“How much does that come to?”
“I doubt we’d want to measure it.”
chapter 13
Who the hunter, then,
And who the prey?
—ELIA RASMUSSEN,
THE LONG PATROL, 2167
NEAR THE END of the third day, the Memphis slipped from the transdimensional mists and coasted back out into sublight space. They were well away from the local sun, which was a small yellow-orange main sequence star.
Hutch duly reported their arrival to Outpost. At about the same time, she was informed that the John R. Sentenasio, a survey yacht, had been dispatched to Point B. They would record everything they could about Safe Harbor, the moonbase, and the satellites. When they had completed their mission, they would be available to follow the Memphis, if there was a reason for them to do so.
She finished with her duties on the bridge and strolled down to mission control, where Pete had been trying once again to explain to George and the others that a planetary system was a big place, and that finding the associated worlds could take time. They’d apparently all agreed that this was so, but they nevertheless seemed to think that Hutch should be able to work miracles. I mean, that’s what all this super technology is for, right? But even planets weren’t easy to locate in those immense reaches. So her passengers became increasingly impatient when the first afternoon wore on into night, and then into a second day, with no results.
They didn’t even know what the system looked like. No one had ever been there before. Bill estimated a biozone between 75 and 160 million kilometers out, and that became their search area. The first object they identified, other than the sun, was a comet, inbound, its tail trailing millions of kilometers behind it.
While they waited, they played chess and bridge and hunted through the Lost Temple for the Crown of Mapuhr. And they grumbled at Bill, who took it all very well. “At this point,” he told George cheerfully, “it’s hit or miss. We just have to be patient.”
George complained about the AI’s good humor and asked whether Hutch couldn’t tune it down a bit. “Damned thing chatters on, drives me crazy,” he said.
Bill, who had to have overheard, did not respond. Later, when Hutch tried to reassure him, he commented that he understood about humans. He did not elaborate, and she did not press him.
“We have a target,” he reported near the end of the second night, meaning he had found a world in the biozone. “It’s on the inner edge, eighty million klicks out.”
They used another day and a half moving into position to intercept. Meanwhile, Bill located a second possibility. But it didn’t matter: As they slipped onto a line between the inner world and Point B, the speakers came alive.
KM 449397-II WAS a small world, not much bigger than Mars, but it had broad blue oceans and the continents were green and the skies were filled with cumulus.
A summer world. Diamond bright in the sunlight. Hutch could hardly bring herself to believe it. Almost every planet she had ever seen was sterile. It might have sunlight, and it might have broad blue seas, but inevitably nothing walked, or crawled, across its surface, or lived in its oceans. The overwhelming majority of worlds were quiet and empty.
Yet here, twice in the same mission, they had come across life. Not that much of it was left at Safe Harbor. Should have named it Hardscrabble.
George was beaming, watching the images on screen, his hands clasped behind his back like Nelson at the Nile.
Bill reported a stealth satellite. “I’ll scan for others,” he said. “I assume there will be two more.”
Mountain chains ranged everywhere. Volcanoes poured out smoke along the shore of an inland sea. Great rivers divided the land. There were storms and ice caps, and a blizzard worked its way down from the north. Two continents were visible, bathed in sunlight.
“It doesn’t look as if anybody lives there, though,” said Herman. “I don’t see any sign of cities.”
“We’re still too far out,” said Pete.
An hour later Hutch eased them into orbit and they approached the terminator and passed onto the night side.
And there they were! Not the rivers of light they’d hoped for, not London or Paris, but lights nonetheless. Scattered haphazardly across the face of the planet. They flickered, they were dim, and they were few in number.
Campfires. Oil lamps, maybe. Torches. But certainly no moving spotlights. No electrically illuminated rooftop restaurants.
Nonetheless, they were lights.
They stayed in mission control, doing nothing other than absorbing their good fortune, enjoying the warmth of success. Hutch was finally able to throw off the dark mood that had descended on her with the loss of the Condor. She walked among them, patting people on the back, trading toasts, exchanging embraces, and thoroughly enjoying herself. At one point she saw Tor looking at her longingly and she thought, Now’s the moment, took the initiative, and kissed him.
The Memphis moved back out into daylight. Over the continents and several chains of islands.
Hutch trained the telescopes on the ground and Bill put the results on-screen. Mostly, it was mountain and forest. Jungle near the equator. Broad plains in the north of both continents. Herds of animals on the flatlands, and lone beasts near the rivers.
“There,” said Alyx.
Structures! It was hard to make out the details. They seemed to coexist with prairies and forests, half-hidden by the landscape, rather than rising over it.
“Full mag, Bill,” Hutch said.
A harbor city appeared on-screen, unlike anything she had seen before. It appeared fragile, a place of light and crystal, a cluster of chess pieces, brilliant in the sunlight. Hutch noticed that no roads connected them. And no ships drifted in the harbor.
There were no aircraft, no sign of ground transportation. This society, whatever it was, did not seem to have access to power. And with that realization, she understood they had done nothing more than arrive at another relay point.
