Mejox protested, “That’s because Zahmekoses is such a good friend to all of us!”
“True,” Otuz said. She scratched lower on my back, right where it felt best. “But he’d still end up with the bowl of rocks.”
“Probably,” I said. I think I was agreeing with her because I didn’t want her to stop scratching. “But in this case I really don’t have any preference, really. I can’t imagine there’s going to be a dull window anywhere on—”
A chime sounded, and then we heard Kekox’s voice. “Are all you kids in the common dining area?”
“Yes, sir,” we all said, almost in unison.
“All right, good. The clever people down on the ground seem to be about to let us go, and Captain Osepok informs me that we’re ready to boost any minute. Get to an acceleration-protection spot, strap in, and stay there. If you need to get a drink or visit the head, do it now. Get moving.”
We all said, “Yes, sir” again, and the intercom clicked off.
“Rear study room, outer deck?” Mejox asked.
“Sure,” Priekahm answered. The two of them shot out the door into the passageway together, his squat Palathian body framed by her tall, slim Shulathian one.
“Were you thinking of anywhere in particular to watch from?” I asked Otuz. “I really hadn’t made up my mind.”
“Let’s go to the computer lab.”
I laughed. “That’s the other area with a good rear view. So you just argued with Mejox to annoy him?”
“Can you think of a better reason to argue with Mejox? Besides, if he needs somebody to agree with him, there’s always Priekahm. Come on, let’s get strapped in—I’d rather not start out by splatting against a bulkhead.”
Since they had gone out to the right, along the outer deck, we went left, along the inner deck.
Our little private chambers all had windows, but those were small, and besides, by unspoken agreement, we all wanted to share the departure— the beginning, really, of everything that would be important in our lives— with our friends.
Otuz and I swam above the inner deck through the narrow passageway to the computer lab, which had the two things we needed: acceleration webbing and a big rearview port.
The Wahkopem Zomos was a stubby cylinder, wider than it was long and about as tall as a four-story building, inside a wide ring that surrounded its base and extended about one fourth as high as the cylinder. We lived in the ring—once we were on our way, the ship would be spun along its axis, so that the outer edge of the ring formed the outer deck, with the gravity we were used to, and an interior deck formed the inner deck, with about four-fifths of Nisuan gravity, a little less than the gravity would be on Setepos when we got there.
Yet despite the apparent size from the outside, quarters were fairly cramped inside. The entire central cylinder was devoted to the ship’s farm, sail room, power plant, and lander storage; life support, waste recycling, general storage, and everything else took up more than half of the ring. So we actually only lived in the outermost part of the ring, on a double deck that barely had head clearance for Poiparesis. And many parts of the living space were things like the cockpit and the biological laboratory that couldn’t be used for much of anything else and weren’t used most of the time. Even with all that space in the ship, at the time, as a child, I could already span my compartment with my outstretched hands.
Inside the central cylinder were the power plant, the reaction engines, the recycling system, the ship’s farm, and the squat, dark forms of the two landers, Gurix and Rumaz. Though it would be almost twenty-four years until we used them, they were always there, reminding us of what we were intending to do. The forward third of the cylinder was taken up with the sail, brakeloop, shrouds, and winches to operate them.
Otuz and I climbed into the acceleration webbing, checked each other’s fastenings, and settled in to wait. Probably there would be another delay or two before we got started.
There were acceleration webs nearly everywhere on the ship— lightweight, closed-top hammocks of strong webbing that would distribute the load, secured to a pole by a rotating cuff so that they could swing freely with the acceleration. It had been necessary because preliminary surveys had indicated that we would need to do a few rapid course corrections on the way out—at peak velocity, one-third of lightspeed, even a grain of sand striking the ship could be a disaster, and radar might not see it till we were within minutes of a hit. Thus there had to be some way to quickly and safely tie ourselves down when the collision alarm sounded.
From the standpoint of us kids, this had meant that during the ship’s early boost phase, we had a wide variety of places where we could safely be.
We strapped in with our faces pointed into the webbing, so that we could see through the gaps, because we knew that with the boost coming from the rear, the hammocks would swing so that their bottoms pointed toward the rear viewport. Now we floated next to each other, peering through the webbing, waiting for the big rocket behind us to fire.
“You wouldn’t really have splatted against the bulkhead, you know,” I told Otuz. “The acceleration on this thing isn’t all that high. They just don’t want us twisting an ankle or getting hit by falling junk that someone forgot to put away. It won’t even get over one gravity of acceleration till the last half hour. It’s not like a regular rocket at all.”
Otuz nodded. “I know. I was exaggerating for effect, Zahmekoses. You’re always so serious.”
“It sort of comes naturally.”
I must have sounded defensive, because she reached through the webbing and grabbed my hand. “I kind of like it. You really like the lessons and studying, don’t you?”
“Yeah. So do you.”
