Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition

go with Carlotta."

     
    The children came back. Bean piloted the Hound for them again, and this time docked it directly over the cargo bay. The Herodotus was designed for this, and soon the doors opened and a much higher ceiling loomed above Bean.
    He had not realized how claustrophobic he had felt all these years, how the ceiling had oppressed him as he grew larger and larger. But when it was removed, he felt a great lightening of his spirit. He was almost cheerful.
    The children weren't. They were afraid that they would accidently kill him somehow in the transfer. "That's not fair," said Carlotta. "To put that guilt on us."
    "No guilt," said Bean. "I'd rather die doing something than lying here like a melon."
    They had never seen a melon growing on the ground.
    There was work to do before the transfer. Bean insisted that they transfer all the lab equipment first. Bean watched and tried not to fret as the children learned from the drones how to build sealed laboratories in the ecotat. It was a technology well known on the ark, because when they reached the planet's surface it would take time to find or dig tunnels and caves.
    Bean had imagined that he might make the transfer in just a few days, but Carlotta was methodical and slow, testing everything. She also insisted on moving a lot of computers out of Herodotus and getting them powered up and networked in the ecotat. And then the big one.
    "I want to move the ansible," she said.
    Bean hadn't anticipated that one. "Eventually," he said. "But your network is reaching between the ships just fine. You can access human communications systems just fine from there."
    "Ender and I hacked the tech years ago," said Carlotta. "We thought you'd be angry so we didn't tell you."
    At last it was time for Bean to make the voyage.
    It had been hard enough for him to walk into Herodotus when he took the toddlers aboard and left Petra and the other babies -- for their normal children truly were still babies then, just learning to talk, toddling about on unsteady legs. He hadn't cared much about the uselessness of the enlargements that had been attempted. He knew that even the taller table and larger chair would soon be useless to him. He wasn't going to make another. He knew from the start that he would end up lying on his back or his side in the cargo bay, with gravity set as close to nothing as possible.
    But he had walked onto the ship. Now Carlotta cut the gravity to nothing, then turned on the gravitator she had rigged on the Hound. It drew him upward very slowly. She and Cincinnatus rose with him, rotating him slowly in midair, so that when he reached the padded flooring of the Hound, he settled into it very gently on his back.
    "Carlotta," he said, "we can't go until I'm rigged to control the Hound. Bring me my holotop."
    She laughed. "We know how you pilot ships, Father. You're deft at it, but the trajectory you used on every trip you've piloted for us would kill you. Cincinnatus is taking you, and instead of an hour, the trip is going to take the best part of a day. So snuggle in and sleep."

     
    It was a better flight than Bean would have given himself, and as they drifted into the open airlock in the side of the ark, Bean could only admire how deftly Cincinnatus brought the Hound to a stop in the middle of the air.
    This high off the ground, Bean felt almost no gravity. Then the door opened and he saw the ecotat with his own eyes for the first time.
    The relief he had felt when the ceiling lifted in the Herodotus had been nothing compared to this. It was so large, and the false sun in the center of the opposite hub gave such a sincere imitation of sunlight that Bean felt for a dizzying moment as if he had come back home to Earth.
    Then he saw how the world bent upward in both directions, and formed a clearly visible ceiling overhead, with trees and meadows and even small lakes -- ponds, really. But there were birds flying -- had anyone mentioned the birds? -- and while the trees were all from the Formic worlds, Bean had never become an expert on the trees of Earth. They were forest enough for him. The green took his breath away; the strange colors here and there still seemed to belong.

     
    It wasn't a planet, but it was as close to one as he would ever come. He had never thought to be in a living world like this again.
    Carlotta and Cincinnatus had rigged a scaffolding opposite the door, and as they drew him from the bay in the wheel, Bean realized that the cloth