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and introduces himself in a pleasant tone, “Lag. Is this taken?” The table responds in a chorus of “Oh, not at all/Please be my guest/Have a seat/Welcome.”
    “Ah, thank you. Sorry I’m late. Always more details.” The others return to their conversations while Lag looks over the menu, makes a couple of rapid selections, and sets it down. He turns to speak to Bipasha, but the ship’s announcement system chimes, and the familiar calm female voice sounds.
    “May I have your attention, please. Navigation has informed the Captain that due to a change in the regional subspace conditions and forecast our schedule will be somewhat altered.” A collective groan rises from the around the dining room. The passengers listen attentively and exchange looks.
    “We still expect to arrive in Niven on the scheduled date. We will be detouring through a swirl headed our way, stopping briefly at a transfer station point outside of Eldari to exchange passengers, then continuing to Balltic and Niven. Ship time will be approximately five days, universal time about seventy-two hours plus a short time at Eldari for transfers. We will be arriving at the Eldari transfer point in about ninety hours. That is all.” The dining room erupts in murmurs of excitement, confusion, and relief.
    Senator Snol thumps the table with his beefy hand. “I don’t understand; we’ll be on the ship for five days, but we will arrive at Niven in only three? And we won’t get to the transfer for ninety hours? That doesn’t make any sense!”
    “Yes, that’s impossible,” his wife agrees. “How can we get there before we leave?”
    “No, we won’t,” Helton responds politely.
    Liner Engineer looks at him acutely. The others look at Helton curiously, surprised at his plain contradiction of a powerful man.
    “The details of FTL are complicated of course, but the basic idea isn’t. Universal time, how time passes in the conventional universe where we usually live, passes as a pretty constant rate everywhere. According to the clocks on Niven and where we just left, we’ll arrive in-system in three days. But time moves differently in subspace, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but always forward, depending on a lot of things: what kind of drives you have, what sort of gravity wells you pass, which way subspace is blowing, and–”
    The doctor’s wife is confused. “Subspace blows?”
    “Yes,” Helton explains, rearranging a few things on the table, removing items from the centerpiece, putting a carafe at one end and a bauble from the centerpiece near the other. “There are twenty-two dimensions, as you may have heard. Three in space that we can normally perceive, plus time. The physics are similar, but different, in the other dimensions, and by transitioning into them we can do things like going faster than light can here in our universe. But, just like space bends from gravity and solar winds blow here, things are neither smooth nor static in the other dimension. It’s kind of like wind. A little bit of wind and you can walk or fly normally and mostly ignore it. If there is a strong tailwind blowing, you get there faster; if you are bucking a strong headwind it takes longer, but the distance is the same. If a hurricane is passing through, then you can’t go anywhere–”
    “Ah, the ‘Deep Black’,” Bipasha interjects.
    “Yes, that is where the subspace is simply much too turbulent to transition into and fly.” The others look at him with expressions of interest or incomprehension.
    “Pretend this,” he indicates the centerpiece on the table, “is an island. That,” pointing to the bauble, “is your ship, and that,” points to carafe, “is your destination. In a light tailwind blowing from you,” pointing to the Flight Engineer on the end, “the ship could sail down either side of the island at the same speed, but going back would be slower. But if a strong wind was blowing from you ,” points to another, “at an angle