Infinity Beach (27 page)

The FAULS screen was blank again. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think the invitations are working.”

There was nothing more for almost two hours. Then
Hunter
transmitted the open-door image again, this time
with Tripley. But he merely waved to the viewer and made no effort to point at the cargo area.

“I guess they’re at a standstill,” said Solly.

Kim exhaled. “I’m surprised.”

“In what way?”

“That they’d spent so many years trying to accomplish precisely this and been so little prepared for the event.”

“You mean the open-door pictures?”

“I mean the whole thing has a kind of spontaneous feel, doesn’t it? As if they were all taken by surprise. It makes me think they never really
expected
to succeed.”

“What
should
they do?” asked Solly.

“The bottom line is that Emily and her friends can’t do very much. And they need to recognize that. They aren’t going to be able to master a new language; they can get only so far with number games; and it’s obvious that establishing a sense of mutual trust with, say, giant spiders is going to be a tricky business. I’d say it would take a team of specialists to get much beyond saying hello.”

“Therefore—?”

“Therefore they should concentrate on
one
thing: establish a date for a second encounter. If they could do that, they’d have achieved as much success as anyone could wish.”

“How would you go about it?”

“They’ve got a planet handy. They could use the planet to make a date. Show them, say, a couple hundred revolutions. Six months.
We’ll be back in six months.
The meaning would be plain enough.”

“You make it sound easy,” Solly said. “Too bad you weren’t with them.”

She drew up her knees and put her arms around them.
Emily was with them.

Solly was showing signs of frustration. “How about some breakfast?” he suggested.

“No, thanks. I want to stay here.”

“You won’t miss anything. I don’t mind getting it.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not hungry. Really.”

He shook his head. “I’m going to exercise my prerogative as captain and insist. This might go on for another twenty-four hours or so, and I don’t need you getting sick out here.”

She looked at the status panel. At the glowing lamps. “All right,” she said.

He brought out two plates of ham, biscuits, and pineapple slices. Kim ate quietly, subdued, annoyed at the apparent inability of the
Hunter
to create an effective strategy. Solly suggested the celestials might have been scared off by the open door. Or that they might have a cultural bias prohibiting them from befriending a different species. Or—

“How could
that
happen?” she asked. “These critters have spaceflight. Since they’re in the vicinity of Alnitak, they must have FTL. Surely they wouldn’t be afflicted with preconceptions about another sentient species.”

“Maybe they’d have a religious problem about us,” he said. “Maybe we’re not supposed to exist, and we’ve trashed a theological system.”

“I don’t think you’d find that kind of thinking among space-travelers.”

“Really? We had Christians and Muslims arguing all the way out to Carribee. Even the Universalists are inclined to look down on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the official theology.”

“Which is that there
is
no official theology.”

“Doesn’t matter. The same tendency is there. I don’t know. Maybe the celestials don’t come in a lot of packages the way humans do. If there’s basically only one type of critter, it would never have been required to deal with anything
different
.”

Solly slowly ate through his breakfast, let his head drift back, and fell asleep. After an hour or so he woke up, went to his room, showered, and changed. When he came back he looked neater but still fatigued. “I can’t believe they’re just sitting there doing nothing,” he said.

“Maybe they’ve launched the lander,” suggested Kim. “It’s possible they’re trying a meeting.”

“No. There’d be radio traffic. The
Hunter
would need to tell them—
show
them—what they wanted to do.”

During the course of the morning the screens remained quiet. Solly and Kim went over the same ground again and again. By midafternoon Kim thought the quality of the signal had probably disintegrated to a degree they were simply not acquiring it anymore.

“It’s possible,” said Solly. “But not likely.”

They went down to the rec room and worked out. Neither said much and when they were finished, had showered and changed, Solly asked whether she thought it was over.

“Probably,” she said.

“So what do we do now?”

“We listen some more. If we don’t hear anything, we move to another intercept site and listen to it all again. That’ll allow us to take a second bearing and pin down their location.”

“How long do we stay here?”

The
Hunter
had been in the Alnitak area almost two days. “Let’s stay put through midnight tomorrow. If we haven’t heard anything by then, we’ll clear out.”

