'What happened?' Iphigenie whispered.
24 0 vonda N. Mclntyre
'Somebody crashed the web. Turned off the safeguards and crashed it. It was deliberate. It . . .' About to say that it blasted the web to shreds, she stopped herself. It scared her to think what the crash might have done to Iphigenie. 'It caused a lot of disruption. But things are getting back together. How are you feeling?'
'I mean the orbit.'
'It's pretty close to what you planned. But without any refinements.'
'Did it work, Victoria? I want to know if it worked.'
Victoria drew in a long breath and let it out. 'I don't know yet. We won't know till we outrun the carrier ... or get caught.'
Iphigenie moved weakly, rising from the bed, wrapping the blanket around herself.
'I'm going back out.'
'Do you feel up to it?' 'I don't like being in gravity, I've got to get out of here.'
Though everyone else in the sailhouse had been hooked into Arachne through Iphigenie, and had felt the web's disintegration only secondhand, many other members of the faculty and staff had been routinely hooked in on the web during the crash. The overworked health center staff were treating everything from headache and nausea to coma. No one even noticed when Iphigenie and Victoria left.
Victoria helped Iphigenie out of the center. The sailmaster looked gray beneath her dark skin, and her hands were cold and clammy. But if she could improve the course by a fraction of a percent, it might make the difference between the continuation of the expedition, and its complete, permanent failure. They had gone too far now to back off from risk.
Once more in the crystal bubble of the sailhouse, Iphigenie glanced at the sail, at the moon, the earth, the sun, as if she could plot out the best course without any technical support at all. She gazed across at the hard-link, warily.
'Is Arachne back yet?' she asked.
A strange question; easy enough to check for herself. Victoria had been querying every couple of minutes, to no avail.
'No. No answer yet.'
Iphigenie pushed herself toward the console. Drifting in STARFARERS 241
weightlessness with the blue blanket wrapped around her, she looked like a forlorn baby-blue ghost. She reached the console and worked over it for a few minutes, every so often reaching up to pull a drifting comer of the blanket closer.
'That's it,' Iphigenie said. 'That's as good as it gets. You did well, Victoria. Thank you.'
Returning, exhausted, from the sailhouse, Victoria realized that it lacked only a few minutes till the transport's departure. She had vowed not to go to the waiting room, not to bid goodbye to anyone who chose to leave the expedition.
But when she reached the corridor that led to the transport access, she realized her vow was a cruel and petty one.
She pushed off toward the waiting room.
Ten meters ahead, someone wearing long black garments pulled herself doggedly forward, trying to maneuver with one hand while using the other to hold the excess fabric of her long, drifting skirt. Each time she let it go, the skirt crept up around her knees.
Such heavy clothing was rare on board the starship, and Victoria could not think who might be wearing it. She caught up and glanced curiously sideways.
'Alzena!'
The chief ecologist continued without pausing. Her chador covered everything except her hands and her face.
'Where are you going? Why are you dressed like that?'
'I'm going back to earth. I can take only one set of clothes.'
'But you can't leave''
'I must. If I remain, illegally, my family will be shamed.'
'What about your work? The ecosystem depends on your knowledge. The whole expedition could succeed or fail—'
'You don't understand, Victoria. You can't. All the branches of your family are Western. My family is different.
I have obligations that have nothing to do with my work.'
'So you're going to wrap yourself up in mourning—'
'It is not mourning, and you know it. It is traditional, and I must be wearing it when I reach earth. It's one thing to adopt Western dress up here, in private, quite another to appear in public—there will be cameras . . . My family will see me. I cannot embarrass them.'
242 Vonda N. Mclntyre
Victoria looked away. This was a facet of Alzena she had never known about. She would rather not have met the Al-zena who would abandon a position of respect, authority, accomplishment, and freedom, in order to return to a circumscribed existence and submit herself to rule by accident of birth.
The ecologist was correct. Victoria did not understand. She could not understand actions that seemed to her more alien than anything she could imagine encountering in a distant star system.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm sorry for your decision. I'm sorry things worked out this way.'
'So am I,' Alzena said.
Distressed, Victoria hurried on. leaving the ecologist behind.
J.D. let herself hover by the wall of the transport waiting room. She felt limp and distressed; if there had been any gravity at all here she would have been sitting slumped in a chair. Other soon-to-be-ex-expedition members filled the room. The noise level was high and harsh, but the talk and argument and recriminations and last-minute goodbyes often fell into the middle of strange abrupt silences.
As the transport approached, the public address speaker broadcast the conversation between its pilot and Starfarer's traffic controller. They had a direct radio link, independent of communications satellites. They exchanged information in a sort of technological ritual, just the same as always, as if
nothing had happened.
J.D. knew about the attempted sabotage of Starfarer by the disruption of the web. The web had safeguards, to protect people hooked in during crashes. Someone had deliberately overridden them. J.D. could not understand the mind of someone who would hurt people on purpose. Worst of all, it had to be someone on board Starfarer.
The sabotage had angered a number of people to the point of changing their minds about leaving. J.D. would have been among them if she had been departing for any reason but the divers.
She shivered, closed her eyes, and extended a tentative tendril toward Arachne. If the web was re-formed, if the con-
STARFARERS 24 3
nection to the satellite had been restored, she could ask once more if Zev had been found.
No reply.
She was about to go looking for a hard-link to the computer when Victoria entered the wailing room. She paused in the hatchway and looked around. J.D. averted her gaze, wishing Victoria were seeking someone else, but knowing why she must be here.
The transport docked with a faint low-frequency thud, a faint vibration of the walls.
Even without looking, J.D. knew it when Victoria touched the wall nearby and brought herseif to a halt at J.D.'s side.
'Hi.'
'Hi.'
Victoria took J.D.'s hand. J.D. flinched, startled by her touch.
'Please,' she said. 'Victoria, I'm sorry. I have to leave.
I can't—' Her throat tightened. If she kept speaking she would break down.
