A musical note sounded. “Pardon me,” Chandor said, and to the visiphone: “Accept. Proceed.”
“Search for Captain Ricardo Nansen,” stated the voice.
Chandor gave his visitor a surprised look. Nansen nodded, equally unsure what it meant. Hanny, are you all right? “I am here,” he said.
The scanner found him. The wall opposite generated an image panel. He saw a short, dark man in a tunic with an emblem on the left breast. A transparency behind showed dusk falling where he was. Nonetheless Nansen recognized the high-peaked roofs, archaic, unlike any hereabouts; and he knew the man also. It was Kenri Fanion, calling from the Kith village on the Isle of Weyan.
“Apologies for disturbing you, Captain Nansen.” He spoke in the dominant language of Harbor. Once in conversation he had confessed that his Kithish was rusty; they didn’t use it much anymore in the settlement, apart from rites and ceremonies. Besides, it had drifted from the versions spoken in the ships into a dialect of its own.
Yet, though he had never gone to the stars, he was a Kithman in blood and heritage, his community the last abiding rendezvous, he an information broker for a living but by dedication a member of the Kith’s Tau Ceti service establishment. He addressed the commander of Envoy straight-forwardly but with awe in his eyes.
“It could wait,” he said. With grimness: “It will have to. However, I thought you should know immediately, before the news comes out.”
Nansen grappled calm to himself. “Thank you. What is it?”
“I have just heard from Shipwatch,” the system of orbiting instruments that kept track of starship trails. “Bad word. A vessel bound for us … won’t arrive.”
Chandor gasped. “Say on,” Nansen ordered.
“Shipwatch has recorded a trace.” From far off. Else the craft, running close to the speed of light, would be in telescope range. “Suddenly it blanked out.”
“They may have gone normal for a while to take observations or for some other reason,” said Nansen, knowing how empty his words were.
“It’s been five hours, Captain. And why would they lay to at all? They know this vicinity.” A tic pulsed in Fanion’s cheek. “We’ll keep alert for a sign, of course. But I think something has gone radically wrong.”
“Do you have a location?”
“About seven and a half light-years distant, inbound from the Cassiopeia sector. We’ll have a better figure when the readings from the far-orbit stations come in.” Longer baselines, for triangulation. Not that a few billion kilometers either way are important, across a gap like that.
Chandor’s knuckles stood white above the arms of his chair. Somehow he achieved the same quietness. “Cassiopeia. That suggests Fleetwing. She hasn’t been here often. Generally she’s plied remote parts, the Brent and Olivares regions, or even farther.”
Fanion’s head jerked, a nod. “Yes. The oldest left, wasn’t she?” He blinked hard. “Well, I suppose death finally caught up with her, too.”
“Too?” asked Nansen.
“Word reaches us eventually, by laser beam if not by ship. Whether or not a particular vessel has called on us in centuries, she’ll have done so elsewhere. When nobody’s seen or heard of her for a very long time—then nobody ever does again.”
The things that can fatally happen. … But what did? There shouldn’t be any hazard in a familiar region like Tau Ceti’s, nothing she hasn’t dealt with over and over in her thousands of star-years.
“That’s my message, Captain Nansen,” the Kithman finished. “I wish it weren’t. I’ll inform you as soon as we learn more.”
“If you do,” Chandor said.
“Yes, if. God keep them yonder.” Fanion ended transmission, maybe afraid he couldn’t have gotten through the usual formalities.
Ghosts of nacre drifted in a wall gone bare. The sky outside shone as it had no right to shine. The city mumbled.
“God keep us all,” Chandor said, “and the hopes we had.”
“What do you mean?” Nansen demanded.
“You should know, Captain. How few and far between the Kith ships are. Now we probably won’t see any for more than a hundred years. When you and I are dead.”
“Unless another one happens to be bound here, too.”
“Hardly.” Chandor’s tone flattened. “It could chance to, I suppose, as thin as the trade is and as loosely organized as it always was. But in general, the ships settled long ago on a cycle of routes. It’s complicated and variable, no doubt—I don’t know the details—but roughly speaking, if this was Fleetwing’s turn to call on us, nobody else will for at least a century.”
