Infinity Beach (25 page)

On the sixth day out they tried a Veronica King interactive, “The Laughing Genie.” Kim’s taste ran to the King adventures because they were much more than whodunits. Rather, the emphasis was on solving puzzles in which crimes may or may not have occurred. When a victim died, she was inevitably in a locked room, or asleep under the watchful eye of a security system that detected no perpetra
tor. In “The Laughing Genie,” an archeologist has spent a lifetime looking for the tomb of Makarios Hunt, the second century Numian dictator and mass murderer; he finds it; but uses explosives to reseal it and refuses to tell anyone its location, or what he has seen.

They enjoyed it so much that the following night they tried “The Molecular God,” the story of a physicist who comes into possession of the lost diaries of Embry Sickel, whose work led to the development of the jump engine. The physicist, now in possession of an exceedingly valuable historical document, proceeds to burn it and apparently leaps from a seventh-floor office.

In each case, witnesses and documents are made available to the detectives, played, of course, by Kim and Solly. They switched the roles back and forth. Kim particularly enjoyed portraying the giant bodyguard Archimedes Smith.

They spent much of their time lounging in virtual environments. Kim preferred artscapes, settings that never existed and never would, where colors and images assumed impressionist designs, where fountains floated in midair and sprayed tactile light into azure skies. Solly was more conservative: he liked seascapes, mountains, and had a special taste for the Egyptians, favoring pyramids and the great temple from the Valley of the Kings. Sometimes the temple was portrayed as a ruin; sometimes it was seen as it appeared during its glory days.

Neither was inclined to be alone, but since Solly tended to lose his color among Kim’s abstractions, she gave in and settled for the more mundane surroundings.

She had plenty of time to think, and she spent much of it trying to persuade herself that she’d done the right thing. She fretted over Solly, and came to realize that she desperately wanted him not to come to grief because of her.

She owed him a considerable debt. He’d helped her through some bumpy times, including the loss of the only man she’d ever thought she loved. He’d gone off with an accountant, leaving her a note wishing her a good life. Kim un
derstood now that the relationship would never have worked, but the experience, even after several years, still gnawed at her. Solly and his then-wife Ann had almost adopted her during that period.

Later, when Ann chose not to renew, Kim had been there when he needed to talk, and had even fixed him up with friends.

They had a lot of good memories and prided themselves in thinking they were closer, in many ways, than most lovers. They’d celebrated together, supported each other, and enjoyed one another’s victories. When Kim’s wildeye team had won an amateur championship two years earlier, Solly, who was bored silly by team sports, had been in the stands.

They’d grown closer after Ann left. But there was a line between them, and they both respected it.

But Kim had begun to fantasize about Solly. And one evening, midway through the third week, she decided the time had come to make an offer.

It was her turn to choose the evening’s entertainment. She selected
Raven
, a historical romance set in Equatoria’s second century, when law, order, and civilization had all broken down. The Raven was a dark jewel, supposedly a relic from an unknown and possibly nonhuman technology, which falls into the hands of Clea, a young woman who must transport it through a host of perils to present it finally to its rightful owner. She is pursued by all manner of pirates, scavengers, corrupt government officials and, most feared of all, the bandit chief Aranka.

The program incorporated a nudity selector, which Kim set at a modest level. When they were ready, when the drinks had been poured and the snacks set out, she started the entertainment.

Clea of course wore Kim’s appearance.
Was
Kim.

She has just rented a flyer and is preparing to cross a rain forest on the last leg of a trip home when a wounded man staggers out of the trees barely ahead of a mob of pursuers.
The pursuers have guns and are blazing away. The fugitive sees her and turns in her direction. Clea is his only chance.

She hesitates and throws open the hatch. He leaps on board in a hail of lasers. The flyer bucks but lifts off and they are away.

But the man is bleeding profusely.

Clea examines him and sees quickly that he’s dying. She does what she can. In the meantime, another flyer takes off in pursuit. In a spectacular sequence, she leads it into a tunnel where an oncoming train takes it out. But the aircraft has also suffered damage and is forced to land.

“What happened?” she asks her passenger when they are on the ground. “What did they want?”

He produces the Raven. Minutes later he is dead and she detects movement in the trees around her. She hides the artifact under a seat. Nomads emerge from the woods and take her prisoner.

