The ship was very fast, as men reckoned such things. Boosted by lasers fixed to the moon and floating in space, by the time the ship reached the point it was at it was going a very appreciable fraction of c. Everything was operating normally, though there was a bit of trouble in the Number Thirty-three vent. There were nearly a hundred such, however, which allowed Mission Control or the robot to steer the thing a bit. Even with one such operating at suboptimal efficiency, there was no danger.
Imagine the consternation at Mission Control, then, when the robot and sail seemed to wink out of existence completely…
Chapter Two
I loved you
And so I took the tides of men into my hands
And wrote my will across the sky in stars…
Cochea,
Provincia del Valle de las Lunas, Republica de Balboa,
Terra Nova, 10/7/459 AC
Art, precious metals and the occasional young slave were not the only in-demand product of Earth. Music, too, was popular, in particular the wild and violent sounds of the twentieth century. Earth literature also had its place on the new world. Both had been brought by the original immigrants in the form of computer discs. Much had been lost, of course, but much had survived the days from when the old computers wore out. Indeed, developing new machines capable of reading the old discs had given Terra Nova a leg up in artificial intelligence, generally.
As with many immigrant tongues on Old Earth-American English, Quebecois French and South African Dutch, for example- many of the languages of Terra Nova retained many features that had been lost to their mother tongues. Indeed, a man or woman of the twentieth century would likely have found the English of the Federated States more comprehensible than that commonly used by the Anglic-speaking proles of Old Earth. In any case, this made much of the older music of Old Earth quite in tune with Terra Novan listeners.