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  Jonas chose his words with care. "That's because—well, frankly, it's because there aren't any, Bailey. Even when we did the northern ice cap, we had to inject suspense by sending you under it in a one-man sub. Face it, there are no unexplored frontiers left. Unless you go offplanet."

  "Yeah, sure," said Barnum. "Damn right. Do you realize that less than two centuries ago there were still whole tribes undiscovered in the jungle? Now you can't get ten yards into the underbrush without getting a ticket from the Diversity Police. Amazonia, Papuguinea, Chukotskii Hrebet—same everywhere. Not a thing moves without some snoopy computer logging its entire family history. How the dump can you be a trailblazing explorer when the navsats have your position pinned down to the nearest inch?"

  Cashew picked up the fallen glass and placed it on the table. Bailey did exaggerate; they were only accurate to a foot or so. "What we need is something that doesn't use navsats."

  Barnum laughed. What an idea. "Cash, how else would we find out where we were?"

  She reddened. "Sorry, it was a dumb idea. Just thinking aloud."

  "No, it wasn't," said Jonas. He activated his wristnode.

  Cashew craned her neck to see. "History?" she said with incredulity. "Jonas, we'll never get even a toehold in history. The Xnet's got nothing but—"

  "Shhh. I'm getting a new angle. History is just the entry point." Cashew shut up. Jonas's flair for the vidivisual was legendary throughout the industry.

  He muttered some commands to his wristnode, then looked up. "Simple idea, but lots of potential. We re-create historical voyages. Using the same kind of gear, the same technology. Crossing the Antarctic in a dog sled, like that Scott Amundsen guy in nineteen-whatev—"

  Cashew was quick to point out the flaw. "ERO wouldn't give us a dog license, not for W 'Gratuitous involvement of animals.' And ecovisas for the Antarctic are as rare as pandas' thumbs."

  "You're right," said Jonas. "A managed ecosystem is all very well, but there are times when this one is too managed. But I didn't mean the dog thing literally." He reactivated his wrist-node. "Plenty of alternatives . . . Yeah, this one looks tasty . . ." Bailey glanced at Cashew, who shrugged. Jonas liked a little drama; it was in his blood. "Okay, genius, let's have it. But remember, it'd better work or we're all out of a job."

  "You cross the Atlantic," said Jonas.

  Bailey gritted his teeth in exasperation. "Jonas, a three-year-old child could cross the Atlantic blindfolded on a rubber duck."

  "Using the navsats, yes. But you're going to do it using only pretech navigational aids. Let me give you the rundown on a primitive Italian geezer called"—he glanced at his wrist— "Galileo."

  If ever a child had been inepdy named, it had to he Prudence, thought Charity, as she waited impatiently near the arrivals gate. And if ever anyone needed evidence that the phrase "identical twins" was a misnomer, the Odingo girls were living proof. As children, first in the foothills around Gulu and later in the bustle of Kampala, they had been almost indistinguishable—physically. But mentally they were not so much opposites as orthogonal—their thoughts ran at right angles to each other. It had made them a powerful team on the rare occasions when they had joined forces. Orthogonal vectors span the largest dimensional subspaces.

  As they'd grown older, they'd changed. Charity was now distinctly on the plump side, heavy around the hips like most middle-aged African women. The unforgiving equatorial sun had tanned her face like old parchment, but her hair was still dark, not even a few gray curls, which was unusual. People lived longer now than two centuries ago; a hundred years was common, a hundred and twenty not unheard-of. They were fertile longer, active much longer, and usually kept their faculties right up till the day they died. But the medical advances hadn't affected the timing of gray hair, and there were just as many bald men under forty as there had ever been. Charity was just thinking how strange it was that medicine could cure Alzheimer's but not hair loss, when she saw her sister, accompanied by a robo-cart bearing a pile of exceedingly scruffy suitcases.

  Prudence was tall, slender, lightly clad for hot weather, long legs and a riot of multicolored hair held together with a huge wooden pin and an orange sweatband. She emanated drive and energy. Charity considered her sister to be something of a fidget. Right now, though. Charity was the energetic one, jumping up and down and yelling. Prudence spoke a few words to the cart and it negotiated its way through the crowds toward her overexcited sister.