They talk of selling her into slavery. Clea tries to win the favor of her captors by performing a torrid torchlight dance. It is this sequence which had prompted Kim to select
Raven
. The viewer never quite gets a good look at the dancer: everything is firelight and shadow, tempo and drum. Passion and temptation.

While her doppelganger writhed and spun, Kim sat back with a mix of satisfaction and nervousness. It was, after all, not very subtle. If Isabella’s DNA had opened the way for Columbus, hers was now performing a similar service for Solly. A smile formed on her lips: the eternal female, real or virtual, civilized or barbarian. The game never changes.

Solly watched the shadow play, but kept his eyes averted from
her
.

He knew of course what was happening and it was evident he was trying to play his own game, pretending to be objectively amused by the scenario. But she saw the tension in his face.

She lost track of the narrative at this point. The entire world—curious that she would think in that term, given that
the entire world, in this reality, consisted exclusively of the interior of the
Hammersmith
—the entire world squeezed down to Solly’s eyes, narrowed, looking straight ahead, aware of her all the same.

“I don’t think,” he said finally, still avoiding her glance, “this is a good idea.”

She let almost a minute pass. They might have been frozen in place, illuminated only by the flickering glow of the VR. “Okay,” she said at last. “Whatever you think.”

Solly touched the remote and shut down the projector. The room went dark save for the soft glow of security lights along the base of the wall.

Nobody moved.

“Kim.” His voice was low and seemed to come from far away. “I think I love you.”

And there it was: finally out in the open.

She got up and stood before him, entwined her arms around his neck and drew him to her.

“I’ve always loved you,” he said.

“I know.” It was what made the moment particularly frightening. And particularly joyful.

He pulled her down beside him. Their lips brushed lightly, withdrew, came back. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said.

She could feel his heart beat. Or maybe it was hers. It was getting hard to tell.

His cheek was hot against hers and she clung to him, reveling in the passion of the moment. She felt him shudder. But he still seemed tentative.

“It’s okay, Solly,” she said.

Inhibited by the behavior pattern of more than a decade, he drew just far enough away to look at her. “I’m not sure about this,” he said.

“Be sure.” She took his hand and placed it against her breast.

The bunks were not portable, nor were they big enough to accommodate two people, so after the first couple of nights,
which were spent in a tangle on the floor of the rec room, they retreated to their individual quarters after their passions had been satisfied.
Ham
, Solly remarked, had not been designed for lovemaking.

Kim found the arrangement eminently unsatisfactory. Solly agreed and removed the mattresses from two of the beds, added some cushions, took over a third compartment, and turned it into their sleeping room. It worked quite well.

As one might expect, morale on the spacecraft soared. Solly revealed to her, under prodding after an offhand remark, that in his view she’d spent much of the first week in a general funk. Reviewing her moods, she realized it was probably true. Despite his presence, she’d felt alone because it was
she
who had pushed the project, she who had insisted it was worthwhile to hang their careers out to dry. She who would bear the responsibility if they found nothing. And then she had learned that Solly thought it would be
better
if the mission failed.

Well, now at least Solly had come on board. So to speak.

Kim began to think of those days as the happiest of her life. By the end of the fourth week, she was wondering how she could possibly have waited so long to take him.

At midnight on the thirty-second day of the voyage, February 30, the second nova would be triggered. “If we get lucky,” she said, “Beacon will be obsolete before they’ve blown Ozma.” Ozma was scheduled to be the last star in the series.

Despite the exhilaration that came with giving herself free rein with Solly, she had begun to develop an irritation at being cut off from the outside world. “It isn’t just the newscasts,” she explained. “It’s like being in a cocoon.”

“You need more candlelight and music,” Solly said. “It’s probably the same effect that causes hallucinations in the liners. There, it’s less pressing because there are a thousand or so people on board. They run casinos and gossip shows and all kinds of things like that, but even then the sense of
extreme solitude affects people. Here there are only the two of us.”

“I recall,” Kim said, “reading an account once about a woman stranded on a world for three months before help came. She had all she could do to stay sane, knowing she was the only person on the planet.”

Solly nodded.

“Do
you
feel it?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “The ship has echoes. It’s like an old house. But look, if it’s getting to you, we can jump back into realspace and at least talk to somebody. You could ask Phil Agostino how he’s doing.”

“How long would that take? To talk to somebody at the Institute?”

