Seeker (42 page)

Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to burn hydrogen, so they don’t ignite, the way a full-fledged star does. But they still give off considerable heat, more or less from tidal effects. They can be observed through infrared telescopes, in which they will appear as a faint glow.

Get close enough to the average brown dwarf and it’ll look like a dim star. It’s only .00004 times as bright as the sun, either ours or Earth’s. Still, according to the book, they’re pretty hot. Temperatures on the surface range up to 3,200 degrees C. At that level, substances like iron and rock occur as gases.

During the cooling process, they generate methane. The gases condense into liquids and form clouds, which contain some of the heat. But continued cooling results in storms, which in turn clear off the clouds. When that happens, infrared light from the heated atmosphere escapes, causing the dwarf to brighten.

Shara wasn’t kidding that there were weather patterns. Some dwarfs, the hotter ones, have iron rain. Others, which have cooled sufficiently, may produce rain that is ordinary water.

They come in a variety of classifications based on spectral features. “But any of them,” I asked Shara, “would be visible to our telescopes?”

She nodded. “Actually,” she said, “this whole exercise should be pretty easy. At least I hope so.”

“Why?” I asked. “You got a hot date?”

“Chase,” she said. “I’m an astrophysicist. But it doesn’t mean I want to spend my weekends out here.”

We made the jump on schedule, but emerged several days away from our target area. She wasn’t unduly happy about that. “Seems as if we could use some improvements in the technology,” she told me.

I checked in with the
Gonzalez
, the mission command ship, to let them know we’d arrived in the area. Alex took advantage of the link to talk to Emil Brankov about the latest findings at the excavation sites. There were, Brankov said, “
a lot of artifacts. And some human remains. Not much left of them, but they’re there
.”

While we cruised into position, we spent time talking, watching sims, working out. Shara enjoyed role-playing games that involved blowing things up. I wasn’t sure whether she was trying to send me a message or whether it reflected a naturally combative spirit. I became more aware how much she had changed since our days together at college. When I mentioned that sometimes I felt as if I barely knew her, she asked if I was aware how different
I’d
become.

“In what way?” I asked.

“You were shy. Unsure of yourself. And, as I recall, you took authority figures pretty seriously.”

“I’m still shy,” I said.

She laughed. “I have no doubt.”

We also enjoyed
Conversations with Caesar
. If you haven’t tried it, it gives you a chance to sit and talk with avatars of historical personages. Shara had a taste for the ancients, so we spent the better part of two days discussing religion with Cleopatra, women’s rights with Thomas Aquinas, and public relations with Henry VIII. Marinda Harbach explained why we have such a bloody history. “
Serious predators
,” she said, “
do not kill one another. Never have. A tiger understands, for example, it’s dangerous to attack another tiger. It’s not at all certain who will end up dead
.” But humans had never been serious predators. On the contrary, they’d been innocuous creatures, had eaten whatever came to hand, and never developed the instinct to avoid quarrels. “
After all
,” she said, “
when a fight breaks out between two monkeys, somebody gets a few lumps, but that’s about all. They actually enjoy it. Brain scans make the point beyond question. By the time the monkeys discovered advanced weaponry, it was too late
.”

We talked about war and peace with Winston Churchill, and bumping universes with Taio Myshko. Kalu, the AI, did impressions of each character. Nobody knew, of course, how Churchill had actually sounded, but Kalu had Myshko down cold.

He also did impersonations of us. He seemed to enjoy himself commenting in Alex’s deliberate and studied manner on the advantage of antiquities as an investment. He did Shara talking about how stars go bump in the night. And he was forever ordering snacks using my voice.

“I don’t eat that much,” I told Alex. But he just laughed.

When we got close to the impact point, Shara decided it was time to inspect the telescope packages. Rather than pressurize the cargo deck, we put on suits.

Cargo was divided into three sections, the middle being the largest. It was our launch area, and it contained the packages. The lander, which was a bilious yellow color with DEPARTMENT OF PLANETARY SURVEY AND ASTRONOMICAL RESEARCH stenciled on its hull, was secure in the lone bay.

