Earth Song: Twilight Serenade (40 page)

In only a few hours she’d managed to process more data from her mystery files than she’d been able to analyze in all the months she’d worked so far, combined.

With a full member species access she went into the Bureau of Planetary Control where leases were kept and checked on that certain mysterious planet. It was indeed logged. Last explored during The People’s era, it had been categorized as unsuitable for colonization due to insufficient land mass and hostile native flora. “No Indigenous Sapients” were noted in the survey, completed by robotic ships.

She tried to compare that survey date against her own data and ran into a wall. There was no commonality with which to compare dates.

Frustrated, she turned to methods she used in space. Ships that travel faster than light needed ways to find out what the date was. It was one of the conundrums of supra-light travel that the faster you went, the less time distortion. The humans’ famous scientist had gotten that one wrong. Of course they’d believed travel faster than light impossible, and the closer you got to light speed the slower time passed for the traveler. That much was true, up to a point. But that was why faster was better.

Even at very high speeds, like a Kaatan was capable of, there was still distortions. So when a ship arrived, in order to be able to communicate and work with others ships, common time indices were necessary. The simplest way to facilitate this was via star positions.

The galaxy was constantly in motion, and all those motions were predictable. Take sighting of known stellar phenomenon, powerful stars or unusual ones, and compare them against records. Adjust as necessary, and you know what time it was.

“Got it,” Lilith thought. Inside the personal files she’d pilfered from her mother were the astronomical files that had once belonged to Mindy Harper, who had been an astronomer before she became the mother of a tribe. There were the observations she needed, taken by the woman after arriving on Bellatrix.

But when she compared it to observations taken before humans’ arrival on Bellatrix…there was an error. Well, not really an error, exactly. Call it an inconsistency.

Minu and Bjorn came down the hall. Everyone in the room became instantly alert. Even Mindy woke up and looked around curiously.

Minu looked like she’d been cut from stone. Her face was all sharp angles and there were deep circles under her eyes. Lilith thought at first her mother looked defeated, but she quickly revised that. She looked resigned. Resigned to a task that would be the hardest thing she ever did.

While everyone was trying to find out what happened next Lilith quickly reviewed the files for details on her ancestor. Mindy Harper was a well-respected astronomer, up until the day she’d reported receiving a signal she claimed to be of extraterrestrial origin. Unable to substantiate the claim, her career and reputation was destroyed.

Lilith wondered if the great Mindy Harper had been that skilled then to make such a mistake. Then she reviewed the details of how Mindy Harper had located Bellatrix by simply looking through the portal and studying the foreign world’s stars and extrapolating the view she saw against the one she had memorized. No, Mindy Harper had had the incredible ability to do that by herself with only that primitive computer capabilities available to her.

“We’re going home,” Minu announced to everyone, “without delay.”

Lilith nodded in understanding as everyone began falling in behind their leader. How was she to tell her mother what she had learned? P’ing had said that when hse arrived on Bellatrix more than a hundred years ago hse had never seen a human before. Comparing the stellar observations, that would make sense.

One hundred years ago on Bellatrix, Lilith thought and recalled the world she’d flown so close to. Its blue seas and swirling white clouds. Its teeming cities that had lit up the night side sky like a hundred thousand stars.

How do you tell your mother that the world of her species’ birth was not only still alive and well, but it had yet to face its moment of fate? And wouldn’t for many more years.