Precursor

  “Luck to us,” Jason said anxiously, in the last-moment activity of the stewards.

  “Baji-naji,” Bren said. That black-and-white symbol was conspicuous on the forward wall, right beneath the monitors: Fortune and Chance, the give and take in the universe that made all the rigid numbers move.

  The engines fired, whined, roared into life. The shuttle wasn’t particularly good at maneuvering on the ground. Towed to its berth, it had a straight line to one runway going straight forward as it sat, and as the engines built, it gathered speed away from the space center. The cabin crew, too, presumably had belted in.

  The shuttle gathered more and more speed… disconcerting for passengers used to taxiing and maneuvering. They could see nothing; the craft quivered to the thump of tires.

  “One hopes the small craft have heard the tower,” Banichi said cheerfully, from the matching aisle seat, over the thunder.

  God, Bren thought, and reminded himself all air traffic would be diverted away from Shejidan for the next half hour, sufficient for the shuttle to clear the airport, with the aiji’s planes to enforce it. The shuttle was not as maneuverable as an airliner, in the air, either. One unanticipated fool, and the whole program was in jeopardy; not to mention their lives.

  The center screen flicked on, showed a double row of runway lights ahead. A lot of runway yet. The pace still increased. The lack of side windows combined with the black forward view made a center-seat passenger feel like a bullet in a gun.

  Not nervous, Bren said to himself, not nervous, not nervous, no, not at all. He locked his sight on those monitors, hyperfo-cused there to keep his stomach steady, trying to convince his claustrophobia that what he saw was a window. But the aft cameras had come on, retreating perspective of the lights warring with the forward motion. Then a belly camera came into operation, showing a spotlighted forward tire and a blur of dark pavement.

  The engines cycled up and up. Thundered. The tires thumped madly. Where’s the end of the runway? Bren thought. Lift! Lift!

  The tires suddenly went silent, and the deck slanted up. A hand shoved Bren against the foam of his seat: he felt himself sinking back as the whole craft shook to the engines, found his fingers trying to hold him against that illusion.

  Deep breath. He tried to relax, look casual in the moment, but his heart cycled in time with the engines. No easy circling of the city like the aiji’s jet, just a straightforward climb, proverbial bat out of hell.

  They climbed and they climbed before the press backward eased.

  “Well, it worked again,” Jason said weakly.

  “It did,” Bren agreed, convinced himself he dared let go the armrest.

  But the tilt of the deck was still extreme; they were still climbing, if under less pressure; and every citizen of Shejidan would have been shaken out of bed, hurried into the open to look up and wonder… the wonder was still new, in Shejidan, and people forgave the handful of falling tiles, and filled out the requests for repair, which they would point to, doubtless, and say to generations to come, see, this crack was in the first days of the space venture: all Shejidan suffered this, and won…

  What? The space station? The Foreign Star that had shone in their skies for centuries?

  A birthright?

  Not every citizen of Shejidan welcomed roof repairs. But the aiji promised a new spaceport, conversion of the space center to an acculturation center, promised work for craftsmen, a great felicity, an ultimate association not with the humans but with the associations of humans, a method by which they could avert war and ensure the future.

  Humans could read the translations of the aiji’s statements and never understand. The aiji had received a deputation from representatives of the Gan, original tenants of Mospheira, heretics, of a sort. A whole bright new world was upon them.

  The aft monitor showed a seam of dawn, past the running lights on white edges, the belly camera very little but black. The forward cameras picked up nothing but black. They were on their way.

  And of all things, Banichi and Jago turned on their seat lamps and broke out reading material.

  Look at the damn monitors! Bren wanted to shout at them. A miracle is happening! Look at the sky, for God’s sake! The people pour into the streets of Shejidan! Are you numb?

  They’d taken the technical manuals.

  It was very like an airplane. It flew and showed no sign of malfunction. It was proved on several flights before. Should they be other than confident in the pilot and the design the paidhiin had translated?

