Source: On The Shore Of A New Technology

The room is long and its wall of windows overlook the sea lengthwise down the shaft of of the suntube. She can smell the soft odor of salt and hear the gurgling melodies of swarms of shore lizards. A pair of tall lace curtains bracket the view, swaying gently.

Clu leans on the sill and takes a deep breath. "It's lovely," she exhales. She steps back and faces the landlord, a willowy blonde with a finely curved long neck, and a beautifully shaped head that frames fine features and large blue eyes. "I'd like it. I can provide you with a deposit right away, if you'd like."

"A promissory will be fine," the woman replies. "Make it to Ivo Hitaro Ikai. Here's my account - " She gestures a form recognized by Clu's lenses, and Clu can see the folder. She awkwardly gestures the transfer from her account.

She checks her balance. It will be a day or two before the funds from her new job begin to enter her account, but she still has enough for her next stop - clothes and food shopping - with savings to spare.

An early evening shower moves in from the sea, bringing out the shore lizards to throng the walls and plazas with their song rising and falling in soft chaos. Clu pauses her gravitational engineering review with a hand twist. She leans back and sighs. Her brain is full and heavy with fatigue. Worse, the enveloping multimedia presentations are so much richer than any book, and it is easy to lose hours in trying to grasp animations and walkthroughs of difficult mathematics. More than ever, she misses Lan. He would have loved this. Though maybe it would have made him feel futile and useless.

But her effort in reviewing Stellar Interiors gives her an edge in the understanding she needs now - even though only a little of the notation is the same, and the fields barely overlap. She rubs her eyes.

Thinking of Lan, and Stellar Interiors, she realizes that now she knows enough to find it. If it's here. She picks her favorite search agent, one that is simple enough for her rudimentary understanding. It vanishes into the distance, and she leans back against her chair, smelling the breeze, enjoying the soft song, the distant surf, and the gentle clicking that is the sound of the shore lizards' nails on the wall outside her window.

I'm starting to feel at home, she realizes. And it makes her afraid. Afraid of losing her resolve. But she knows there is a tortured path between where she is now and being able to return to Cocteau, and unless she has the resolve to navigate every stage, and still keep sight of her goal, she will be lost, and Lan will slip further and further away.

A soft tone alerts her to the return of her agent. She looks up and accepts it. Five entries are available, all apparently referencing Stellar Interiors. Her breath catches briefly as she brings up the first entry and sees the title page. This copy is in the original typescript, as if it is an exact reproduction of the paper she had spent so many hours typing... She shifts to the next entry. It is a reformatted version, in a much better typescript, with links to reviews. She waves up the reviews to the corner of the room and scans them. They are not much easier to follow than the book, but she sees that Lan's work is considered interesting and important in his field. That stirs her. She had thought it would be impossible for it, or anything from Cocteau, to be interesting here. She returns to the listings.

The third entry contains a free biography of Lan. With an image - as sharp as if he were sitting with her. She is suddenly blind with tears. She leans back and rubs her eyes. Must be fatigue, she tells herself. But she knows it is just a relief and a terror.

Finally her eyes focus again, and the contacts regain the image. "Oh, Lan," she whispers.

She touches an interview link, and she can hear his voice and see him sitting in their apartment on Cocteau. He must be talking to Rannart, she thinks, wondering oddly where she had been when they recorded this. Probably working. She is embarrassed to see how shabby their place looks by the standards of even her small Promethean apartment.

"What do you think was the most important aspect of your work for this book?" the interviewer asks. The view is from his contacts, from her couch, and Clu is frightened to look through a dead man's eyes at an apartment that seems part of a life lived by a ghost. Probably dusty and empty now, everything gone to the scavengers. But the sound of Lan's tenor is enough to thrust that crawling sensation away.