“Oh, yes. Pardon me. I’ve heard that, but forgotten.”
Chandor smiled sadly. “Understandable, sir, as much as you’ve had to learn in four short years, and as much as you’ve been doing.”
Staving off grief as best he could, Nansen forced some resonance back into his voice. “This doesn’t have to be a disaster for the League.”
“I’m afraid it is, sir. Our opponents will be quick to take advantage. The psychological effects—”
“Well, you know your society better than I do.” A free society with an ideal of enterprise, where the story of the great pioneering era has the power of myth. Would its young really surrender their newborn dreams so soon?
Maybe. Those dreams are so very new.
“And, you know,” Chandor trudged on, “we were counting on a shipful of starfarers, their experience and example, their help.”
“Yes. We were.” He’s right, this could be the blow from which we can’t recover. “They may not be lost.” Don’t let it sound forlorn. “They may start up again—have started up again—and arrive in another seven or eight years.”
Chandor shook his head. His shoulders sagged. “I can’t believe it, sir.” He drew breath. “Once, before Envoy returned, I got to wondering about the mysterious disappearances. I’ve been interested in the Kith my whole life, you recall. I retrieved everything about them that’s in their database on Weyan. It goes back millennia, and includes many observations made elsewhere. Three times in the past, Shipwatch systems have detected trails—not bound their way, as it happened, but detectable—that suddenly ended. No one knows why.”
“Did no vessel make a search?”
“None were on hand. Except—let me remember—yes. A ship that stopped at Aerie, decades after an observation there, did go look, since the distance was fairly short, a few light-years. But she found nothing, Cumulative effects of uncertainties in the data, during the time that had passed. The search volume was too huge.”
“Wouldn’t survivors have broadcast a signal?”
“None was detected. The searchers gave up. Nobody else ever made such an attempt. They couldn’t afford to.”
A chill coursed through Nansen. He tautened. After a minute he said, gazing past the other man, out at the sky, “Perhaps we can.”
Chandor gaped. “Sir?”
“Let me use your visiphone, please.”
First Nansen called Dayan at their home and spoke briefly with her. Thereafter he told the communications net to find the rest of Envoy’s crew, widely scattered over the planet. It was to bid them get in touch and come to him as soon as possible.
“Now, pardon me,” he said, rising. “We’ll talk again later. Meanwhile, carry on.”
“Yes, Captain,” Chandor whispered. In his face bewilderment struggled with something that dared not yet be rapture.
Nansen had ported his aircar two or three kilometers from the Venture building. He liked to walk. He did not like the stares he drew on a street. Not that they meant trouble. Most were friendly, many close to adoration, especially in this city. A few were wary or even resentful—Envoy had brought great strangeness to Harbor, and already the changes were felt—but not blatantly. Nor did anyone hail the famous man, though some nodded or gave him the hand-to-temple salute of deference. He simply didn’t enjoy being a spectacle.
The boulevard was wide, lined with the sweet
ly curved double trunks and feathery orange foliage of lyre trees. Vehicles glided along it, pedestrians through the resilient side lanes. The buildings behind were seldom more than ten stories high, set well apart on lawns of golden-hued native sward or green terrestrial grass. They ran to fluted or color-paneled façades with turrets elaborately columned and spired. Argosy was founded about six hundred years ago, by Kithfolk who despaired of wandering. Assimilation was not entirely complete. Ancestral genes revealed themselves here and there in small, trim bodies and craggy visages. More pervasive and meaningful was ancestral tradition, an ethos half forgotten, now stirring awake. It made Argosy a favored site for an organization that aimed to launch fresh emprises among the stars.
And Harbor itself is a favored world. Jean’s world. We were lucky, arriving when we did, when a new civilization is reindustrializing the planetary system and dynamic individualists are seeking their fortunes. It can’t last.
Though who knows what real interstellar traffic, whole fleets of ships, might bring about that never was before in human history?
