"I missed you," he said, silently cursing himself for banality.
"And I you." She paused, then continued hesitantly but irrevocably. "I knew what father was up to when he sent me to Altair. And I could understand his reasons, and even share them to some degree, for I was frightened of what was happening. So part of me kept hoping that his plan would work. But it didn't. And that part of me, that frightened part . . . it isn't here anymore. I left it somewhere out beyond Altair."
With utmost gentleness, they came into each other's arms. Through the armorplast, the stars continued to gleam, unnoticed.
Moving Day arrived.
Phoenix was, despite everything, ready to move out of its immemorial orbit and swing into the sunward course that would bring it into collision with Mars. Ballistic calculations of incredible sophistication and complexity had been required to assure that the two bodies would arrive at the same place at the same time. Planning of nearly equal subtlety had assured that the relatively few remaining personnel to whom the conspiracy had not been revealed, and they alone, were at the small observation station near Phoenix—as near as would be reasonably safe when the mammoth fusion drive was ignited. They, of course,
knew
that everyone else was aboard the various ships to observe the event from other vantage points while they handled the ongoing transmission to Earth.
There were, of course, a few exceptions . . . .
Major Levinson and Sergeant Thompson walked briskly along the curving corridor in Phoenix Prime. On their approach, Corporal Ramirez came to attention at his post outside Computer Central.
"As you were, Corporal," Levinson acknowledged. "Sergeant Thompson and I need access."
"Certainly, sir." Ramirez indicated the retinal scanner beside the hatch.
"You go first, Sergeant," the Space Force major said offhandedly. "I just remembered something I need to check." He set his briefcase on a ledge projecting from the bulkhead and unlocked it with a snap.
"Aye aye, sir." Thompson moved to the scanlock, Ramirez turning to watch him and therefore missing the object that Levinson drew from the briefcase. It consisted of a small box with a pistollike grip and, extending from what seemed to be the front end, a translucent probe surrounded by metallic rings that tapered to smaller and smaller diameters toward the tip. Holding it like the pistol that it resembled in size and overall shape, Levinson aimed it at the corporal's back.
Suddenly, Thompson's face lost all expression, and he crumpled silently to the deck. Ramirez, momentarily paralyzed by the sheer unexpectedness of the sergeant's collapse, began to open his mouth just as Levinson pressed a firing stud, producing no visible effect and only a faint whining sound. But Ramirez fell unconscious, in the odd way things fall under the Coriolis force of a spin habitat.
"Bravo, Sergeant," Levinson said, smiling, as Thompson got to his feet. "An amazing performance—I hope everybody put on as good a show for the people we're leaving behind. The world lost a great actor when you joined the Big Green Machine."
Thompson grunted skeptically. "What's amazing is
that
." He indicated the major's Raehaniv stunner. "When I was in covert ops, there were times when I would have given my left nut for one!"
Levinson couldn't argue. The thing projected ultrahigh-frequency focused sound that attacked the target's nervous system, resulting in unconsciousness (lasting for hours if the zapping was done at this range) but producing no ill effects beyond a splitting headache on awakening and leaving absolutely no physical trace. He imagined there were crowd-control types who would echo the sergeant's sentiments.
Without further conversation, they carried Ramirez to the airlock where he would join the other non-cleared individuals still in Phoenix Prime. They would awake to find themselves aboard a shuttle, non-functioning save for life support and the emergency transponder that would bring quick rescue from the ships now raptly observing Phoenix. And each of them would have the same memory of passing out in company with whoever was in his or her field of vision. And a mystery would be born, to dwarf that of the
Mary Celeste
.
DiFalco listened to the last of the reports and, nodding in satisfaction, signed off. (Communications security was not a problem; all their ships had Raehaniv neutrino-pulse communicators now.) He swiveled his chair around to face Varien and Aelanni.
"Everything appears to be in readiness. I'd better get back to
Andy J.