  “Much better than parachutes,” Jase muttered, beside him.

  That view persisted. Bren didn’t even consult his memory of technicalities, just watched the monitors, time stretched to a long impossible moment.

  The stewards rose, sheer atevi obstinacy, Bren thought, viewing procedures with dismay, procedures he would have disapproved if any ateva had asked him.

  “Nadiin,” one of the stewards said, walking up the steep incline of the deck, “fruit juice is provided, should you wish. Please avoid excess. Breakfast will be easier to provide now, rather than during free fall.” The attendant repeated the same message in Mosphei’, not too badly pronounced.

  There was laughter from the front.

  “Have I spoken badly?” the dismayed crewman asked Bren.

  “Not at all,” Bren said. “They hadn’t expected service aboard.” Impossible to explain near-hysteria, and the relief of humor. “They’re in very good spirits, and if they were atevi, they would say thank you. —Ms. Kroger, Mr. Lund? Do you want breakfast, up there?”

  Kroger said nothing. Lund leaned from his seat, a face at the high end of the aisle.

  “What’s available?” Lund asked.

  “He is courteously inquiring,” Bren said, “the nature of the offering, and means no offense.”

  “Nand’ paidhi.” The crewman offered a respectful bow, and proceeded forward to take the orders from the Mospheirans with a written list as the other steward came to take their orders. “Nadiin-ji?”

  “I’ll have just fruit juice, if you please.”

  “Paiinai for me,” Jason said. “My last chance for a long time. Juice. Toast.”

  “Nandiin,” the crewman said, and walked back the precarious route to the rear.

  “You all right?” Jase asked.

  “Fine,” Bren said shakily. “Supposed to be like an airliner, isn’t it?” The breakfast call still amazed him. “It’s a bit wilder on the takeoff.”

  “No problems.”

  Don’t say that, he wanted to say, at his most superstitious; and Banichi and Jago, having ordered a large breakfast, continued their manual-reading, probably because they hadn’t had a chance in all else that had been going on. Tano and Algini were behind them, likewise possessed of an appetite.

  The fruit juice arrived, in spillproof containers. Lund thought they might like another juice on the way to orbit, and the cabin crew stayed busy.

  Bren confined himself to one glass of juice. Jase ate with good appetite.

  No further calls from the island. That thought flashed through his mind as it hadn’t since waking, since sleepwalking through dressing and last-moment details.

  He supposed Toby had dealt with matters.

  He supposed their mother had finally gotten home, and that none of his family had any idea the shuttle creating a sonic boom over the straits carried a Cameron back into space.

  Back to a space station he’d dreamed of seeing… dreamed of seeing, like the surface of the moon; a station where all Mospheirans’ political dreads were born, for its history, up there with the starship that was the ark in their ancestral stories, the beginning of all human life on the world.

  At a certain point the engines grew quiet; and quieter. Ginny Kroger’s laugh carried farther than she intended, doubtless so, but he was glad to hear it. Fear might have been a part of Kroger’s anger, something Kroger herself might not have known; and now they were past the worst danger… technically the worst. That was w
hat the reports tried to assure them.

  The crew collected the plastic trays and cups, passed to the rear. Bren looked at his watch, knowing the flight profiles, knowing them as having crossed his desk, knowing them as having sweated through the launches.

  Now he was where minutiae counted, degrees of the schedule that had seemed long on the ground, but that seemed both too short and too long, up here.

  “Stand by for changeover,” came from the cockpit, and the cabin crew translated to Mosphei’: “Sirs, now the engines will switch over. Secure all objects immediately. There will be a moment of free fall. Place all loose objects securely in confinement, however small. They may fly back and strike a fellow passenger.”

  Oh, God, Bren thought. This was the point he dreaded. This was the point where they shut down the engines he knew worked, and the others were supposed to start.

  The cabin crew went aft.

  The sky in the forward monitor had almost brightened to color, but now quite suddenly a hole opened in it… not night, but the threshhold of space.

