Lifeline

Ramis had been there, peering out the window plates as two engineers wearing manned maneuvering units jetted after the still-growing sail-creature, but they could not turn it around again without damaging the sail’s cell-thin membrane. The engineers looked like tiny dolls as they floated side by side back to the docking bay, with the green-tinged sail moving behind them against the stars.

As the second attempt failed, Ramis felt his heart sink. The next nymph would be Sarat—his companion, his … pet.

Ramis kept to himself and said a silent prayer and good-bye when the bioengineers came to remove Sarat from the weightless core. Sarat drifted along with them, complacent, unaware. They had been force-feeding Sarat for the past day, “hyperfueling” the creature, the bioengineers called it, to make the sail survive as long as possible in space.

The nymphs had no awareness, according to Dr. Sandovaal. It had been a lucky coincidence that Sarat had kept Ramis from crashing into the Aguinaldo’s rim—a programmed reaction, that was all.

But Sarat had always found Ramis in the core. The nymph had recognized him, played with him.

The bioengineers led Sarat away as Ramis floated in the air, watching. He kept his eyes dry. Help me out one more time, my friend. We have a long journey together.

Sarat survived the accelerated metamorphosis. Ramis did not watch. He went back to the dato’s

dwelling and dimmed his own rooms, pretending to sleep in the middle of the day. After an hour or so had passed, he heard Magsaysay return home and shuffle across the floor to his closed door. He listened, waiting for Magsaysay to knock, to say something, but the president walked away and left him alone.

Ramis loved him for it.

The bioengineers performed the procedure in space, tending the sail-creature like a baby. They oriented Sarat’s proto-sails edge-on to the Sun to keep it from the light pressure before the process could complete itself. They injected concentrated nutrients into the body core to make it grow faster, larger. For two days the sails expanded. Sarat’s fins spread out into vast, cell-thin wings, scores of kilometers to a side.

Sarat’s main body core became rigid and exceedingly tough, an organic “hull.” But the creature could still metabolize, using the hard solar radiation for direct photosynthesis. With the metamorphosis, the sail-creature switched over to the plant attributes in its cells, becoming an immobile receptor of solar radiation.

Ramis watched the creature out the window plate and thought about the process, the right and wrong of it. Sarat had had no choice. It knew nothing of the people who would be rescued by its sacrifice. It could never turn back, could never come back inside to play in the zero-G core of the Aguinaldo. The creature’s course had been set. Sarat had no future except to become a dead and drifting sail, used up, battered about by the solar wind.

Ramis rubbed his fingers on the window plate, but the coated quartz showed no smudges.

“What we want to do is this, so pay attention, boy.” Sandovaal rapped on the surface of the holotank with his old-fashioned pointer stick. The image in the tank jiggled, then focused again into a diagram of the Earth-Moon system.

Magsaysay spoke up. “Luis, Dr. Panogy should be explaining this. She is the Aguinaldo’s

celestial mechanics—”

“Too long-winded,” snapped Sandovaal. “Ask her what time it is and she will tell you the history of timepieces, starting with sundials. I will explain just enough so as not to confuse the boy.” He turned his attention to Ramis. “Now. When we release you from the Aguinaldo, you will turn the sail so that it faces the Sun, taking the full momentum of solar photons. Never mind what that means.”

“I know what it means,” Ramis muttered, but Sandovaal did not hear him.

“You will then be moving ‘backwards’ in orbit, relative to the Aguinaldo. In about three hours, this will provide enough braking to slow you from our orbital velocity at L-4 down to three kilometers per second. You must then turn your sail edgewise. This will help you drop like a stone toward Earth, skim past it at a distance of about an Earth radius, and then head back up to where you started.”

On the holotank a dotted blue line appeared, tracing Ramis’s planned trajectory. “But while you have been going down and coming back up, the Moon, L-4, and L-5 will have continued in their own orbits. By the time you return to the starting point, L-5 will be there instead of L-4.”

Ramis studied the diagram. “So I am just killing time by going down to Earth? Waiting for the other points to change position?”