Yes, yes, there she was. A true deep-space ship. My deep-space ship. My own personal MCQ3, I loved her already.
Brilliant loser?
At least I wouldn’t go aboard her unprepared, looking like some lost fool who couldn’t tell inner from outer. I was going to memorize every square inch of her.
So little time. Nineteen days. So much to do and no time at all. Practically no time at all. Nineteen days!
Deep worms, it was going to seem like forever.
My mind was focused sharply, even obsessively, on the MCQ3 and its launch, but everyone else was more interested in the Dance By of Polar Orbit High. The Polars were Ketran, of course, just like us, but with a possibly different society. I say possibly because we only encountered them every nineteen years.
Naturally we had secondhand reports from the other crystals who’d encountered them and gone on to do a Dance By with us. Just last year we’d done the Dance with the Equatorial High Crystal Two, our sister crystal, and they’d had an encounter with Polar just three years before that.
Still, getting secondhand reports from three years before is not the way to understand a civilization. And in any case, some of what the Two’s had told us about the Polars was a bit strange.
For one thing the Polars supposedly were very involved in quill coloring. Not of itself a bad thing, I guess, but weird. I mean, you have the quills you’re born with, why would you want them to be green or whatever?
But more profound, the Polars were said to be making great strides in atmospheric communications. This, of course, would be a breakthrough of world-shattering proportions. If anyone could figure out how to punch a wave signal through the background radiation they’d be able to communicate crystal to crystal. We would no longer be a planet of thirty-two independent crystals; we’d have all thirty-two hooked up to a planetary uninet. I’d be able to play against gamers from entirely different crystals!
I’d be able to lose to people I might never actually see.
But maybe it was all just rumors. It’s one thing firing electrons through a crystal, it’s a very much harder thing to do it through the air.
The Dance By of the Polar Orbit High Crystal would not last long, only a few hours. Neither of us was willing to undergo the terrific exertions necessary to slow our momentum and then restart. So we’d have at best three hours where we could free fly across the divide. And individually we’d have far less.
I was scheduled early when the distance was greatest. I was young. You wouldn’t expect the oldsters to want to free fly for half an hour only to have a ten-minute encounter.
The whole of society was excited. Me? Not so much. I had other things on my mind.
I was docked, gliding through a uninet sim of the MCQ3 for the twentieth time, when I heard a voice calling me from very close by. I opened my eyes and there was Aguella. She had come right to my spar.
“Ellimist. What are you doing?”
I blinked. “What?”
“It’s time. What, are you ignoring time cues? It’s time! The Dance By.”
“Oh. Right.” I released my docking talons and peered southward. Polar had been in sight for most of a day now, but it had grown quite a bit larger in the last few hours. In fact my first thought was that we were going to intersect.
Aguella was grinning expectantly, waiting for something. Waiting for me to notice something. I frowned and returned my attention to Polar. Then I yelled.
“Hey!”
Aguella nodded. “Yeah.”
“They’ve gone asymmetrical. Look at that new growth.” The sphere, or what should have been a sphere, had a definite lump. The lump was only a tenth of the diameter, but way too large to be simply new growth awaiting a trim.
“Not asymmetrical,” Aguella said. “Or at least that’s not the end goal, I think. I may be wrong, but I suspect a pattern. You can’t see it from here, but I think they’re trying to flatten the sphere in all directions. I think this lump has a matching lump opposite.”
“Why would they …”
“Airfoil,” she said triumphantly. “The Polars are making an airfoil.”
For the first time in seven days I completely forgot about MCQ3. An airfoil! It was something out of fiction. It was no surprise that a sphere was harder to keep lifted than an airfoil. The airfoil could fly into the prevailing breeze and actually derive lift.
It was the utopian’s answer to engines. Attaching engines to a crystal might destroy social cohesion, but an airfoil design would still require the people to lift. They would just have to lift a lot less. I once read that an efficient airfoil design would allow for half the people to be in free flight at any given time.
“That would be so breezy if they did it,” Aguella said jealously. “I wonder if we’ll ever try.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. I recalled to mind images of the Wise Ones in council. Half of them were so old they were more drag than lift. I was willing to bet some of them had dropped dead on the spot when they saw the Polar’s airfoil.
“Come on, let’s get going,” she urged.
We Four-Effed: flew free, fast, and furious. Not a moment to be lost. Aguella, being female, was faster than me, of course, but she restrained her impatience to allow me to keep up. I rode her wind, staying just behind her. This had the advantage of offering me a view that included both the amazing soon-to-be airfoil and Aguella herself. She had lovely pods.
Not the point, Toomin, I thought. Not really what you need to be thinking about right now.
Mones! She was spreading the mones for me!
For