  There was a moment of uncanny silence. A stomach-dropping moment of no-thrust. We’re falling, apprehensions cried.

  Suddenly the shuttle stood on its tail. That, at least, was the illusion. The whole world reoriented. There was a yelp from forward, cries from the servant staff in the back seats.

  And a muffled yelp from the paidhi-aiji, Bren realized to his embarrassment.

  Yet up was the direction of the central monitor, and that was black. Belly-cam showed nothing. Aft-cams showed the running-lights.

  Banichi and Jago, damn them, hadn’t done more than calmly comply with the safety instruction.

  “This is what it should do,” Jason said.

  “I’m glad,” Bren said. “I’m so very glad.” He wished he hadn’t drunk that acidic juice, he was not mentally prepared for this, and somewhere in his memory was a confused datum of how long this acceleration should last. It had been numbers. Now it was life and death, and he truly didn’t want it to fall one second short of that, not in the least.

  Slowly the sensation of being on one’s back eased.

  And suddenly there was no down and no noise at all but the fans and the general static noise of the systems. We’re falling, the brain screamed again, growing weary of panic. Bren glanced to the left too fast: the inner ear didn’t accommodate the change, not at all.

  “God,” he murmured, sternly admonished his gut, and turned his head far more slowly, looking about him to see whether items did, as advertised, float. His arms did.

  Beyond Banichi, Jago experimented with a pen from her pocket. She seemed quite fascinated when it rebounded off the seat in front of her. Bren stared at that miracle, too, fighting his stomach.

  Banichi seemed a little less entranced with the phenomenon, rather grim-faced: Bren took moral comfort in that. Atevi were not immune to disorientation: the first crew had proved that biological fact… the same crew, in fact, that was flying the shuttle at the moment.

  “We’re back,” Jason said softly. “I’m back.”

  “Are we doing all right?” Bren asked.

  “Completely,” Jase said.

  So Jase’s stomach understood what was going on; and if that was so, damned, then, if he’d miss the trip he’d dreamed of seeing… the engines had fired, they were in free fall, and doggedly, seeking something to prove it, he searched up a small wad of paper from the bottom of his pocket, the paper Banichi had handed him with the hospital phone number.

  He let it go, floated it in personal incredulity, a miracle. It shouldn’t do that.

  Or was gravity the miracle? Wasn’t it wonderful that the world stuck together, and accreted things to it?

  No, he didn’t want to think about accretion.

  The view in the monitors now was all black. He’d thought he’d see the stars. There was one. Maybe two.

  And all the rules changed.

  It was a lengthy universal experiment, this traveling in zero-G… even Lund and Kroger tried it, if only partially out of their seats; Ben and Kate held carefully to handholds, careful of transgressing that unspoken territorial limit in the cabin, but skylarked there like youngsters on holiday.

  Even Banichi, which was the more remarkable, unbelted, and then the others did, but in his security Bren saw a purpose beyond curiosity… Banichi’s experiments were of measured force, push here, bounce there, back again; and Jago and Tano and Algini did much the same.

  A pen sailed by on intercept, lost by a rueful translator forward, and Tano plucked it from space.

  Narani was delighted, the servants likewise, laughing with the stewards.

  Bren regarded them in slow revolution, wondering at what his mind knew, that they were all hurtling at very high speed.

  “The station,” Jase said, then, catching his sleeve, directing his attention toward the screens, where a gleam showed against all that blackness, where hull-shine dominated the camera. Banichi and Jago, then Tano and Algini, ceased their activity and focused their attention on that point of light, and after that the four of his security drifted together to talk, a conversation obscured in the thousand nattering systems that kept the shuttle from utter silence.

  The cabin crew moved through again, this time horizontally, assessing the state of the passengers, returning Kate’s pen. Later, over the general address, the steward admonished all of them: “Be cautious of releasing hard objects, Nadiin, which might lodge in secret and become missiles during accelerations.”