"
"And I should return to
Pathfinder
," Aelanni added. DiFalco had hoped they could be side by side at the moment of departure, her clean features and darkly burnished hair silhouetted against the blazing star-fields that seemed her natural and proper backdrop. But they each had their own responsibilities. The Raehaniv lacked, or had forgotten, many of the unwritten laws that enshrined the intangible mystery of command; but they were relearning them, and
Pathfinder
was Aelanni's ship now, beyond all possibility of argument or evasion.
Varien looked at one of them, and then the other, and smiled faintly. He had long since resigned himself to the inevitable, but DiFalco could never be absolutely sure how much was resignation and how much was secret satisfaction. The old Raehaniv was, after all this time, still awfully hard to figure out.
I suppose I'll never really know where I stand, Varien. So I suppose I should stop worrying about it.
Spontaneously, they all turned to the holo tank at the center of
Liberator
's control room, in which was displayed their fleet—such as it was. Four
Washington
class cruisers—
Andrew Jackson
,
Theodore Roosevelt
,
Ronald Reagan
, and
Judith Kramer
—and three of their Russian
Aleksandr Nevsky
class counterparts, led by
Boris Yeltsin
. A gaggle of interplanetary personnel transports and cargo carriers which, like the military cruisers, had been equipped with Raehaniv fusion drives and continuous-displacement generators. Varien's twelve survey/factory ships (variations on the same basic class as
Liberator
and
Pathfinder
) and five fast courier ships. A few thousand Terrans and a few hundred Raehaniv. The bolt they were preparing to hurl at an interstellar empire of unknowable extent and limitless resources.
Aelanni shook her head slowly. "We must be crazy!"
DiFalco smiled crookedly. " 'If we weren't crazy we'd all go insane.' " They both recognized a quote—Varien from his in-depth knowledge of English and Aelanni from her in-depth knowledge of him—and two left eyebrows rose in unison. He smiled more gently and explained. "Jimmy Buffett. A poet of my people. Last century. Seems every generation since his death has rediscovered him." His eyes strayed to the viewscreen, from which the barely visible blue planet of his birth was absent—mercifully so. For his mind had, unwillingly, free-associated from tropical beaches across ocean and steppe to a colder land and a man who would remain there despite a promise DiFalco had meant to keep.
I tried, Seryozha. I even thought I had something worked out, a couple of times. But you were right all along. There was no way. There never was.
Forgive me.
A small sun flamed into life, seeming to erupt from the asteroid Phoenix—an asteroid which began to move ponderously into a new orbit, which was to be its final one.
The enormous outpouring of gamma radiation from that artificial sun (or, strictly speaking, ongoing series of suns) would have been fatal to any organic observer at close range. But remote cameras transmitted the spectacle to the people of Earth, who watched transfixed, not noticing the departure of an unsuspected fleet of vessels from another region of the asteroid belt.
DiFalco stood on
Andy J.
's control room deck, to which he was attached by the serene one gee of Raehaniv artificial gravity, and marvelled at the inventiveness inspired by humankind's quest for comfort.
The Raehaniv vessels were designed with an "aft-equals-down" orientation. The bogus weight supplied by their drives served when they were accelerating—sometimes too much so, when powerful accelerations were called for and the waste plasma of their fusion-powered photon drives was dumped into the exhaust, causing the flames that twentieth-century science fiction illustrators had considered essential to belch forth; the crews simply took it. In free fall, the artificial gravity fields operated in the same direction.
But Terran spacecraft were arranged otherwise. In their control rooms and spin habitats, aft meant toward the rear bulkhead—not a great problem for vessels that were usually in free fall. The ships couldn't be rebuilt from scratch, so a way had to be found to make them liveable under conditions of long-term acceleration. The application of fresh Terran perspectives to Raehaniv technology had produced the solution. Now the spin habitats no longer spun; some gravitic generators provided a "down-equals-inboard" orientation for them, while others compensated for whatever acceleration the ship was undergoing. It was a cumbersome, Rube Goldbergish arrangement, which the Raehaniv would never have thought of if they hadn't been faced with the problem of adapting quaint, pre-gravitic designs. But it had started Varien thinking, and now he was working hard on the software for a genuine inertial compensator—the "acceleration damper" that had always eluded him. DiFalco wondered how many more unthought-of possibilities would emerge from the cross-fertilization of Raehaniv and Terran viewpoints.
