Rogue Powers (17 page)

C'astille looked on in confusion as M'Calder took M'Gustav's hand in hers and squeezed it, for the briefest of moments, before she let it go. The two humans looked at each other in a most peculiar way for a moment, then drew apart, seemingly very upset about something.

"It can't be, Lucy. But God, I—no, I can't even say it."

"Neither can I, Johnson. Neither can I. We'd better get back before they miss us." The humans said their goodbyes to C'astille, arranged to talk with her the next day, and went back to the jeep.

C'astille, watching them go, could make nothing of it. But there was something about that moment when the two humans touched that seemed perverse, as if the two of them wanted to—but C'astille couldn't think
that
, even to herself. Alien or not, they couldn't be monsters. And there was something else that disturbed her greatly. The translator hadn't be able to make complete sense of the English-spoken conversation, and she had to take that into account. Yet she had gotten the strong impression that the humans were discussing medicine—and not as a bizarre, horrifying, and dangerous thing, but as something quite normal and routine.

She started back toward the clearing where the engi
neers were still hard at work. Every time she thought she was used to the humans, had finally made sense of them, this sort of thing happened. Only in the last few weeks had she become certain that they were all one species, instead of a vast number of related species that worked together. But they varied so much, in height and size and color and shape, and in a hundred details. No animals species on her planet had such a wide range of variation. She had thought for a time that they were all mutations from some true breed, and she had worked out a complicated social theory to account for it, of a race that got some use out of its mutants and sports by sending them on risky jobs of exploring and so forth. But that hadn't made a great deal of sense, and all the humans seemed far healthier than mutations usually were. There was a lot to learn about them, and learn from them. If D'etallis didn't wipe them out first.

It was only when he was behind the door of his office that Randal] Metcalf felt really safe. The Navy had assigned him an overly automated hotel as a billet, and there was little he could do about the hyperactive robot service there, but in his office, inside
those
four walls,
he
could call the shots and choose the equipment. There was no machine more complicated than a pencil there, no technology higher than an electric light. He could hide alone behind his reports, slogging through another day of flying a desk, sifting through transcripts of interrogation, searching for some morsel, some clue, that would be of use in the fight to come. If they ever found anyone to fight.

But today, as usual, there was nothing in the reports. The prisoners had been squeezed dry, long ago. But orders were orders, and reading the interrogations was the job at hand. It sure as hell killed the day.

Metcalf was very glad to hear George knock on his door at quitting time. He eagerly closed up his work and they left the office together. George was as bogged down in busy-work as Metcalf, generally sitting in on interrogations that went over and over the same ground again and again. The Intelligence types had theories about long questioning sessions being the most effective.

It turned out to be a pleasant evening, with a freshening wind blowing in off the Straight Straits, and Metcalf had had enough of the corner bar for a while, so they decided to grab some carryout from the robot in the lobby and eat in the park.

Ivory Tower, the largest city on Bandwidth, was a forest of tall buildings set in generous parkland; towers and pylons and skyscrapers in every imaginable architectural style all caught the eye. It seemed a far more mature city than it should have been, but robots could build fast. Twentieth-century-style glass boxes shared the skyline with gaudily baroque piles based on medieval cathedrals, scaled-up pagodas, and copies of the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument and the cliff-dwelling blocks that were the latest style on Earth. It kept the eye busy. Smaller buildings, more modest in scale but equally varied in style, were set along the wide boulevards. Trees, grasses, and flowers imported from Earth were planted in the parklands, and real, honest-to-God ducks quacked and fussed and paddled around the ornamental ponds and lakes. Metcalf liked to sit on a low hill in Unity Park, near the League HQ tower, and look out over it all. Even he had to admit that Bandwidth had spent its riches well.

It was a perfect evening, the sun still reddening the sky, a hint of the enticing spicy odor of the Sea of Ness in the air, the stars just coming out in the purpling east. Lounging back on the grass, staring out over the park and the skyline, munching on a kosher hot dog that would have done New York proud, and with his beer still cold, Metcalf concluded that Life was Good. He looked up at the sky, and a familiar thrill ran through him. "Just look at those stars, George," he said in a near whisper, all the usual bantering tone gone from his voice. "They're so damned far away—and they're
people
out there! We've crossed that distance. Makes me feel sort of proud and small all at once."

"I know what you mean."

"Maybe ten years after they got the C
²
drive running, they flew a ship to Rigel. The light that shone on that exploring ship won't reach Earth for more than another century! Jesus, it makes me proud. We're not just some bunch of geeks standing around on street corners! We can reach the stars!"

Neither of them spoke for a long time. The sky grew darker, and the stars came out in all their glory. Meteors zipped across the firmament as lights came on across Ivory Tower, subdued enough not to disturb the splendid skies, but artfully placed and aimed to set the great buildings off from the surrounding darkness.

"The stars are different here," George said.

"That
much, we know," Metcalf replied with gentle sarcasm. None of the Guardians had recognized the night sky as seen from any world. "I remember back at Annapolis, back on Earth. I had put in for Space Fighters the first moment I could, and the night the word came through! We all went down to the shore and pointed out the stars to each other. We kept telling each other—'see that one to the left of the Big Dipper? I'll be there!' "

"The Big Dipper?"

"One of the constellations as seen from Earth."

"Okay, I’ll bite. I forget what a constellation is."

"Whoa. You're kidding. You know, connect-the-dots between the stars and imagine a picture there."

"Oh, okay. That's right. Mac explained that, and the Intelligence guys asked me about 'em once. Didn't seem surprised when I couldn't quite place the term."

"Wait a minute. You guys don't even have
constellations?"
Metcalf asked.
Every
culture made up constellations. Anyone with a normal imagination would find patterns in the sky and name them.

