WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(36)

Adele squirmed out onto the tiles. Sunlight had warmed them, but the glaze was smooth. She started down, realizing immediately that she should have backed instead of proceeding nose-first.

Daniel squatted at the edge of the roof. He turned and smiled at her, looking like a friendly gargoyle. "Ah?" he said. "Would you like a hand?"

"I'm all right," Adele snapped. "I'm just not used to this."

Daniel nodded and returned his attention to the crowd below, slipping his goggles over his eyes. She wasn't sure whether he was being polite or if he simply took her statement at face value. Daniel Leary wasn't, quite clearly, a man who did things by indirection.

"An RCN officer has to be able to rig the antennas," Daniel said musingly as he looked at the street. "Has to be able to do all the jobs on a warship, actually, but the one that's likely to wash out a midshipman is rigging. `Young gentleman' you may be on the ship's books, but you're trained the same as a rating recruited straight off a farm."

Adele concentrated on crawling, moving one limb at a time. The tiles were half-round sections of ceramic pipe laid each over the end of the next tile below. The ridged surface was hard on her knees but there was no way she'd have been able to walk down the way Daniel had, as calm as if he were at ground level.

All she'd have to do was roll forward dizzily and she would be at ground level, no question.

"The antenna controls are hydraulic," Daniel continued. "Mechanical on some ships, but that's rare. You can't use electrical power to shift the rig. Can't use radio when you're in the Matrix because even a tiny signal distorts the field and the ship goes God knows where. There's no more alone than that."

Adele's fingers touched the lip of the stone gutter. Verdigrised copper downspouts thrust out every twenty feet of its length. The only gargoyles on the Elector's Palace were those in its internal decoration.

Daniel put his hand beside hers on the gutter though his eyes remained fixed on the crowd. "Use my arm as a brace as you get yourself turned around," he said.

"Thank you," Adele said. She gripped his wrist with her left hand and rotated her legs under her. She didn't need the help, but it would have been impolite to refuse—and it was a help.

His arm felt as firm as a piece of structural tubing.

"They say `One hand for the ship and the other for yourself,' " Daniel said, "but you can't always do that. If a joint's frozen or a valve is bleeding fluid, you need both hands for the job . . . and you use them, even though if you drift and the ship leaves you behind it'll be like you never existed."

Adele put her heels in the gutter but deliberately crossed her hands in her lap instead of bracing them behind her. She took deep breaths and forced herself to look down on Fountain Street. Crews were rolling a float up the palace's entrance drive to the waiting grandstands. It was supposed to be a spherical starship.

"I love standing at the top of an antenna, watching the universe throb," Daniel said softly. "It's like being a part of everything that ever was or ever will be.

"Here," he said. He seemed embarrassed to have been so talkative. He took off his goggles and offered them to Adele. "The sign says this was the first landing on Kostroma, by slowboat. I'd thought Kostroma dated from after sponge-space astrogation."

"Umm," Adele said. She held the goggles to her eyes instead of strapping them on. The image was bright and perfectly clear despite being magnified by something on the order of forty times. A pair of servants carried a banner between them on poles. When the angle was right she could read the legend: CAPTAIN WANG'S COLONY—2706 ANNO HEJIRA.

The servants' skin-tight suits looked like no garb Adele had ever seen before. She supposed it was somebody's idea of what people wore in the days mankind was limited to the Solar System.

Adele returned the goggles and slid her personal data unit from its pocket. She sniffed in amusement at the qualm she'd felt at bringing it out: she was even more afraid of dropping the computer than she was of falling.

Using the wands that she preferred to the virtual keyboard, she linked to the base unit in the library below and went searching. The bright sun made her think she should have worn a hat, but she wasn't sure she owned one that would have stayed on in the breeze here on the tiles.

Martial music began to play, its strains severely attenuated by the time they reached Adele's ears. "The float's in front of the grandstand now," Daniel explained with the goggles over his eyes again. He didn't ask what she was doing. "Eight people have gotten out—they can't have had much more room than they would've in a real starship. Especially a slowboat. One of them's claiming the planet, I gather."