“So I don’t have as high a credit rating as I hoped.”

“Bean, take this offer seriously. While there’s still time. Acceleration is hard on the heart. You have to go while you’re still healthy enough to survive the voyage. As it is, we’ll be cutting it rather fine, don’t you think? A couple of years to accelerate, and at the end, a couple more to decelerate. Who gives you four years?”

“Nobody,” said Bean. “And you’re forgetting. I have to come home. That’s four more years. It’s already far too late.”

Rackham smiled. “Don’t you think we’ve taken that into account?”

“What, you’ve figured out a way to turn while traveling at lightspeed?”

“Even light bends.”

“Light is a wave.”

“So are you, when you’re traveling that fast.”

“Neither of us is a physicist.”

“But the people who planned our new generation of messenger ship are,” said Rackham.

“How can the I.F. afford to build new ships?” asked Bean. “Your funding comes from Earth and the emergency is over. The only reason the nations of Earth even pay your salaries and continue to supply you is because they’re buying your neutrality.”

Rackham smiled.

“Somebody’s paying you to keep developing new ships,” said Bean.

“Speculation is pointless.”

“There’s only one nation that could afford to do that, and it’s the one nation that could never keep it secret.”

“So it’s not possible,” said Rackham.

“Yet you’re promising me a kind of ship that couldn’t exist.”

“You go through acceleration in a compensatory gravity field, so there’s no additional strain on your heart. That lets us accelerate in a week instead of two years.”

“And if the gravity fails?”

“Then you’re torn to dust in an instant. But it doesn’t fail. We’ve tested it.”

“So messengers can go from world to world without losing more than a couple of weeks of their lives.”

“Of their own lives,” said Rackham. “But when we send someone out on such a voyage, thirty or fifty lightyears, everyone they ever knew is dead long before they come back. Volunteers are few.”

Everyone they ever knew. If he got on this starship, he’d leave Petra behind and never see her again.

Was he heartless enough for that?

Not heartless at all. He could still feel the pain of losing Sister Carlotta, the woman who saved him from the streets of Rotterdam and watched over for him for years, until Achilles finally murdered her.

“Can I take Petra with me?”

“Would she go?”

“Not without our children,” said Bean.

“Then I suggest you keep searching,” said Rackham. “Because even though the new technology buys you a bit more time, it’s not forever. Your body imposes a deadline that we can’t put off.”

“And you’ll let me bring Petra, if we find our children.”

“If she’ll go,” said Rackham.

“She will,” said Bean. “We have no roots in this world, except our children.”

“Already they’re children in your imagination,” said Rackham.

Bean only smiled. He knew how Catholic it made him sound, but that’s how it felt to him and Petra both.