  "Pru, you haven't changed a bit! How do you keep so slim?" And how do you keep looking so young? But Charity knew the answer to that: years cooped up in the low light of a cramped spacecraft, years of low gravity. There was a downside, too, of course. Low gravity could also cause physical deterioration, if you didn't exercise. Bone damage, muscular atrophy And it took a very special kind of person to survive years of trying to stay sane in the company of the same few companions. She'd always wondered how the spacers handled it, but whenever she'd asked Pru about it, her sister had changed the subject. She did know that some people didn't handle it at all—insanity, obesity, and addiction were just three of the failure routes, and every so often some autodestructively inventive spacer came up with a new one.

  What were the routes to successl The spacers knew, but they weren't telling.

  "You're looking well yourself, little sister."

  "Moses makes me feel younger than I am." She stopped. "Mostly. The rest of the time he makes me feel a great deal older. By several million years."

  "But you're glad you had him? Yes, you are. Motherhood suits you."

  "Maybe you ought to try it."

  Prudence laughed, a dry laugh with no hint of malice, and changed the subject.

  "Galileo? Wasn't he that French guy that dropped a cannon-ball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove that gravity existed?"

  Jonas took a deep breath. Bailey had talent, but his talent came at a price. "Italian. Legend has it that he dropped two cannonballs of different weights to show they both fell at the same speed, Bailey."

  "So did they?" asked Cashew.

  "Well, there's no actual evidence that he did it—it was more of a thought experiment. But that's not the point. What I'm thinking about is one of his astronomical discoveries. 'The Cosmian stars,' he called it."

  "And what does that gibberish mean?"

  "The moons of Jupiter. The four biggest ones—lo, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, numbers five to eight out of sixteen, but the rest are tiny. Galileo observed them through his telescope, realized that some bodies didn't go 'round the Earth, and got himself into hot water with the Inquisition."

  Cashew chuckled. "Smart career move. He ought to have hired Ruthie Bowser; she'd have set him straight."

  "Yeah. Anyhow, Galileo was kind of obsessed with time. In those days there were no accurate clocks, which was a nuisance because Galileo wanted to work out the laws of motion and it's difhcult to do that if all you've got to measure time is a pig-fat candle marked into hour-long lengths. He tried all sorts of tricks, including humming tunes to himself. Then he discovered the principle of the pendulum clock. In fact the development of clocks and astronomy went hand in hand: Better clocks let the astronomers time celestial happenings more accurately, and a better understanding of astronomy helped to improve the design and testing of clocks. With me so far, Bailey?"

  "Galileo was a nut for clocks and moons. Sure. Jonas, is there anything vidivisual in this deluge of factoids?"

  "Uh-huh. Burnings at the stake, harmony of the spheres . . . But most of this is deep background, just for us, okay? Main thing to realize is that the big deal in those days was ships— for trade—and the big problem with ships was navigation. No navsats then, okay? Finding longitude, that was the nasty one. Latitude was easy: Measure the altitude of the sun at noon, or the pole star at night. But longitude—basically, what was needed was a clock. Every fifteen degrees east, the sun rises and sets an hour later."

  "So Galileo's pendulum clock solved everything, right?"

&nb
sp; "Wrong. It wasn't anything like accurate enough. Instead, Galileo found a huge clock in the sky."

  "Oh, I get it. The Cosmian stars."

  "Precisely. What you see when you look at Jupiter through a telescope depends on whereabouts on the Earth you are. The moons move pretty damn fast, and they cross each other or the edges of Jupiter practically every day. Galileo drew up tables of the positions of Jupiter's moons and worked out how to use them to tell local time. There was a big prize on offer, and in 1616 he sent his idea to King Philip III of Spain. But Philip was so besieged by cranks that he wasn't interested. Galileo tried to sell him the idea on and off for sixteen years, but—"

  Cashew's marketing antennae flickered into life. "Hell, if the network execs won't buy, there's no point asking twice. Didn't Galileo know that?"

  "I guess life was slower in those days. Cash."

  "He could have tried another network," said Bailey

  "He did. After twenty years he offered the idea to the Dutch."

