One big man obviously was; his skin had a greenish cast. He raised his hand. “I’ll take you to the doctor,” I said. “She has something stronger than that pill.” He actually made it to the clinic before he barfed.
There were ten communication channels, and Marygay allowed everyone ten minutes for goodbyes. Not many people took that long. After a little more than an hour, everybody was in the assembly area, watching a large flat-screen display of Marygay in the captain’s chair. All 148 of us had maneuvered so as to be “lying” on the “floor” in front of the screen.
Marygay peered out of the screen, her thumb poised over a red button on the console. “Is everybody ready?” The crowd shouted yes and, with less than military precision, our journey began. (I wondered how many people were aware of the fact, or suspected, that the red button wasn’t attached to anything. It was just an engineer’s joke. The ship launched itself, and knew its time of departure to within a millionth of a second.)
The onset of acceleration was slow. I was floating about a foot off the floor, and I drifted down gently, and then gained weight over the course of ten or twelve seconds. There was a slight hum, which would be the background of all our lives for ten years: the tiny residue of the unimaginable sustained violence that was flinging us out of the galaxy.
I stood up and fell down. So did a lot of people, after days or weeks of zerogee. Sara took my arm and we helped each other up, laughing, forming a wobbly triangle with the floor, that closed up into two roughly parallel people. I cautiously lowered myself into a squat and stood up again, muscles and joints protesting.
About a hundred people were stepping around carefully, looking at their feet. The rest were sitting or lying down, some showing signs of anxiety or even panic.
They’d been told what to expect, that even breathing would seem to be an effort, at first. Those of us who’d been in and out of orbit the past months were used to it. But having it described to you and feeling it were two different things.
Marygay switched us over to a view of the planet. At first it just turned beneath us, a few wispy clouds over the mottled white snowscape. People were chatting and groaning in commiseration.
After a few minutes, things quieted down, as our motion became apparent. People sat and stared at the screen in silent meditation, perhaps a kind of hypnosis.
One curved horizon appeared, and then, on the opposite side of the screen, another. They inched toward one another until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, the planet was a huge ball, visibly shrinking.
Marygay had tottered down the stairs and was sitting next to me. “Goodbye, goodbye,” she whispered, and I echoed her. But I think she was mostly saying goodbye to our son. I was saying goodbye to the planet and the time.
As it shrank away I felt an odd epiphany, born of science and mathematics. I knew that it would be a month–34.7 days–before we reached a tenth of the speed of light, and officially entered the realm of relativity. And it would be months later before the effect of it would be visible, looking out at the stars.
But we were actually there already. The huge force that made the ship’s deck feel like a floor was already bending space and time. Our minds and bodies were not subtle enough to directly sense it yet. But that acceleration was slowly pulling us away from the mundane illusion we called reality.
Most of the matter and energy in the universe live in the land of relativity, because of extreme mass or speed. We would be joining them soon.
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Chapter fourteen
W e kept the image of Middle Finger centered on the screen for a couple of days, as it shrank to a dot, and then a bright star, and then was lost in the hot glow of Mizar. By the end of the first day, we didn’t even have to filter Mizar’s glare; it was just the brightest star in the sky.