“Several days for the transmission to make the round-trip.”

“Not really worth it, is it?”

“It is if you need to do it.”

“No,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”

That night, at midnight, they toasted the Beacon Project. They did it with mixed drinks and crystal glasses that Kim had brought aboard, and Solly expressed his fervent hope that, when the light from the novas reached Greenway in several centuries, people would still remember Kim Brandywine.

She blushed. “Why
me
?”

“It would be a reminder of a time when the human race thought it was alone. Before Brandywine opened the door.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Kim, refilling both glasses.

“I’ve something more important for you to drink to.”

She laughed and put down her glass and kissed him and rubbed her breasts against him, warming to see the light come into his eyes. “What could be more important?”

“Kim,” he said, “I know this is a special circumstance, and I don’t want to read more into it than what’s there. But I want you to know that, when we go home, wherever we go from here, I’m not going to want things to go back to being the way they were.”

It was the moment she’d both feared and hoped for. “I don’t think we ought to make any decisions like that out here,” she said.

“Why not? Or is that a
no
?”

They were sitting on their impromptu bed, both in underclothes. A Nelson adventure was running, full-masted naval warships blazing away at one another. They’d turned off the sound and reduced the images so that the vessels simply floated in the middle of the room.

“No, it isn’t. I just don’t think we should rush into this.” She wondered why she was saying something so at odds with what she was feeling.

“Okay,” he said.

“Solly, let’s let it go for now. Enjoy what we have.”

“Okay.” He looked unhappy.

“I mean, hey, how long’s Ann been gone?”

“Seven years.”

“That’s how long you waited to make your move.” She was surprised at her own sudden anger. Where the hell had
that
come from?

Solly said nothing for several moments. Then he excused himself and left the room.

Goddamn it. A lover’s quarrel.

It hadn’t taken long.

Never go to bed angry.

They slept together that night as they had every night since
Raven
. But the lovemaking was perfunctory, reserved, cautious. One might almost say
politic
.

“Are you okay?” she asked, when they’d finished and lay quietly, aware that the tension had not eased.

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. Solly, I don’t want you angry with me.”

“I’m not angry.”

And so it went. The odd thing was she’d never seen him this way before. She’d known him to sulk, to take offense, and even on occasion to turn cold. But there was something deeper here, a degree of resentment that both surprised and hurt her.

It might have been that he also regretted the lost years, and that he was holding her responsible. Being bottled up in the ship didn’t help. Everything was too closed in. There was too much solitude.

In the morning things were better. He apologized and agreed that of course they should wait, should not rush into commitments that maybe neither of them was ready to keep.

During the days that followed they supplemented their
impassioned evenings by creating love by proxy, staging romances in which their alternate selves indulged in exotic exploits. But only with each other. No outsider was permitted to join the party.

The climax of the first phase of the flight came during the late afternoon of March 7, the thirty-ninth day. The
Hammersmith
’s automatic systems warned them that transition into realspace was imminent. They’d been waiting in mission control, drinking coffee, full of anticipation for the hunt.

“Five minutes,”
said the AI.

Kim brought the harness down over her shoulders.

“Zero hour,” said Solly. “Good luck.”

The ship was always alive with the sound of power, of ongoing maintenance, of life support, of the engines even when they were in an inactive mode, which was most of the time. Kim had quickly become inured to it and heard it only when she deliberately listened for it, or when the tone changed. Now, as they approached their destination twenty-seven light-years off Alnitak, the jump engines began to build and power flowed through the walls.

Kim’s eyes drifted shut. She imagined herself going home with the evidence, showing Agostino proof that an encounter had taken place, calling press conferences, accepting the congratulations of the world. A thousand years from now people would still speak in hushed tones of the flight of the
Hammersmith
.

The
real
challenge, she suspected, would be to create a
second
meeting.

It all seemed very promising, and she was luxuriating in the glory to come when the jump engines took hold and they crossed back out into realspace.

“Okay,” said Solly. “That’s it. We’ve arrived.” He brought the forward view up on the overhead screen. It was filled with stars.

“Time to get to work,” she said, so anxious she could scarcely contain herself.

He reached over and clasped her hand. “We should have
thirty hours or so before the signal will be arriving here. But since we can’t trust the clocks, let’s get to it.”

