Starfarers (35 page)

Letting go, they saw the next breaker coming at them, taller yet, a glassy cliff maned with foam. They turned about, jumped clear of the bottom, swam, caught the onslaught, and rode it in.

As it receded they scrambled to their feet and waded ashore. “Hoo,” Mokoena panted, “that beast tumbled me!”

He looked her over. “It had the right idea,” he said.

She stopped. He moved closer. She lifted her hands and pushed at him, not very hard. “No.” Her tone wavered. “Hanny—”

“She’s away. For two years and more.”

“I won’t go behind her back.”

“
We
won’t. Mam, Hanny and I were—are—friends. We never owned each other. If we did, she would not have left. She told me again and again, as the time approached—the last night, too—she told me she won’t be jealous and you are her shipsister.”

“I don’t know—when she returns—”

“That will depend on you, Mam. You and no one else.”

She quivered. “Selim, if you mean that—”

He pulled her to him. “A lovely setting, this, for a lovely woman.”

“And a—lovely man …”

They hurried to the soft sward and sank down upon it.

Afterward, happily, she murmured, “I wonder if our friends have us under observation.”

He grinned. “Then they got their demonstration. Do you mind?”

“Not too much, now.”

Before Dayan
left, Yu had traded cabins with her so that she might be next to Sundaram’s. He and she no longer slept apart.

They sat in the unit that had been his, among relics and keepsakes they had mingled, sipped wine, and gravely talked about their research. It was among their highest pleasures.

“No,” he said, “I do not think we can properly call this a conservative society, like old China or old India. That is too weak a word. I think it is posthistoric. It has renounced change in favor of a stable order that apparently provides universal peace, plenty, and justice.”

“Or so they tell us, if we understand them rightly,” she
replied. “A majestic vision in its way. Like a saint reaching Nirvana, or a stately hymn at the end of a Catholic mass.”

“But how can we explain it to our shipmates? I fear several of them will find it ghastly.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because it may forecast what will happen to our own race.”

She considered. “Would it be tragic, actually? Not an eternity of boredom or anything like that. The riches and beauty of the world, the treasures of the past, aren’t they new to every newborn? A lifetime isn’t long enough to know and savor them all. And there can still be new creations. Ancient, fixed modes, I suppose, but new poems, pictures, stories, music.”

Sundaram smiled ruefully. “I doubt that the likes of Ricardo Nansen or Jean Kilbirnie will agree. For that matter, I doubt that every individual Tahirian is content with things as they are. I have an impression, almost a conviction, that some of them look at the stars with longing.”

She nodded. “That may be one reason the race ended its starfaring. Deliberately, as a policy decision. It carried the danger of bringing in something new and troublesome” She winced. “What effect are we having? Is it for good or ill?”

His smile warmed. “You have an overactive conscience, my dear.”

She smiled back and teased, “Have you none?”

He went serious again. “Oh, I feel my occasional qualms. But I don’t have your—tenderness, beneath the tough competence. I am too detached.”

“Nonsense. You are the kindest man I have ever known”

“And you—” He leaned forward in his chair. They clasped hands.

Less than
two shipboard hours after she had gone zero-zero,
Envoy
arrived at the pulsar.

Year Four.

Nine-tenths of a light-year distant, the sun of Tahir stood lord among the stars. But it was another point of light that vision sought, nearly as bright as Sinus in the skies of Earth. Enhancing every other stellar image, the screen mildened this one, for it would have burned a hole in the retina of a naked eye.

“One millionth Solar luminosity,” Dayan said like a prayer to a pitiless god, “shining from a body ten kilometers in diameter. Therefore nineteen thousand times the intensity; and that’s just in the visible spectrum?”

Her companions could well-nigh hear the thoughts prowling through her.
The core of an exploded giant sun, a mass almost half again Sol’s, jammed down by its own gravity till it’s that small, that dense, no longer atoms but sheer neutrons, except that at the center the density may go so high that neutrons themselves fuse into something else, hyperons, about which we know little and I lust to know more. An atmosphere a few centimeters deep—incandescent gaseous iron? What storms go rampant through it, what quakes rack the ultimate hardness beneath, and why, why, why? A spin of hundreds per second, a magnetic field that seizes the inter-stellar matter and whips it outward till it nears the speed of light, kindles a radio beacon with it that detectors can find across the breadth of the galaxy. O might and mystery! Out of the whirlwind, God speaks to Job.