Having claimed his car, he set it to wheel out past city limits and take off. Field drive, miniaturized for bubbles like this, would make it safe to land and lift anywhere. That alone meant enormous wealth for the innovators. But let somebody better qualified find the right managers to reap it. Nansen was no businessman; his skills and goals lay elsewhere.
From above he spied a cluster of buildings lately erected, laboratories for research and development in the nascent technologies. The League’s financial backers did not lack vision—if their vision was largely financial, what of it?—while today’s computers, robotics, and nanotech made for rapid progress.
The sight fell behind him and he flew over a tawny plain. Shagtrees lined riverbanks with vivid yellow, fireplumes with scarlet. This part of Duncan had reverted to nature during the death agonies of the Mandatary; several circular marshes were warhead craters. Reclamation was under way, hampered by disputes over ownership. Twice, however, he crossed a broad swathe of green, cropland and pastureland, where a village nestled as a center for single farmsteads.
Not too favored a world. Population rising steeply again, more and more lands overcrowded. Yes, technics feeds, clothes, houses, medicates everybody, but it can’t create living space; and poverty is relative. The economy today is ruthless; for each person who succeeds, a hundred or a thousand go under. And there are other malcontents, misfits in religion, politics, lifeways—and some who look at the stars with a pure kind of longing.
At least open land could still be had, square kilometers of it, if you could pay. Nansen’s aircar slanted down toward his estancia, where Dayan awaited him.
He had not copied the house of his childhood. That would have been a mockery, here where grass was only slowly spreading outward and only terrestrial saplings rose from it. Rower beds decorated a lawn, but a big arachnea dominated, like a spiderweb against the sky, swaying and rustling in a wind that smelled faintly of spices no human ever tasted. Two dogs lolled near the porch, panting in the warmth, but the glittery mites dancing in the air around them were not insects, and a sunhawk overhead, watchful for prey, had four wings. Yet the house was high-ceilinged and rambling, stone-floored, red-tiled, and a fountain played on the patio.
The Envoy crew sat near it, under a vine-draped trellis. Household staff had brought drinks and withdrawn. There was no need for servants as such; in most respects, robots would have done better. These youngsters, though, were like apprentices, here to be with Don Ricardo and Doña Hanny, to learn from them and someday win berths on their ships. They were like family.
But they were not those who had fared with Nansen. His glance ranged over his crew. As erstwhile, they were in a semicircle facing him. His beloved sat on the right, her hair a flame above a cool white gown in the fashion of Duncan. Sundaram sat beside her, the usual mildness on his brown visage, the usual contemplativeness behind it. Yu showed a measure of weariness. Zeyd’s lean frame was tensed. Mokoena’s arms cradled an infant.
Nansen stood up. “The meeting will please come to order,” he said.
It was not pomposity. They needed a touch of ritual to focus their attention. Until the last of them arrived, they had talked mainly about their roles on the planet—Yu and Zeyd planting the seeds of an industrial revolution, Dayan and Mokoena of a scientific revolution, Sundaram trying to guide the religious and philosophical transformations that were afoot after the revelations from the Holont. Now they must turn their minds back to the deeps.
Nansen sat down. For a span only the clear song of the water sounded forth.
“You know what the situation is,” he said. “The question is, what shall we do about it?”
Mokoena responded promptly. “First, I think, we had better ask if we should.”
They were not surprised.
“We have too much to lose.” She held her baby closer. “Everything we’ve gained, homes, new lives; everything we’re accomplishing.”
“Yes,” Sundaram concurred. They could hear his reluctance. “Why squander the years we have left, and Envoy, to seek a derelict?”—Envoy, the sole working starship in tens or scores of light-years.
“Are we certain she is a derelict?” Nansen answered.
Yu’s eyes brightened. “Do you mean this might be just a quantum gate malfunction?” The light faded. “If so, the energy shift probably destroyed the vessel, or at least the crew.”
“Or maybe not. Hanny, will you explain?”
