“Finality,” she answered low.
“What?”
“This maneuver ahead of us. Oh, yes, it’s not absolutely irrevocable. We could still turn back—for quite some time to come, can’t we? But what’s soon going to happen, the course change, it’s like—I don’t know. Not birth or marriage or dying. Something as strange.”
He nodded. “I believe I know what you mean, and I’m the hardheaded pragmatist. Wanderer certainly does. He mentioned to me that he and Corinne are planning a ceremony. Maybe we should all attend.”
She smiled. “Rite of passage,” she murmured. “I should have realized Wanderer would be the one who understands. I hope he can make a part for me.”
Hanno gave her a sharp glance. They had all paired off, informally and more or less tacitly, he with her, Wanderer with Macandal, Patulcius with Aliyat, Tu Shan and Yukiko renewing their alliance. Not that each man and each -woman had never shared one another. It had been inevitable that they’d swap around occasionally, during the long time of their masquerade. But since, they had been more apart than together. How much emotional risk dared they take on this voyage? Fifteen years under way, with God knew what at the end—Separations or no, after centuries a couple gained considerable mutual sensitivity. Svoboda’s hand caught Hanno’s. “Not to worry,” she said in the American English that was their favorite dead language. “I only have a, a solemnity in mind. We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.”
“We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”
13
SCREEN FIELDS warded particle radiation off as Pytheas slipped close by Jupiter. The planet laid its mighty gravitational hand upon the ship and swung it out of the ecliptic, northerly toward Pegasus. Inboard a drum tbuttered, feet danced, a song called to the spirits.
When it was safely away, robots went outside. Flitting around the hull, they deployed the latticework of ramscoop and fire chamber. By this time, low boost under torch drive had built up a considerable speed. Interaction with the interstellar medium was becoming significant. By terrestrial standards it was a hard vacuum, averaging about one atom per cubic centimeter, overwhelmingly hydrogen. Yet a wide funnel traveling fast would gather a great deal. When the robots returned inside, Pytheas resembled a btunt torpedo caught in the net of a giant fisherman.
Its folk flashed their last laser beam to Earth, made their little speeches, received ceremonial good wishes. The ions and energies that were to surround them would blank out electromagnetic communications. Modulated neutrinos passed easily through, and Pytheas was equipped to receive them, but the beams it could cast dispersed too rapidly. That huge facility which was capable of sending an identifiable message hundreds or thousands of light-years was fixed in place, locked on remote targets that might eventually respond.
Now, through the net and beyond it, out to thousands of kilometers, the harvester fields came into being. Their forces meshed, intricate, powerful, precise, an ever-changing configuration molded by the controlling computers and what came to them through their sensors. New laser beams sprang from the ship’s bows, swordlike, cleaving electron from nucleus. The fields seized on the plasma and swept it backward, well away from the hull; impact on metal would have released X-rays in swiftly lethal concentration. Aft to the fire chamber, which was itself a magnetohydrodynamic vortex, the gas went.
Another immaterial engine released a little of the antimatter it held suspended, ionized it, sped it into the maelstrom and the star gas. Particles met, annihilated, became energy, the ultimate conversion, nine tunes ten to the twentieth ergs per gram. That fury lit fusion reactions among other protons, and continued them. Behind the heavily shielded stern of Pytheas, a tiny sun blazed forth.
Powered by it, the fields hurled most of the plasma aft. Reaction drove the ship forward. Full weight came back to her crew, an Earth gravity of acceleration, nine hundred eighty centimeters per second added every second to velocity.
At that rising pace, in just less than a year the voyagers would transit half a light-year of distance, and their speed would be close to that of light.