sight of the planet that gave her birth and the only world she had ever known dwindling away to a beautiful abstraction in the endless void of the interstellar night.
Indeed such emotions may have flickered for an augenblick across my mind's sky like a wisp of cloud punctuating a brilliant blue summer's day, but I would be untrue to the essence of the moment if I herein paid them significant heed, for as soon as the future became visible in the form of myriad bright stars displayed like jewels for my consideration across the black velvet cloth of space, I became a true Child of Fortune, gazing forward into my wanderjahr among those unknown star-flung worlds with scarcely a thought in my mind or a place in my spirit for looking philosophically back.
And then, as the ferry curved into orbit a quarter way around the circumference of the planet below, I caught sight of what from this vantage seemed a tube of silver filigree set off against the blackness in which it floated like a webmoth's nest reflecting starlight on the edge of visibility against a jungle night.
A frisson of excitement went through me as knowledge supplied a sense of scale that vision could not, for I knew that this must be Glade's Flinger, and far from being a little webmoth's nest seen close at hand, it was a huge framework of cryowire half a kilometer in diameter, a hundred kilometers long, and orbiting, therefore, very far away.
I was impressed by far more than the overwhelming grandeur of its scale, for a planet's Flinger is its gateway to the wider worlds of men. While the Jump Drive enables a Void Ship to traverse light-years in an augenblick, it must make its final approach to orbit via more conventional means. To achieve the needed relativistic velocity from a dead rest in space would require either immense onboard reaction mass or many weeks, or both. Fortunately, a Void Ship emerges from its Jumps with the velocity with which it entered, and thus the construction of its Flinger marks a frontier world's mature emergence into easy commerce with the worlds of men.
The cryowire gridwork is electrified, the Void Ship, resting at the bottom of the tube like a seed in a blowpipe, is encapsulated in a magnetic bubble of opposite charge, at which moment, voila, it is accelerated electromagnetically by the Flinger field, flung down the hundred-kilometer tunnel and into the void at near-light speed.
My excitement at first beholding this device, which would soon propel the Bird of Night out of Glade's solar system on its way to distant stars, was darkened only by the knowledge that the experience of this magic moment would be one which I would be denied. While the Honored Passengers celebrated and toasted the beginning of the voyage at the departure fete in the grand salon, I would be lying insensate as one more item of human cargo in a dormodule.
But even this resentment, which had been simmering inside of me ever since I had been told that the experience of traveling as an Honored Passenger in the floating cultura would not be mine, faded away into no more than a faint regret as the sky ferry rounded the limb of the planet and I at last beheld the Bird of Night herself, silvery and magnificent against the star-flecked dark.
She hung there, a vision of baroque complexity, glowing and glittering in the light of our sun as it peeked around the edge of Glade. The Bird of Night, like all Void Ships, was a modular construct assembled around a long central spine depending from the ellipsoid capsule of the bow, which contained the bridge and Jump Drive machineries, so that its essential core appeared like an enormous flagellate microbe, or, I thought with some bemusement at the workings of my own mind, like a giant silvery sperm. Slung along this rigid spermatozoon's tail, like literary clutter designed to obscure the metaphor, were assorted cylinders of various sizes seemingly affixed there at asymmetrical random like so many
Indeed such emotions may have flickered for an augenblick across my mind's sky like a wisp of cloud punctuating a brilliant blue summer's day, but I would be untrue to the essence of the moment if I herein paid them significant heed, for as soon as the future became visible in the form of myriad bright stars displayed like jewels for my consideration across the black velvet cloth of space, I became a true Child of Fortune, gazing forward into my wanderjahr among those unknown star-flung worlds with scarcely a thought in my mind or a place in my spirit for looking philosophically back.
And then, as the ferry curved into orbit a quarter way around the circumference of the planet below, I caught sight of what from this vantage seemed a tube of silver filigree set off against the blackness in which it floated like a webmoth's nest reflecting starlight on the edge of visibility against a jungle night.
A frisson of excitement went through me as knowledge supplied a sense of scale that vision could not, for I knew that this must be Glade's Flinger, and far from being a little webmoth's nest seen close at hand, it was a huge framework of cryowire half a kilometer in diameter, a hundred kilometers long, and orbiting, therefore, very far away.
I was impressed by far more than the overwhelming grandeur of its scale, for a planet's Flinger is its gateway to the wider worlds of men. While the Jump Drive enables a Void Ship to traverse light-years in an augenblick, it must make its final approach to orbit via more conventional means. To achieve the needed relativistic velocity from a dead rest in space would require either immense onboard reaction mass or many weeks, or both. Fortunately, a Void Ship emerges from its Jumps with the velocity with which it entered, and thus the construction of its Flinger marks a frontier world's mature emergence into easy commerce with the worlds of men.
The cryowire gridwork is electrified, the Void Ship, resting at the bottom of the tube like a seed in a blowpipe, is encapsulated in a magnetic bubble of opposite charge, at which moment, voila, it is accelerated electromagnetically by the Flinger field, flung down the hundred-kilometer tunnel and into the void at near-light speed.
My excitement at first beholding this device, which would soon propel the Bird of Night out of Glade's solar system on its way to distant stars, was darkened only by the knowledge that the experience of this magic moment would be one which I would be denied. While the Honored Passengers celebrated and toasted the beginning of the voyage at the departure fete in the grand salon, I would be lying insensate as one more item of human cargo in a dormodule.
But even this resentment, which had been simmering inside of me ever since I had been told that the experience of traveling as an Honored Passenger in the floating cultura would not be mine, faded away into no more than a faint regret as the sky ferry rounded the limb of the planet and I at last beheld the Bird of Night herself, silvery and magnificent against the star-flecked dark.
She hung there, a vision of baroque complexity, glowing and glittering in the light of our sun as it peeked around the edge of Glade. The Bird of Night, like all Void Ships, was a modular construct assembled around a long central spine depending from the ellipsoid capsule of the bow, which contained the bridge and Jump Drive machineries, so that its essential core appeared like an enormous flagellate microbe, or, I thought with some bemusement at the workings of my own mind, like a giant silvery sperm. Slung along this rigid spermatozoon's tail, like literary clutter designed to obscure the metaphor, were assorted cylinders of various sizes seemingly affixed there at asymmetrical random like so many
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