They climbed and they climbed before the press backward eased.

“Well, it worked again,” Jason said weakly.

“It did,” Bren agreed, convinced himself he dared let go the armrest.

But the tilt of the deck was still extreme; they were still climbing, if under less pressure; and every citizen of Shejidan would have been shaken out of bed, hurried into the open to look up and wonder… the wonder was still new, in Shejidan, and people forgave the handful of falling tiles, and filled out the requests for repair, which they would point to, doubtless, and say to generations to come, see, this crack was in the first days of the space venture: all Shejidan suffered this, and won…

What? The space station? The Foreign Star that had shone in their skies for centuries?

A birthright?

Not every citizen of Shejidan welcomed roof repairs. But the aiji promised a new spaceport, conversion of the space center to an acculturation center, promised work for craftsmen, a great felicity, an ultimate association not with the humans but with the associationsof humans, a method by which they could avert war and ensure the future.

Humans could read the translations of the aiji’s statements and never understand. The aiji had received a deputation from representatives of the Gan, original tenants of Mospheira, heretics, of a sort. A whole bright new world was upon them.

The aft monitor showed a seam of dawn, past the running lights on white edges, the belly camera very little but black. The forward cameras picked up nothing but black. They were on their way.

And of all things, Banichi and Jago turned on their seat lamps and broke out reading material.

Look at the damn monitors! Bren wanted to shout at them. A miracle is happening! Look at the sky, for God’s sake! The people pour into the streets of Shejidan! Are you numb?

They’d taken the technical manuals.

It was very like an airplane. It flew and showed no sign of malfunction. It was proved on several flights before. Should they be other than confident in the pilot and the design the paidhiin had translated?

“Much better than parachutes,” Jase muttered, beside him.

That view persisted. Bren didn’t even consult his memory of technicalities, just watched the monitors, time stretched to a long impossible moment.

The stewards rose, sheer atevi obstinacy, Bren thought, viewing procedures with dismay, procedures he would have disapproved if any ateva had asked him.

“Nadiin,” one of the stewards said, walking up the steep incline of the deck, “fruit juice is provided, should you wish. Please avoid excess. Breakfast will be easier to provide now, rather than during free fall.” The attendant repeated the same message in Mosphei’, not too badly pronounced.

There was laughter from the front.

“Have I spoken badly?” the dismayed crewman asked Bren.

“Not at all,” Bren said. “They hadn’t expected service aboard.” Impossible to explain near-hysteria, and the relief of humor. “They’re in very good spirits, and if they were atevi, they would say thank you.—Ms. Kroger, Mr. Lund? Do you want breakfast, up there?”

Kroger said nothing. Lund leaned from his seat, a face at the high end of the aisle.

“What’s available?” Lund asked.

“He is courteously inquiring,” Bren said, “the nature of the offering, and means no offense.”

“Nand’ paidhi.” The crewman offered a respectful bow, and proceeded forward to take the orders from the Mospheirans with a written list as the other steward came to take their orders. “Nadiin-ji?”

“I’ll have just fruit juice, if you please.”

“ Paiinaifor me,” Jason said. “My last chance for a long time. Juice. Toast.”

“Nandiin,” the crewman said, and walked back the precarious route to the rear.

“You all right?” Jase asked.

“Fine,” Bren said shakily. “Supposed to be like an airliner, isn’t it?” The breakfast call still amazed him. “It’s a bit wilder on the takeoff.”

“No problems.”

Don’t say that, he wanted to say, at his most superstitious; and Banichi and Jago, having ordered a large breakfast, continued their manual-reading, probably because they hadn’t had a chance in all else that had been going on. Tano and Algini were behind them, likewise possessed of an appetite.

The fruit juice arrived, in spillproof containers. Lund thought they might like another juice on the way to orbit, and the cabin crew stayed busy.

Bren confined himself to one glass of juice. Jase ate with good appetite.

No further calls from the island. That thought flashed through his mind as it hadn’t since waking, since sleepwalking through dressing and last-moment details.

He supposed Toby had dealt with matters.

He supposed their mother had finally gotten home, and that none of his family had any idea the shuttle creating a sonic boom over the straits carried a Cameron back into space.

Back to a space station he’d dreamed of seeing… dreamed of seeing, like the surface of the moon; a station where all Mospheirans’ political dreads were born, for its history, up there with the starship that was the ark in their ancestral stories, the beginning of all human life on the world.

At a certain point the engines grew quiet; and quieter. Ginny Kroger’s laugh carried farther than she intended, doubtless so, but he was glad to hear it. Fear might have been a part of Kroger’s anger, something Kroger herself might not have known; and now they were past the worst danger… technically the worst. That was what the reports tried to assure them.

The crew collected the plastic trays and cups, passed to the rear. Bren looked at his watch, knowing the flight profiles, knowing them as having crossed his desk, knowing them as having sweated through the launches.

Now he was where minutiae counted, degrees of the schedule that had seemed long on the ground, but that seemed both too short and too long, up here.

“Stand by for changeover,” came from the cockpit, and the cabin crew translated to Mosphei’: “Sirs, now the engines will switch over. Secure all objects immediately. There will be a moment of free fall. Place all loose objects securely in confinement, however small. They may fly back and strike a fellow passenger.”

Oh, God, Bren thought. This was the point he dreaded. This was the point where they shut down the engines he knew worked, and the others were supposed to start.

The cabin crew went aft.

The sky in the forward monitor had almost brightened to color, but now quite suddenly a hole opened in it… not night, but the threshold of space.

There was a moment of uncanny silence. A stomach-dropping moment of no-thrust. We’re falling, apprehensions cried.

Suddenly the shuttle stood on its tail. That, at least, was the illusion. The whole world reoriented. There was a yelp from forward, cries from the servant staff in the back seats.

And a muffled yelp from the paidhi-aiji, Bren realized to his embarrassment.

Yet upwas the direction of the central monitor, and that was black. Belly-cam showed nothing. Aft-cams showed the running-lights.

Banichi and Jago, damn them, hadn’t done more than calmly comply with the safety instruction.

“This is what it shoulddo,” Jason said.

“I’m glad,” Bren said. “I’m so very glad.” He wished he hadn’t drunk that acidic juice, he was not mentally prepared for this, and somewhere in his memory was a confused datum of how long this acceleration should last. It had been numbers. Now it was life and death, and he truly didn’t want it to fall one second short of that, not in the least.

Slowly the sensation of being on one’s back eased.

And suddenly there was no downand no noise at all but the fans and the general static noise of the systems. We’re falling, the brain screamed again, growing weary of panic. Bren glanced to the left too fast: the inner ear didn’t accommodate the change, not at all.