“Mejox and Priekahm—” she said, and hesitated.
“I know, they’d be just as glad if we never had to learn a thing more. It’s okay, it’s not that I can’t see things about people, you know; it’s just that I kind of know how delicate things are and I have to watch myself, so I don’t usually say anything,” I explained.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Otuz said. “Just because I’m a princess I can say anything I want about anybody. But you have to watch out for Mejox because he’s royalty, and you have to stick together with Priekahm because she’s the other Shulathian, and—”
“It’s all right, really,” I said. “I could still be back at the orphanage, hoping to qualify someday for a job as a mechanic or a dentist. And I really do like all of you, so it’s not that hard to be polite and watch out for what I say. Don’t worry about it too much.”
“It’s still not fair,” she said.
“Boost imminent,” Osepok’s voice said from the intercom.
We turned to look out the big viewport. Behind the ship, connected by a long, thin pole, was a big structure of struts and tanks, a third as wide as the ship and five times as long: the booster. It filled most of the window, shining silver in the harsh light of space. For a long breath or two nothing happened. Then a glow appeared behind the booster and spread to fill the rest of the window.
There was no sound, of course, with no air to carry it; just the purplish-white glow. We sank into the webbing, and the hammocks swung around so that our faces were pointed down toward the view port as the ship began to accelerate. Moment by moment, we felt ourselves gaining weight, sinking deeper into the hammocks.
Ordinary spacecraft had to take off from Nisu’s surface, starting with no velocity and fighting directly against gravity; they had to accelerate at about one and a half times the acceleration of gravity, increasing to three gravities, for periods of a thirty-second of a day or more, to leap up to orbit. But the Wahkopem Zomos was already in orbit around Nisu, and Nisu was orbiting Sosahy; we could begin with a gentler thrust and let it run for a third of a day.
At first the thrust was pushing the Wahkopem Zomos, plus all those tanks and struts in the booster, plus the immense weight of fuel, thirteen times the weight of the ship itself. The ship and booster sped up very
slowly. But with each passing instant, more of the fuel was gone, and yet the engines pushed just as hard. Acceleration increased, and the webs pressed harder against our faces.
The glare we saw was hydrogen plasma, heated far beyond the point where its electrons and protons stayed together, so that it was a mere thin wisp of atomic particles. By weight the booster was almost all liquid hydrogen, and the rest was the assembly of girders, tanks, and pipes that held it together—but a tiny fraction of the total mass, held in one small compartment that any of us could have picked up and carried with one hand, was the key to the whole thing: antimatter. Mix liquid hydrogen just above absolute zero with one millionth of its weight in antimatter, and it became hydrogen plasma hotter than the core of the sun.
Had we been outside, looking directly at the glow instead of seeing it through a shielded viewport, we would have been blinded; on Nisu below us, people had to be warned not to look directly at our boost out of orbit, and we briefly lit up the sky so brightly that night animals went back to their dens and plants opened their leaves to what they thought was sunrise.
We hung there in the webbing for a long time, getting steadily heavier as the acceleration increased. The glare that danced around and behind the booster flickered and wavered in colored sheets, endlessly fascinating against the black of space, as occasional stars shone through it and now and then a glimpse of Nisu or Sosahy would appear as we swung outward in our escape orbit.
It was always changing and yet always there, like a flame, and in the same way that after you watch a campfire for a while with an old, close friend, you begin to talk seriously, Otuz and I eventually slipped back into conversation. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “I’m glad to have someone to see this with.”
“Well, I didn’t want you just moping in your compartment, with no friends,” she said. She was still holding my hand; I looked at the thick brown fur on her heavy forearm, next to the soft tan-yellow skin on my long slim one. “You’ve seemed kind of lost these last couple of eightdays, since Mejox and Priekahm have gotten so tight with each other. I mean, ever since you started standing up for yourself—”
I was surprised. “I didn’t know that I was standing up for myself. Or that I wasn’t before.” A great cascading pink sheet rippled across the plasma outside, and we paused to watch it rip into pieces and vanish in little dark blue pulses.
“Really?” Otuz said. “You don’t notice a difference? Priekahm and I certainly do. A few eightdays ago when we were on the last big tour of Nisu, just before we crossed over to visit Shulath, all of a sudden you stopped pacing yourself to hang just behind Mejox and started setting the pace for the rest of us. It was like overnight you just stopped being afraid of him. I guess he must not have liked that—he doesn’t deal very well with people disagreeing with him or showing him up, you know. I mean he’s very loyal and he doesn’t mean to be that way, but he gets angry and mean when he comes out behind. And then you just stopped worrying about it and let him sulk. I thought it was great.”
“I didn’t even notice,” I said. “Maybe I just got some more confidence or something. You don’t think he’s still mad at me or anything? He is my friend and I don’t want bad feelings between us.”
