Starfarers (28 page)

Kenri stood up. The room around him lay as sharp as if he saw it in open space. He no longer heard the music. A metallic singing filled his skull.

He did hear Nivala: “Oms! You whelp!” and from Canda: “Silence!” The sounds came from light-years away. His left hand caught hold of the tunic and hauled the Honorable Oms to his feet. His right hand made a fist and smote.

Oms lurched back, fell, and moaned where he lay. Nivala quelled a scream. From Canda leaped to his own feet.

“Arrest me,” Kenri said. A detached fraction of him wished he could speak less thickly. “Go on. Why not?”

“Kenri, Kenri.” Nivala rose, too. She reached for him. He saw at the edge of vision but didn’t respond. Her arms dropped.

Oms pulled himself to an elbow. Blood coursed from his nose. “Yes, arrest him,” he squealed. “Ten years’ penance confinement. I’ll take everything he’s got.”

From Canda’s shoe nudged his grandson in the ribs, not gently. “I ordered you to stay quiet,” he said. Oms whimpered, struggled to a sitting position, and rocked to and fro.

“That was reckless of you, Lieutenant Shaun,” stated from Canda. “However, it was not unprovoked. There will be no charges or lawsuit.”

“The Kith girl—” Kenri realized he should first have said thanks.

“I daresay she’ll be all right. They’ll raise the money for her father. Kithfolk stick together.” The tone hardened. “Bear in mind, you have renounced that allegiance.”

Kenri straightened. A hollow sort of peace had come upon him.

He remembered a half-human face and eyes without hope and
A man’s only alive when he has something bigger than himself to live and die for
. “Thank you, sir,” he said belatedly. “But I am a Kithman.”

“Kenri,” he heard.

He turned and stroked a hand down Nivala’s hair. “I’m sorry,” he said. He never had been good at finding words.

“Kenri, you can’t go, you mustn’t, you can’t.”

“I must,” he said. “I was ready to give up everything for you. But not to betray my ship, my people. If I did that, in
the end it would make me hate you, and I want to love you. Always.”

She wrenched away, slumped onto the bench, and stared at the hands clenched in her lap. The blonde tresses hid her face from him. He hoped she wouldn’t try to call him tomorrow or the next day. He didn’t know whether he hoped she would take treatment to adjust her mind-set or wait and recover naturally from him.

“We’re enemies now, I suppose,” the colonel said. “I respect you for that more than if you’d worked to be friends. And, since I presume you’ll be shipping out and we’ll never meet again—luck to you, Lieutenant Shaun.”

“And to you, sir. Good-bye, Nivala.”

The Kithman passed through the ballroom, ignoring eyes, and through the anteroom to the ascensor.
Well
, he thought vaguely on his way down,
yes, I will be shipping out.

I do like Theye Barinn. I should go around soon and see her.

The time felt long before he was back in Kith Town. There he walked in empty streets, breathing the cold night wind of Earth.

After her
last zero-zero leap,
Envoy
paused a while, some seven astronomical units from her goal. Again Dayan and Cleland took instruments out onto the hull.

The destination sun glared as bright as Sol at the orbit of Saturn; it was a K0, with about two-thirds the luminosity. Already the searchers knew that eight worlds attended it, that the second was in the zone of habitability and indeed had an oxynitrogen atmosphere, and that thermonuclear power plants operated not only on it but at several other sites
around the system. Now they gathered more data, more precise, for forecasts and warnings.

For a long span, however, their attention was on a point where eyes found nothing but the dark. Meter readings computed numbers, graphic displays bore them the tidings. Their hearts knocked.

“Yes,” Dayan said, “there’s no more doubt. A pulsar, within one-third parsec of us. And it has planets.”

No mere white dwarf like Sirius B—a neutron star, self-compressed remnant of a giant that burst itself asunder, clinker still shooting its furious radio beams into space with no message but its own ferocity—Unless ships from Earth had traveled well beyond Sol’s neighborhood since
Envoy
left, humans had never before been this close to one.

“Wouldn’t the supernova have sterilized the planet here?” Cleland saw immediately that his question was stupid, blurted in excitement.