Cleland’s voice trembled. “How close dare we come?”

“The ship will decide,” Dayan answered, her tone flat, her mind still at the star. “Not very, I think. It’s blazing X rays, spitting plasma and neutrinos—lethal.”

“Besides,” Brent put in dryly, “we’re at about two hundred AU now. Another jump in that direction, and we’d certainly fry.”

“But we’re no so far frae the planet we ken, are we?” Kilbirnie cried. “We’ll tak’ our station ’round it, no?”
And explore it
, said the glance she exchanged with Cleland.

Of the three Tahirians, Colin and Fernando stared as raptly at the object of the quest—and beyond it, into the cold cataract of the Milky Way? Leo stood aside, ens mane held stiff. The powers on Tahir, whoever they were and whatever their power meant, had required that a person whom they would pick come along to observe.

The spaceboat
was not intended for humans. There was no way
Envoy
could have carried it or any of its kind on her expedition. Not only the hull docks but the entire control system would have had to be rebuilt, which would have caused dangerous instabilities elsewhere in the robotic complex that she was. Improvised facilities—for security, sanitation, nourishment, sleep—enabled humans to go as passengers in the boat. Lately. Yu and the Tahirian physicist Esther had jerry-rigged circuits that allowed a skillful human to act as pilot—temporarily, under free-space conditions with plenty of safety margin.

“Hoo-ah!”

Ruszek tickled the board before him. The craft leaped. Nonetheless, weight inside held steady. The moon loomed enormous in sight, a sweep of smooth-fused stone studded with structures, curving sharply to a near horizon. Ruszek cut the drive. Zero gravity felt like an abrupt fall off a cliff. The three aboard had learned to take it as a bird does. The boat swung low around the globe on a hyperbolic hairpin and lined out for the great blue crescent of Tahir.

“That will do,” said Yu from aft. “Let us return.”

“
Járvány
,” grumbled Ruszek. “I hoped for more of this.” His tone was genial, though, and a smile bent his mustache toward his brows.

Harnessed beside Yu, Esther asked, “(Did you record the data you need?)” En quivered and fluted; sweet odors wafted from the skin.

Yu nodded. “(I believe so.)”

“What’s the result?” called Ruszek, whose back was to them.

“Excellent,” Yu replied. “I think once I have analyzed these readings, with Esther’s help, I will know how the field drive operates.”

“You don’t? I mean, uh, you told me before, you’re sure it’s a push against the vacuum.”

Yu sighed. “An interaction with the virtual particles of the vacuum,” she corrected. “Energy and momentum are conserved, but, loosely speaking, the reaction is against the mass of the entire universe, and approximately uniform. What I referred to was understanding the exact, not the general, principle.”

“Uniform? Don’t they adjust the field inside a hull? Weight’s the same during any boost.”

“In quantum increments, obviously.” Yu paused. “Compared to this drive, jets are as wasteful as … as burning petroleum, chemical feedstock, for fuel once was on Earth.”

“What
I
like is the handling qualities. How soon can you and your computer design a motor for us, Wenji?”

“Not at all, I fear, until we’re home. Besides, we couldn’t possibly do so radical a retrofit on
Envoy
, or even her boats.” Yu’s voice lilted. “However, I think, with Hanny’s help when she gets back, we can devise a unit that will compensate for linear acceleration and keep the vector in the wheels constant.”

“Do you mean, when the ship’s under boost, we won’t have to cram like swine onto those manhater-designed gimbal decks?” Ruszek waved clasped hands above his shining pate. “Huzzah!” he bellowed.

Esther looked at ens friend. “(Does he rejoice?)” en asked; or so Yu thought en asked.

“(It is no large matter,)” the engineer replied. “(What I think we have really done, at last, is break some dams of
misunderstanding. Now you and I can add a proper language of physics to Cambiante, and have it ready for Hanny Dayan when she returns. Before then, you should be able to explain some things to us. Hints of a strange, tremendous truth—)”

Her gaze went ahead, to the planet, where spring was gusting over Terralina.