"The most interesting part to work out was the study of degenerate convection. There hasn't been much really done on that area of stellar core physics." He is leaning forward intently, in that way he always had when explaining, as if he could crawl into your mind through your eyes and check to make sure you were hearing what he was saying without the slightest distortion. "Even the off world materials that get through here have little to say about it, and, based on what I've found, most of what they think they have is wrong."

"But how did you accomplish this in such an advanced area, without the measurement and simulation systems freely available to your colleagues elsewhere?"

Lan leans back in the chair and throws his arm high across the back. It looks uncomfortable - and on anyone else it would be, but Clu knows it stretches a part of his back damaged in an accident toward the end of the war.

He smiles. "It's not that hard to understand, Haris. The universe, I mean. With mathematics, done right, anyone can comprehend the complete structure and dynamics of the universe. True, there have been times when people thought understanding of that kind was discredited. But all this stuff about operators, chaotic replacement lanors, or any of the other tools, they've been evolved, and they represent the human mind groping for patterns in the dark - just forgetting to clear away the substructure every once in a while. And sometimes making a real mess in the metaphysics of it all in the process. Now it's hard to say how much better my new notation is, and I don't want to dwell too much on that, since it's just a notation, but because it was done right, it made it that much easier for me to carry most of the book around in my head."

"You know that Caprisio has indicated your equations may also have some application to non-degenerate environments. He seems to think you've done a pretty good job."

Lan laughs and sits forward. "Well, that nice, I suppose. Actually, though, I'd like to take it a little further in, and see what can be done on proximity to a singularity in degenerate material. You know, one thing I'm suspecting - under the right conditions, this is an energy source with incredible potential. And it may not be that far out of the technological reach of some of the offworld civilizations. I wonder who'll be smart enough to take advantage of it."

The interview ends, and switches into a link with a text biography. She pauses the page, and switches back to the image. She stares at his young face, and sharply cropped blond hair. Then she looks around, and suddenly her spartan room is far too empty. She needs a hardcopy of this image for her wall, but she hasn't a printer. She pins the image to a known location in the room and then drops back to the reality of a room by the sea. Suddenly she remembers seeing a printer at Ivo's, and she is up and out of the door in a moment.

"My printer?" Ivo asks, peering past the edge of her door. "Why not? Come on in, girlfriend." She pulls the door the rest of the way, and Clu steps into the large open room that occupies most of the bottom floor. Ivo is dressed as if her clothing is painted on her body - or as if her body is a strange intermediate between plastic, metal and cloth. Clu is embarrassed by the implicit intimacy.

"I... don't want to intrude," Clu replies, hesitating.

Ivo grins, a strange expression for a face that should be on a statue. She snatches up a cloth from a disordered pile on a nearby chair of pipes. She pats her face gently with it, drying the sweat. "So," she says, as if she had been waiting for Clu to speak, and had finally had to break the silence. "What's to print?"

"Oh... this - ", she brings up the image of Lan from her local store.

"Wait a minute." Ivo steps gracefully to a table, dabs up her contacts and slips her transproc behind her ear. "Here, let me see." She reaches out, and Clu knows she can see the image of Lan. "Who's that?"

"My husband," she answers.

"Really?" Ivo comments, walking over to her printer. "How big?"

Clu doesn't know. She shapes her hands about the size of a book or datasheet. "... if that's not too much."

"No problem. The consumes are so cheap there's no point in thinking about it. So you're married? Where's he?"

"I don't know."

Ivo waits with a graceful stillness, watching the image slide from the printer. "Here you go." Clu takes it and stares down at the nearly dimensional image. "Sorry it's not that fi," Ivo says. "I just don't use too much hardcopy - it's mostly for promo, you know?"

"No, no, it's fine... Thanks."

"No problem, girlfriend. Anything else, drink?"

Clu shakes her head. She can't take her eyes from the image. "No, not tonight." She looks up. "Sometime though. I still have a lot to do to get ready for work tomorrow."