LIKE THE STRUCTURES that rose from them, the forests had a delicate appearance. No counterpart of the great northern oak was going to be found here, or of Nok’s ikalas, or of the iron-hard kormors of Algol III. Rather, these seemed to be the kind of woodlands Japanese artists might have designed, subtle, precise, fragile, suggestive of a spiritual dimension.
Here was a maple green palace straddling a ridge of hills, and there a pair of emery-colored buildings shaped like turtle shells. The imagers picked out a cliff dwelling, a group of balconies and windows carved in the living rock, looking out of the face of a precipice. And a series of gleaming glass mushrooms, lining both banks of a river.
They were curious structures. There seemed to be no means of ingress to the cliff city unless you’d brought your climbing gear. And no bridges crossed the river, connecting the buildings on either side.
They saw a tower rising out of the symmetry of vines and branches.
They weren’t sure at first. It might have been merely an odd grouping of trees or limbs, a natural cage of sorts, but it would have been a very large cage. They studied it. Bill extracted it from its surroundings, tried to strip the forest away. But it was anchored in the vegetation and you could not remove it any more than you could remove a cave from the side of a mountain. Bill turned it about, displayed it from every angle.
Here was a roof, and there a set of supports. It almost seemed to be constructed of branches and vines, wild in themselves, yet part of an overall design.
As Hutch watched, a large bird appeared in an alcove, spread enormous wings, and launched itself like a great swan into the sky.
“Bill,” she said.
The AI knew what she wanted. He magnified the image.
The swan wore clothing! A loose-fitting tunic was draped across near-human shoulders. It had limbs that might have been arms and legs. And it had a face. Its skin was light, and golden hair, or feathers, tumbled down its back. The wings were patterned in white and gold, and as they watched the creature soared to another level
of another structure, alighted gracefully, and stepped out of view.
Alyx was first to make the obvious observation. “It looked like an angel,” she said.
A pair of the creatures appeared, and rose from the trees. They swirled gracefully around each other in an aerial dance with a vaguely sexual flavor.
“We’ve come to Paradise,” said Herman.
They were all gawking at the images and somebody said how by God it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen and who would have believed it.
“How soon can we be ready to go down?” George asked.
Hutch hadn’t expected that such a moment would arrive, and she was caught off guard. She hadn’t considered what might happen if they actually found a set of aliens. It all seemed so preposterous.
“George,” she said, “let’s go up on the bridge for a minute.”
He frowned, and she knew he wanted no cautious advice, but he followed along. The others turned to watch, and Herman said, “Don’t be hard on him, Hutch. He means well.”
They all laughed.
“It’s not a good idea,” she said when they were alone.
“Why not?”
“We don’t know anything about these creatures. You don’t want to go barging in down there.”
“Hutch.” His voice suggested she needed to calm down. “This is why we came. Eleven people died to put us here. And you want me to, what, wave and go home?”
“George,” she said, “for all you know they could be headhunters.”
“Hutch,” he said soothingly, “they’re angels.”
“We don’t know what they are. That’s my point.”
“And we never will know until we go down and say hello.”
“George—”
“Look, Hutch, I hate to put it this way, but you’re one of the more negative people I know. Have a little faith in us.”
“You could get killed,” she said.
“We’re willing to take our chances.” They hadn’t made the bridge. They had in fact come to a stop outside the holotank. But they were alone so it didn’t matter. “Hutch, listen. We’re all doing something we’ve dreamed about for a lifetime. If we sit around up here and look at the pictures, and call somebody else in, it’s going to be like—”
“—You backed off at the critical moment.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” He pressed his fingers against his temples, massaged them, but never took his eyes from her. “I’m glad you understand.”
“I hope you understand that anyone who goes down there is putting his life on the line.”
He nodded. “Do you know what we’ve been doing all our lives? Making money. And that’s about it. Alyx, she’s been running glorified strip shows. Nick does funerals. Pete, of course, did Universe. Herman’s not that well-off, but it’s what his life is about. Every day he goes to a job he doesn’t like very much. Just to pay the bills. Ask him what he’s most afraid of. You know what he’ll tell you? You know what he told me once?”
Hutch waited.
“That he’d get to the end of his life and discover he hadn’t been anywhere.” His eyes bored into her. “Tor’s the exception. He was born into money. You know why he was at Outpost? Because he wants his work to be something more than wall hangings for rich people.”
Hutch thought she knew why Tor was out on that remote moon, and she didn’t believe it had much to do with wall hangings. But she let it go. “George,” she said, “you’re taking a terrible chance if you go down there. Don’t do it.”
“Captain,” he said, “I own the Memphis. I can order what I want. But I don’t want to do that. I’d like it very much if you tried to understand what this means to us. To all of us. Even if we were to lose somebody.” He shrugged. “Talk to anybody back there, and you’ll hear that this is why we came. And it’s all we really care about.”
She took a long moment, looked down the empty passageway. “The others feel the same way?”
“Yes.”
“Even Pete?”
“Especially Pete.”
She nodded. “What do you want from me?”
“Your permission.”