Envoy
rode
as at anchor, circling a world of steel.

Cleland and Kilbirnie stood before the spaceview on a screen. Already their shipmates were busy. Robots would flit out to place instruments in orbit; Tahirian probes with Tahirian field drives would plunge toward the pulsar, wildly accelerated, bearing other instruments; preparations filled every waking hour and haunted many (beams. These two alone had little to contribute. Their yearnings reached elsewhere.

In the light from the heavens, the globe was barely bright enough for the unaided eye to search. Its plains were like vast, murky mirrors, mottled with ice fields. Gashes broke them here and there. Mountain ranges and isolated peaks thrust raw-edged. The limb arched slightly blurred against the stars.

“Mass about half Earth’s, diameter about seventy percent—given the mean density, more or less the same surface gravity.” Cleland was repeating what they had both heard a dozen times, as humans will when the matter is important. “Thin atmosphere, mostly neon, some hydrogen and helium retained at this temperature. Other volatiles frozen out, including water. Paradox, paradox. What’s the answer?”

“What do you mean, Tim?” Kilbirnie asked. It was chiefly to encourage him—she had a fairly good idea—but she hoped for thoughts he might have had since the last general discussion.
God is in the details
, she reflected.
And so is the devil, and the truth somewhere in between.

When he was into an enthusiasm he spoke fluently. “Look, we know this has to be the remnant of a bigger planet. The supernova vaporized the crust and mantle, left
just the core and maybe not all of that. The loss of star mass caused it to spiral out into this crazy orbit it’s got now. Meanwhile, taking off the upper layers released pressures—expansion, eruption, all hell run loose. It hasn’t stabilized yet, I suspect. What’s going on? Theoretically, it should be a smooth ball, but nonlinear processes don’t pay much attention to theory, and so we’ve got rifts, grabens, highlands. How? Where did it get the atmosphere and ice—outgassing, cometary impacts, infall from the supernova cloud, or what? Oh, Jean, a million questions!”

She gripped his hand. “We’ll go after the answers,” she said, “yonder.”

No doubt Dayan, the acting captain, would object, and still more would
Envoy’s
robotic judgment. Kilbirnie’s thought coursed about in search of arguments, demands, ways to override opposition: anything short of mutiny. She had not come this far, leaving her true captain behind her, to sit idle in a metal shell.

Summer heat
lay on the settlement like a weight. Forest stood windless, listless beneath a leaden overcast. Thunder muttered afar.

Windows were not opaquable, but Nansen had drawn blinds over his and the air conditioning worked hard. In the dusk of the living room, a crystal sphere, a Tahirian viewer, shone cool white. Within it appeared the image of a being. Nansen leaned close. The form was bipedal, slanted forward, counterbalanced by a long, thick tail. From beneath a scaly garment reached clawlike hands and a hairless, lobate, greenish head. The effect was not repulsive, simply foreign.

“(I show you this,)” wrote the parleur of the Tahirian he called Peter, while attitudes and odors gave overtones he was beginning to interpret, “(because somehow, in your company, command flows through you. Later we will talk, and then you can decide what your others shall learn.)”

“(Everything,)” Nansen replied.
I can’t explain about
tact, discretion, timing, especially when four of us are off beyond reach. (Jean, what are you doing as I sit here, how do you fare?)

He sensed grimness. “(Yes, you are free with information, whatever the hazard. Most of us would have kept knowledge of the black hole from you, for fear of what reckless things you may do. Too late.)”

Inevitable that that incident become known, I suppose. No mention of punishment. Emil and the rest go about as freely as ever. A consensus society? What
are
the sanctions?

Maybe none were needed, only the slightest social pressures, until we came. The powers that be don’t know how to handle us.

As if en had read the thought, Peter said, “(Yours is the second starfaring race we have encountered. Now that communication is acceptably clear, I will tell you of the first.)”

Nansen steadied his mind.

“(Their nearest outpost was about three hundred light-years from Tahir, their home world twice as far,)” Peter said. “(As with you, the trails of their ships inspired our scientists and called our explorers—although for us the development took much longer than yours did. Already those trails were dwindling away. By the time we arrived, the beings had ended their ventures and withdrawn to their parent planet.)”