Field Aeroforms is on the leftward bank of the C45, a river that winds down to the sea from the Isigar highlands. By the time it approaches the sea, it is flat, broad and silty, but bulk traffic moves slowly from the harbor to the inland ports and back again.

Clu looks out across the river from a waiting room seventy-five levels above the ground. She worries, quietly, the only outward sign being her slightly widened eyes.

"Clu Sherril?" a raspy contralto asks. She turns.

A thin dark woman with bright green irises and slit pupils stands watching, hands on hips.

"Yes?"

The woman thrusts out a hand which Clu clasps in the customary Promethean fashion. "I'm Marie. I'm sorry we haven't been able to meet before now. But I've had good reports from the interviews."

"Thanks. I've been studying every spare minute."

"Good, because you're going to need it. There's a lot to be done, and a tight schedule to do it. Come on, I'm going to hand you off to L'ihart'Imata, whose leading the engineering team. It'll eat you alive if you can't handle the jargon."

The engineering leader is only half Clu's height, with violently brown-orange flesh molded like plastic into strange ridges. It apparently speaks in a non-human range, since it's only sound is translated. Clu can sense a deep thrum that may be emerging from its well-toothed double-mouth, but from her system she hears only a quiet, nearly contralto tone and clear words.

"Sherril it is. Hear you really jock a ship without sparing the hoops indeed."

She hopes she will get more familiar with its way of speaking, or that there is some adjustment for her system.

The prototype vehicle is a golden lens, reflecting its environment so sharply that it seems almost a distortion of the background. But sections have been removed, cables and optics and piping snake across the floor and up into the openings. The voices of beings echo in the hangar.

"Come to simulator, show you of interfaces and elements shall we?"

"I don't understand this," she insists. It is a week later, and her eyes are fogged by nights of struggling with schematics in a strange notation, but the idea has a hold on her. "Why is this here?"

Morisan scrunches up his already narrow eyes and peers at the display. "Side wall generator power conduit. We need that over there for the lock off under low G operation."

"No, not that. This."

"The microwave exhaust waveguide?"

"Yes. That. Look, the simulations don't include it, but my guess is that when we get to full power test there's going to be an EM polarity from the intermediate frequencies that will leak here, into the stabilization cross link, and then... well, you can guess." She sips the hot stimulant, and blinks brief tears of fatigue from her eyes.

"Let me run a check on that and see if it confirms."

"No, I hate this gesture," Clu snaps. "Look, imagine doing this in an emergency, or maybe the weather's terrible and you're being bounced all over the place. There's got to be some way to, you know, to let go of the handle. With everything you've reserved, there just isn't much I can do, maybe even sneezing, that the system won't take as a control input. It's too much."

On the other end of the wall screen, the pantropist looks defeated and slumps back in its chair, black spikes taut. The connection terminates. Clu sighs and steps back to the center of her apartment, looking out over the sea. Slowly and sadly, without engaging the simulator, she gestures through a control sequence that should flow the vehicle through an spiral roll and layout. It feels like a sad dance, but awkward, like a sea flyer with broken wings.

There is a chime at the door. Ivo stands beyond, a rueful expression on her face. "I'm sorry, Clu, I have to ask a favor."

"Sure," Clu replies, eagerly, glad for a distraction from morose thoughts. "Come on in."

"Haven't done much with this, have you?" Ivo mutters, looking around.

Clu sighs. "No time, no money." But an old couch, salvaged from a door sale down the plaza and covered with a throw patterned in angular shapes of green and cream faces the window, beside it, a glass table, and Luke's gift set prominently on it, catching the light of the suntube. "So, what do you need?"

"I need a ballet partner."

Clu looks at her with a friendly mockery. "Moi?" she asks, reverting to Franca for effect. "Seriously, Ivo, what do I know about dancing? I'm a test pilot."

Ivo eyes Clu appraisingly. "For what I need, pretty much all you have to do is stand there and pretend to be a guy. I've got a choreography problem to work out."

"Pretend to be a guy...?"

