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"The funny thing is that they really do have one. Old Captain Azizi's finally
retired, and Lenn Grandy's been promoted."
"Ah." The name was vaguely familiar; one of Alana's fellow junior officers
during the year she'd been on the Angelwing. "I presume you compared notes on
which of you got the captaincy first?"
"Oh, we tried, but we ran into the usual simultaneity problems. He probably
made it first, though."
"Well, I bet you look better in the captain's uniform than he does."
She glanced a smile up at me. "Why, thank you, Pall. Maybe sometime this trip
you can stay with me during a cascade point and see for yourself."
Right then I decided she was unfit to be poking around the Dancer's bridge
controls. Going through a cascade point alone is about as much fun as an
untreated double hangover; doing it with someone else is even worse. "We'll
see about that," I told her. "But for now you are going to your cabin until
whatever
Grandy and his fellow clock-watchers were plying you with wears off."
"They're not clock-watchers-Cunard's just very touchy about keeping their
liners on schedule," she protested. But she obediently got to her feet and
headed for the door. "Just remember, I've got first cascade point duty in four
hours."
"We'll see if you're up to it," I called after her, a line that permitted me
to be basically honest while still avoiding an argument. Physically, she'd
certainly be up to doing the point by then. But emotionally-
Emotionally, she would still be carrying the warm glow of the celebration and
the triumph of a "captaincy"
which, though purely imaginary, was in another sense very real.
And I had no intention of letting cascade point duty ruin that for her quite
so quickly.
Four hours later I was alone on the bridge, and ready for the first cascade
point.
The Dancer was quiet. All her sensors and control surfaces had been shut down,
all electronics including the computer put into neutral/standby mode. The
crewers and passengers were shut down, too, the sleepers Kate Epstein had
administered guaranteeing they would all doze blissfully unaware through the
point. They were ready, the Dancer was ready; and postponing the inevitable
gained nothing for anyone.
Lifting the safety cover, I twisted the field generator knob... and watched as
the cascade pattern began to fill up the room.
Someone early in the Colloton Drive's history, I'd once heard, had described
the experience as being like that of watching some exotic and rapid-growing
crystal, and there'd been times I could see it myself on almost that high of
an intellectual level. The first four images that appeared an arm's length
away were quickly joined by the next set, perfectly aligned with them, and
then by the third and fourth and so on, until I was at the center of an
ever-expanding horizontal cross of images.
Images, of course, of me.
Land-bound philosophers and scientists still had lively arguments as to what
the effect "really" was and what the images "really" represented, but most of
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us who saw them regularly had long since come to our own conclusions, minus
the fine details. The Colloton Drive puts us into a different kind of space...
and somehow it links us through to other realities. The images stretching four
ways toward infinity were hints of what I would be doing in each of those
universes.
In other words, what my life would be like if each of my major decisions had
gone the other way.
I spent a moment looking down the line, focusing on each of the
semi-transparent images in turn. Four figures away, conspicuous among the
jumpsuits and coveralls on either side of it, was an image of myself in the
gold and white of a star liner captain.
I didn't regret the decision I'd made a year earlier that had lost me that
universe, but the image still sometimes raised a reflexive lump into my
throat. I had the Dancer-my ship, not some bureaucracy's-and
I was satisfied with my position... but there was still something siren-song
impressive about the idea of being a liner captain.
And if anyone aboard ship had had any doubts about that, the living proof
would be taking over for me as soon as this cascade point was past.
Reaching to the small section of control board that still showed lights, I
activated the Dancer's flywheel.
The hum was clearly audible in the silence, and I shifted my gaze to the
mirror that showed the long gyroscope needle set into the ceiling above my
head. Slowly, as the flywheel built up speed, the needle began to move. The
computer printout by my elbow told me the Dancer needed a rotation of three
point two degrees to make the four point four light-years we needed for this
jump. It was annoying to have to endure a cascade point for such relatively
small gain-the distance traveled when we left Colloton space went up rapidly
with the size of the yaw angle the ship had rotated through-but there was
nothing I could do about it. The configuration of masses, galactic magnetic
field, and a dozen other factors meant that the first leg of the Baroja/Earth
run was always this short. And it was accounted for in our-as usual-tight
schedule. So I just leaned back in my chair, did what I could to ease the
induced tension that would turn into a black depression when we returned to
normal space, and thought about Alana. Alana, and her phantom captaincy.
It had been on the last cascade point coming in to Baroja that she'd first
seen the gold-and-white uniform in her own cascade image pattern, tucked in
there among the handful of first- and second-officer dress whites that
represented the range of possibilities had she stayed with the Angelwing.
She'd caught the significance immediately, and the resulting ego-boost had
very nearly gotten her through the point's aftermath without any depression at
all. She'd left the liner four years back for reasons she'd apparently never
regretted, which put the new image into the realm of pleasant surprise rather
than that of missed opportunity. A confirmation of her skills; because had she
stayed aboard the liner, she, not Lenn Grandy, would be captain today.
Or so the theory went. None of us who believed it had ever come up with a way
to prove it.
The gyro needle was creeping toward the three-degree mark now. Another minute
and I'd shut the flywheel down, letting momentum carry the Dancer the rest of
the way. A conjugate inversion bilinear conformal mapping something something,
the mathematicians called the whole thing: a one-to-one mapping between
rotational motion in Colloton space and linear translation in normal space.
Theorists loved the whole notion-elegant, they called it. Of course, they
never had to suffer the drive's side effects.
But then, neither did most anyone else these days. The Aker-Ming Autotorque
had replaced the old-fashioned manual approach to cascade maneuvers aboard
every ship that could afford the gadgets.
The Angelwing could do so; the Dancer and I could not. I wondered, with the
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