He climbed into his robe and looked out into the corridor. The lights had come up, and the others were having breakfast.
Amy called out a hello, and he padded down to the common room. “Good morning,” he said.
Eric raised his orange juice, and Valya inquired whether he’d slept okay. “Sometimes the first night aboard can be difficult,” she said. Bill, the ship’s AI, asked what he’d like for breakfast.
He showered, dressed, and returned to a plate of pancakes and bacon.
AMY AND ERIC played a game that involved corporate empire building. Valya found things to do on the bridge. MacAllister went back to Bleak Angel for a while, but eventually put it down and joined her. She invited him to take the right-hand seat. “How’d you manage to get invited on Margie’s show?” he asked.
She smiled. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”
“You can be a tough cookie.”
“I’d been on a couple of their science programs before. I guess the arrangement whereby you showed up was more or less a last-minute thing—”
“It was—”
“So they called the first person they could think of. And I thought, holy cats, I get to go up against Gregory MacAllister himself.”
“That’s odd,” he said.
“What is?”
“I had the impression you had no idea who I was.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
She looked amused. “I guess you caught me. I looked you up before I went down there.”
“Oh.”
“You have a major-league reputation. The Insider Report described you as ‘not the biggest curmudgeon of the age, but among the top five.’”
“I thought you held up your end of things pretty well.”
“You were actually far more polite than I’d expected you to be.”
“I’m sorry I was a disappointment.”
She laughed. “Mac,” she said, “I doubt you’re capable of disappointing anybody.”
He understood she was trying to reel him in, but that was okay. He couldn’t resist being pleased with the compliment. “We’ll be leaving monitors at each site,” she said. “Would you be interested in taking a look at them?”
He could hardly have cared less what the monitors looked like, but she seemed interested in showing them off. “Sure,” he said.
“Good.” She seemed almost surprised at his answer. Had she expected him to grumble and pass? She got up and led the way to the rear. “We have eight units altogether. Four of them are secured outside to the hull. The others are in cargo.” They went down the zero-gee tube to the lower deck.
He was disappointed to see they were simply black boxes. Big ones, big enough to pack an armchair inside. But there was no sign of an antenna or a telescope.
“Everything pops up once it’s been activated,” she said. “They have sensors and a scope. And a collector, so it’ll continue to draw power from the sun as long as it’s on-station. And it has a hypercomm system.” MacAllister understood that meant it was capable of sending and receiving FTL transmissions. “We’ll be leaving one close to the Origins Project. There’s no sun there, so they’ve added a dark-energy unit. That one cost three times what the others did.”
“Do we think the moonriders are likely to show up near Origins?”
“They’ve been seen in the area.”
The casings were covered with spindles, brackets, jacks, and coils. She pointed at a slot. “This is the reader, where it gets its instructions.” She produced a chip.
“Does it have a thruster? Can it move on its own?”
“You mean, if it sees a moonrider, can it take off and follow it?”
“Yes.”
“No. Once we put it in orbit, it’ll stay there. It’ll report to us and to Mission Operations. After that, I guess if there’s any chasing to be done, we’d do it.”
LATER HE FOUND himself with Eric while Valya read and Amy grabbed a nap. “I’ll admit to you,” Eric said, “I was a bit nervous about this flight.”
“Why’s that?”
“First time off-world. It’s kind of scary.” He flashed a nervous smile. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mac: I haven’t been sleeping well the last few nights.”
This was not a guy you’d want on board if things went wrong. “I’d never have known.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you here under orders, Eric?”
“No.”
“Then why—?”
He looked past MacAllister as if he could see something in the distance. “You’re not going to believe this, but I haven’t done much with my life.”
MacAllister fought hard not to smile. Oh, yes. It was hard to believe.
Eric walked over to the viewport and looked out. The navigation lights were off. There was no point running them in hyperspace. But the illumination from the bridge reflected against the mists. “I have a brother and a sister who envy me. They see me live doing the press conferences. So in their eyes, I’m famous. And they think I make big money. And I suppose, in a way they’re right. I’m doing a lot better than most of the people I grew up with. Better than I ever expected. But the truth is I haven’t really ever accomplished anything.”
“You seem to be doing pretty well. You’re the face of the Academy.”
“Mac, you’re a famous man. Everybody knows you. Everybody knows Hutch. She’s the big hero at the Academy. People are always asking me about her. What’s she like in person? Has it all gone to her head? They want to know whether they can meet her. I have a nephew who was heartbroken when Hutch got married.” His eyes came back to MacAllister. “You know what it’s like to work with somebody like that?”
“It can’t be that bad. She seems okay.”
