And part of her now, the living dreaming part, knows that she has crossed the border. Nightingales, clear springs, great rose-trees whose rich scents confound the senses. The large made small; the small, large, and one’s own self made true.
And Time a leafy, sun-dappled orchard.
Gray horse, crunch of sweet, crisp fruit, swish of long silver tail.
Long ago. Ever-now.
She is Gulliver, pounded by tiny fists.
“Please, please, wake up! We need your help! We can’t do it alone! Please, please, wake up!”
She opens her eyes. Bean is there. “You have been asleep for a long, long time, Pele.” Her eyes are grave.
“This is too slow,” says Kevin, shaking her arm. “We’re only transiting Venus. We’ll never get to Shining Leaf.”
Ignoring trumpet fanfares, Pele calculates, considering Orion’s acceleration, that she has been asleep for three months.
Ta’a’aeva says, “We can’t make the drive work. You know how. Tell us! Tell us, and we’ll engineer it. You know that we can.”
Pele says, “Get me out of this.” As they unstrap her cocoon, she looks at a nearby screen. “I’ve been exercising three hours a day on the bike? Really?”
“You weren’t awake,” says Eliott. “You were in a trance.”
“Indeed,” she says, taking in the compressed graphic of her brainwaves for the past few months, noting the sharp spikes that she knows linger in her mind like haunting, exotic music, calling her to return.
It takes all her will to remain where she is, on Moku, where she has committed a powerful, monstrous act. She sees the resolve of the children arrayed around her and knows that she cannot gain control of the ship. She knows that they would have done this without her help.
She tries to believe that they are better off with her here. She must make that true.
She also sees, scrolling, continuous, messages from Earth. With a touch, she speeds them up, goes backwards, absorbs them like a blow, for it is all her fault.
And Gustavo. She searches wildly, finds a tiny line of news—
“No!” She raises her hands to cover her face, and sobs, slumping back into the cocoon, curling up so that no one, no one, can see her.
She does not re-emerge for another spell. But now, her dreams are new. She is working.
Bean sees Pele first.
She is standing just outside Nucleus, where diagrams, equations, charts, and virtual models of FTL drives litter the air in transparent, threedimensional overlays. She has been watching, listening to the hum of intense concentration, several intertwining musics that tangle and leap within her long-quiet mind, and getting ready to turn and re-enter her cocoon.
The displays rainbow Bean’s slight body as she approaches Pele, her stare a powerful command. She takes Pele’s hand and, as the others gather, leads her to an array of cushions. Pele settles on one, back straight, legs crossed, and says, direct from her hard-won beginner’s mind, “You don’t really need me. Are you ready to tell us, Bean?”
First, Bean’s eyes widen as she tilts her head at Pele.
Pele nods. “I know.”
Bean frowns and clenches her fists. “I’ve been trying. It’s closed in. Like a hard nut. I can’t tell it. No one understands.”
“Try another way.”
Bean takes a deep breath, then shakes her head and makes her long hair swirl round her face. She stretches her long legs out in front of her, grasps the soles of her feet with her hands, tucks her head in, and silences.
“Bean, who is in this story?” asks Pele.
She asks three times. Finally Bean says, her head still down, her voice muffled, “It is a story about a horse.” She walks her hands up her calves, singing more than speaking, bends both knees to the right, and kneels, her spine ramrod straight, hands moving as in a hula, shaping the story in space. “Sometimes the story seems short, and sometimes I know that it is actually very, very long. “On the pampas, I ride Alcubierre, my silver mare, all day through the wheat. It parts and lets us through.” Her hands speak in swift, darting signs now: her own language, Pele knows, which they must learn.
Another way in. Another way out.
“It makes a swishing sound, like wind, and then the sounds are a music that might keep me there forever. They are … enchanting.”
Pele hears what Bean hears; it assails her even now, calling her.
But she cannot, will not, succumb.
Bean’s eyelids are half-closed. She speaks as if in a trance. “Alcubierre pulls the mountain closer when she gallops. She and I—we do not move. We remain the same, and in the same place. The wheat is time. Flowing and parting around me.
“I thought of this story for a whole year. I worked on it in my head when I rode. I see us from above. Alcubierre’s tail flows out behind her, white, blending and waving with the golden wheat. It is long … long … long …” She lowers her head as if in apology and whispers, “But still. The story is not in words.”
“Ah,” says Pele, grateful when Bean stops speaking, and the imperative music fades. She has tried to wake before. It may be still a dream.
But she does not think so. “Show us.”
The showing unfolds. It is complex, and long, as Pele knew it would be, and wakes her fully. All of them struggle to understand, to master various parts of it, to use theory to imagine this drive, to picture the concept of the space that it would use.
Xia, Chief Nanotechnologist, prepares to infuse the ship with her work and the work of a million materials engineers, biomedical engineers, environmental scientists—a synthesis of every science and engineering discipline—generated from a century of research and application.
They gather for a ceremony. Xia’s black eyes are serious and steady when she speaks. “We will be enabled, today, through enlivenment, which is how we describe this coming change, to manipulate the matter of our ship at the atomic level. The rules we hereby embed within the ship are the final arbiter