  "Wow," said Cashew. "Rapid response time."

  "The Dutch gave him a gold chain as a retainer, and they were going to send a marketroid to Italy to negotiate terms when the Pope got wind of it and they had to cancel his ticket. Galileo wasn't exactly flavor of the month with the Pope, on account of theological differences about whether the Earth went 'round the Sun or vice versa. By the time the Dutch plucked up enough courage to send someone, Galileo had snuffed it."

  "That," said Bailey, "is about the least vidivisual story I have ever heard. Jonas, you're a genius. The kind of genius that dies of poverty in a garret."

  Jonas shrugged. "Still deep background, Bailey. It gets better, trust me." Bailey found an unopened bottle and poured a round of drinks. Jonas was a great guy; it just took him a while to get to the goddamned point.

  "Another Italian guy took up the same idea. Gian Domenico Cassini."

  "Right on! The womanizer, right?"

  "No, that was Casanova."

  "Oh. Don't we get any breaks?"

  Jonas tried to keep calm. "These guys were scientists."

  "We don't."

  "Cassini made lots of new observations, drew up new tables, and in 1668 he revived the whole Jovian moons scam. This time, a lot of people pointed their telescopes into the night sky and tried it."

  Despite himself, Bailey was starting to get interested. If only Jonas would explain how any of this would revive their flagging fortunes. He poured himself another glass, offered one to Cashew.

  "Did it work?" she said.

  "Sort of. With the equipment they had in those days, you couldn't actually make the observations from a moving ship. Imagine trying to keep a telescope steady on the deck of an old sailing ship! But land-based telescopes were okay. In the 1670s hundreds of cities and towns used Jupiter's moons to work out their longitude. Cassini even made a map of the whole goddamned world that way, called it the planisphere. Twenty-four feet across, it was, on the third floor of the west tower of the Paris observatory. King Louis XIV came to see it—brought the whole of his court—"

  Bailey sat up in his chair. "Now, that fucking well is vidivi-sual! I can see it now. Lots of pomp and circumstan—"

  "Yeah. Bailey, shut up, huh? We'd never get a license for the horses, the History Channel always grabs the whole allocation."

  "Thanks, Cashew. Now, Louis was really impressed, and he invested big bucks in the whole deal. Then in 1682—"

  Bailey groaned. "For God's sake, Jonas, what's the bottom line? What's the program idea?"

  It would ruin the careful buildup, but Jonas could see that his boss was about to explode, so he relented. "Okay, Bailey. The bottom line is: we re-create the expedition of 1682 made by a couple of guys named Varin and des Hayes—two of King Louis' engineers. Just like them, we set out from Goree and end up in Martinique."

  "Huh?"

  "Across the Atlantic from east to west, filling in the biggest navigational gap of them all—the longitude of the New World."

  "Eh? What new—"

  "The goddamned Caribbean, Bailey—outpost of the American continent. It was new then. Thanks to Varin and des Hayes, people found out, for the hrst time, exactly where it was on the face of the globe."

  The idea seeped in slowly. "Hmm. Yeah, maybe. Normerica: Its Place in the World. Not your best program concept, but— hmm. Needs a bit mo—"

  "We don't just re-create the appearance of the voyage, Bailey. We do it using only the navigational methods available in 1682. A sextant to find latitude, a pendulum clock, a nineteen-foot telescope, and an ephemeris of Jupiter's moons to calculate longitude."

  There was a stunned silence. Cashew was the first to break it. "You mean we don't use the navsatsV

  "Yeah."

  "But how would we know where we were?"

  Jonas took her gently by the hand. "Cashew, haven't you listened to a single word I've been saying?"

  The thought was awesome. "You mean that ridiculous old method actually works!"

  "Think of it as a kind of God-given system of navsats. But they're going 'round Jupiter, not the Earth, and the only signals they broadcast are light."

  "God's Navsats! That's what we'll call it! Jonas, it's brilliant!" Bailey leaped to his feet, stopped, sat down again. "Provided we can actually pull the scam off. I thought you said nobody could observe Jupiter's moons from a ship."

