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the sails, can’t you?”
    “Sure we could,” Pal Sorricaine said absently. “Oh, we’ll get there all right, I guess.”
    “Then—”
    “But it’s not very goddamn elegant!” he barked.
    Viktor understood what his father meant. The wondrous thing about astrophysics was that the more you learned, the better everything fit together. Things didn’t get more complicated, they got more breathtakingly clear. In Pal’s view (as in the view of all scientists) oddball events spoiled the symmetry of the laws that ruled the universe. They were a disgrace that could only be repaired by figuring out how, after all, they did fit. “Anyway,” Pal Sorricaine said after a moment, “there’s a price tag on this thing. That fuel’s not just supposed to get us there. It’s going to power industry and stuff. The more we use, the more we’re stealing from our future.” And that was true enough, because when Mayflower was just a hulk in orbit the colony would need the microwaves it would be beaming down to the surface. “But mostly it’s not elegant,” he said again dismally. “We’re supposed to know all about these things. And we don’t!”
     
    They defrosted a mathematician named Jahanjur Singh to help them out, but Viktor could tell from the way his father kept staring into space that it wasn’t helping enough. Still, Viktor found with pleasure that his parents had time to relax with their son. Amelia kept as busy as Pal—her own specialty of thermodynamic engineering wasn’t very relevant, but at least she could run a computer for the astrophysical team—but still there were times when they all played tag together in the centrifuge; they watched tapes of Earthly TV together; they even cooked fudge together, one night, and Viktor’s mother didn’t stop him however much he ate.
    Viktor was no fool. He could tell that there was something on his parents’ minds that went beyond the astrophysical problem and the navigation of the ship, but he expected they would tell him about it when they were ready. Meanwhile he had the ship to explore. With so few humans awake, he had a lot of freedom to do it in. Even Captain Bu tolerated his exploration.
    Before he was frozen Viktor had been pretty much afraid of Captain Bu Wengzha. It took him a while after defrosting to get over the feeling, too, because Captain Bu wasn’t happy about the jawbone course corrections he had to make when he was thawed out himself. New Mayflower was, after all, his ship.
    Captain Bu was the oldest man aboard Mayflower —well, to be accurate, he wasn’t anymore; he’d spent more than eighty years frozen, daring the odds to be thawed out for a while every decade to make sure the ship was shipshape in all its myriad parts. People like Wanda Mei had had their biological clocks running much longer than he. Bu was still biologically fifty-two, with a wide, strong-toothed mouth in a wide, plump face the color of the beach sand at Malibu. He had no hair on his head at all, but he had carefully cultivated a wispy beard. Most of the time he didn’t smile. He didn’t smile when things were going smoothly, because that was simply the way they were supposed to go, and he certainly didn’t smile when Fifth Officer Sorricaine came apologetically to the bridge to tell him that that day’s sail-setting order, still in the process of being carried out, had to be revised because the flare’s light pressure hadn’t fallen off quite the way the model predicted.
    Peering over the captain’s shoulder in one of those discussions, trying to be invisible so as not to be sent off the bridge, Viktor looked wonderingly at the sail. It spread out in an untidy sprawl at the bow of the ship—which was now, of course, its stern—like a drop cloth for untidy house painters. Only it was not meant to catch spilled paint, but photons. The sail was almost more nuisance than it was worth, except that, of course, everything on New Mayflower was designed to serve at least