He decided to ask Sylvia Virgil to intervene. After all, it wasn’t as if he lacked influence himself. Hutch said fine, it was okay with her. When he was ready, she set him up in the cupola, where he could stand beside a giant chair, with a row of books on the wall behind him, and make his appeal. He explained what the problem was. They had been careful in their inspection of the retreat, he told her, and they had begun the process of understanding its nature. They had found the place when no one else had wanted to bother, and they had bled for it. Now the Academy proposed to take it from him.
He was getting worked up as he proceeded, and he told himself to keep cool. Let her see that he was resentful. That the Academy might pay a price down the road somewhere. But don’t let her think he’d become a crank.
He asked that Mogambo be placed under his authority. And he felt he did it in diplomatic fashion. Hutch warned him that it would be several days before they could hope for an answer, but that would be adequate because they would have it before the Longworth arrived. George could see that she didn’t expect his request to be granted, but she didn’t comment other than to tell him she hoped he had won her over. George got the impression she, Hutch, didn’t think highly of Mogambo.
HUTCH SPENT ONE night in the dome with Nick, Alyx, and George. (Tor, either seeking inspiration, or demonstrating his independence, stayed in the lander.) It was enough. Group sleepovers had never appealed much to her, and this was a restless bunch. It was all very historical, George maintained, entering all the details in his notebook, as if someone a thousand years from now would care that Nick hadn’t slept well or that Alyx was the first one up.
They never really got used to being in the Retreat. (It had by then acquired a capital letter.) They lowered their voices and talked about how much time they were going to spend with the books when they got translated. Hutch thought that would be an unlikely result. If they turned out to be treatises on celestial mechanics or on the philosophical aspects of the soul, they’d bail out pretty quickly. Nick admitted as much to her, while they stood in the half-light of the living room. “At the moment,” he said, “they’re like women.” He was talking about the books. “They’re mysterious and they look good and we can’t really touch them. But once it’s all laid out, where everybody can see…” He shrugged. Stopped. Realized he was in a mine field.
Hutch nodded but kept a straight face. “Men aren’t that way at all.”
“No, we’re not. We don’t rely on mystery.”
“Just as well,” she said.
OUTPOST FORWARDED A series of news reports on the discoveries at Safe Harbor, Paradise, and the Retreat. There was a covering comment by Virgil, informing them that the world was watching.
Maybe, but for all the wrong reasons. The world was fascinated by the nuclear devastation at Safe Harbor, and by the loss of Pete and Herman, which had become known as the Angel Murders. And she suspected that, for most of UNN’s audience, the most intriguing aspect of the Retreat would become the presence of bodies in the courtyard grave.
At the time of transmission, the media knew almost nothing about the Retreat other than the fact it was there. But they were stressing the hazards involved, the possibility of more murderous aliens running loose, stay tuned. After which they switched back to the usual, shoot-outs in the Middle East, a government sex scandal in London, a serial killer in Derbyshire, a revolt in Indonesia, and a corporate argument about who really controlled the newest longevity procedures.
In one of the broadcasts, Virgil was interviewed by Brace Kampanik of Worldwide. She expressed her concern for the losses endured by the mission, but argued that forays into the unknown are always done at hazard. But the discoveries would be “far-reaching,” she said, stipulating that “we are finally beginning to get a sense of what our neighborhood looks like.”
On the whole, she was quite good. She inevitably tended toward pomposity and usually said too much, but this time she hit the right tone, grabbed the credit for the Academy (which it clearly didn’t deserve), and expressed her hope that Mr. Hockelmann and his gallant team would get back safely.
THEY MADE A virtual record of the Retreat, and Hutch was able to re-create it on the Memphis so that it became possible to discard the e-suits and use the holotank to spend time there. Bill even reconstructed the place as it might have looked when it was new, and he shrank the dimensions so they could see it as its occupants must have seen it.
But it didn’t really matter. George and his people preferred the real thing, the pocket dome, the proximity to the graves, and the books. Always the books. Expectations for their contents, the wisdom of an advanced race, their history, their ethics, their conclusions about God and creation, ran so high that she thought they could not fail to disappoint when translation eventually came. It occurred to Hutch that it might be a blessing were the library and all its work to vanish. Go up maybe in a volcanic eruption. It would provide debate and romance for centuries, while scholars and poets speculated about what had been lost. Nick had commented once that people never look good at their funerals, not because they’re dead, but because there’s too much light on them. “We need some shadowing,” he said. “Some concealment.”
Virgil’s reply to George arrived during the early afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Hutch was on the ship when Bill asked whether she wanted to look at it before it was relayed down to the Retreat.
“Other people’s mail,” she said.
“You might want to look anyhow.”
“Let it go.”
Five minutes later George was on the circuit, outraged. “Did you see it?” he demanded.
“No. But I assume she denied the request.”
“Worse than that, Hutch.” He looked ready to commit murder. “She says she’s directed Mogambo to move the Retreat back to Virginia.”
“The furnishings?” she asked. “The books? What?”
“Everything. Lock, stock, and barrel. The woman’s lost her mind.”