“You said it yourself. You don’t need it.”
“I want it anyhow.”
She took a long deep breath. “Damn you, George,” she said, “I won’t give it. The landing is too dangerous. Leave it to the professionals.”
He looked at her, disappointed. “I assume you’ll remain here.”
“No,” she said. “You need somebody riding shotgun.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I wish we had a shotgun.”
THERE WAS NO legitimate way she could stop them. If she refused to pilot the lander, they could have Bill take them down. She could direct Bill to refuse instructions from them, but George was the owner, and she really could not legally do that. Hell, maybe they were right. Maybe she was being overprotective. They were, after all, adults. If they wanted to be front and center when history was made, who was she to stand in the way?
She sent off a report, explaining what the ship’s owner proposed to do and recording her reservations. Then she collected her laser cutter (which was the closest thing the Memphis had to a weapon), and went down to the shuttle bay.
They were all there, ready to go. Tor, believe it or not, with his easel; Pete and George in earnest conversation; Nick, wearing a coat and tie, as though the occasion were formal; Herman, in black boots and carrying a connecting bar from—she thought—his bed, presumably in case defense was needed; and Alyx, in a jumpsuit, looking as good as the angels.
There was much of the atmosphere of a Sunday afternoon.
Alyx and Herman appeared a trifle wary. Brighter than the rest, she decided.
She reviewed the e-suits with them. There’d be no air tanks this time. The atmosphere, she explained, was oxygen-rich. “You’ll have a converter.”
“Could we live with the suit off?”
“For a while. But I don’t recommend it.” She passed out the converters, showed them how to clip them to their vests. “They’ll go on when the suit activates,” she explained. “You don’t have to do anything.”
They smiled back at her, a bit nervously, she thought. They’re not sure about this. Even George. But they’d committed themselves so they were stuck and nobody was going to back out. Hutch opened the lander hatch, and they climbed in. After everybody was seated, she closed up and opened a channel to the AI. “Bill,” she said.
“Yes, Hutch.”
“If we’re not back in twenty-four hours, and you haven’t heard anything to the contrary from me, take the ship home.” She felt the mood change around her. That was good. Just what she wanted.
“Yes, Hutch. May I ask how severe the danger is?”
“We’ve no idea.”
“I wish,” said George, who was beside her, “you wouldn’t play these games. We’re nervous enough.”
Yeah. “You have reason to be nervous, George,” she said.
He looked angrily at her, but he let it go.
Bill evacuated the air from the bay, and the launch doors opened. Her board went green, and they eased out of the spacecraft.
“I hadn’t thought this through very well, I guess,” said George. “But do we have a way to speak to them? So that they can hear us?”
“There’s a switch on the harness.” She showed him. “It’ll turn on a speaker for you.”
“Excellent.” He’d brought a pair of portable lamps and fabrics and a couple of electronic devices. “To use as gifts,” he explained.
“Going to trade with the natives,” said Alyx, amused at the prospect.
“Listen,” said George, “nothing to lose.”
“Hutch.”
She put the AI’s voice on the cabin speaker. “Yes, Bill?”
“There is another stealth. One-twenty degrees around the orbit from the first one. It seems to be the same arrangement as Safe Harbor.”
Pete leaned forward
and signaled he wanted to talk to the AI.
“Go ahead,” said Hutch.
“Bill, are you looking for the second set?”
“Of satellites? Yes, I am, Pete. I will report when, and if, I find them.”
“It’s beginning to look,” said Tor, “as if what we really have is a group of interstellar busybodies.”
THE TEAM HAD decided on its landing site before leaving the Memphis. Two relatively small clusters of spires and minarets rose out of the middle of a plain, on opposite sides of a river, in the center of a Britain-sized island in the southern hemisphere. The river was wide and sleepy. No boat moved across its surface. There was no jetty, no beach on which swimmers might have gathered, no boat house, no buoy.
Well, thought Hutch, if I had a large pair of wings, I’d probably stay away from deep water myself. She wondered how they showered.
The sun was rising as they descended toward the twin settlements.
“There,” said Hutch, indicating her preference for a landing spot.
“That’s a long way from the populated area,” said Nick.
About six kilometers. She’d have preferred maybe twenty, but she knew George wouldn’t stand for it. Still, it was a decent site. The land was flat, they were well away from the foliage that grew in clusters, so nothing could come up on them without their seeing it.
“It’s good,” said George. “Do it.”
The lander descended through a few wisps of gray cloud into the clear early-morning air. There were no structures in the immediate area, and nothing moved.
They dropped gently to the ground.
Hutch pointed their scopes at the settlements and put the pictures on the displays. No one seemed to have noticed their arrival. The locals drifted undisturbed through the sky. Others lingered on open porches in the towers. An idyllic life, indeed.
Well, what else would you expect from angels?
Uh-oh.
“What, Hutch?”
Someone had apparently seen them come down. The towers had open decks at all levels. On one, across the river, several of the inhabitants had gathered. They looked excited. “And I do believe they’re pointing at us.”
Chindi Page 19