Adele gave him an odd smile. “Yes,” she said. “And I dare say I’ll be more comfortable trying not to fall off the hull than I would staring at the fact I completely failed to gather useful information.”
Daniel chuckled. He closed her helmet, closed his—ordinarily a pair of spacers going topside would check each other’s fittings, but that wasn’t going to work here—and opened the outer hatch onto the hull.
Daniel paused a step from the coaming. As always, the beauty of the Matrix brought a lump to his throat.
The Princess Cecile trembled through veils of light more delicate than spiderweb, bathed in colors that had no name in the world of landsmen, and formed patterns that reproduced themselves all the way to an infinity not of one universe but all universes. Daniel Oliver Leary was a part of this splendor!
He handed Adele onto the hull and touched helmets with her. He said, “What do you see when you look out, Adele?”
Daniel felt her suit stir against his; she’d probably shrugged. “The light, you mean?” she said. “It seems gray where I look, but at the corners of my eyes it seems . . . pastel? I couldn’t put it more clearly than that.”
Ah, well; she found an excitement in databases that seemed likely to continue eluding him.
Daniel hooked Adele’s safety line to a staple, then closed the hatch behind them. The Princess Cecile’s twenty-four masts were at their full extension; topsails shimmered on all of them, and the huge lower courses were set on the dorsals as well.
He and Adele stood silent—he entranced, she . . . well, polite and docile might be the correct description of her feelings, but in the shrouded anonymity of the suits he could at least imagine that some of the wonder reached her below the level of awareness. The riggers were scarcely noticeable even when they were in direct view. The sails were huge and alive with the energy of the cosmos pressing them, while the humans who walked the yards to make final adjustments in the spread and lay were mere shadows against the effulgence.
The mainsails on rings C and D shifted clockwise. The Princess Cecile trembled, then sank from one bubble universe to another. The astrogation computer had chosen the latter’s physical constants as most suitable for this stage of the voyage. To Daniel it was as if the heart of a sun had opened momentarily, blinding in its beauty.
Whatever Adele felt or saw caused her to snatch at him so violently that her boots lost their magnetic grip on the hull. Daniel’s arm encircled her and guided her back to firm footing.
“We’ll make three more shifts before we exit for a look at our colleagues from the Alliance,” Daniel said. “We’ll be three light-seconds sunward of Tanais; a quick in-and-out, the way we set up for the Falassan guardship.”
Daniel cleared his throat, lifting his helmet away from Adele’s momentarily so that the sound wouldn’t pass. “I want to get the feel of the region we’re sailing in before I set up the attack,” he went on. “The most precise calculations in the world will leave you fifty miles out if the Matrix is slow. . . .”
He frowned, thinking about the way Adele had tried to describe the sensation of Casimir radiation on human retinas as gray or pastel. “Slow” was a word whose normal meaning had nothing to do with the interplay of forces between the universes; but Daniel had no better word, so he used what there was to give false meaning to a concept that even many astrogators wouldn’t have understood. There were things that you could only explain to someone who already knew.
“Fifty miles isn’t important if you’re making planetfall,” Daniel went on with a sigh. “You start your braking effort a little sooner, a little later. But for our present purposes . . .”
The topsails of E Ring furled forty percent. On Dorsal, the sail fluttered but jammed well short of the programmed amount. Daniel took a step forward—and caught himself, feeling silly, because with both watches on duty there was someone at the antenna already.