  "Not then. Easy enough now. Quick snap with a charge-coupled device and a photomultiplier tube, all over before the ship can move."

  Cashew wasn't buying that. "You said 're-create.'"

  "In spirit. You said yourself we'll never get the horses, probably have to use wire-frame simulacra and postproduction graphic drapes. So we fuzz out history a bit on the telescopes. Nineteen feet long, yeah: old-fashioned optics—nah. Likewise we set the calculations up on a wristnode, rather than doing them freehand with pen and paper. Safer that way." Jonas's eyes were wide, his heart racing.

  "Yeah." Bailey's vidivisual antennae were pulsating, glowing— melting. He could see exactly how it would go. And it would, indeed, go. Ballistic to big One, please God. Provided—"But we do one thing right, and this I insist."

  "What?"

  "We don't take any navsat gear."

  Cashew was reluctant. "Not even as failsafe?"

  "Nope. We want it failunsafe. For the Lumleys."

  Ah, yes, the sacred Lumleys. The others nodded.

  "And we don't take any transponders."

  That was even harder to take. Not even passive observations by outside observers. "Hell, Bailey, that's genuinely dangerous. The insurers will throw a fit."

  Bailey dropped his final bombshell. "No insurers."

  Hot shit. "You mean we take the responsibility ourselves?" Cashew's voice had gone up an octave. This was totally new intellectual territory.

  "Tranq yourself down, Cashew, then hear what I say. The way to get the Lumleys is to grab the audience by their collective balls and squeeze them so hard their eyes pop out on stalks. No navsats, no transponders, and no insurance. Just a trio of intrepid explorers against the raging ocean."

  Cashew shuddered. "You're mad, Bailey Stark staring crazy." She tossed back her drink. "It's brilliant."

  "Yeah."

  "Provided our master navigator here can hack it with the gear."

  Jonas rose to the bait. "Are you doubting the abilities of the best vidi-engineer in the known universe?"

  "No, Jonas. I'm doubting your abilities."

  "Crap. Bet you a week's pay our final landfall is accurate to within a hundred yards."

  Cashew nodded like a woodpecker on speed, and Bailey entered the bet into his wristnode's notary.

  Charity had been unusually quiet during the drive back to the house, but as soon as they reached it, her pent-up curiosity could no longer be contained. As she bustled about the tiny kitchen fixing food and drink, she dropped ever heavier hints. She knew Prudence had made some kind of discovery, otherwise she wouldn't have returned to Earth. Last time it had been gia
nt Ionian sulfur flowers, worth a fortune to any private collector and therefore beyond the reach of any legitimate scientist—which is what had caused all the trouble.

  What was it this time? Charity desperately wanted to know, and it showed.

  Prudence sighed. Soon she'd have to put her sister out of her misery or there would be some kind of meltdown. She hesitated, knowing how difficult Charity found it to keep her mouth shut. When she was a kid they'd called her Chatty; Prudence still used it as a pet name. But in a sense the damage was already done. The moment Prudence had set foot on Earth, her sister would guess there must be a very good reason indeed for her return. That thought would not be lost upon others, either.

  Anyway, the story would soon be public domain.

  "Chatty?" Charity put down the potato peeler and looked up. "Promise you won't breathe a word of what I'm about to tell you? Not to anyone? Not your confessor, not your lover, not even your personal disorganizer." Charity blushed: only one of the three was even a remote possibility. She nodded, then said, "Yes, I understand," to show she was serious, even though she had no idea what her sister was talking about.

  "Soon—very soon, but I can't yet say when—you'll be free to tell everybody. But not till I give the word, okay?"

  "Okay"

  Prudence unpeeled her flight bag and pulled out a box sealed with tape. Sitting it on the table, she pulled off the tape and pried the lid off the box. Inside was an irregular lump, about the size and shape of a squashed cat, wrapped loosely in bub-blewrap to absorb shocks. She removed it from the box, placed it on the rough kitchen table, and unwrapped it.

  The object was metallic, bent, and corroded. Its shape was hard to describe—sort of lumpy and lopsided, curiously organic yet technological ... Its most recognizable features were three wheels set deep into the body, one at each corner, except that where the fourth should have been there was just a circular