That evening he came to her with a tenderness and a passion that overwhelmed her. “I’m glad you got what you wanted,” he told her after the first flush of lovemaking had passed. “We don’t have all the details yet, but at least we know it happened.”

“Kiss me, you fool,” she sighed.

The night filled with laughter and a few tears, and she didn’t know why, couldn’t explain the tears either to herself or to him, but just let them flow.

“I’m in bed with an immortal,” he said.

And she knew it was so. Eventually they’d sort everything out, get the answers, learn what had happened to Emily and find out how Yoshi ended up in a river and what had blown the face off Mount Hope. It was just a matter of time, and kids a thousand years from now would be learning how to pronounce her name.

She had never,
ever
, felt more alive than she did then, and she attacked Solly with a will, laughing when he finally slumped back exhausted, pleading with her to give him a rest.

Somewhere around five
A.M.
, lying on her back with Solly’s left arm thrown over her, she decided that she would keep him, she would do whatever she had to. Moreover, Solly was part of this whole marvelous event and she was going to hold onto all of it. They had been wedded by the sheer joy of the experience. The ceremony, when it came, would be only a recognition of what had happened in this most glorious of starships.

They slept late in the morning, ate, watched a VR, and wandered down to mission control, where the FAULS screen was still blank. They had gone more than twenty-four hours without any further interceptions. It now seemed clear, for whatever reason, that the party was over. But they waited anyway. They hurried through dinner, anxious to concede the issue, to be off to their next station, to outrun the radio transmissions, to race across the void and jump back into realspace and take a new bearing on Alnitak.

“But I’m not hopeful,” she said, down considerably from the previous day’s high. She was thinking of the old axiom that if you want people to believe extraordinary claims, you must present extraordinary evidence. Did she
have
extraordinary evidence?

She remembered the telescope she would have turned on Henry IV, and wished with all her heart she had such an instrument to point at the ringed world in the Alnitak system. She’d be able to
see
the two ships,
see
what was happening. It frustrated her to know the photons were all around her, the disassembled truth of whatever had happened to the
Hunter
and the
Valiant
, flowing past, accessible to the proper instruments.

At midnight she sighed. “Time to go.”

The
Hammersmith
passed into hyperspace at 12:41
A.M.
, Saturday, March 10. The plan was to go back outside the expanding bubble of radio signals. They would remain in the plane of the Alnitak system, but their new bearing on the giant star would be at right angles to the first one. They would be traveling roughly thirty light-years, and would arrive at their destination just after eight
P.M.

They slept late. Kim woke up excited, anxious to get through the day, and to launch the second round of FAULS devices. But she could find nothing to occupy her, and ended by playing chess in the rec room with the AI, whom she set at a beginner’s level and proceeded to hammer.

Solly, with his inimitable sense of what was needed, put together another candlelight dinner. She drank a bit more than she should have, and she was a bit woozy when the
Hammersmith
returned to realspace.

This time, because the jump had been much shorter, they arrived closer to their ideal site, and within an hour they were listening again to the
Hunter
trying to open a conversation with its invisible companion. Shortly after the intercept had begun, however, they lost the signal. They were gratified
to see it appear fourteen minutes later, precisely on schedule. That seemed to confirm the speculation that it was passing behind the gas giant.

They knew there’d be several hours of futile signaling by
Hunter
before
Valiant
responded. So they settled in, alternately reading and napping, and occasionally cavorting like adolescents. “This is the way star travel was meant to be,” Solly told her.

Four hours after the first signals, the four-count, had been sent, the
Valiant
had apparently responded.
Hunter
replied with thirteen blips. Emily and her shipmates appeared onscreen, and sent greetings. And showed their open door.

As before, there was no further transmission.

But they had their second bearing. They compensated for stellar movement in the interim, and the lines intersected at a point three hundred AUs from Alnitak. Right on the orbit of the gas giant.

They waited nevertheless through two more days. Finally, there could be no question that the show was over, and Solly put a disk into the recorder and directed the AI to copy the intercept record from both sites. When it was completed he gave it to Kim. “With luck,” he said. “It’ll keep us both out of court.”