“He’ll get over it, if he’s really your friend. Anyway, it’s no big surprise that Priekahm is around him all the time now. He likes people to suck up to him, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself if she isn’t sucking up to somebody.”
“That’s nasty,” I pointed out. A great streamer of orange swayed across the viewport for a moment, seeming to curl around the crescent of Sosahy.
“It’s also true. I like them, believe it or not. I just don’t think I have to lie to myself—or you—about what my friends are like.”
I didn’t answer because I was watching another green sheet shimmer and twist. Besides, I had suddenly realized what had caused what Otuz thought was my “sudden change.” After Kekox had warned Mejox not to beat me up for doing better than he did, I had been afraid Mejox would be punished again just for doing better than me. So I had been careful to stay well ahead of him wherever I could. I’d even shown Mejox up in front of adults now and then, just to be on the safe side.
But I had thought he would be relieved not to be punished. It hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t know that I knew . . .
Were we still friends? With most of our lifetimes ahead of us, I hoped so.
A great red and orange ball, silent like all the others, big as a large mountain, billowed out of the booster exhaust, then abruptly vanished as if it had been turned off. Otuz made a gulping noise in her throat.
“Beautiful,” I agreed. “What a way to say good-bye.”
We watched the dark, and felt our increasing weight sink into the webbing, but she didn’t say anything more and I drifted back into my thoughts. It was true, now that I thought about it, that Mejox had been spending a lot of time with Priekahm. But after all, our friendships waxed and waned all the time. Ever since we had become fully conscious and articulate, around the age of four, we had been together, constantly discovering each other, clashing over this and banding together over that. Mejox and I had been close for almost a year, but still, when we had first arrived at the training base, Priekahm had been my closest friend. If Mejox was fading, well, Otuz and I now had more in common, since we both liked school much better than the others did. There would be a lot of years, I thought, and we would all be friends of one kind or another for a long time.
I hoped. I couldn’t help thinking that Mejox did hold grudges a long time.
Had I offended him by not lagging behind him, as I’d done before? But if I hadn’t, Kekox would have surely hit him again.
Or was this whole thing Otuz’s imagination? Priekahm often saw things between people that weren’t there—usually very dramatic things . . . was Otuz the same way, was it something all girls did? I suddenly missed my closeness with Mejox; he had been rude and pushy but comprehensible. I wondered if I would have to wait for twenty years or more, till puberty hit, before I would understand girls.
Otuz was staring at me. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Just thinking.”
The last part of the acceleration seemed like the longest; there were just as many bright colors and interesting effects, but by now most of the fuel mass was gone, and the acceleration was much greater, so we sank deep into the webbing face-first. It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, and because the mesh was wide we could breathe and see, but it wasn’t as pleasant as it had been.
Finally, the weight ceased all at once. “Remain in your webbing,” Osepok reminded us over the intercom. “Engine shutdown is complete, but we’re preparing to jettison the booster.”
A long minute crawled by, and then a bright light flashed far out on the long spar connecting us to the booster. The explosive retaining ring had blown, and the now useless assemblage of tanks and engines was falling away from us. Briefly, a small rocket motor on it flared to life, to kick it safely into an orbit that would crash it into the Sun—since there would be so many operations in space in the next century, it was vital to keep space junk to a minimum. With a slight thud, the ship expelled the spar from its rear attachment, and that too whirled off into space.
The explosive separation, the falling away, and the boost of the small motor all happened in complete silence. The only sound I could hear was Otuz breathing softly beside me. The acceleration webbing hung loosely, and we floated freely on the tethering lines.
As the booster fell away behind us, there, hanging in the sky, was Sosahy, cut neatly into a dark and a light side by the terminator line. The gas giant was strangely shrunken, as much as it had been during the shakedown cruise, and as we watched, suddenly a crescent wedge formed on the curved side of the great bow of light that the day side of Sosahy made in the sky. Rapidly the much smaller curve grew to a half-circle, and if we squinted we could just see a few dark dots peeping through
the clouds and water—a little bit of the Windward Islands or the Ring. By the naked eye at this distance it was hard to tell.
“Priekahm will be insufferable,” Otuz said. “It’s right where she thought it would be.”
The intercom crackled again. “All right, everyone stay in place for one more thing.”
There was a faint rumble through the Wahkopem Zomos, and the ship began to vibrate; we could feel it even through the web. Then Sosahy and Nisu began to roll over in the viewport, faster and faster. Captain Osepok was using the attitude jets to spin the ship up to speed for the voyage. Our acceleration webs stretched and settled toward the deck. A few moments later, the captain gave permission, and we unfastened ourselves. We slipped out of the webbing and put our feet on the inner deck, standing up carefully. Outside the viewport, Sosahy and Nisu looped crazily around each other, but the ship was big enough so that we did not feel ourselves spinning—rather, it was the sky outside the viewport that spun.
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