Ivo stares at her. "You really don't know anything, do you? Well, come on, what do you say?"

Clu shrugs.

She finds herself breathless as the music winds down into silence. "How can you do that?" she asks. Ivo had moved in a tension of gentle violence, and rigid fluidity, rising onto the toes of shoes which seemed to make her stand like a wisp of strength that was far taller than her actual height. Ivo grins widely, though her face is lined with sweat. "Experience," she replies. "It's called 'ballet'. It's a very old art, probably over a millenium. Distorted, perhaps. There's a gap in our history, and we don't know what happened to the art then. But I think it's the most beautiful form of dance."

"I can't do that," Clu pleads.

"No, no, you don't have to do that. I just need you to mark this spot, and support me in the turn. Here, come here. Now at this point, I've done what you've just seen, and I'm standing like this. Put your hands at my waist."

Clu embarasses herself by giggling. "Oh, I can't."

"Look, it's nothing special. Dancers do this all the time, it doesn't mean anything. If Jarulefl was around, he'd be doing this. In ballet, that's the primary job of the male dancer - to support and counterpoint the female - and to solo, of course." She laughs, but it is a joke that Clu cannot follow. "OK. So try it. No, not so tight. You're supposed to see if I start tilting too much one way or the other and keep your hands in. Also, I'll feel it if I touch them, so I won't. Come on, let's try."

They sit on the balcony overlooking the rocks and the waves only a short distance below. The shore lizards are clinging all over the walls behind them, but are silent, torpid in warmth. Ivo pours cool water over ice cubes, and Clu sips. Ivo drops into the seat beside and looks out over the ocean. "Thanks for helping," she offers.

Clu nods. "I didn't do much. Say, what was the music? I liked it."

"That right? It was Feari Del Intania, friend of mine, composes and plays. You want to meet him? I'll take you with me sometime. He lets me sit in - well, watching, anyway. I don't play. He made that for me, for the dance, you know. I'm calling it 'On The Shore Of A New Technology'. Del, he doesn't like that very much, he uses a lot of old instruments for the piece, but I think there's a connection between exemplifying clean modern lines in ballet, which is a thousand year old art form, and music by a non-human using instruments from Promethean history and technology, don't you?"

Clu suppresses a laugh. Does everyone here talk a mile a minute? she wonders, reminded of Celine.

"There was one instrument I liked a lot. Smooth, but strong? Never heard it before."

"Hmm," Ivo leans back, a wisp suddenly escaping from the tight cap of her pulled-back hair. She looks over. "Probably cello, one of those strings, something like that. He'll tell you, if you ask. Of course, he uses designed instruments and pure instruments. So, you're a pilot?"

Clu nods. "Test pilot."

"What's the difference?"

"A regular pilot flies routes or flies production vehicles. I fly them before they go into production."

Ivo turns to face her, elbows on her knees, eyebrows raised. "Dangerous?"

"Yeah, they have problems sometimes."

"You crash?"

"Yeah."

"Three times. Once, on the way here."

"Was it bad?"

"Actually, I don't remember. They tell me I was unconscious for a couple of days."

"Oh, come on, don't hold out on me."

Clu hesitates. "I... uh, I was escaping from Cocteau in the, uh, well we called it the 369, but I... always thought of it as Zadar, that's a strong fast predator from the plains near Oridia. I designed it. It's... a light attack escort. For protecting space transport, cargo, that kind of thing." A horrible emptiness seems to yawn beneath her ribs. "I, uh, well, the Cocteau military were in chase. I was supposed to rendezvous with someone from Prometheus, a ship, out near Quandeau Maior. The ship was a prototype. I stole it before it's first flight, to try to rescue my husband. Which didn't work."

"Wow. You must have been lucky to get out. What happened?" To Ivo it is an exciting story, but she finds it hard to credit it to a slight, dark haired woman who is so shy about dancing.