  It occurred to Bren that he wouldn’t want to contest with Banichi’s mass in any free-fall encounter. And he didn’t want to receive Kate’s pen on the return, either.

  At a downward tug from Jason on his jacket, he secured a hold on the seat and drew himself back in… just before the senior steward said, in Mosphei’, “Please be seated for the duration.” The stewards had practiced that. “For your safety.”

  The Mospheirans did listen. Buckles clicked, instant obedience.

  Bren fastened his own. Jason had reacted to the effect of leaves and sunlight on the planet in utter panic. He measured the fear of vacuum, the fear of movement, against other fears he’d suffered, fears of drawn guns, fears of falling off mountains. This was visceral, a war against lifelong experience, the laws of nature overset… as far as his body was concerned. But his senses weren’t skewed, nothing except that tendency to look about in panic. Too many surfaces, he decided: all of a sudden too much change. He calmed himself. Thought of lily ponds on the mainland. A formal garden.

  “We shall be braking, Nadiin.”

  He wished they’d been able to have windows. He did wish that. The monitors weren’t straight-line forward. The cameras had moved to track the station; he began to figure that out. Of course. They were gimbaled, to track anything outside they needed to. The crew was giving them a view. It was giving him extreme disorientation.

  Jase talked to him, small matters, observations: “We brake to overtake,” Jase reminded him. He knew that. Gravity-tied to the planet, they couldn’t catch the station by accelerating: the result would be a higher and higher orbit, missing the equally-bound station. Their path was simply—simply!—to coincide with it and brake slightly, little by little.

  That would drop them in the orbital path to line up with the docking stem.

  “There we go,” Jase said. Jase knew he was scared.

  He’d sweated through this, every docking from the first one; knew this whole docking business was another troubled sequence. He bit his lip and prayed there was no mistake.

  “Easy,” Jase said, salt in a wound.

  “I’m fine” he said. Jase had used to say that. Jase prudently didn’t remind him.

  The image, over a long, long nervous approach, resolved itself from one dot to two connected dots.

  Finally into a ring with that second dot against the stem.

  Kate pointed to it as the camera suddenly brought it up close, while Jason just said, in a low voice, “Phoenix.”

>   * * *

  Chapter 9

  « ^ »

  The cameras on close-up, as they glided past, showed a battered surface, not the pristine white Bren had once imagined Phoenix to be. She was sooted, discolored with black and with rust-color, streaked and ablated on the leading edges.

  Their ship. The ship. She carried the dust of solar systems, the outpourings of volcanoes on Maudit’s moons, the cosmic dust of wherever Phoenix had voyaged… and the scars of the first accursed sun where Phoenix had lost so many lives. Jason’s forefathers. His own.

  The whole world had seen the scarred image on the television during the first shuttle flights, and the sight had shocked everyone, moving some even to question whether it was the same ship. Phoenix in all Mospheiran accounts was always portrayed shining white, though every schoolchild also memorized the truth that the earth of the atevi was in a debris-filled, dangerous solar system, that the colonists had rebelled against Phoenix’s plans for refueling principally because fatalities were so much a part of mining.

  The image of authority. The ark that had carried all their ancestors on two epic journeys, and a third… without the colonists, but with Jase’s fellow crew. Bren felt a chill go over his skin, felt a stir in his heart, an awe he hadn’t entirely expected.

  Now the outcome of this last voyage, this run home with hostile observers behind them. The captains had no disposition to die without a struggle, as hard a struggle as their compatriots back in this solar system could make of it, with or without their consent.

  Welcome to the space age. Welcome to the universe we’ve made, and the consequences of all we’ve done.

  “Stand by, Nadiin, for braking. —Sirs, ladies, prepare your safety belts. Secure all items.”

  Bren tugged the belt tight, fastened the shoulder belt as Jason unhurriedly, confidently at home, did the same.

  He glanced across the aisle and saw his security belted in, looking as calm as if they sat in their own apartment.