"Yeah we did. We just don't call 'em that. Called 'em sky pictures. We didn't have any
official
ones, of course, but all the kids made up their own.'

Metcalf grunted. That made sense, in a twisted Guard
ian sort of way. If you didn't want people to learn astrogation, you didn't teach them astronomy. If you didn't want them to learn astronomy, you didn't encourage people to make up pretty pictures in the sky. But they'd do it anyway. Who could enforce a rule against looking at the sky?

"Doesn't really matter, anyway," Metcalf said. "Stars is stars, and stars is pretty."

They were both quiet for a while.

"I wonder what the new stars will look like," George said at last.

Metcalf suddenly sat bolt upright. He had the feeling that George had just said something very important. "What do you mean, George?"

"You know, the new stars that appear in the southeast."

"It's summer here, now. Do you mean the winter stars? These stars will come back next summer, and so on."

"No, but come to think of it, that might be what the interrogators thought I meant, too."

"Well, what do you mean?"

"I mean the sky pictures—the constellations—that no one has seen yet. Every year there isn't just the move back and forth between the winter and summer stars. Every year, every summer, New Stars that no has seen appear east, and Old Stars vanish in the west. They used to tell us kids that the Old Stars were old dreams, and the New Stars were new dreams. The old dreams pass through the northern lights and are reborn as new dreams, new stars to wish on."

"Hold it.
Northern
lights? You said you lived in the southern hemisphere and the north was unsettled. And you said you had northern lights. That'd mean lights coming from the
equatorial
sky, and that doesn't make sense. Northern and southern lights are linked to the magnetic poles. Charged particles are pulled in from outer space by the planet's magnetism and sucked in toward the poles. The charged particles zip into the atmosphere, and hit an air molecule, and that sets off sparks of light—the aurora.

If there were enough charged particles hitting the equator so they could be seen in the south, then the whole planet would glow in the dark—and so would the people. The radiation would kill everything."

"I could say you're glazing my eyes over, but I’ll leave it at a simple 'huh?' "

"Sorry. Trust me, equatorial aurora don't make sense."

"Whatever you say, but every night back home, there was always a strong glow of orange light, all along the northern horizon."

"Always the same brightness?"

"Pretty much. It follows the same pattern every night: The northern sky starts out pretty bright, gets darker until the middle of the night, and then gets lighter again, until it's lost in the glare of the rising sun. The lights get hidden by weather, of course, but they're more or less always the same."

"Hmmm. That's not aurora, anyway. Aurora aren't constant, they come and go, flicker for a few hours or days and then fade."

"Fine. Now I’ll know aurora when I see it. Why are you all excited about this stuff?"

"Because it all sounds very unusual. It means there's something odd about the skies of Capital. And that means there might be something odd, maybe even unique, about Capital, or space around it—"

"And that might help us find Capital."

"Right. So let me ask a dumb question," Metcalf said. "How do you know for certain that north was north and south was south. Couldn't the Grand Wazoo or the Imperator of the Grand Bugaboo—"

"You are referring of course to the Most Honorable Leader of the Combined Will, long may he lead us, etcetera, etcetera. Did you get the last pickle?"

"Yes, sorry. Whatever you call him. Couldn't he or some guy a hundred years ago have decided to fool all of you and tell you south was north, just to confuse the issue if you tried to help us barbarian hordes find your home?"

"Well, Mr. Barbarian Horde, they could have, but they didn't. The birds flew north when it got cold. Toward the equator. My mouth was all ready for that pickle."

"Ah. They couldn't have fooled the birds, I guess. So let's see: We've got a glow in the sky toward the equatorial horizon and Old Stars that vanish over the southern, polar, horizon, never to be seen, and New Stars that pop up in the northern sky. I'd say that's weird enough to rate comment Gives me an idea, but I'm no expert. Let's go scare up an astronomer and see what he has to say."

Metcalf left the job of finding an astronomer to George, and George had led him back to his office. Compared to the barren cell Metcalf hid himself in, George s workshop was a madhouse. George fell in love with every gadget and put them all to work in his office. The chairs were self-adjusting, the lights came on automatically, a grabber was ready to find any book on the shelf and hand it to George. There were keyboards and terminals hooked into a half dozen computer grids, and old coffee cups and printouts were everywhere. Metcalf found himself wishing George had one more gizmo—a cleaning robot. But before Metcalf could shove the magazines off the chair and sit, George had dipped into the professional directories and retrieved a list of the astronomers currently on-planet and in Ivory Tower. A hard copy of the fist in hand, they were ready.

Metcalf toyed with calling one of them up, but then decided to just show up. It was always harder to say "no" to someone in person, and the odds of getting a "no" seemed pretty high with such sketchy information. Who'd want to waste their time on it? Besides, if they blew it, they could just try the next name on the list.

Metcalf didn't realize it, but he was lucky to have such an embarrassment of riches. On any other planet, finding even one astronomer to consult would have been a challenge. Very few of them were
on
planets anymore. The opening of interstellar space had hurt astronomy in some unexpected ways: the discipline had become fragmented and specialized. The traditions of the old science were that of the utterly passive observer, cut off from the object of study by light years, forced to glean every scrap of information from whatever miserly number of photons the instruments could capture. Not anymore. People interested in planet formation or atmospheres didn't become astronomers at all—they went out and found a planetary system forming or an atmosphere that they could study. Stellarists interested in a particular star would load their instruments onto a ship and launch for the object of their interest. Scientists were widely scattered and communications weren't good enough. Results were frequently published long years after the work was done. Many results were lost altogether, along with the experimenter. Astronomers weren't good ship handlers, and they had an unfortunate tendency to get "just a bit closer" to some rather dangerous objects—like stars.