"The damper."
"Right. It would shut down our mains. But it's a bluff."
"How do you know?"
"Rev up an engine and then turn it off, just like that, you risk an explosion. Damn near a fifty-fifty chance. They won't use it without getting permission first from the Institute. And that'll take time.
Anyway Agostino would never agree to it. He doesn't want to lose a ship."
The comm system was crowded with incoming voices: the Patrol warning them again to stand down; the supervisor at Marlin insisting they return; and, oddly, Webley, demanding what in God's name did they think they were doing?
"Just relax," Solly said, "and enjoy the ride. In the meantime, it wouldn't be a bad idea to tell me precisely where we're going."
"Zeta Orionus. Alnitak. Or rather, I want you to pick a spot twenty-seven and a fraction light-years from Alnitak." She dug in her pockets and pulled out a data disk. "Here," she said. "Put us anywhere on the bubble."
"Alnitak," he said. The easternmost star in the belt of Orion. "Why? A guess? Or do you know something you haven't told me?"
"You remember asking if I knew how long the trip would take?"
"Sure. You gave me a fairly specific answer."
"Forty days, seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes. It's the total elapsed return-trip time on the Hunter logs."
"The bogus ones?"
"Yes. But I couldn't imagine any reason why they'd change the elapsed time from the originals. The time frame, if it's correct, gives us Alnitak. And there's something else."
She showed him a blowup of Kane's mural. "See this?" She pointed at the Horsehead.
"Yep."
"It's visible from Alnitak."
The Patrol moved into a parallel course on their starboard side, at a distance of only a few hundred meters.
Solly shut down the comm system and the voices died. "Makes me nervous," he said.
"You think that's a good idea, right now?"
"Depends on whether you want to listen to the threats."
He set the timer to count down to jump status. Kim stared at it, willing the numbers to hurry along.
They were still several minutes out when the AI announced an incoming transmission from a new source.
From one of the satellites. "From the Institute."
"It'll be Agostino," said Kim.
"You want to talk to him?"
"No," she said. "We'll talk when we come back. When we have something to negotiate with."
The patrol vessel was still there when power began to flow to the jump engines, and Solly took them out of their range.
17
It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
-HENRY W. LONGFELLOW,.
Kavanaugh, XXI1849 C.E.
Solly's analysts thought the Hunter logs were accurate to the point where the vessel experienced engine trouble. Allow approximately a day or so for Kane's repair work, and that puts Tripley and his party at Alnitak roughly February 17 or 18. Those estimates also fit with the timing of the return to Greenway. "If all that's correct," said Kim, "then getting proof should be easy."
It was now January 28 in Seabright. Assuming February 17 as the base date for the event, for the contact between the Hunter and the celestials, and assuming further that radio transmissions would certainly have been involved, she had calculated precisely where the radio waves would be at this moment, and had derived an intercept course for the Hammersmith. All very simple.
"There's really only one feasible scenario," she told Solly. "They ran into another ship out there. That means there would have been at least an attempt at radio communication."
"You're hanging an awful lot on the fact that the turtle-shell showed up in the mural. There could be other explanations. They might have found a ground-based civilization.
Maybe preindustrial, no lights, no radio, nada. Just torches and the local equivalent of horses. In that case- "It couldn't have happened that way," she said. They were seated in the mission control center, chairs angled toward each other, drinking coffee.
"Why?"
"Alnitak's too young, for one thing. It's not ten million years old yet. So no local life. And it puts out too much UV. Millions of times what Helios does."
"Oh."
"Right. It would fry everything in sight. Anybody they ran into out there would have had to be star- travelers."
A survey ship had looked at Alnitak two centuries before. As planetary systems went, it didn't have much: one world, a captured gas giant far out in the boondocks.
"It's been a long time for a radio transmission," Solly said. "You get a lot of spread over three decades.
FAULS is a good system, but it might not be good enough to pick up a signal that weak. Or to sort it out from the general babble."
But Kim had spent time with the specs for the flexible array. "If it's there," she said, "we'll find it."
They spent the first day housekeeping, arranging their quarters, exploring the ship. Solly was already familiar with it, of course, but he enjoyed showing it off to Kim. She wondered whether her initial failure to be impressed with the vehicle might have insulted him. But it did remind her of the Institute's Special Quarters, where non-VIP visitors were housed.
They wandered from floor to floor, and he demonstrated the features of the recreational facilities and the VR section. They inspected the two sets of engines, the mains, which propelled the Hammersmith through realspace, and the Transdimensional Interface, the jump engines. The TDI was small enough to hold in her hands.
Kim was pleasantly surprised to discover that the transition into hyper had come with no side effects.
She'd never experienced transdimensional flight as an adult. She was aware, as she hadn't been as a child, that some people got ill during the jump; that others experienced changes in perspective, that walls seemed less solid, that the grip of artificial gravity lessened or tightened, that people claimed to become aware of the thoughts of those around them. There were accounts of unearthly dreams and severe bouts of depression and of sheer exhilaration. Solly told her there was some truth to it. All interstellars, he said, carried a generous supply of antidepressants and sedatives. He had seen people stricken with severe headaches, stomach cramps, toothaches, all deriving from no discernible physical cause. "But it's never been more than an irritant," he said. "Like seasickness."
