Daniel stood at a semaphore platform between the first and second antennas of the dorsal row. The maincourses of both were furled, but the topsails and the sails above the topsails—Adele instinctively reached for her data unit to check the name, then remembered she didn’t and didn’t dare carry it here—stretched from the pressure of Casimir radiation bearing on them. Above, filling everything beyond the bubble of the Princess Cecile and the crew aboard her, was the pulsing, sullen, magnificence of the Matrix—of all worlds and all times, pressing in on the starship which had intruded on them for this brief instant.
Daniel’s gauntleted fingers moved on the controls while his face remained turned to the patterns above. A rigger moved to the foremost mast and began to climb swiftly hand-over-hand. A latch had stuck or a cable was fouled; a human being was going aloft to free it so that another sail could billow out to match those Adele saw spreading at the peaks of the five masts behind it in the row.
She stepped forward, placing herself across the semaphore stand from Daniel; there he would see her but she’d remain out of his way. Catching the motion or perhaps feeling the tremble of her boots on the hull, he looked toward Adele and grinned through the heavy faceplate of his rigging suit.
Daniel motioned her forward, then touched his helmet to hers. Pointing toward the heavens with his right arm, he said, “There’s a discontinuity there that we’re following.” His voice distant but very clear as it rang through the two helmets. “I don’t suppose you see it . . . ?”
But obviously he hoped she did. Well, Adele thought she could make a librarian out of Daniel, but the chance of him making her an astrogator was something below the likelihood that she’d become Speaker of the Cinnabar Senate.
Nonetheless she looked upward, trying to follow the sweep of Daniel’s arm. To her, looking into the Matrix was like staring at a well-stirred vanilla pudding—which was glowing brightly besides.
“I’m afraid I don’t, Daniel,” she said apologetically. It was something that mattered a great deal to him, and he doubtless regretted that it meant nothing whatever to her. “Is it a faster way home than, than another way would be?”
“Ah?” he said in puzzlement. “Oh, I see what you mean. It’s a good passage at that, better in this direction than the other, to tell the truth. But what we’re actually doing is retracing the route by which we came from Radiance to the rendezvous point. There we’ll reenter normal space for the first time, build up speed, and then strike for Todos Santos.”
He paused, eyeing the quivering splendor for a moment in silence. Then he bent into contact with Adele again and went on, “I’m hoping that Captain Semmes will lose our new course in our backtrail. There’s so much traffic into Radiance that only God Himself could follow us on a cold track outbound.”
He coughed and added, “And God, of course, is on the side of Cinnabar.”
“Of course,” Adele said without emphasis. She assumed Daniel was joking—while religion wasn’t an acceptable subject of conversation in the RCN, she’d certainly never known him to visit a temple—but his assurance of the rightness of the RCN was at least very close to religious faith. Daniel was a sophisticated man in many respects, but there were parts of him that were frankly childish.
Of course, if the God Adele didn’t believe in had provided the RCN with commanders like Daniel Leary, then he was correct in his faith.
“What I’d really like to do would be to load reaction mass on Radiance,” he continued, “but at this point I don’t trust the Commonwealth government to accept the story that the Sissie is a private yacht.”
He chuckled; Adele heard the sound as a distant grunting.
“Though in fact that’s just what we are, you know.”
As Daniel talked, he continued to watch the Matrix. He made a slight adjustment at the semaphore. Adele didn’t see any change in the sails from where she stood, but the glowing pudding overhead began slowly to rotate around the corvette’s axis, a motion distinct from the streaks which seemed to move longitudinally.