Sue-ling thought wonderingly of how the Turtles had managed to create artificial bodies for the two who could be saved, using the nineteen cadavers for dissection and study. That was how the Turtles had been able to develop the memo disks, Marco said.
Evidendy there were Turtle medical skills they had not seen fit to pass on to their humans . . . although, on second thought, she wasn't entirely sure of that. Perhaps, she mused, they were embodied in memo disks and it simply happened that she had been using them all along without knowing she was doing so. . . .
She was startled to feel Marco Ramos's tentacle on her shoulder. "What is it?" she demanded, suddenly alarmed.
"I just wanted to tell you," the machine-person said reassuringly, "that I hear Daisy Fay coming. I didn't want her to startle you. She's got someone with her."
The someone was Moon Bunderan. "I thought I'd find you here," Daisy Fay told her partner. "We got tired of listening to them argue, too."
Sue-ling impulsively put her arm around the younger woman. "Where's your, uh, friend?" she asked.
Moon shook her head. "Thrayl's in one of his moods," she sighed. "He's just squatting there with the others, not paying any attention to them. I think he's worried because his songs are all mixed up and confusing."
"He's not the only one," Daisy Fay said morosely. "I don't know what's happening, either. The Turtles have some kind of plan, and they insist on carrying it out—and Francis is telling them it's his ship, and it's all a mess." Her tentacles writhed.
"The big thing," she said, "is Chief Thunderbird has decided he's the captain."
"Oh, hell," said Marco. "That's really going to tear it."
"Already has," Daisy Fay sighed. "Naturally Francis says there's only one captain for The Golden Hind and that's Captain Francis Krake. Heaven knows how they'll sort it out. Meanwhile we're just floating around in space, till they come to some agreement."
The robot-woman's tentacles floated around, and her face looked up at the humans. "Anyway," she said, "we've got some time before we go into wave-drive. How would you like it if Marco and I showed you around the rest of the ship?"
For Sue-ling everything was beginning to seem dreamlike. None of this was part of her old familiar life! Nothing had been, really, since the day her university had closed down and she had come to the Turtle compound in the hope of something more important to do with her life. But to be here—in a Turtle wave-drive spaceship!—with these strange half-human robots for companions—not to mention a pair of Turtles— and, by every token, on the verge of a trip into deep space, with the knowledge that everyone she had left behind would be dust by the time she saw Earth again—
It was all simply too strange.
With Moon Bunderan, she followed the two robot-people down the empty passageways of The Golden Hind. There was nothing familiar here at all. She gazed uncomprehendingly as Daisy Fay, tentacles awave, gestured at two huge black cylinders looming above a passage. They were decked with a maze of knobs and colored lights. "Those are the antimatter generators," Daisy Fay said proudly.
"Antimatter," Sue-ling repeated, frowning up at the glowing board.
"That's what we use for the mass-drive," Marco Ramos put in. "The ship has two drives—mass reaction for short trips and docking maneuvers, and also for landing on a planet when we have to. Mass drive is just a kind of rocket, if you know what a rocket is."
She nodded. "Human beings used to use rockets to travel in space."
Marco gazed up at her ruefully. "So they tell me. It was all before my own time, of course—or after. Anyway, those early rockets were all chemicals. Like big firecrackers. These are a million times more powerful."
"But of course," Daisy Fay chimed in, "they're no good at all for interstellar travel."
"Right," Marco agreed. "For that we have to use the wave-drive. We'll show you the wave-drive stuff" in a minute, but let's finish up here first. Do you know what antimatter is?"
His eyes weren't on Sue-ling but on Moon Bunderan, who was gazing around with awe. "Well, yes," Moon hedged. "At least, sort of—"
"It's common matter turned inside out," the robot-man explained. "The electric charges are all reversed: the shells of the atoms are positrons, instead of electrons; the cores are antiprotons. Antimatter would be a deadly explosive if it got free—but it doesn't.
"You see," he went on, warming up, "when antimatter meets the normal stuff it reacts. The unlike charges cancel into gamma radiation. These generators simply create it by reversing a few of the charges in a stream of fuel atoms. Then the new antimatter reacts instantly with the normal atoms in the same stream, the mass converts to energy and it comes out as electrical power. That's our mass drive: electrical rockets."
Moon nodded as if she understood. Satisfied, Marco charged ahead. They went through another passage, tugging themselves along by holdfasts, and came out on the naked curve of the hull. "We're taking a chance here," Daisy Fay warned, "because we're out of the shielded section of the ship. But this is where the mass-drive thrusters are, and the wave-drive equipment just aft of this compartment." Sue-ling felt the air colder here, and it was alive with a faint vibration from the dark metal all around them.
"The mass thrusters," Daisy Fay said, waving a tentacle at a maze of thick pipes and humming machines. "The pumps and the energy exchangers, where the exhaust mass becomes a superheated plasma that goes out through the external rocket nozzles."
Sue-ling stood staring, until she saw the others moving away. She hurried after them, caught up as Daisy Fay was indicating a web of heavy cables that spread to a thick, bright metal ridge that curved around the hull.
"The wave-drive," Daisy Fay said with satisfaction.
"I don't understand the wave-drive at all," Moon Bunderan declared positively.
"No, of course not," Marco said reassuringly. "I don't really understand it myself—but I know it works. Of course, you can't really see much of it. Do you know what particle-wave duality is?"
"No," said Moon flatly.
"It's simple enough. Particles and waves are just two aspects of the same thing, you see," Daisy Fay put in. "The drive turns our particles into waves, and we travel at the speed of light. Of course, we can't use the wave-drive for launching. That's why we're out here, away from the orbit station. We have to get well away from the docks before we can shift into it."
"Will it hurt?" Moon asked, observing with pleasure that her voice did not quaver.
"Oh, no. Anyway, it shouldn't." Daisy Fay's cyestalks tipped back and forth like shaking heads. "The effect is hard to describe, because of our language and the way we've learned to think. Even the terms 'particle' and Svave' don't fit quantum reality. You'll probably know when we shift—"
"You positively will," Marco laughed.
Daisy Fay turned a warning eye on him. "But don't worry about it. Different people feel it differently," she said.
Sue-ling stirred herself. "Differently how?" she asked.
"Well," Daisy Fay began, considering, but was interrupted by a blare: Francis Krake's voice, coming over the ship's internal communications system.
"Marco, Daisy Fay!" he was saying. "Take your places for wave-drive entry!"
"We'd better get back in the shielded room," Daisy Fay said, and her voice seemed to smile. "You're going to have to start learning how to run the ship if you're going to be part of the crew, because it seems we're on our way. I won't have to try to explain how it feels. You'll find out soon enough!"
The songs of the aiodoi are heard by many, in many places, and often they are loved. The aiodoi sing frequently to the Taurs, and the Taurs love to hear them. The aiodoi do not sing to humans, because the humans cannot hear. Nor do they sing to the Turtles, who will not listen. But the aiodoi themselves always listen to the smallsongs from everywhere, and when they listen it is always with love, even when they listen to the childish babblings from Earth.