Constellations tend to dissolve when one moves a considerable distance toward them. Stars that appear in home skies to be close to one another are seldom so in reality. But Orion’s Belt was a brilliant exception. Its three superluminous components remained in their classic relationship to each other, except that here, at a range of less than thirty light-years rather than the approximately fifteen hundred across which humans customarily saw them from Greenway, they dazzled the eye and utterly dominated the night.

Mintaka, “The Belt,” is the westernmost. It’s officially Delta Orionus, the least brilliant of the three, with a luminosity 20,000 times that of Sol or Helios. It has a relatively dim companion, not visible at this range, which orbits at about half a light-year.

Epsilon Orionus, in the middle, is also known by its Arabic name
Alnilam
, “Belt of Pearls.” Its luminosity is twice that of Mintaka. A haze surrounds it, caused by the irregular nebulous cloud NGC 1990, glowing in the way that cloudy skies do when they reflect light from cities.

And finally, on the east, Zeta Orionus.
Alnitak
.

The Girdle.

She watched it move to center screen in the mission control center as the
Hammersmith
turned toward it. Alnitak too had collected a haze, contributed by the Flame Nebula and the emission nebula IC434.

“We are on course toward Alnitak,”
said the AI.
“And accelerating to thirty-four kilometers per second.”

“Very good, Ham,” said Solly.

The ship’s normal operating antennas locked on the giant star. Others emerged from wells around the hull and lined up along the central axis.

“It really amazes me,” said Kim.

“What’s that?”

“I’d always thought of the ship’s captain bent over consoles, punching buttons, making adjustments, doing stuff.
You could sit here with a good book and nobody’d know the difference.”

“We’ve got good public relations,” he said. “Maybe you should think about going to work for the pilots’ association.”

The engines shut off and they began to coast.

“Acceleration complete, Solly,”
said the AI.

“All right, Ham. Launch FAULS.”

Twin ports that had originally been designed to accommodate probes ejected a pair of communications packages. Eleven minutes later a second pair were launched. And then a third, until sixteen of the devices had been released.

They waited several hours while the packages arranged themselves into a vast field, aimed at the target star. Then they unfolded, one at a time, great white blossoms opening up.

Kim never left the mission control center during the deployment, save for a couple of trips to the washroom and a quick meal. At around eleven
P.M.
, Ham announced that FAULS had come online. They now had a radio dish whose effective diameter was roughly equivalent to that of the orbit of Greenway’s outermost moon.

Solly smiled at her. “Do you want to give the command?”

“Oh yes,” said Kim. “Ham, activate FAULS.”

Lamps blinked on.
“FAULS activated.”

A storm of low-volume static spilled out of the speakers.

An auxiliary screen on Kim’s right powered up. The system ID blinked on and stipulated it was working.

“Activate program search,” said Solly.

“Activated.”
The static volume lessened.

“Now what?” she asked.

He looked up at the overhead monitor, which was locked on Alnitak, and increased magnification until the star became a disk. “We wait,” he said.

She diverted the input to her earphones and listened for a few minutes. The void was alive with radio waves, a cacophony of whimpers and squeals and murmurs, the fading shrieks of stars plunging into black holes, the staccato clatter of pulsars, the murmur of colliding hydrogen clouds. The
FAULS search program would sort out anything that might be a coherent signal. If
Hammersmith
succeeded in picking up a broadcast from the
Hunter
(or by wild chance from something else), the AI would immediately sound an alarm.

Solly instructed Ham to kill the sound.

Kim wondered about the range of possibilities, whether they might not be able to travel one day to remote places and collect historically significant radio broadcasts. Of course, they’d have to get closer to home. At fifteen hundred light-years from Greenway, and
sixteen
hundred from Earth, no radio transmissions would yet have reached this far. It was fascinating to think what they could see if they had a telescope capable of looking at Earth, where at this relative moment Henry VI sat on the British throne and Joan of Arc was a schoolgirl.

Solly got up. “That’s as much as we can do for now. Want to go back to the workout room for a while?”

She was surprised he was willing to walk off at a time like this, even though the high-probability period was still hours away. “No,” she said, “I think I’ll hang on here.”

She was still there when he came back two hours later with sliced beef and fruit.