The two telescopes were cubes with rounded edges, not much taller than I was. Plastene sheets protected them. Working in zero gee, we moved them onto the launch track.

We stripped the plastene from one of the packages to get a good look. The unit was a shoulder-high black metal dish, with several minithrusters attached.

“It’s a two-meter scope,” Shara said. “Equipped with a thirty-two thousand times thirty-two thousand infrared-sensitive imaging array. It can cover three by three degrees of sky.” She circled the thing and clicked a remote. Lamps blinked back. She compared them with a checklist.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Yes, indeed.” We walked back to the second package, pulled off the wrapping, and repeated the process. When she was done, we inspected the launcher. “I guess we’re all set,” she said at last.

We went back up an ascent tube, passed through the airlock onto the bridge, and climbed out of our suits. Shara commented it was good to feel some gravity again. Kalu announced we were one hour from the impact point.

We sat down and, for whatever reason, began reminiscing. We discovered we’d both dated the same guy, and both had the same reaction. We talked about instructors I hadn’t thought of for fifteen years. And ambitions, some fulfilled, some abandoned. “You became a pilot,” Shara said. “When I first met you, when you were still a kid, you told me that was what you wanted to do.”

That was true. I also wanted to be a sculptor at one time, but that didn’t go very far. “Yeah,” I said. “I always liked the idea of coming out here. Thought it was romantic.”

“And it wasn’t.”

“It wears off.”

She laughed. “I remember when that guy Jerry Whatzisname was going to be the father of your children.”

“That’s a long time back.”

“Whatever happened to him?”

“He became a banker,” I said. “Or a financial advisor. Something like that.”

“You ever see him?”

“No. Not for more than ten years.” And, after a moment: “He’s married. Two kids, last I heard.”

“I can’t imagine you married to a banker.”

“Me, neither.” Still, I thought of him on occasion. I wouldn’t have minded running into him some evening. By accident, of course.

When Kalu announced we were within seven minutes of our destination, we retreated to the ops center, where Alex was waiting. Shara sat down in the operator’s chair. “Kalu?”

“Yes, Shara. I am here.”

“Prepare to launch the Alpha package.”

“On your direction.”
There was a bank of monitors. One provided an outside view of the launch doors. We watched them open.

“Who the hell is Kalu?” asked Alex.

“The AI,” I said.

“I know that. But who
was
he?”

“When the government wanted to shut interstellar exploration down two centuries ago,” Shara said, “he was the guy who dissuaded them. It cost him politically because people didn’t want to pay for it. One opponent asked him where does it stop?”

“What was his answer?” asked Alex.

“ ‘You stop, you die.’ He was the first secretary of the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research.”

“The first
secretary
?”

“This is a while back. They didn’t have directors then.”

“Okay.”

A stellar cloud was coming into focus on one of the monitors. “Up there,” she said. “That’s Virginium. Lots of hot, young stars. Come back in a few billion years and it might be a nursery for new civilizations.” She smiled at Alex. I was getting the impression he was taken by her. “Time to launch. You want to do the honors?”

“You go ahead,” he said. And that generosity of spirit convinced me. Alex loved drama and ceremony.

“Kalu,” she said. “Launch Alpha.”

The package went out through the hatch, its thrusters fired once, twice.

“Alpha away,”
said Kalu.

The package dwindled and vanished in the night.

My turn. “Everybody strap down. Kalu, prepare to depart.”

Kalu acknowledged. Shara talked with the Alpha telescope’s onboard AI, giving it final instructions.

Moments later, Brankov’s image blinked on in the ops room. He looked tired. “
We found some inscriptions on stone
,” he said. One of them appeared, a large marble block with English symbols. We couldn’t read them, but he translated: McCorby Health Labs. Beneath it, a date. The name of the month was March. It was the fourteenth day, and the year was 11.

