'We're realigning an antenna,' Victoria said. 'The transport will hear us. We might get one voice link to earth. But that's it.'
'I wanted a test,' Iphigenie said- Her eyelids fluttered.
'How close do we have to cut things?'
'I won't know until after lunar passage. We won't have more than a couple of hours. Everybody who's leaving is going to have to cram themselves onto the transport fast. Are there a lot?'
'Not as many as I was afraid there would be.'
'They'll all fit on one transport?'
'It will be crowded.' Victoria shrugged- 'They'll manage.' She did not want to think about who was leaving. It made her too unhappy, too angry.
'I've got to concentrate,' Iphigenie said. 'Do you want to link in?'
'Yes!'
She slipped into Iphigenie's multidimensional mathematical space. Images poured through her connection with Arachne. Starfarer fell behind the moon.
Iphigenie drifted in her accustomed position, all her senses focused on the sail and the connection between Arachne and the sail, measuring control in micrometers.
The craters and maria on the sunlit limb of the moon vanished abruptly into darkness at the terminator.
The sun disappeared behind the earth; the earth disappeared behind the dark limb of the moon. Darkness overtook the starship. The bright sail dimmed. In starlight, it began to collapse. In the illumination of Iphigenie's instructions, Victoria felt the slackening sail's control strands tighten and shift and move.
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The dark moon looked huge, a great black shadow in space.
Starfarer plunged toward it.
Then the ship passed over it, as if over the dark depths of a sea. For a strange, unsettling time Victoria felt as if she were traversing the airless surface in a hot-air balloon, impossibly high.
As Victoria's eyes grew accustomed to the change in contrast, she saw features in the shadows, faintly illuminated by starlight.
Suddenly Iphigenie shouted in anger and in pain. An instant later Arachne jerked the web's connections from Victoria, flinging her into darkness and emptiness. Victoria gasped for breath and fought for consciousness.
The light was very dim. Far beyond the spinning cylinders of the starship, the moon lay shadowed with starlight, craters black at the rim, fuliginous inside. On the other side of the sailhouse, Victoria could see the sail only as a shadow against the starfield. But she knew that without Iphigenie's control, without the solar wind to stabilize it, it would collapse, tangle, destroy itself.
The starship plunged toward the surface of the moon. The illusion of stillness changed abruptly into the reality of tremendous velocity.
The harmony of the control chords collapsed into dissonance. Victoria heard the other people in the sailhouse, all shadows, shouting in confusion, moaning in pain. They, too, had been hooked in.
Awkward with shock, she dog-paddled toward Iphigenie, who tumbled, rigid and quivering, through the air.
'Iphigenie!'
She had a pulse, but she did not respond to Victoria's voice or touch. She had taken the brunt of Arachne's abrupt withdrawal. Outside, the sail began to collapse upon itself. Iphigenie's eyelids nickered.
'Hard connection . . -' the sailmaster murmured.
Victoria grabbed her shirt and towed her toward the backup console at the edge of the sailhouse. She had never seen anyone use it, for the interface with Arachne made it obsolete. Unthinking, Victoria sent Arachne a signal to enliven the console. Of course nothing happened. Victoria felt foolish, and crippled. Losing her connection with the webworks was
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like losing a limb- Its phantom remained, perceptible but useless.
Victoria slapped the controls of the console. It registered activity. It connected with the starship's computer. Victoria let out her breath. If it had been Arachne itself that was damaged, rather than the computer's connections to the outside worid, the expedition would have ended right there.
'Iphigenie, are you all right? It's on, it's here, what should
I do?'
'Just . . . feed in the numbers . . .'
Iphigenie reached for the interface, but her long slender hands trembled. Her eyes rolled back and she fainted.
'Iphigenie!'
First Victoria had to remember her password, which she had not used in months. With the direct connection, the web recognized the pattern of her brain waves. At the first try she mistyped it. Whoever had to type anything anymore? Victoria never typed. On the second desperate try she got it right.
Then she had to search for the files in which she had so easily immersed herself under the sailmaster's tutelage. All Victoria could do was change Starfarer's path by rote, without the minute alterations Iphigenie would have made as she flew.
The other people in the sailhouse, recovering, paddled toward her through the dissonant notes of chaos.
'What happened? Is she all right?'
'I hope so,' Victoria said. 'She talked. Get her to the health center. Anne, please, would you log in and try to keep the tension even on the lines? Maybe there's a control program here somewhere, I don't know.'
She heard at the edge of her hearing and saw at the comers of her vision that others were helping, working, taking Iphigenie to aid. Letting them go, she disappeared into the mathematical space that controlled the starship, seeing only the strange dimensions and hearing only a cacophony that she urged toward harmony.
The moon's gravity drew the starship out of the plane of the moon's orbit. In the original plan, Starfarer spent the next six months in a shakedown cruise. The alternate path drove the ship immediately to the nearer but more complex transition point.
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If the new plan succeeded, Starfarer would escape before the military carrier arrived with its nuclear arms.
The tones blended. To Victoria's ear the music lacked the simple beauty of Iphigenie's solutions.
The moon passed beneath the starship. The moon's sunlit limb changed from a bright flaring line, to a bow, to a crescent: dark of the moon to new moon to half-moon in the space of a few minutes.
The sail caught the sunlight again, silver, shimmering. The wrinkled center filled; the edges straightened.
Starfarer passed beyond the moon.
Within the cylinder, J.D, paused when the moon's shadow cut off the light to the sun tubes. She looked out the window of her house to watch the eerie midday eclipse pass over the land. It lasted too brief a time for the auxiliary power to kick in and illuminate the campus.
The light returned. Everything had, J.D. assumed, gone smoothly.
She glanced around the main room of her house. Mats given to her at the welcoming party remained rolled up and stacked. She had put off laying them out till she finished building her shelves. Slabs of rock foam lay just inside the door, unused, perhaps never to be used. Her books remained in their boxes. She could not take them back with her, for the transport would be too crowded. Many of the people leaving felt like refugees, forced to abandon everything. J.D. had heard the sadness and distress and anger in their voices. She sympathized with them, and knew she should feel lucky, if she had to leave, to be leaving before she could put her roots down very far.
Nevertheless, she felt uprooted.
Though the transport would not dock for an hour, J.D. left her house, empty-handed, and trudged down the path toward the cylinder's end.
Victoria crept silently into Iphigenie's room in the health center. The sailmaster lay bundled in a blanket with the edge pulled close around her face. Victoria sat nearby, prepared for a long wait.