"There was a missile launch. I tried a z dive off the pattern, but, you see, I turned too early. I... you have to leave trajectory after the missiles burn out. If they still have thrust, they can change course, and follow. They did." Her eyes are fixed on the sea, but her vision is elsewhere.

"Rennart was behind me. He had been pretending to be a Cocteau officer. He took out some of the missiles, but not enough. One got through. The blast... knocked everything out. Even me. Opened the hull to space. I don't remember anything after that." She doesn't feel the redness at the corner of her eyes. She doesn't notice the shaking of her hands. She only hears the rattling of the ice.

Ivo is silent. Finally she ventures, "I'm sorry, Clu. I didn't know, girlfriend."

Clu looks over. Her face is still composed, and that seems odd to Ivo. But Clu replies, "There's nothing to be sorry about. I don't know why I even mentioned it, except that I keep thinking about it."

"You know, I don't follow the reports much, but this it was on about a month ago, right. Somebody buzzed your ratification, right?"

"Rannart's wife. She thinks - well, I don't know what she thinks. She said I murdered her husband."

"But you didn't."

"No? I could have gone on to the rendezvous. But I had a crazy idea that I could go back, that I could rescue my husband. Rannart put himself on the line for me, to get me out of that. I don't know why. I don't think his wife knows why."

"Is that what you meant, you didn't know where your husband was?"

"He's in prison on Cocteau. Somewhere. I had this crazy idea of stealing the Zadar, because I found out, or I thought I found out, that he was at the orbital facility. But he wasn't. It was a fool's errand, you know? All I could do was run. And now I'm here, and I can't get back until I raise enough."

Ivo stands and looks at Clu, then walks to the railing and leans against it, looking back toward Clu and the house. "I can't believe you want to leave. But then, I've lived here all my life. I've got what I want."

Clu shakes her head and joins Ivo at the rail, but looking out at the sea. "I like it, too, Ivo. You don't know what it's like on Cocteau. Do you know this place is a myth to us? I mean, we tell stories about it like we wish it were real. I'm standing here, and I can hardly believe it. I go to the store. I mean, stores are the size of spacecraft hangars, here. There are, you know, I counted, eight kinds of tomatoes, and then there's fresh, frozen, canned, paste, sauce... We don't even have the things on Cocteau. Never had them before I came here. I couldn't even get implica more than once a month. Once, I stood in line for it. I ended up with shoes. Lan wrote his book in longhand. I typed it. It took a year to type. I think twelve people on Cocteau might have gotten to read it, and every one of them was risking prison, because Lan was out of favor for pushing to get his work read off world. But here, I can gesture, and - there it is: five different publishers, some of the type work is... well, I haven't seen anything that perfect since we stopped being able to get datasheets five years ago. And the publishers are all saving the royalties in accounts gathering interest, for Lan. Two of them contacted me and let me know that those funds would be available to me in the event Lan was found to be dead." Her chuckle is bitter. "You think I want to leave this to go to Cocteau? Not if it weren't for Lan."

"What I think is you need a break from all this stuff you're worried about, that's what. C'mon, let's take a ride and see if Del's in the studio."

"Oh, no, that's not necessary."

"Silly. Just silly, girl. Del and I are good friends. He's been working too hard anyway. Some of the stuff he's done lately... well, anyway, he should have a chance to meet someone who likes his work. He doesn't really care, but I suspect it helps him, somehow, to know a few people see what he does. Come on, I'll drive."

Del is a twelve foot tall bundle of spindly ebony fibers and sinewy lacework, topped with a cranial bulge, an undershot set of four coppery eyes lining the edge of its jaw, and a frill of auditory material rising from the back of his flexible neck. When he opens the door, Clu shrieks and leaps back. Both Del and Ivo erupt in a cackling laughter as Clu flushes from neck to forehead.

"I suppose you're... Del," Clu manages, finally.

A fan of tentacles erupts from Del's side, and rub gently across Clu's arm. "I apologize. I shouldn't be unkind. But, you know, Ivo is prone to bring humans here, and somehow she never manages to tell them what to expect."