"Some of the effects, though," he added, "can be eerie. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid. And I've seen other odd stuff. I remember a woman who thought she'd regressed to her childhood, and a man who claimed to have seen through to the end of his days. Alternate personalities show up sometimes. One elderly passenger swore she'd become possessed. Another insisted he'd been followed on board by a werewolf."
"A werewolf?"
Solly's blue gaze locked on her. "You haven't been seeing anything out of the ordinary, have you?"
"I'm fine, thanks." She was quietly proud of herself.
"Tell me about Alnitak."
Kim pushed back in her chair. "It's a class O. Pretty hot, about thirty-five thousand times as bright as Helios."
"Wear your sunglasses."
"I'd say. It has two companion stars, both a long way out, but close enough to ensure that planets will probably never form. Or if they do, that they'll be unstable."
"But you said there is a planet."
"Captured," she reminded him.
"Alnitak." He tasted the word.
"From the Arabic for 'girdle.'"
They took over the briefing room for their first onboard dinner and put out a few candles. The windows, had they been real windows, could have revealed nothing other than the glow of the ship's running lights, had Solly chosen to put them on. Instead he programmed a view of the Milky Way as it would have appeared to an approaching intergalactic vehicle.
The meal itself was quiet. Solly usually carried more than his share of the conversation, but he had little to say that evening. The candles and the wine and the galactic disk provided an exquisite atmosphere. The food was good. Yet Kim felt the weight of her decision, and worried that she might be wrong, that she might have overlooked something, that she might have destroyed Solly's career. And her own. They were probably swearing out warrants at this moment. "I wish," she said, "that I could come up with any kind of explanation why they would have kept it quiet. I mean, contact would be the story of the age."
"Don't know," said Solly.
She looked up from a piece of corn. "We've more or less assumed that everybody feels the same way about celestials that we do. That everybody wants to find them if they're out there. Except maybe Canon Woodbridge and probably the Council. But there might be a lot of people who'd prefer the status quo.
Who'd just as soon we not discover that we have company."
Solly's face was framed by the candles. "I'm one of them," he said.
"You're kidding."
"I never kid. Look, Kim, life is pretty good right now. We have everything we could possibly want.
Security. Prosperity. You want a career, it's there. You prefer lying around the beach for a lifetime, you can do that. What can celestials give us that we don't already have? Except things to worry about?"
"It might be a way to find out who we are."
"That's a cliche. I know who I am. And I don't real'y need philosophy from some thing that may in fact look on me as a potential pork chop. There's a real downside with this, especially considering your experience in the Severin. And I'm sorry, but I can't see much upside. For you and me, maybe, if this pays off. But I think the human race, in the long run, would not benefit."
She pushed back from her food and stared at him. "Considering how you feel, I can't understand why you came."
"Kim, if they're out there, then it's just a matter of time before we meet them. I don't like it, and I'd stop it if I could. But it has the feel of inevitability about it. If it happens, it'll be a big moment. I'd just as soon be there. And we're probably better off if we know it's coming."
"Hunter instinct," said Kim.
"How do you mean?"
"Hide in the bushes. Kill or be killed. Are those the kind of conditions you really think would exist between interstellar civilizations?"
"Probably not. What I said was, it could happen. And since things are pretty good right now, I can't see why we'd want to change anything. Why take chances? Leave well enough alone."
"Solly, why do you think we went to Mars?"
He dipped a roll into his soup, bit off a piece, and chewed it thoughtfully. "We went to Mars," he said, "because we recognized that exploitation of the solar system would have long-term economic benefits."
"You really think that was the motivation? Long-term economic benefits?"
"It's what the history books say."
"The history books say Columbus headed out because he wanted to establish trade routes to India."
"Last I heard, that was the explanation."
"It was a cover story, Solly. It was intended to help Isabella make the right decision. To hock her jewels, have an argument ready for her councilors, and at the same time to follow the call of her DNA."
"The call of her DNA?" He looked amused. "You always did have a talent for poetry, Kim."
She waited patiently while he finished his wine.
"So," he asked at last, patting his lips with his napkin, "what was the call of her DNA?"
"It wasn't trade routes," said Kim.
"So what was it?"
"Outward bound," she said. "Exploration. To set foot, either in person or by proxy, in places that have never been seen before."
"I hear what you're saying," said Solly. "But we've done that. We've set foot in a lot of places over the last few centuries. What's that have to do with celestials?"
"We've accepted the notion we're alone."
"We probably are." Solly reached for the decanter and refilled their glasses. "Maybe there's somebody out there somewhere, but they're probably so far away it'll never make a difference. Yes: for practical purposes, I think we can proceed as if we're alone."
"The problem with that," she said, "is that we've become complacent and selfsatisfied. Bored. We're shutting down everything that made us worthwhile as a species."
"Kim, I think you're overstating things."
"Maybe. But I think we need something to light a fire under us. The universe has become boring. We go to ten thousand star systems and they're always the same. Always quiet. Always sterile."
"Is that why Emily was on the Hunter? Is that the way she felt?"