Dayan’s head shook, shadowy behind the helmet. “No, it wasn’t near at the time. High proper motion; it’s only passing by. I’ve detected an expanding nebulosity yonder.” She pointed at another object which distance made invisible. “If it’s from the eruption, then that happened about a thousand light-years off and ten million years ago.”

“Only ten million? M-my God, those planets must still be re-evolving!”

Dayan’s own voice quivered. “Yes, and the pulsar itself probably hasn’t reached a steady state yet. The physics—” She set about directing instruments to more urgent concerns. “I imagine the Yonderfolk can tell us about it,” she finished a bit harshly.

Envoy
proceeded
inward at a full
g
, ignoring economy, to cut the passage time down to a week. Her people were impatient.

“Look at
that,” Kilbirnie breathed. “Just
look
at that.”

“Apa Isten.”
Ruszek did not seem to notice he had crossed himself.

The ship was passing within twelve million kilometers of the third planet. Her crew had gathered in the reserve saloon-galley to see what her optics could screen for them. Magnified and enhanced, a thick crescent stood ruddy, mottled—and silver-spotted with seas. Air slightly blurred the limb and softened the edge between day and night. Clouds, elongated and patchy rather than marbling, shone less brilliantly white than Earth’s; but they shone. Three firefly sparks glinted against the blackness beyond, satellites. Instruments had found at least a dozen more.

Only a third again as big as Mars, receiving at its distance no more light from the weaker sun, the globe should have been a similar desolation, its atmosphere almost as thin. But: barely discernible as a shimmer where sunlight struck at particular angles, a transparent shell enclosed it, twenty-odd kilometers greater in radius. A few of the travelers thought they could make out one or two of the pillars upholding the structure. Spectroscopy showed the air within to be thicker than Earth’s, and as warm. It was carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water vapor, traces of methane and other gases, nothing to sustain creatures with lungs. Nevertheless waters and land gave reflection spectra of complex organic materials. Life-stuff?

“Those satellites are neutrino radiators,” Dayan said. Not everyone aboard had yet heard of her newest discoveries. “Thermonuclear reactors. I think they’re beaming energy down to the planet, heating it. And there are areas of violent activity on the surface. The waste heat from them contributes.” Awe underlay her dry words.

“The Yonderfolk are terraforming,” Mokoena marveled.

Sundaram smiled, less calmly than he was wont. “Not precisely ‘terra,’ Mam.”

Cleland spoke confidently, in his element. “It can’t be that simple. I daresay they brought in ices from comets, and
roofed everything in to keep volatiles from escaping. Probably the shell also filters out excessive ultraviolet and screens off hard radiation. The planet’s not massive enough to have much of a magnetic field for protection, if any. But neither can it have plate tectonics. How do they propose to maintain the carbonate-silicate cycle and the other equilibria necessary for life to last? For that matter, transforming raw gases into breathable air and rock into soil takes huge amounts of energy. Which means time—geological time.”

“Perhaps the Yonderfolk think that far ahead,” Yu said low.

Nansen’s gaze brooded on the image. “All that time, all that effort,” he murmured, “when they have zero-zero—or did—and could go find new worlds. Why this?”

“We’ll learn, skipper,” Kilbirnie said.

“And learn how they’re doing it.” Zeyd’s enthusiasm drove off the momentary chill.

Brent’s eyes smoldered at the burning moonlets. “The power,” he said, deep in his throat. “The power.”

Envoy
took
orbit around the world of her quest.

It glowed as beautiful as expected, royal blue with a tinge of purple, wreathed and swirled with white. To adaptable human vision, the sun disk seemed well-nigh homelike.

Differences abounded. The planet was darker than Earth, of lower albedo, for only half was under water, there were no polar caps, and the vegetation covering most of the land ranged from red-brown to almost black. A single moon, small but close, showed a disk one-seventh the familiar width of Luna, like a tiny gold coin; scars had been smoothed over, and magnification revealed curious shapes scattered across the surface.

The humans’ attention was wholly on the planet. Rapt at their instruments and screens, they beheld forests, fields that clearly were tended, buildings that curved and soared, vehicles that skimmed and floated and flew, creatures walking about who must be the dwellers. Settlement was dispersed, with few concentrations, none comparable to a terrestrial
metropolis. Much seemed to be underground, including fusion power plants, though most energy was evidently generated on the moon and beamed down via half a dozen artificial satellites.

