She buzzed in about fifteen minutes before our scheduled lift, and I do mean buzzed. All the worry and guilt on her face couldn't mask the fact that she'd just been through some very serious celebrating with some old friends and was running a good two points above cruise velocity. "Sorry I'm late, Pall," she apologized with the slight breathlessness of having come from the hatchway to the bridge at a dead run.

"Did you have to drop us in the lift pattern?"

"No, I was going to give you another five minutes before I called the tower, I told her as she slid into her chair.

"They'd have had your head," she said, keying for a systems check. "You're supposed to give them twenty minutes' notice of a delay.

"Life is tough all over," I shrugged, watching her fingers skate over the keys. For a moment I considered telling her all the pre-lift checks had been done, but changed my mind. Alana was the serious type who insisted on pulling her own share of the load, and there was no point making her feel any worse about her tardiness. Not that she was really feeling bad now, but it would eventually catch up with her. "So... how did the Angelwing take the news that they had a new captain?"

She laughed, a sparkling splash of sound we heard all too seldom aboard ship. "The funny thing is that they really do have one. Old Captain Azizi's finally retired, and Lenn Grandy's been promoted."

"Ah." The name was vaguely familiar; one of Alana's fellow junior officers during the year she'd been on the Angelwing. "I presume you compared notes on which of you got the captaincy first?"

"Oh, we tried, but we ran into the usual simultaneity problems. He probably made it first, though."

"Well, I bet you look better in the captain's uniform than he does."

She glanced a smile up at me. "Why, thank you, Pall. Maybe sometime this trip you can stay with me during a cascade point and see for yourself."

She glanced a smile up at me. "Why, thank you, Pall. Maybe sometime this trip you can stay with me during a cascade point and see for yourself."

"They're not clock-watchers-Cunard's just very touchy about keeping their liners on schedule," she protested. But she obediently got to her feet and headed for the door. "Just remember, I've got first cascade point duty in four hours."

"We'll see if you're up to it," I called after her, a line that permitted me to be basically honest while still avoiding an argument. Physically, she'd certainly be up to doing the point by then. But emotionally- Emotionally, she would still be carrying the warm glow of the celebration and the triumph of a "captaincy" which, though purely imaginary, was in another sense very real.

And I had no intention of letting cascade point duty ruin that for her quite so quickly.

Four hours later I was alone on the bridge, and ready for the first cascade point.

The Dancer was quiet. All her sensors and control surfaces had been shut down, all electronics including the computer put into neutral/standby mode. The crewers and passengers were shut down, too, the sleepers Kate Epstein had administered guaranteeing they would all doze blissfully unaware through the point. They were ready, the Dancer was ready; and postponing the inevitable gained nothing for anyone.

Lifting the safety cover, I twisted the field generator knob... and watched as the cascade pattern began to fill up the room.

Someone early in the Colloton Drive's history, I'd once heard, had described the experience as being like that of watching some exotic and rapid-growing crystal, and there'd been times I could see it myself on almost that high of an intellectual level. The first four images that appeared an arm's length away were quickly joined by the next set, perfectly aligned with them, and then by the third and fourth and so on, until I was at the center of an ever-expanding horizontal cross of images.

Images, of course, of me.

Land-bound philosophers and scientists still had lively arguments as to what the effect "really" was and what the images "really" represented, but most of us who saw them regularly had long since come to our own conclusions, minus the fine details. The Colloton Drive puts us into a different kind of space... and somehow it links us through to other realities. The images stretching four ways toward infinity were hints of what I would be doing in each of those universes.

In other words, what my life would be like if each of my major decisions had gone the other way.

I spent a moment looking down the line, focusing on each of the semi-transparent images in turn. Four figures away, conspicuous among the jumpsuits and coveralls on either side of it, was an image of myself in the gold and white of a star liner captain.

I didn't regret the decision I'd made a year earlier that had lost me that universe, but the image still sometimes raised a reflexive lump into my throat. I had the Dancer-my ship, not some bureaucracy's-and I was satisfied with my position... but there was still something siren-song impressive about the idea of being a liner captain.

I didn't regret the decision I'd made a year earlier that had lost me that universe, but the image still sometimes raised a reflexive lump into my throat. I had the Dancer-my ship, not some bureaucracy's-and I was satisfied with my position... but there was still something siren-song impressive about the idea of being a liner captain.

Reaching to the small section of control board that still showed lights, I activated the Dancer's flywheel.

The hum was clearly audible in the silence, and I shifted my gaze to the mirror that showed the long gyroscope needle set into the ceiling above my head. Slowly, as the flywheel built up speed, the needle began to move. The computer printout by my elbow told me the Dancer needed a rotation of three point two degrees to make the four point four light-years we needed for this jump. It was annoying to have to endure a cascade point for such relatively small gain-the distance traveled when we left Colloton space went up rapidly with the size of the yaw angle the ship had rotated through-but there was nothing I could do about it. The configuration of masses, galactic magnetic field, and a dozen other factors meant that the first leg of the Baroja/Earth run was always this short. And it was accounted for in our-as usual-tight schedule. So I just leaned back in my chair, did what I could to ease the induced tension that would turn into a black depression when we returned to normal space, and thought about Alana. Alana, and her phantom captaincy.

It had been on the last cascade point coming in to Baroja that she'd first seen the gold-and-white uniform in her own cascade image pattern, tucked in there among the handful of first- and second-officer dress whites that represented the range of possibilities had she stayed with the Angelwing. She'd caught the significance immediately, and the resulting ego-boost had very nearly gotten her through the point's aftermath without any depression at all. She'd left the liner four years back for reasons she'd apparently never regretted, which put the new image into the realm of pleasant surprise rather than that of missed opportunity. A confirmation of her skills; because had she stayed aboard the liner, she, not Lenn Grandy, would be captain today.

Or so the theory went. None of us who believed it had ever come up with a way to prove it.

The gyro needle was creeping toward the three-degree mark now. Another minute and I'd shut the flywheel down, letting momentum carry the Dancer the rest of the way. A conjugate inversion bilinear conformal mapping something something, the mathematicians called the whole thing: a one-to-one mapping between rotational motion in Colloton space and linear translation in normal space. Theorists loved the whole notion-elegant, they called it. Of course, they never had to suffer the drive's side effects.