Precursor (19 page)

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 what 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
.”

«
^
»

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.