“God,” he murmured, sternly admonished his gut, and turned his head far more slowly, looking about him to see whether items did, as advertised, float. His arms did.

Beyond Banichi, Jago experimented with a pen from her pocket. She seemed quite fascinated when it rebounded off the seat in front of her. Bren stared at that miracle, too, fighting his stomach.

Banichi seemed a little less entranced with the phenomenon, rather grim-faced: Bren took moral comfort in that. Atevi were not immune to disorientation: the first crew had proved that biological fact… the same crew, in fact, that was flying the shuttle at the moment.

“We’re back,” Jason said softly. “ I’mback.”

“Are we doing all right?” Bren asked.

“Completely,” Jase said.

So Jase’s stomach understood what was going on; and if that was so, damned, then, if he’d miss the trip he’d dreamed of seeing… the engines had fired, they were in free fall, and doggedly, seeking something to prove it, he searched up a small wad of paper from the bottom of his pocket, the paper Banichi had handed him with the hospital phone number.

He let it go, floated it in personal incredulity, a miracle. It shouldn’t do that.

Or was gravity the miracle? Wasn’t it wonderful that the world stuck together, and accreted things to it?

No, he didn’t want to think about accretion.

The view in the monitors now was all black. He’d thought he’d see the stars. There was one. Maybe two.

And all the rules changed.

It was a lengthy universal experiment, this traveling in zero-G… even Lund and Kroger tried it, if only partially out of their seats; Ben and Kate held carefully to handholds, careful of transgressing that unspoken territorial limit in the cabin, but skylarked there like youngsters on holiday.

Even Banichi, which was the more remarkable, unbelted, and then the others did, but in his security Bren saw a purpose beyond curiosity… Banichi’s experiments were of measured force, push here, bounce there, back again; and Jago and Tano and Algini did much the same.

A pen sailed by on intercept, lost by a rueful translator forward, and Tano plucked it from space.

Narani was delighted, the servants likewise, laughing with the stewards.

Bren regarded them in slow revolution, wondering at what his mind knew, that they were all hurtling at very high speed.

“The station,” Jase said, then, catching his sleeve, directing his attention toward the screens, where a gleam showed against all that blackness, where hull-shine dominated the camera. Banichi and Jago, then Tano and Algini, ceased their activity and focused their attention on that point of light, and after that the four of his security drifted together to talk, a conversation obscured in the thousand nattering systems that kept the shuttle from utter silence.

The cabin crew moved through again, this time horizontally, assessing the state of the passengers, returning Kate’s pen. Later, over the general address, the steward admonished all of them: “Be cautious of releasing hard objects, Nadiin, which might lodge in secret and become missiles during accelerations.”

It occurred to Bren that he wouldn’t want to contest with Banichi’s mass in any free-fall encounter. And he didn’t want to receive Kate’s pen on the return, either.

At a downward tug from Jason on his jacket, he secured a hold on the seat and drew himself back in… just before the senior steward said, in Mosphei’, “Please be seated for the duration.” The stewards had practiced that. “For your safety.”

The Mospheirans did listen. Buckles clicked, instant obedience.

Bren fastened his own. Jason had reacted to the effect of leaves and sunlight on the planet in utter panic. He measured the fear of vacuum, the fear of movement, against other fears he’d suffered, fears of drawn guns, fears of falling off mountains. This was visceral, a war against lifelong experience, the laws of nature overset… as far as his body was concerned. But his senses weren’t skewed, nothing except that tendency to look about in panic. Too many surfaces, he decided: all of a sudden too much change. He calmed himself. Thought of lily ponds on the mainland. A formal garden.

“We shall be braking, Nadiin.”

He wished they’d been able to have windows. He did wish that. The monitors weren’t straight-line forward. The cameras had moved to track the station; he began to figure that out. Of course. They were gimbaled, to track anything outside they needed to. The crew was giving them a view. It was giving him extreme disorientation.

Jase talked to him, small matters, observations: “We brake to overtake,” Jase reminded him. He knew that. Gravity-tied to the planet, they couldn’t catch the station by accelerating: the result would be a higher and higher orbit, missing the equally-bound station. Their path was simply—simply!—to coincide with it and brake slightly, little by little.

That would drop them in the orbital path to line up with the docking stem.

“There we go,” Jase said. Jase knew he was scared.

He’d sweated through this, every docking from the first one; knew this whole docking business was another troubled sequence. He bit his lip and prayed there was no mistake.

“Easy,” Jase said, salt in a wound.

“I’m fine” he said. Jase had used to say that. Jase prudently didn’t remind him.

The image, over a long, long nervous approach, resolved itself from one dot to two connected dots.

Finally into a ring with that second dot against the stem.

Kate pointed to it as the camera suddenly brought it up close, while Jason just said, in a low voice, “ Phoenix.”

Chapter 9

The cameras on close-up, as they glided past, showed a battered surface, not the pristine white Bren had once imagined Phoenixto be. She was sooted, discolored with black and with rust-color, streaked and ablated on the leading edges.

Their ship. The ship. She carried the dust of solar systems, the outpourings of volcanoes on Maudit’s moons, the cosmic dust of wherever Phoenixhad voyaged… and the scars of the first accursed sun where Phoenixhad lost so many lives. Jason’s forefathers. His own.

The whole world had seen the scarred image on the television during the first shuttle flights, and the sight had shocked everyone, moving some even to question whether it was the same ship. Phoenixin all Mospheiran accounts was always portrayed shining white, though every schoolchild also memorized the truth that the earth of the atevi was in a debris-filled, dangerous solar system, that the colonists had rebelled against Phoenix’splans for refueling principally because fatalities were so much a part of mining.

The image of authority. The ark that had carried all their ancestors on two epic journeys, and a third… without the colonists, but with Jase’s fellow crew. Bren felt a chill go over his skin, felt a stir in his heart, an awe he hadn’t entirely expected.

Now the outcome of this last voyage, this run home with hostile observers behind them. The captains had no disposition to die without a struggle, as hard a struggle as their compatriots back in this solar system could make of it, with or without their consent.

Welcome to the space age. Welcome to the universe we’vemade, and the consequences of all we’vedone.

“Stand by, Nadiin, for braking.—Sirs, ladies, prepare your safety belts. Secure all items.”

Bren tugged the belt tight, fastened the shoulder belt as Jason unhurriedly, confidently at home, did the same.

He glanced across the aisle and saw his security belted in, looking as calm as if they sat in their own apartment.

There was no stir from elsewhere. This was the sequence that had fouled on the first flight, nearly ended the mission in a dangerous spacewalk.