They lay awake talking long through the night, listening for the alarm. Now that they were here, on station in a place where she could see countless stars,
clouds
of stars, but no sun, she lost confidence. Silly to do that: she’d checked the math any number of times; the equipment was equal to the task; physical law was very precise about how radio waves traveled in a vacuum. But
Hunter
seemed so long ago, in human terms. And what evidence did she really have other than Kane’s sketch and a bogus set of logs?

Solly, who’d lived all his life in a star-traveling fraternity which assumed that the cosmos belonged exclusively to humanity, tried to encourage her, but his tone gave him away.

They spent most of the next day huddled over the instruments. Kim listened to the cosmic noise and watched the clock. She skipped lunch and tried to read, opening one
book after another. Solly busied himself calibrating instruments that probably needed no attention.

They ate a light dinner and put on another King mystery. Just to watch, without participation. But Kim couldn’t keep her mind on it. They did not go to bed. At midnight Kim was sprawled on the couch, one arm thrown across her eyes, listening to the silence.

“It might take a couple more days,” Solly said. “Maybe even a week. Out here, we can’t be all that precise about where we are.” On the screens, the void rolled out forever. He was about to say something more when Ham spoke to them:
“We have a hit.”

Kim came wide awake.

“Transmission acquired 12:03 a.m. No visual. It is an audio signal only. On standard frequency.”

“Run it,” said Solly. It was 12:06. “From the beginning.”

Kim sat up.

The speaker delivered a single
blip
.

Then, moments later, a pair of blips.

“Is it
Hunter
?” Solly asked the AI.

Three blips.

Four.

“Uncertain. It is artificial, with better than ninety-nine percent probability.”

Hammersmith
had
Hunter
’s transmission characteristics in its files. Given time, and a sufficient sample, it would be able to establish identity beyond question.

“It couldn’t be anybody else,” said Kim, elated. “We’ve
got
them.”

She listened intently for more, but the speakers remained silent. Solly asked, “Is that all?”

“Yes. The signal arrived four minutes ago.”

“Ham, if you get any more, pipe it directly through.”

“They counted to four,” Kim said.

It started again.

One. Two.

“What the hell is that all about?” asked Solly.

Three.

“They’ve seen something.”

Four.

Kim wanted to scream for pure joy. “Something they can’t talk to. They’re trying to say hello.”

And again. One—

“What kind of
hello
is counting to four?”

“It’s the only common language they have. If it’s really a celestial, it can reply by counting to
five
.” She pressed her palms together and whispered a prayer to whatever power controlled such matters. Then she threw herself into his arms. “Solly,” she said, “It’s
really
happening.”

“Let’s hold on before we start to celebrate—”

The signal stopped. Kim let him go, pressed her palms together, and waited.

“If they’ve really got somebody else out there,” she said, “we’ll only get one side of the conversation.” That was because the other vehicle would almost certainly be using a directed signal, as opposed to Tripley’s omnidirectional broadcast.

“Do you think they’re getting an answer?” asked Solly.

It began again. Same pattern.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.” Her heart was pounding. The sequence stopped. And started again.

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Characteristics of the signal have been analyzed,”
said the AI.
“Confirm it is the
Hunter
.”

She visualized the scene: somewhere near Alnitak, the Tripley vessel was busily making repairs,
had been
making repairs—it was at the moment hard to separate past from present—when they’d encountered
something
. The flared teardrop. The
turtle
. The
Valiant
.

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Come
on
,” she pleaded.

Solly watched her. “You still figure they’re getting no answer?”

“I think so. As soon as the other ship responds, they’ll switch to something else.”

“What would they switch to?”

“I have no idea, Solly. Anything—”

One—

“Why doesn’t the celestial answer?” she demanded.

“Maybe they don’t know
how
.” Solly too was caught up in the confusion between past and present. They had, in a sense, retreated into time.

“They’d
have
to know, Solly. How could they
not
?” She prayed for a visual. Had
she
been onboard
Hunter
, she’d have taken the
Valiant
’s picture and sent it across to the other ship, inviting the stranger to do the same. A nice friendly gesture. One that would put an image into the transmissions. And tell her without any question what was going on.

The four-count continued to come in. The durations between individual blips varied, indicating they were manually tapping out the signal. The complete count usually ran about eight seconds. The sequences were divided by almost a minute.

“Are we using the multichannel?” Kim asked. Just in case the celestials transmit and their antenna
happens
to be pointed in the right direction, Ham would be able to hear it.