"I hope you don't think.... I mean, I was just surprised. But Ivo brought me here..."

Ivo interrupts, "Because she really liked 'New Technology'. And I thought you might be working on something interesting. Girl needs a damn uplifting piece of work."

"Then come in, I am engaged in a work which may be, eventually, one of my most powerful. It is much better than what Ivo persists in calling 'On The Shore Of A New Technology'."

Del's extremities lash across the length of the blue metal instrument, wielding a device called a "bow" across its strings with an implacable smoothness and power. Dark lids neatly cloak its copper eyes.

Later, he carefully places Clu's fingers on the bow, and shows her how to draw it across the strings to elicit, what, with her knowledge, is merely, a strange moaning.

"That is not bad for a first try," Del says, kindly. "With practice, and training..."

She rubs her fingers softly over the strings. "I wish I had time or money.

"Someday, if you want it, you will."

As they drive home, the shadow races down the wall toward them and then they are in the darkness. Ivo drives much more sedately than Celine had. Faintly glowing vehicles rush past them as dangerously as in the day, between the shining red boundaries of the road.

"But you're a test pilot, and you can't drive or fly here?" Ivo asks.

"Can't shoot either," Clu mutters.

Celine gestures up an account.

"What's that?" Clu asks.

"That's your vehicle. Storage fees. Your stipend from the Foundation is just about gone, so you need to see if you can afford it, or if you'll have to sell the vehicle."

Clu sits up on the couch and scans the numbers. "I can't sell it. If I sell it, about all I'd get here would be scrap prices. It isn't much in Prometheus, but it's all I have to get back to Cocteau. I can't afford to lose that edge."

Celine's eyes narrow and the fine wrinkles at the edges deepen. "Well, there's a trade-off, hon. For the funds you spend keeping that thing in the bay, you could lose money you might use later to buy a better one that uses Promethean technology. If that's what you want." She gazes at Clu speculatively.

"I don't think I can make myself let it go, Celine. It's the only thing I have left to remind me. If I let it go, I'm afraid I'll never leave."

Celine smiles. "I'm less afraid of that than you are. I wish you'd stay."

"Every day I'm here is a day for Lan, trapped in South Cocteau. All because he wrote a book. A book he'd be honored for, here."

"A book he has been honored for, here, remember?"

Clu stands and rubs her hands across her thighs, like a workman preparing to start a task. "There are things I need to learn, things I'm not going to get on the job."

"Such as?"

"I need to learn to shoot, for one thing. And I can't keep paying for shuttle transport. I need to learn to drive. I'm starting conventional flight training at Field tomorrow."

Celine nods. "I'll talk to Luke. He's the better driver. And I'll see about setting you up with an instructor at the club."

Clu nods tightly. "One more thing."

"Which is?"

"I want you to find out what's happened to Lan. I know you can do it. You've got to still have people on Cocteau who can find out."

Celine smiles oddly and sips some tea. "I can try," she suggests.

"Please. I need to get some idea of what I'm going to be walking into."

"I can't promise anything, but I'm going up to the League the day after tomorrow. I'll ask the people who handle that side to see if we have anyone on the planet who knows anything. Okay, hon?"

"Okay. Thanks, Celine. I wish I knew some way to return all you've done for me."

Celine stands. "Let's take a walk." She takes Clu's arm and they walk out on the deck. Down on the driveway, they can see Luke leaning into the internals of the car. "You know, Clu, Prometheans are producers and traders. But there are some trades that are abstract, and there are some that are indirect. My satisfaction lies in watching you grow, from seeing some of what I know become part of what you know, from remembering what things were like when I first came here, and repaying indirectly a debt I owe, even if it is through you, instead of those who helped me. So there's nothing to do in return. Right now, at least, OK, hon?"

Çlu nods uncertainly.

"Now, tell me about the job. How do you like it?"