Looks went to the physicist. She spoke fast, impersonally, as if to keep emotion out from underfoot. “You remember what we learned at Tahir and the black hole, about the Bose-Einstein condensate having a small probability of going unstable. Not all the borrowed energy goes smoothly back to the substrate. It’s reclaimed instead from the surrounding matter, violently. This is in the data we downloaded here, of course, but in that cataract of information, it seems to have gone almost unnoticed.
“Well, since we mastered the modern computer systems, I’ve used their power to work on the equations, off and on. I’ve only mentioned this to Rico. Damn it, there hasn’t been time to prepare a paper! But I’ve found a solution that suggests how to eliminate the danger. A matter of devising quantum-wave guides.” She could no longer wholly restrain herself. “Oh, when humans go back to the stars, they’ll go with that, and field drive, and so much else!”
“If they go,” Sundaram said.
“Yes,” Nansen conceded. “Chandor Barak, whose judgment we’d better listen to, thinks that most likely we have a threshold to get across—here, now, on Harbor—and if we don’t, star traffic will continue dying till it’s as extinct for humans as for … all others?”
“We expected a Kith ship would become our ally,” Zeyd said. “But this disaster—”
“They may be alive aboard her,” Dayan stated.
“What? In God’s name—”
“That’s something else that’s come out of my solution. The manner of energy reclamation when a gate fails. It takes the form of deceleration of matter in the immediate vicinity. That would definitely ruin the engine part of any ship. But, depending on what the energy differential is, the front section might not be too badly damaged, and the deceleration might not be lethally high.”
“I’ve studied plans of Kith ships,” Yu breathed. “They show an emergency nuclear power plant forward in the hull. Given self-sealing, self repair—an essentially intact life-support system, recycling everything—the crew could survive.”
Mokoena spoke raggedly. The baby sensed her unease and wailed. She rocked it. “Recycling is never perfect, you know. A ship is not a planet. She can’t hold a full ecology. She doesn’t have plate tectonics, or any broad margin of tolerance. Wastes accumulate, toxins, unusables. Adrift in mid-space, with no proper means of flushout and replenishment—if a crew did live through the shock, I wouldn’t give them more than twenty years.”
“What a ghastly, slow death.” Zeyd turned to Nansen. It
blazed from him: “But Rico, you think you can save them!”
“If they are in fact alive, which we don’t know, I think perhaps we can,” the captain replied carefully. “And I think it’s worth trying.”
“Allah akbar!” Zeyd cried. “The old crew faring again—”
Mokoena laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said, gentle and immovable. “I’m sorry, Selim, darling, but no.”
“She’s right,” Nansen agreed. “It’s more than your child, and other children we mean to have. It’s everything we’re building here. The whole future we’ve dreamed of, lived for. Your advice, example, and inspiration are absolutely essential. Your duty, all of you, is to stay.”
“But not yours?” Yu challenged.
“I’m the most dispensable. The League can carry on without me—if people see that it is carrying on, that the industrial and social foundations for a starfleet are being laid—if they can keep a hope alive that the work will be rewarded in their lifetimes.”
“What will you do for crew?” Zeyd growled.
Nansen smiled. “Oh, we have no dearth of adventurous young souls. They’ll fight to go. Fifteen years’ absence won’t seem terribly consequential to them, and anyhow, they’ll experience just a few days. But they’d better have a seasoned commander.”
Sundaram shook his head. “Fifteen years for us without you, dear friend. Or perhaps forever.”
“We’ve time to be together,” Nansen said. “Envoy can’t leave tomorrow. Her gamma makes her safe enough from a quantum accident. But there are other kinds. And the Kith did make technological advances while we were gone. She needs a dozen sorts of retrofits. And the crew will need training, and—I don’t suppose we can start for at least a year.”
Mokoena’s gaze rested dark upon him. “An added year for them in that ship. You’re cutting it close, Rico.”
“I have no choice. Nor, really, about going. But I want to consult and work with my former crew.”
“You realize, don’t you,” Dayan broke in, “I’m going also.”
“We’ll argue about that later,” Nansen said roughly.
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