“A clean nuclear cycle,” Dayan said when the neutrino spectrum had identified it for her. “Extremely high transmission efficiency. But nothing like the gigawattage at home. The population must be much less.”

“And less greedy?” wondered Sundaram.

The ship’s exocommunicators rolled through band after band, visible, infrared, radio, calling, calling.

No more than three breathless hours had passed when Nansen’s command rang through the wheel: “All hands to emergency stations. A spacecraft is approaching.”

His hands poised over the control console of the weapons. He expected no hostility, he prayed for none, but who could tell? After the robots in the star cluster, who could tell?

The vessel converged at a fractional
g
. It must have risen from the ground, for nothing like it had been in ambient space when
Envoy
arrived. Torpedo-shaped, coppery-hued, some fifty meters in length, it maneuvered as smoothly as an aircraft into the same orbit. There it took station, three kilometers ahead.

“N-n-no jets.” His crew had never before heard Nansen stammer. “
Dios todopoderoso
, how does it boost?”

“We’ll learn,” Kilbirnie called once more.

Silence stretched.

“They are probably scanning us,” Nansen said.

“Wouldn’t we do the same with surprise visitors?” Zeyd replied. “I think we can safely go back to our proper work, and be more useful.”

Nansen hesitated a bare second. “Yes. Engineers and boat pilots, stand by. The rest may leave their stations.”

“No, let me go outside,” Ruszek proposed. “Give them a look at one of us.”

Nansen considered. “That may be a good idea. Proceed.”

“Damn you, Lajos, you spoke first,” Kilbirnie lamented.

Before the mate had his spacesuit on, receivers awoke—
visual flickers, audio clicks and glissandos; response from the Yonderfolk.

The quickness
was not overly astonishing. Although it could not be expected that equipment would be compatible, scientists(?) should soon analyze what was coming in and devise means to send back the same kind of signals. Thereafter the humans could explain how to make audiovisual sets that would work together with their own. Best do it thus; the Yonderfolk undoubtedly had more resources, on a whole planet vis-à-vis a single spaceship from five thousand years ago.

Envoy’s
database contained the work of many bright minds who had dreamed about exchanges with aliens. Programs were ready to go. After the simple initial flashes, messages became binary, describing diagrams on a grid defined by two prime numbers. By showing such easily recognizable things as the black-body curve of the sun and the orbiting of its planets, they established units of basic physical quantities, mass, length, time, temperature. The Yonderfolk replied similarly, with refinements—for instance, the quantum states of the hydrogen atom. Not everything was immediately comprehensible on either side, but computers sifted, tested, eliminated, deciphered, electronically fast. Nature herself was providing a common language.

The time seemed long aboard ship—where nobody slept well or ate with any appreciation of the food—but it was not really—until circuit diagrams crossed the gap, and circuits were built, and pictures and sounds began to pass to and fro.

Nansen chimed
Sundaram’s door. It opened. He entered the cabin. Austere furnishings revealed little that was personal other than some views and mementos from the India that had been. An incense stick sweetened the air. Sundaram sat studying a recorded image. He would activate it for a few seconds, then stop it and think.

“Good evenwatch, Captain,” he greeted absently. “Please be seated.”

Nansen took a chair. “I’m sorry to disturb your concentration,” he said, “but I do need to know how your work is progressing, and you didn’t want to discuss it openly.” Sundaram had practically sequestered himself.

“Not yet. Too early in the game.”

“I understand. I wouldn’t have asked for this meeting, except that—Well, Zeyd has now examined those biospecimens the others shot over to us from their spacecraft, in that capsule full of containers. The quarantine conditions were unnecessary, he’s found. Not that the aliens would mean to harm us. If they did, they could blow us apart with a nuclear warhead.” Nansen seldom spoke superfluously. He was under stress. “No hazard of disease. The biochemistries are too unlike. Mokoena confirms. I daresay the others have reached the same conclusion about the material we sent them. So, how soon can we communicate well enough to take the next step, whatever it may be? Can you give me some hint? Lying idled like this is beginning to fray people’s nerves.”