12

Rafiel is excited over the trip. Their first leg is an airplane flight. It's his first time in a plane in many years, and there's no choice about it; no maglev trains go to the Peruvian Andes. That's where the railgun is, on the westward slope of a mountain, pointing toward the stars. As the big turboprop settles in to its landing at the base of the railgun, Rafiel gets his first good look at the thing. It looks like a skijump in reverse: its traffic goes up. The scenery all around is spectacular. Off to the north of the railgun there's a huge waterfall which once was a hydroelectric dam supplying power to half Peru and almost all of Bolivia. Lukewarm-fusion put the hydropower plants out of business and now it is just a decorative cataract. When they get out Rafiel finds his heart pounding and his breath panting, for even the base of the railgun is nearly 2500 metres above sea level, but he doesn't care. He is thrilled.

While they were dressing in their cushiony railgun suits, Rafiel paused to listen to the scream of a capsule accelerating up the rails to escape velocity. Alegretta stopped what she was doing, too, to look at him. 'Are you sure you can handle this?' she asked. His offhand wave said that he was very, very sure. She checked him carefully as he got into each item of the railgun clothes. What they wore was important - no belts for either of them, no brassiere for Alegretta, slippers rather than shoes, no heavy jewellery - because the seven-gee strain would cost them severely for any garment that pressed into their flesh or constrained their freedom. When Alegretta was satisfied about that, she got to the serious problem of fitting baskets to the cats.

'Will she be all right?' Rafiel asked anxiously, looking at Nicolette - meaning, really, will the almost-baby in her belly be all right?

'I'll make her be all right,' Alegretta promised, checking the resilience of the padding with her knuckles. 'That'll do. Anyway, cats stand high-gee better than people. You've heard stories of them falling out of tenth-storey windows and walking away? They're true - sometimes true, anyway. Now let's get down to the loading platform.'

That was busier than Rafiel had expected. Four or five other passengers were saying good-byes to friends on the platform, but it wasn't just people who were about to be launched into space. There were crates and cartons, all padded, being fitted carefully into place in the cargo section, and servers were strapping down huge Dewars of liquid gas. 'Inside,' a guard commanded, and when they were in the capsule a steward leaned over them to help with the straps and braces. 'Just relax,' he said, 'and don't turn your heads.' Then he bent to check the cat baskets. The kitten was already asleep, but her mother was obviously discontented with what was happening to her. However, there wasn't much she could do about it in the sweater-like restraint garment that held her passive.... No, Rafiel thought, not a sweater; more like a straitjacket-

And then they were on their way.

The thrust squeezed all the breath out of Rafiel, who had not fully remembered what seven gees could do to him. The padded seat was memory plastic and it had moulded itself to his body; the restraints were padded; the garments were without wrinkles or seams to cut into his flesh. But still it was seven gees. The athletic dancer's body that had never gone over seventy-five kilograms suddenly and bruisingly weighed more than half a ton. Breathing was frighteningly difficult; his chest muscles were not used to expanding his ribcage against such force. When he turned his head, ever so minutely, he was instantly dizzied as the bones of the inner ear protested being twisted so viciously. He thought he was going to vomit; he forced himself to breathe.

It lasted only for a few minutes. Then they were free. The acceleration stopped. The railgun had flung the capsule off its tip, and now they were simply thrown free into the sky, weightless. The only external force acting on the railgun launch capsule now was the dwindling friction of the outside air; that pressed Rafiel's body against the restraining straps at first, but then it, too, was gone.

'Congratulations, dear Rafiel,' said Alegretta, smiling. 'You're in space.'

Once they had transshipped to a spacecraft it was eight days to Mars-orbit, where Hakluyt hung waiting for them. There were a few little sleeping cabins in the ship, in addition to the multi-bunk compartments. The cabins were expensive, but that was not a consideration for Rafiel, who was well aware that he had far more money than he would ever live to spend. So he and Alegretta and the cats had their own private space, just the four of them - or five, if you counted the little cluster of cells that was busily dividing in the white cat's belly, getting ready to become a person.

Their transport was a steady-thrust spacecraft, accelerating at a sizeable fraction of a gee all the way to turnaround, and decelerating from then on. It was possible to move around the ship quite easily. It was also pointless, because there was nothing much to do. There was no dining room, no cabaret, no swimming pool on the aft deck, no gym to work out in. The servers brought meals to the passengers where they were. Most of the passengers spent their time viewing vid programmes, old and new, on their personal screens. Or sleeping. In the private cabin Rafiel and Alegretta had several other options, one of which was talking; but even they slept a lot.

More than a lot.

When, at their destination, they were docking with the habitat shuttlecraft Rafiel, puzzled, counted back and realized that he had only slept twice on the trip. They had to have been good long sleeps - two or three full twenty-four- hour days at a time; and that was when he realized that Alegretta had doped him to make him rest as much as possible.

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