For now he was content to take advantage of this one, although he and the others who passed for old-timers in the Space Force still found the absence of the familiar sensations of free fall and acceleration unsettling. It was almost comforting when the artificial gravity wavered queasily—not all the bugs were out of the system—as the drive cut off and it shifted to free-fall mode. They had reached the cold outer regions beyond the orbit of Uranus, where the continuous-displacement drive could be engaged without interference from Sol's gravity well.
"Colonel," Loreann zho'Trafviu said quietly from her communications console, "Varien reports that all Raehaniv ships are ready to commence continuous-displacement drive." Every Terran ship had a Raehaniv gravitics technician to intercede in technological realms where Americans and Russians were still newcomers, and Loreann would implement DiFalco's commands. A glance at a status board showed him that the Terran ships were likewise prepared.
"Acknowledged," he spoke formally. "Tell him that we will be ready as soon as the purging of our data bases is complete." Loreann spoke a liquid Raehaniv sentence, and the fleet was effectively tied into
Andy J.
's command net for the departure.
"Major Levinson," he continued, "please execute." Levinson's fingers flew over the keyboard that was still used for operations above a certain level of complexity, and blocks of data—indeed, the fact that the data had ever existed—began to vanish from the memory of
Andy J.
's computers. The same was happening on all the Terran ships, as it already had aboard the Raehaniv ones.
DiFalco gave a further series of terse commands, setting in motion phase after phase of the long-planned procedure. When it was over, nothing remained in the fleet's data bases that could be any use in identifying, or finding, Sol. The coordinates of the displacement points in the Altair Chain remained, but they would be wiped in succession as each transit was made. All printed matter had already been sanitized.
Earth's people were, unknowingly, secure in what amounted to an informational black hole. And the fleet had cast off from its last moorings, with nothing but a star to steer by: the blue-white flame of Altair, dead ahead.
But every Terran eye in the control room was on the shrunken sun in the view-aft screen, and every imagination pictured a now-invisible blue planet orbiting close to its warmth. A long moment passed before DiFalco turned to Loreann and spoke the command that sundered them from that world.
There was no sensation of motion. Indeed, there was no
motion
, in the true sense. But the little yellow sun in the screen began to shrink with soul-shaking rapidity.
That he could see it (and Altair, far too distant to be visibly growing in the forward viewport) was, DiFalco knew, no mystery. The ship still possessed only the velocity it had attained in its journey to the outer system—considerable, but far from relativistic. And now, making several score thousand instantaneous displacements per second, its occupants saw the outside universe as if it were a video film with that many thousands of exposures per second. And so the sun, impossibly, receeded in the screen at an apparent rate of over fifty times lightspeed without any visual distortion. The more theoretically minded among the scientists were still muttering darkly about things like "causality violation."
(No, of course the displacements weren't
really
instantaneous. As Varien never tired of pointing out, that would have required an object to be in two places at the same time. He'd just never succeeded in measuring the time elapsed. At some point, he was sure, the drive's pseudo-velocity would run up against an upper limit imposed by quantum indeterminacy; but as yet there was no indication of what that limit was.)
DiFalco thought of none of these things. He looked around the control room at his fellow Americans, from whom America was receeding more swiftly than light, and knew he must say something.
"We're not leaving our country," he began hesitantly. "We're taking it with us! We're not leaving
this
!" He slapped the stars and stripes on the left shoulder of his space service grays. "It meant something once, and we're taking with us the memory of what it meant. All we're leaving behind is the bullshit!" He took out his brown Ethnic Entitlements Card.
"Our country made a mistake, long ago, in drawing distinctions between groups of people. Then, in the last century, we froze those distinctions into law so that we could try to atone for them by
reversing
them instead of simply abolishing them. Well, that's all over. From now on, among us, men and women will be judged as individuals—the way they should have been judged in the first place—and not as symbols of some historic grievance that political careerists can cash in on!" He strode to the waste disposal chute and thrust in the card. It flamed for an instant as it was reduced to its components. He turned and swept the control room with his eyes.