Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [12]
Except, maneuvering a ship with more than one magsail required high skill and an unusual intuition, following the right-hand rule. The flat palm as a “surface” of the sail, with its magnetic field into the palm. The fingers pointing straight, in the direction of the solar wind. The thumb, extended to the side—the thrust.
“I know that,” the girl said.
He did not expect the girl’s involuntary writhing movements to actually match their flight. They did. Whatever training she’d received in her Flamethrower family, an electro mag netic intuition was ingrained in her dance movements.
But of course! She was a parahuman, wasn’t she? The Dragon Guard. She must have had an augmented set of faps, fixed action patterns, straight from birth. So what he thought was choreoathetosis was really a preinstalled magsailing fap? He clicked their shared tongue.
Her feet moved—and the “ship” responded. The magsails behind them turned into a concave honeycomb. Deflected, the charged particles imparted a momentum—
“Hey!” The sky turned upside down. Nathi swung their left arm, turning the falcon mast like the long arm across the surface of a clock, to compensate. “Hey, careful around the peacock tail.”
“These arms are mine!” She lightly slapped her forearm, laughing. “Falcon topgallant—quarter-turn, the mast in staggered half-spiral!” The fingers of her other hand turned—and the falcon mast’s sails twisted into helix, relative to the topgallant sail.
That saved them from careening right into the shining surface of the polar ice cap. “Genie, you can have the legs. Hey, peacock tail—unfold!”
She laughed. She laughed! Incredible, but she regained control over her limbs. The strange dance still continued, but—the girl directed it. She danced. They danced.
And she was not half-bad.
“Right on, ma’am!”
They soared above the whiteness of the polar cap, swimming in the river of charged particles, feeling their magnetic touch on their skin.
“Laceland ahoy!”
The edges of the polar cap already had been speckled with the lacework of swiss-cheese terrain. The cheese was mined by little spacemen mice—
How odd that he should think that! The idea must have floated up from somewhere deep within the dreaming girl’s subconscious. But, right now, Nathi felt as if it were his own.
Aye for the world of dreams! He thought that he could almost see the spacemen mice throw their little hard hats up in cheers—no, these were geysers of abiogenic oil, breaking out from beneath the ice and sublimating in thin air.
They skimmed over the almost geometrical patterns of “dalmatian spots,” marked by the interacting streamers of the solar wind. Here, the lines of the interplanetary magnetic field passed almost vertically though the surface, having skirted over the local magnetic field anomaly.
The girl laughed, spun. What Zulu wouldn’t break into a song at times like these? The song was pulsing, bursting from his mind. He didn’t care what the words. It was the very act of singing, his being able to sing, that gave the song its meaning, that confirmed his self—a geno-song. He felt alive.
They danced up in the air on magnetic wings. The famous layered terrain of the Cryptic Region spreading out far below—terrace upon terrace, a filigree of color bands. They flew above the wrinkled land of Australe Sulci—so dense it looked as if the planet’s brain had been left bare by the sharp edge of Australe Chasma, cleft into hard rock. They skimmed it, veering northeast.
The Needle loomed before them.
“Needle ahoy….”
The words trailed out into silence. They had stopped. Sky-tall, the Needle looked as if it pierced through the heaven’s firmament itself; its top was lost to space. Encased in spinning flywheels—rungs of an impossibly tall ladder up—the Needle thrummed with energy. It pulsed through their skin. It gripped like deep vibrations