He touched the control board, and the nose of the aircar tilted farther. Jeff felt himself pressed back harder into his seat.
"Do you mean it?" Lory turned to Jeff. "You're going to space, and you're taking me with you?"
"That's right, Uncle Lory." Under Drakes guidance the car was moving faster and faster. The sun was visible, rising again around the curve of the earth.
"I can't wait to get there." Lory's face glowed in the light of a new dawn. "You've been to space. Is it really as good and exciting as people tell you it is?"
"No, it's not."
For the past few hours Jeff had been controlled by others, with no more say in where he went or what he did than a wasp trapped inside a jar. But finally he had a question that he could answer, without consulting Drake or anyone else.
He thought of the network nodes, glimmering opalescent bubbles providing transfer points to distant parts of the universe; he remembered Hooglich and Russo, speaking of Diabelli Omnivore drives and Anadem fields in tones normally reserved for a religious experience; he recalled the eight-armed, bottle-bodied Logans, perpetually frustrated by and patient with human frailties and failures of logic; he saw in his mind the Messina Dust Cloud, that vast tapestry woven by twisting rivers of dust and glowing gas, with the space sounders coming and going as they chose, moving in mysterious ways across the Cloud's broad face; he recalled the monstrous wheel of the Galaxy, seen from so far away that a hundred billion suns merged into a single bright image. Last of all he remembered Lilah, hanging in free fall, babbling relentlessly of horses, and making Jeff swear that he would one day return to the Cloud.
"Space isn't as good as people tell you," Jeff said. "Uncle Lory, it's much, much better."
THE END
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six