The Sunspacers Trilogy (60 page)
“Is he well enough to go?” his mother asked.
“He’s just fine,” Lucky said, looking around at the station. “We wouldn’t have dared let him try to get back here if he weren’t.”
Jake looked at his wife. “You go along,” he said. “I’ll run things here for you.” Linda did not object.
“I can’t wait much longer!” Captain Calder shouted from the ship.
“Don’t worry about him,” Lissa said with a touch of affection. “Our schedule isn’t that tight.” She looked at Lucky Russell. “Want to come along? We can take one more.”
“Oh, no,” he replied. “I’d much rather look around this place first. Reminds me of an old joke about an expedition to the Sun. They were told it would be much too hot to land on, but that didn’t bother them at all.”
“That’s the joke?” Max asked.
Lucky smiled, obviously ready with the punch line.
“They landed at night,” he said.
As Max watched the big screen in front of them, the black globe of the alien station grew smaller behind the ship. A ghostly image of the Sun’s otherspace echo flickered faintly, as if struggling to rekindle the full fire of reality.
“We’re at the window …” Captain Calder’s voice said over the ship-com, “… and going through.”
Suddenly the strange gray space was gone. The screen blinked and filled with stars in the forward view. The view aft stayed as an inset, showing the Sun, now restored to its fierce electric glare.
“This window,” Captain Calder announced, “lets us out three million kilometers from Earth orbit.”
“There’s Earth,” Lissa’s voice added.
It seemed just ahead on the screen magnifier—a blue-green oasis in a jet-black sea, warmed by a yellow-white sun. The Moon stood guard nearby, pockmarked from battle with cosmic debris, but still copper-bright.
Joe leaned over from the seat behind Max. “Still worried about all the billions on Earth?”
Max shot a glance at Emil and Lucinda next to him, but they were looking at the screen and had not heard his father’s question.
“I don’t see a single one of them,” Max whispered back.
His mother’s hand touched his shoulder.
“It doesn’t bother me any more,” Max said, deciding that he didn’t care if Emil and Lucinda heard.
“Hey, Max,” Emil said. “We couldn’t have just run into one of these windows by accident, you know. I think they move, and one of them found us when the habitat was coming in. The Others thought we were ready, so the suncore station reached out, dropped a window around the habitat and pulled it into the otherspace station.”
Max thought about the idea. “That’s really good, Emil. It might even be true.”
“We’ve been moving outward in small steps for over a century,” Joe said. “You three took a large one. One day we’ll turn a corner in one of those passages—”
“They’re
curved
, Dad,” Max said.
“—a curve in one of those passages and meet the Others. We’ll be ready for them then, even if we don’t realize it.”
How many civilizations are out there? Max wondered, looking at the ocean of stars on the screen. He wanted to be there when his kind met the Others face to face. He would know how to reach out—and he had a few questions they might not expect him to ask, like what business it was of theirs what happened in Earth’s Sunspace, even though he had a good idea of what their answer had to be … and he might even agree with it.
“Remember the way you felt about Earth,” Joe said. “We’re all in the same boat as far as the Galaxy is concerned. We’re just as alien as any aliens out there—maybe more so.”
“I know,” Max said, looking over his shoulder. Rosalie smiled at him. Next to her, the navigator relaxed with a peaceful look on her face. She seemed about to have her first good sleep in weeks.
Max looked back to the stars on the screen. How many of them, he wondered, had been harnessed to feed the net? He tried to imagine the uses to which such a vast reservoir of energy could be put.
“I feel confident about one thing,” his father said.
“What’s that?” Max asked as Lucinda took his hand.
“That maybe someone out there is hoping that our kind will make something of itself.”
Lucinda’s hand tightened around his. “We will,” Max said.
