'Stephen Thomas, please, I can't stand that. Will you turn it off? Or let me use the screen for a few minutes, then I'll go somewhere else and you can watch some more.'
'Sure.'
Stephen Thomas and Feral stood aside for her.
'Is this private?' Feral asked.
'I'm calling my great-grandmother. She'll have heard what's happening, she'll be worried.'
Stephen Thomas glanced away, his expression frozen. He had to make a call to earth, too . . .
'What's the carrier's latest ETA?' Feral asked. 'Will it get to us before we reach transition point?'
For a second Victoria could not figure out why Feral would ask Stephen Thomas a question to which he already knew the answer.
'We can't tell,' Stephen Thomas said. 'It depends on STARFARERS 231
how efficient Iphigenie's orbit is and how much extra acceleration the carrier's got—which is classified information.'
Some animation returned to his face and entered his voice. Feral had asked just the right question to distract him, and he had given him an opportunity to lecture a little.
As Victoria requested an earth connection through the web, she wondered if Feral knew about Stephen Thomas's rocky interactions with his father, or if he had simply noticed his unease. Stephen Thomas did not often open up to anyone on such short acquaintance. She wondered, absently, if Stephen Thomas and Feral had slept together last night. Probably not;
no one in the partnership found much attraction in one-night stands. It would be uncharacteristic of Stephen Thomas to start something that would have to end so soon, with Feral leaving on the transport.
'The satellite relay is currently overloaded. Please wait. then try again.'
Impatiently, Victoria complied with the unusual request.
'We'll get to the cosmic string before the carrier gets to us,' Feral said.
'How the hell do you know that?' Stephen Thomas said.
'Because it wouldn't be aesthetically pleasing the other way around,' Feral replied. 'And besides, if the carrier gets here before we hit the string ... I won't be allowed to report the story.'
'Feral,' Victoria said, 'do you know the old joke where the punch line is 'What do you mean 'we,' white man?' '
'You're right,' Feral said, grinning, 'That is an old joke.'
'So, what do you mean, 'we'?'
'You don't think I could leave now, do you? This is the
best story I'll ever get the chance to cover! I'm one of you.'
'You can't sign on at the last minute—'
'The last minute! I only applied about eight hundred times!'
'And you were turned down. I'm sorry, but—'
Feral laughed. Stephen Thomas started to chuckle.
'It isn't funny!'
'But it is, love. I'm sorry, it is.'
'You're trying to pull off the biggest theft in the history of 232 Vonda N. Mcintyre
humanity,' Feral said, 'and you want me to worry about application rules?'
That brought her up short.
'Yes,' she said. 'I do. Maybe it sounds nuts, but if we use this rebellion as an excuse to throw out our laws and customs, we'll be in worse trouble than if we'd let Starfarer be taken over.'
Returning to Arachne, she tried once more to make the connection. Once more she received the 'Ail lines busy' message.
Stephen Thomas and Feral, both made somber by her comment. looked over her shoulder.
'What's going on?'
'Everybody calling out, just like me. Explaining why they're going. Or why they'll be back sooner than they expected.'
All the members of the team, and everyone else on the faculty, had spent the whole morning making sure that everyone knew that they had to decide, immediately, whether to go or stay. Satoshi was off trying to reason with his graduate student. Fox, who had to leave and did not want to.
It was only a few hours till lunar transit, a few more hours till intersection with the cosmic string ... or takeover by the military carrier.
Victoria made a third attempt to connect with the web.
'Your communication request is in the queue. Please be patient.'
Victoria frowned. 'This is weird, eh?'
'Yeah.' Stephen Thomas said. 'Even if everybody up here called at the same time, Arachne's got plenty of channels.'
They looked at each other.
'We're being cut off,' Feral said.
'I don't ... ' Victoria let her voice trail away,
'It's easy. Just interfere with our access to the relay satellite. Damn' I got two stories out, but the third—and the one I haven't done yet, the live report on reaching transition ... ' He tangled his fingers in his thick hair and turned away with a shout of anguish.
Victoria stared at the blank screen. Not to be able to talk to Grangrana, maybe ever again . . . She slumped on the bench.
STARFARERS 233
Stephen Thomas knelt behind her, put his arms around her, and enfolded her.
'She'll understand,' he whispered. 'She'll know you tried. She'll understand.'
Victoria put her hands over his and held him tight. A tear splashed down and caught where their fingers meshed, between his fair skin, her dark skin.
Victoria kicked off from the mouth of the entry tunnel and swam into the sailhouse. Iphigenie, entranced in Arachne's web, drifted in the center of the crystalline cylinder, in the midst of the eerie harmonies of the sail's controls. Only a few other people floated, scattered, within the sailhouse. This should have been a celebration. The changes made a celebration impossible.
The moon's shadow sped toward Starfarer as the moon caught up with the starship. With Starfarer's orbit widening, the moon would pass below. By then the enormous solar sail would have deflected the starship from its original course, setting it to skim the surface of the moon and arc out of the plane of the solar system, straight to the nearest point of the local strand of cosmic string.
Observers on earth saw the full moon about to occlude a bright new star.
Victoria waited in silence until Iphigenie's eyelids fluttered. The sailmaster gazed around, disoriented.
'Victoria ... '
'All set?'
Iphigenie's mouth quirked up at one comer, a wry smile.
'I sure wish I had some ground support.'
'You can do it without.'
'Of course I can,' Iphigenie said.
She let herself spin, visually checking the starship cylinders, the sail, the moon, and beautiful blue-white earth in the distance.
235
236 vonda N. Mclntyre
'I keep imagining I can see the carrier already,' Iphigenie said. 'And the bombs . . .'
'Soon.'
'Too soon. It's going to be close. And the transport, Vic-toria—the pilot's got to take on reaction mass and undock as soon as she can. Otherwise we'll have a civilian transport along for the ride. The last thing we need is a ship full of kidnapping victims.' She pressed her hands against her tight, smooth braids. 'Can we even communicate with the transport? Or are their systems 'overloaded,' too?'