“We’ll see.” She looked at the disk. “It might be easier for someone to argue the entire crew of the
Hunter
went over the edge rather than that they actually saw something. That might be stretched to account for the missing women, as well. What we really need is a glimpse of whatever it was they saw.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go to phase two.”

“The scene of the crime?”

“Yep.”

“Why bother? What’s the point? They’re all long gone.”

“Solly,” she said, “put yourself in the place of the other ship. Look, for reasons we don’t understand, our people came back and didn’t say anything. Maybe there was a fight on board, a disagreement on how to handle the announcement, on who was going to get the credit—”

“—That doesn’t make sense—”

“Okay. But something happened. Maybe the experience scared them off. Maybe they saw something so terrifying it drove them all out of their minds—”

“—And we want to go there?—”

“We’ll be careful. And we won’t be taken by surprise. Look, the point is,
both
ships knew there’d been contact. It had to be as big an event for the celestials as it was for us. So what did they
do
afterward? What would you and I do?”

He propped his chin on one hand and gazed steadily at her. “Assuming no real conversation took place and the other ship just took off, we’d post a surveillance.”

“Can you see any possibility we
wouldn’t
do that? That we’d just ignore the incident?”

“No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “No, although we
did
ignore the incident. But I’d have expected we’d have put science teams out there right away.”

“And they’d have stayed for years, right?”

“I suppose. But
twenty-seven
years?”

“Well, maybe not
that
long. I don’t know. But we’d leave some automated systems in place.”

“Sure,” he said. “We’d establish a presence and keep it indefinitely.”

“Right. So all we have to do is show up at Alnitak and let whatever they’ve left behind get a look at us. We head for the gas giant and we do whatever we can to draw attention to ourselves. We look for anything that doesn’t belong there. And if we’re lucky, who knows what might show up?”

At three hundred AUs, the world was eight times farther out than Endgame was from Helios, or six times Pluto’s distance from Sol. It had seventeen satellites and a ring system divided into three sections. A permanent storm of the kind often associated with gas giants floated in its southern latitudes. It required roughly twenty-three centuries to complete an orbit around the central luminary, which even at this extreme distance, was fully a third as bright as Greenway’s noontime sun.

Solly set course toward the planet.

“The system,” said Kim, “has been surveyed once. That was a hit and run, in-and-out. They spent two days here. There are no really unusual features, unless you’re talking about the atmospherics.” She meant the vast interstellar clouds, cradles for new stars, turbulent and explosive, illuminated from within and also by Alnitak. The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light-years across that restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and interior fires. Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in place.

“Slow lightning,” said Solly. “Like the mission.”

Kim looked at the nebula. “How do you mean?”

“We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would
have
to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.”

On the other side of the sky, a long luminous bar, IC434, stretched away into a glorious haze. Presiding over it was the great dark mass of the Horsehead Nebula.

“It’s a place for artists.” She stood by a window looking out at the vast display. The brilliant rings of the gas giant angled past her field of vision, a glowing bridge to its family of moons, all in their first quarter. She looked again at the blowup of Kane’s mural. It was impossible to know whether this world was the one in Emily’s hand. But she’d have bet on it.

There were two other suns in the system, one too remote to pick out, the other bright enough to provide reading light. The nearer was approximately 1300 AUs from Alnitak. It
too was superluminous, though not in the same league with its companion. “People used to think a binary star couldn’t have a planetary system,” she told Solly. “We know better now, but the planets tend to get tossed around a lot, and often thrown out altogether. Especially when both components are massive and there isn’t a lot of space between them.” She eased herself into a chair and gazed steadily at the rings and moons. “It won’t stay in orbit long. It’s just a matter of time before something jerks it loose.”

The planetary disk had an autumnal coloration. The storm was a darker splotch, a circular piece of night. “About one and a half Jupiters,” he said, using the standard measurement for gas giant mass. “I’m beginning to understand why they decided this was the place to stop while Kane did his patchwork.”