The suntube shadow rolls away from the field as the hangar doors split and ponderously drift back into their recesses. Inside, Clu leans against a doorframe, enjoying the quiet rumble - a sound that is different, yet familiar, reenacted at some point for the first time in every project, and one which is, for her, even more loved than the first signs of spring.

The tow vehicle starts with a soft whining, and shifts forward on its wheels. Behind it, the cradle and the golden lens, now officially code-named Hermes, move slowly through the opening into the gathering day. Marie gestures. Clu grins, and pushes off to follow the team as they trail Hector onto the field.

Morisan opens a thickly insulated case and hands Marie a specially made bottle. It frosts instantly in the air and smokes with condensation. She hefts it in a gloved hand and grins at everyone, her green, slit-pupiled eyes narrowed and, perhaps slightly moist. Then she waves them back. "OK, folks, here we go! Near vacuum at as close to total zero as I'm willing to hold with these gloves." She stands beside the edge of the lens, just beneath the widest point. "May the skill of these engineers make you a success and protect everyone who flies in you." Then she pulls down a pair of goggles, and swings the bottle in an arc. It meets the golden metal, implodes, and then releases a shower of fragments.

Everyone slaps hands on thighs in applause, a sound that only reluctantly dies away. Then they file back into the hangar. Clu casts a regretful glance at Hector as a second team arrives with the portable blast walls.

She hates remote tests.

She settles into the isolator and gestures up the control systems. One small window in the lower corner gives her a view on Hermes from a remote camera.

"Containment on, injection on, reaction timing synchronized, power available," she states. Her voice is only shaking a little bit. Everything until now had been a simulation. But this time, she was handling a multi-billion certificate prototype, with the potential to destroy itself and a large chunk of the surrounding environment. Marie had squeezed her shoulder as she had entered isolation, as if to relax her. It hadn't worked.

She can feel the simulated throbbing of the power plant through her feet, and hear its simulated sound in her ears.

But as she pauses before the next step, she knows she must walk a fine line here. It is easy enough to fall into the suspension of disbelief that comes with a simulation. But there may be unpredictable events to which she wil need to react without hesitation. She cannot count on the simulation to save her.

"OK, I'm starting the field buffers. We have graviton production, inverters are active, we have R field." She can hear a vague applause filter through the communications systems.

"I'm letting the systems settle for five minutes." She waits, watching the countdown timer, thinking through every graph and trend, comparing it to her notes and expectations.

Finally, "It looks nominal. I'm opening the fieldguides. Siren on." The mournful hooting begins to repeat out on the field, and she can hear it through her audio channel. "Guides open 1 percent. Three seconds to field integration. Two, one, okay it's up." A halo of faint reddish light appears around Hermes. "A little extra spike in the returns, but we're only zero three five above the expected optimal, which is well within the tolerance. I'm going for a single G R field. Confirm air traffic clear?"

"Confirmed. Nice job so far."

"Just doing my job. OK, moving to 20 percent. Forty. Sixty - Hermes is showing 0 pounds on the plate. Fluctuations here.... let's see, the error bars show plus or minus five percent. The oscillation period is.. looks like eight per second. Getting a little rattling on the latches. I'm going to let it sit here for a while. Any comments on the spaceframe stress polarimetry?"

Morisan whispers in her ear. "It's nominal so far. Here's the display." Clu eyes the false colors of the stress on the frame members. "Looks like a concentration around the return guide. But it's only blue. OK, I'm going to go to one hundred five percent."

Her hand shifts to the field emission slider and she moves the mark to 1.05. The disk rattles against the clamps, and she can feel it. "OK, the oscillations are up to ten per second, and the excursions are about eight percent. That's a clear growth that might go to failure by a thrust of two or three gravities. I'd suggest we continue at this level for about two minutes, and then power down for a post-mortem."

Marie's voice replies, "Pilot's discretion."

Clu smiles. "That's all I want."