Hutch could think of nothing to say. But she understood the rationale. Out here, a zillion light-years from Arlington, the site was inconvenient. Worse, if they left it where it was, they would need to find a way to keep poachers and vandals off the premises. Furthermore, at home, it would become a pretty decent tourist draw.
Now that she thought of it, she wondered whether the director wasn’t doing the right thing. Why not make it available to the public? The Academy drew 51 percent of its support from federal taxes. It struck her that the taxpayers had every right to see what their money was buying. But she could see that George was in no mood to discuss the matter.
“I won’t allow it.” They were empty words, and they both knew it. “Hutch.” He looked at her as if she could somehow intervene. Make Sylvia Virgil see reason. Beat off Mogambo. “It’s indecent.”
“Archeologists have always been grave robbers,” she said softly. “It’s what they do.” She almost said, what we do. Because she’d been involved, had helped make off with countless artifacts. But she was only an amateur grave robber.
She pictured the Retreat, with its unremarkable decks and its myopic windows looking out across the Potomac. With hordes of schoolkids tracking through it, and vendors outside hustling sandwiches and kites. And a souvenir shop. And visitors would say to one another, Built by real aliens. They’d enjoy their soft drinks and their popcorn, imagining they knew how it had really felt when George and his team landed.
George was right. And all those people making off with jars and knives and cups and medallions from Sumer and Egypt and Mexico, and later from Quraqua and Pinnacle and Beta Pac, had been right, too. She couldn’t bring herself to deny the work she’d assisted all these years. But still…
Without the needle peaks and the Twins and the big ring (they couldn’t take any of that back to Arlington) what would the Retreat be?
THEY WENT BACK to the Memphis for New Year’s Eve. They’d run out of constructive things to do on the ground. By then everyone wanted to get out of the poc
ket dome, or stop sleeping in the lander. So they came back up and had another party.
There’d been some reservation about the propriety of all these celebrations so soon after Kurt’s death. But Hutch assured them that Kurt would have preferred they go ahead and enjoy themselves, which was true. Moreover, it was a bonding process, a way to shut out the strangeness of their surroundings. So they raised the first glass to the lost captain, drank to their other lost comrades, and drowned themselves in each other’s company.
“This is the way archeology is supposed to be done,” Hutch told Nick, late in the evening. She was wearing a party hat and had probably drunk a bit too much by then. There were no rules about captains drinking, other than the general admonition that they be able to function in an emergency. Consequently, Hutch stayed within range of what some coffee and a couple of pills could do to bring her around. Bill helped her keep watch on her limitations, and was not above informing her publicly if he thought she was indulging beyond the limits.
At midnight, of course, everybody kisses everybody else. George had been a bit reluctant when Hutch offered herself to him, but he managed a smile and delivered a chaste peck just to one side of her lips. Poor George. He was the most driven man she’d ever known. Even there, in the midst of a success that would make him immortal, he couldn’t enjoy himself. When he started to pull away, Hutch tossed her own inhibitions to the wind, seized him, looked directly into his startled eyes, and delivered a long wet smooch after which she grinned happily at him. He tried to break free, but she hung on. “Happy New Year, George,” she said, while applause rose around her. It went a long way to breaking down the wall that had been rising between them.
And even Tor, who routinely kept his distance, approached her toward the end of the evening and took her aside. “Next year, Hutch,” he said, “however we do it, whatever it takes, I want to celebrate with you.”
Why not? “It’s a date,” she said.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR, Hutch.”
Bill startled her. Usually, when she was alone in her quarters and he wanted to speak with her, there was a preliminary cough or a telltale squeal from the screen. But this time the voice was right in the room with her, hello ma’am, how are you doing, no monkeying around.
“Happy New Year yourself, Bill.”
“Nice party.”
“Yes.” She had just finished toweling off after coming out of the shower and was pulling her shift over her head. “Is everything okay?”
“We have another anomaly. I think.”
That got her attention. “What?”
“I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s okay. What’s the anomaly?”
“The white spot.”
“The white spot?” She’d forgotten about it. The cyclonic storm on Cobalt?
“On Autumn. At the equator. I’ve been watching it for several days.”
“Why is it anomalous?”
“For one thing, it’s not in the atmosphere.”
“It isn’t? Where is it?”
“It’s in orbit.”
“I thought you said it was a snowstorm.”
“It is.”
“Can’t happen.”
“That would have been my view.”
She was tired. Ready to call the mission a success and go home. “What else?”
“Autumn is directly on the line of transmission.”
“The signal from Icepack?”
“That is correct.”
Hutch had been punching up her pillows. She abandoned them, turned, and waited for the wallscreen to light up. It did, and Bill looked out at her. He was wearing a black dressing gown with the ship’s insignia over the breast pocket. “Has the signal been tracking Autumn?”
“Yes.”
“And you think there’s another set of stealths around Autumn?”
“No. It would be too hard to find a stable orbit. If you were going to put satellites in this system, it would be best to put them outside the big ring.”
“What then? What’s it aimed at?”
Bill smiled at her. “I have no idea.”
