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Victoria and J.D. and Feral joined Satoshi. Still inside the access tunnel,
Stephen Thomas hesitated. He pushed off gin-
gerly, awkwardly, with one hand. In the other he carried a sack, which he had
avoided explaining.
Satoshi looked around. Almost everyone in the sailhouse was faculty or staff".
There were a few sponsored reporters, and Feral, and a number of remotes
transmitting the event back to earth, but none of the VIP visitors the
expedition had prepared for. Chancellor Blades had chosen not to attend the
test, and he had not even sent his usual deputy, Gerald Hem-
minge, the assistant chancellor.
Feral pushed off and started interviewing people, setting the background for
his story. Starfarer navigated from one
125
126 vonda N. MdnCyre star system to the next via cosmic string. But once it
reached a destination, it required other methods of propulsion: pri-
marily the sail. Cosmic string provided macronavigation, the sail,
micronavigation, though it sounded strange to apply Ihe term "micro" to
distances measured in millions of kilome-
ters.
The sail was slow, but near a star it was steady. It had the great benefit of
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operating without reaction mass or onboard fuel. It would propel the starship
from its entrypoint into the star system to a point from which it could
reenter the twisted space-time of a cosmic string. The alien contact team had
a small, fast explorer to use in traveling between Starfarer and a new
system's worlds.
Feral drifted over to the sailmaster.
Iphigenie DuPre's astonishing mathematical ability reached so deep that it
appeared instinctual to anyone who overlooked her years of experience and
practice. She was one of the first people to build a sail-ship and to sail it
in space. She had designed most of the sail systems that racers used down
around the O'Neill colonies. Once her sails started winning races, she retired
from amateur competition and put her time into developing and marketing. She
was probably the wealth-
iest person on board Starfarer, thanks to the popularity of sail-ship racing.
The challenge of a starship's esoteric combination of pro-
pulsions had brought her to EarthSpace, and to Starfarer.
"Ms. DuPre ** Feral said.
"Hush, now," she said quietly. The tempo of the sensor melodies quickened.
Everyone fell silent, and the change began.
Tension eased at the ends of the pieated surface. The folds
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The sail opened.
Liquid silver spread over blackness, widened, flowed like a flooding lake
across the path of the Milky Way, and cut off the stars. One edge quivered. A
vibration shimmered through the satin film. The shivering threatened to twist
the surface out of shape, but control strands shifted and tightened and eased
away the oscillation.
The sail grew.
Its complex harmonies filled the sailhouse. No one spoke.
STARFARERS 127
The sail shivered with one final ripple, then lay quiet, stretched out across
space. Satoshi imagined that he could see a slight curve in the surface, as
the sail filled with the invisible solar wind. He imagined he could already
feel the acceleration, already detect the most infinitesimal widening of the
starship's orbit.
The sensor melody decreased to a whisper.
"Full deployment."
Iphigenie's quiet statement filled the sailhouse like a shout.
Her voice held suppressed laughter and excitement. She opened her unusual
cinnamon-brown eyes. For a few sec-
onds, no one else made a sound. Satoshi released the breath he had been
holding.
"Watch it!"
The shout and an explosive "pop!" broke the silence. It sounded like damage,
like decompression, like a breach of the sailhouse wall into the vacuum of
space. Satoshi tensed, forcing himself not to jerk toward the noise. Any quick
move-
ment in freefall would send him tumbling.
A projectile shot past.
The champagne cork slammed into the transparent wall beyond him. It rebounded
nearly as fast, hit the glass on the other side, and bounced again. It
narrowly missed Satoshi and several other faculty members.
Somersaulting slowly backward, Stephen Thomas laughed as the cork flung itself
around the glass cylinder until it used up its momentum. Champagne pressed
itself out of the bottle he held. Without gravity, the bubbles formed on the
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sides and bottom of the bottle instead of exploding upward; their pressure
pushed the champagne out. As Stephen Thomas tumbled he left a liquid rope
twisting in his wake. It fizzed softly.
Stephen Thomas looked like the star of some weird zero-
gravity sport, celebrating a championship by trying to spray his teammates
with champagne, but being defeated by weightlessness.
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He'd have to be the star of something yet to be invented, Satoshi thought.
He's wrong for the most popular earth sports:
too slender for football, not tall enough for basketball, and far too
beautiful for hockey.
Stephen Thomas spoiled the effect by bumping into the
128 Vonda N. Mclntyre wall and snatching awkwardly at a glass handhold to stop
his tumble. He came to a hall, still laughing, still holding the bottle. The
twisting stream of champagne broke itself into spherical globules that drifted
among the spectators.
"I was wondering how to split it up," Stephen Thomas said. The pressure of the
bubbles slowly pushed the last of the champagne into the air.
The cork tumbled lazily, having lost most of its momentum without hitting
anyone in the eye. Everyone was looking at
Stephen Thomas rather than at the sail.
He tossed his head. His long blond hair nipped back for a second, then fell
forward again to drift in front of his eyes.
He tucked it behind one ear.
"Congratulations, Iphigenie," he said.
"Yes," Victoria said. "Iphigenie, the sail's beautiful."
"Thank you." She reached out and waved a rippling sphere of champagne toward
her, placed her lips against it, and drank it with a kiss. Unlike most zero-g
workers, she kept her hair long, but she wore it in a smooth mass of thin,
heavy braids caught up at the back of her neck.
Iphigenie's action broke the tension of waiting for deploy-
ment, and the fright of Stephen Thomas's exploding cham-
pagne cork. Everyone clustered around Iphigenie, sphering her with their
congratulations, surrounding her like the bub-
bles surrounding the wine; people caught and drank the fizz-
ing globules of champagne that drifted and trembled in the air currents.
Satoshi kissed one and let it flow between his lips. It dissolved against his
tongue, dry and gentle and ephemeral.
Nearby, J.D. floated alone, watching the sail, occasionally glancing at the
celebration with a slight smile on her lips.
Satoshi waved a bubble of champagne in her direction.
"J.D., catch!"
Instead of reaching for the rippling bubble, she pushed her hand toward it to
create a counterdraft in Satoshi's direction.
"Thank you," she said. "It's very kind of you, but I don't drink. I quit when
I started diving."
Stephen Thomas paddled awkwardly toward them.
"Are you guys playing tennis with my good champagne?"
He tried to capture it with the air pressure of a gesture, and
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