“We’ve got a city hall down the street. And what was once the Chalkoski Botanical Gardens a half klick away.”
I could see the intensity in Brankov’s eyes. This was the mission of a lifetime.

A few hours later we jumped one and a half billion kilometers to the far side of the impact point and deployed Beta.

“What we’re going to do,” said Shara, “is to run a full survey of the sky, three hundred sixty to latitudes twenty degrees above and below the orbital plane.”

I was tempted to ask what orbital plane because we were in the middle of nowhere. But of course we were working with the plane of the planetary system as it had been nine thousand years earlier. “The units will run in parallel,” she continued. “We need to look at a total of fourteen thousand four hundred square degrees. That means we need sixteen hundred image pairs. Each image will require five minutes of exposure plus dither time.”

Alex was glazing again.

Shara understood. “It means,” she told him, “we should be able to do the complete survey in about six days.”

“Excellent,” he said. “And at some point during all this, we’ll spot the brown dwarf.”

“We should. Yes. We’ll overlay the images from the telescopes on the screen.” She tapped the central monitor. “Everything’s framed against the stars. The stars won’t show any appreciable movement from one image to the other because they’re too far. But anything close by will appear to jump. And that, Mr. Benedict, should be our dwarf.”

“How much of a jump?” I asked.

“I’d say thirty to sixty arcseconds.”

Alex grinned. How much was that?

“It’s okay,” Shara said. “Just look for a separation. Now, when it happens, we’ll want to measure the radial velocity. That’ll allow us to figure out approximately where it was when the impact happened.”

“But we already know that.”

“Confirmation data. And the more exact our information is, the easier it’ll be to locate Balfour.”

“Okay,” said Alex. “Good.”

“The hitch is that we don’t know the temperature of the dwarf, so we’ll run the survey at wavelengths of two to ten microns. That’ll allow for fairly hot or very cool dwarfs, and everything between.” She held up a remote. “Are we ready to start?”

“By all means,” said Alex.

They exchanged glances. “Thanks,” he said. “I will.” Without another word he took the remote and started the operation.

There are worlds enough out there for all. Go, and you will see canyons to make your head spin, and solitary beaches, and rings of light, and iron rivers. But wear a topcoat.
— Tavron Hamm,
There and Back,
sixth millennium

Once the survey started,
Conversations with Caesar
stopped. Alex never left the ops center except from necessity. He watched relentlessly as the images shifted every few minutes, showing a new patch of sky. If one of the points of light seemed a trifle blurred, he leaned forward expectantly, hoping Shara would react, or that Kalu would declare a hit.

Occasionally, he talked with Brankov, who said he was fascinated by what we were trying to do. “
I wish you all success
,” he said. “
Let us hope you find it. And that your speculations prove correct
.”

Shara stuck it out with Alex the first day. Until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Alex was simply too intense. On the second morning, she told him to let her know if they found something and retreated to the common room. I stuck my head in once in a while to see how she was doing, but for the most part I stayed with Alex. Out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, I suppose.

“Why does he care so much?” Shara asked. “He’s already made the big finds. So what if a few of them retreated to a base somewhere else? Right? Or am I missing something here?”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I’ve never seen him like this before. I think it has to do with the
Seeker
. Full of kids. That really shook him up. I don’t think he buys the idea that they would have known what was going to happen to one world but not to the other. Of the two, they must have known Margolia was safer. He wants to know why they jumped into the lion’s mouth. He thinks he owes it to them to find out.”

“If in fact that’s what they did,” said Shara. “I’m not convinced.”

“Neither am I. But his instincts for things like this are pretty good.”

“Chase,” she said, “instincts are for things like food and sex. They don’t have much to do with logic.” She shook her head. “If they actually landed people on Balfour, the explanation will turn out to be that they screwed up the calculations.”

“But they should have been able to figure it out, right?”

“Sure.” She sighed. “But it’s not my call.”

We needed a change of subject. “Shara,” I said, “I was surprised to find out how common these things are. Brown dwarfs. Do we have the local ones mapped?”