other ship I care about, but I tapped the display and the others popped onto the grid, way behind.
“Looks like it’s just you and me.”
“And the record,” she adds. “How’s it feel to be the second best flyer in the rings?” She’s laughing. Pure speed does that to her.
“When you’re beat by the best,” I say, “Who cares about the rest?”
“That’s sweet, Virgil.”
I’m into my next burn. Speed’s up, so the bubble fairly crackles, sending dust and tiny rocks in all directions and storing energy. I let it go, and the chair kicks into my back, snapping my head into the support. Inertia dampers are good, but most ships let their thrust out more gradual because they carry mass to convert to energy with them. Buglighters don’t carry anything but some maneuvering fuel.
All the rest is gathered in, then, wham, released in a hurry.
A few chords later, speed’s way up, and my work’s harder. Soon as the interference clears, I check the radar for rocks, plug in the new numbers, and let the computer go to work with trajectories and mid-course corrections. While it crunches numbers, I’ve got nothing to do but think.
Blues are perfect for space, and I’ll bet if B.B. King or Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters were alive today, they’d be buglighters. All that other music, well, it has beginnings and ends, but not the blues. You can take any song and run it for hours with variations, letting it build or slide down low. It’s back porch music, smokey pool hall music, buglighter music. You can tell when you’re in a spacer bar by the music. It’s all guitars and bass and c-harp bent all over those blue’s notes. Every tune’s despairing, but kind of funny too, sort of like cruising in the rings. Part of it’s deadly serious, and then you have to laugh. Blues and buglighting and my love for Elinor are just too ironic to keep a straight face.
See, when you’re singing the blues, you start off all sad and lonely, but after a while, you’re into the music. You forget why you started the song, and you’re just doing the song. And buglighting, you forget why you started or where you’re going, and you’re just flying the chords. There’s music in them. Music in the light and the rhythm. Music in the rainbow of colors when the distant sun catches the rings just right. Music in the shadows and darkness behind Saturn. It’s the blues, man; everyone knows it’s the blues.
We go like this for awhile. I blast three times for every two of Elinor’s. It’s kind of sobering watching her eat up the distance. She’s got so much speed, and it’s building. I’m going about as fast as I feel I can go. My burns now just get me into the new chord; they don’t add much velocity.
But that’s the way it’s always been. Old Elinor is always a jump or two ahead of me.
“Doesn’t look like you’re going to give me a race this year, Virgil.”
“It’s a long way around,” I say.
“I’ll have a drink set up for you when you get in,” she says.
I’m a ways from my next turn, so I switch to her monitors so I can see what she sees. It’s scary. Her angle of attack is high. She can only see a third of the distance into the ring that she penetrates.
“Assuming you make it,” I say.
Her screen is graying out as she enters the ring. A couple of big rocks glow off her path; they’re no danger, but I’ve never seen stuff that big moving by so fast. She’s busy, so I don’t say anything and switch back to my own monitor. She fades out as she gets deeper. I won’t see her till she exits, and I check my own course again. Looks like clear sailing to me.
“Uh, oh,” she says.
I shouldn’t be able to hear her yet. I check the screen. She’s there, going the wrong direction, outside of the ring. A spinout.
“You all right?” I ask. Silly question, really. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t have heard anything at all. She wouldn’t be on the monitor.
“Shoot,” she says.
I’m running her numbers through the computer. She’s got way too much speed, and she’s moving away from the ring. My calculations show she can’t push herself back to it either.