“It
is
spectacular. I looked over the records of Tripley’s previous voyages,” said Kim. “He was here before. Wanted to see the Horsehead.”

Solly stared at the clouds and the world for long minutes, and then turned to her. “What do we do first?”

Good question. “We go into orbit. And then we wait.”

“Kim,” he said, “we were a little critical of Tripley for being unprepared to run a contact scenario. Are
we
ready? If something happens?”

She drew herself up in her professorial mode. “Be assured,” she said, “nothing will happen.” They both laughed. In fact, Kim had prepared a visual program to transmit in the event there was an encounter. It included pictures of the
Valiant
and the
Hunter
, of herself and Solly, of interiors of the
Hammersmith
. There were pictures of Greenway’s forests and oceans, of people lounging on beaches. There were anatomical charts of humans and several dozen animals and plants. And finally there was an image of three
Valiants
and three
Hammersmiths
silhouetted against the rings of the Jovian; and the Jovian itself followed by four hundred lines divided into tens. She showed it to Solly.

“We meet back here when the planet has turned on its axis four hundred times.”

“Good,” he said. A day on the gas giant lasted between seventeen and eighteen hours. So they were talking roughly one year. Enough time to outfit an expedition, work out their strategy, and return. “Kim,” he asked, “how do you want me to program the sensors? What exactly are we looking for?”

“Set for maximum sweep and range. And we should look for
anything
that wouldn’t normally be out there. Processed metal. Plastic. Anything that isn’t gas, rock, or ice. Or anything that moves on its own.”

The original survey gave few details for the gas giant. Kim knew it had an equatorial diameter of 187,000 kilometers, and a polar diameter of 173,000 kilometers. Average density was only 1.2 times that of water, indicating a high proportion of the lighter elements, hydrogen and helium. Its axial tilt was 11.1 degrees.

Its most striking feature was the rings, which were coplanar with the equator. They had an overall diameter of 750,000 kilometers, and were divided into three distinct sets. The innermost reached down almost to the cloudtops. They were barely one kilometer thick, so when the
Hammersmith
passed them edge-on they all but vanished.

Two of the satellites were larger than Greenway; one minuscule worldlet at the outermost extremes of the system was only a half-dozen kilometers across. It orbited almost at right angles to the equator.

“It would help,” said Kim, “if we knew precisely where the incident took place.”

“How do you mean?”

“Altitude. Orbit, if possible.”

“Don’t see how we can determine that,” said Solly. “We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet’s not visible at all.”

“But we know when everything happened,” said Kim. “We know now right to the minute.” Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42
A.M.
shipboard time. “We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background.”

“The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system,” he objected.

“The
stars
would,” she agreed.

But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.

There were
two
.

They ran the sequence again,
Hunter
floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights coming on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi’s smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.

They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they’d accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12
P.M.
, February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.

“Okay.” Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. “In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the
Hunter
would have had to be
here
.” He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. “But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it’s not enough to track a complete orbit.”

“We’ve got a second picture,” Kim reminded him. The
Emily
image, which had been taken two hours later.

Solly brought it up, found more moons, three this time, repeated the process, and smiled triumphantly. “I think we’re in business,” he said.

She was delighted. “Good. Let’s get ourselves into the same orbit. But I want to move a bit faster than the
Hunter
would have.”

“Why?”

“So that we’ll overtake anything that might be traveling at
Hunter
’s velocity.”

Solly frowned.

“Just do it, okay?” she said.

“Okay, Kim.”

“And let’s do as thorough a search as we can.”

“What exactly do you expect to find?”

“I expect nothing,”
she said, feeling like Veronica King, who always said that. “But the possibilities are limitless.” The hope that she entertained, that she did not want to describe, was that the celestial was still here somewhere, a derelict. It was
possible
.

Solly passed instructions to the AI. “We’ll be going into orbit,” he told her, “later this evening. And we’ll need roughly twelve hours to do a complete search along the orbit.”

There was something in Solly’s voice. “Anything wrong?” she asked.

“I thought about this before we left but it didn’t really seem like something I wanted to bring up at the time.”

“Tell me, Solly.”