IN THE MORNING they agreed unanimously to go look at the white spot. They returned to the Retreat and effectively broke camp, retrieving the pocket dome, and trying to leave the structure as they’d found it.
chapter 21
When we observe world affairs, is it not quite plain that fortune cares little for wisdom or foolishness but converts one to the other with capricious delight?
—TACITUS,
ANNALS, III, C. 110
“WHAT IS IT exactly, Bill?” They were gathered in mission control, looking at the white disk floating at the top of Autumn’s atmosphere.
Bill sounded puzzled: “Spectroscopic analysis indicates it’s pure ammonia ice crystals. And a variety of gases.”
“Bill,” said Hutch, “I mean, what is it?”
“It’s a blizzard,” he said.
All right. Let’s start with basics. “Bill, something like this, assuming it could happen—”
“—It is happening—”
“—Wouldn’t it be yellow?”
“That is what I would expect.”
“Why yellow?” asked George.
“Because you get a lot of sulfides and whatnot. But the critical thing is—”
“—that you’d expect,” finished Nick, “to find it inside the atmosphere. Doesn’t take a weatherman to figure that out.”
“So what,” asked Tor, “could cause a snowstorm in outer space? Shouldn’t that be impossible? Bill?”
“It’s clearly not impossible.”
“You’re being evasive. Is it possible in the natural state of things?”
“I would think not.”
They were still a few thousand kilometers away from it. Hutch had not been asked her opinion when the decision to come out here went unanimous. She would, of course, have gone along with it. This was the sort of thing the Academy people loved. And it seemed harmless enough.
She even allowed herself to get caught up somewhat in the general enthusiasm. They were like kids, George coming down on Christmas morning and finding one toy after another under the tree, Alyx always trying to fit the cosmos onto a stage, we can do the snowstorm, get the light behind it, we want the audience to see into it, to feel the strangeness because this is no ordinary storm. Tor was making plans to go out on the hull to paint the thing, and Nick spent much of his time entering philosophical observations into his notebook. “It’ll be a bestseller when we get home,” he said. “The Notebooks of Nicholas Carmentine. I like the sound of it.”
“What are you writing?” asked Hutch.
“It’s a personal memoir. Hell, Hutch, when we get back, we’re all going to be famous. Have you thought about that? We’ve found everything we’d hoped for. And more.”
“Well,” said Tor, “almost everything.”
Even Bill was swept along by the general enthusiasm. “It has to be artificial,” he admitted to Hutch.
The disturbance, whatever it really was, was big, thousands of kilometers wide. It threw off jets and gushers in all directions. Streamers arced halfway around the planet. The central body of the storm was a large glob, filled with winds, driving snow, and slurry. The winds blew at about 80 kph, gusting to 130. Relatively serene for a storm on a gas giant. It was located directly on the equator.
The coffee tasted thick and warm and reassuring. When Hutch had been a little girl at camp and they’d told ghost stories around the fire at night, she remembered that the smell of coffee (which she wasn’t allowed to drink) had always made her feel better, had made the world a bit more solid. It was like that now. And it felt good because there was something of the dark woods about that cloud.
She brought the Memphis in close enough that they could have reached out and collected a bucket of snow. The storm trailed down into the atmosphere, but the big central section was clear of the upper clouds by at least a hundred klicks. Over the rim of the giant plan
et they could see Cobalt, blue and gold in the distant sun.
“It keeps getting stranger,” said Bill. “I’m reading an explosive effect. The snow is coming up out of the atmosphere. Like a fountain.”
“How,” asked Hutch, “could that be possible?”
“I do not know. But it is happening.”
“Why don’t we go into the storm?” asked George. “Maybe we can figure out what’s doing this.”
The suggestion visibly alarmed his colleagues. Tor frowned and signaled Hutch he didn’t think it was a good idea. “Actually,” she said, “we might want to do that. But later. Let’s get some more information on local conditions before we jump into anything.”
Bill measured the diameter of the storm at roughly four thousand kilometers. “Whatever’s causing it,” said Tor, “it shouldn’t last long. The sunlight’s on it.”
“How long do you think?” Bill kept the mockery out of his voice, but Hutch knew it was there.
“Oh, I don’t know. A few days, maybe. Right, Hutch?”
“It’s a complete unknown, Tor,” she said. “I’d point out though that it’s been there more than a week already.”
“Got something else,” said Bill. One of the screens lit up, revealing a picture of a moonlet. It was approaching the storm. “Looks as if it’s in the same orbit.”
It was a flattened rock. Generally smooth surface, with several ranges of low hills. “I believe it’s going to go inside,” Bill continued. “In about fifteen minutes.”
Hutch was hungry. She ordered up some pancakes and joined Alyx, who was just starting on a plate of eggs and toast. Alyx asked whether she thought the storm was in some way connected with the Retreat. “I can’t imagine,” said Nick, “how that could be possible.”
Asteroids come in all sorts of shapes. They are elongated, they are hammered in, they are even broken shards. This one was flat, not unlike a sea ray, and it was symmetrical. Not perfectly symmetrical, but its mass appeared to be evenly distributed along both sides.
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