“It’s bad, believe me. I mean, nothing against her. It isn’t her fault. But I’d like to be able to say I’ve done something, too. To know I’ve done something.”
“You’re not married, Eric, are you?”
“No. How’d you know?”
“Just a feeling.”
He looked momentarily wistful. “It shows, huh?”
“Not really.” MacAllister smiled. “And that’s why you’re coming? To try to do something more with your life?”
“That’s why. You know, you’re lucky. You were part of the Deepsix rescue—”
“I was one of the people who needed rescuing—”
“It doesn’t matter. You were there.” He sighed. “I wish I’d been there.”
“You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
“Maybe not. But it would have been nice to be able to tell that story. Anyhow, now at least I’ll have something.”
MACALLISTER HAD PROMISED himself he would actually convert the flight into a vacation. Catch up on his reading, relax, watch some shows. And, of course, take in the sights. But by noon on the second day he was already thinking about future stories for The National. A new challenge to institutional marriage had risen: Men and women were getting involved in virtual affairs with avatars who represented their spouses at a younger age. Was it infidelity to spend a romantic evening with your wife as she had looked and behaved at twenty-two?
Then there was the Origins Project. Major breakthroughs coming. “Mac,” said Valya, “did you know it’s not fully operational yet?”
“It won’t be for years, apparently,” he said.
“I don’t know whether you actually want to stop at Origins or not. They’re not expecting us. We should probably just put our monitor over the side and keep going.”
“That might not be a bad idea. It’s nothing more than a giant physics lab.” He shook his head. “Never could stand physics.”
They’d caught Amy’s ear. “Valya,” she said, “Origins is the most exciting place on the flight. Let’s stop and take a look. Please.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
SOMETHING IS WATCHING US
The space agencies have done what they can to sweep moonrider reports under the table. Various astrophysical phenome
na have been advanced to explain the sightings. But lights moving in formation and throwing sharp turns do not lend themselves to credible natural explanations. Last week’s reports from the Serenity orbiter are especially startling, because the observers were not only ordinary travelers but also included a group of physicists.
If in fact there is even a reasonable possibility that we are being observed by alien intelligences, then the current notion that we should disband the interstellar program is both shortsighted and dangerous.
—The London Observer, Thursday, April 2
chapter 18
61 Cygni is a binary system located approximately eleven light-years from Earth. It is in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Both stars are visible in the terrestrial sky, but they are quite dim. They orbit each other at a range between 50 and 120 AUs. (The distance to Pluto is about 40 AUs.)
—The Star Register
As soon as the jump was complete, they all crowded onto the bridge to look out through the viewport. Nobody was happier than MacAllister to see the mists go away. The transdimensional fogscape reminded him that the real world was far stranger than anything humans had dreamed up, with its quantum effects, time running at different rates depending on whether you’re standing on the roof or in the basement, objects that aren’t there unless someone looks at them. Hamlet had been right.
It was good to see the stars again. And there was an orange-red sun. It looked far away. Or very small. It was difficult to know which. “That’s Cygni A,” said Valya. “It’s a main sequence dwarf. Weighs in at about seven-tenths solar mass, but it’s only about ten percent as bright as the sun.”
“Why?” asked Amy.
Valya passed the question to Bill who, surprisingly, didn’t know. “It just says here,” he said, “that it’s dimmer.”
“Where’s our sun?” asked Eric, who could barely restrain himself.
Valya glanced around the sky. “Can’t see it from this angle,” she said. She told Bill to put it on the display. “This is zero mag, and there’s Sol.” One of the stars momentarily brightened.
“That doesn’t look very bright either,” said Eric.
Amy was more interested in Cygni A. “It has six planets,” she said.
“Where’s the other star?” asked MacAllister, recalling that 61 Cygni was a binary.
Valya referred that question also to Bill, who did better this time. He highlighted Cygni B off to one side. It might have been nothing more than a bright star.
Amy obviously had been doing her homework. “They orbit around each other every 720 years.”
MacAllister simply stared. “The last time they were in their current positions respective to each other,” he said, “Columbus was poking around in the Americas.”
“That is correct,” said Bill, who seemed delighted to have passengers who cared about such things. “Cygni A, by the way,” he continued, “is a fairly old star. Considerably older than the sun.”
“Is there a green world in the system?” asked Eric. “In either system? I assume both suns have planets.”
“B has four,” said Amy. “But there’s no life anywhere.”
“Not in either system,” said Bill. “A is so cool that a planet would have to be right on top of it to have liquid water.”
“How close would that be?” asked MacAllister.
“Closer than Mercury is to the sun,” said Amy.
MacAllister loved listening to a know-it-all kid trying to outdo a know-it-all AI. He resisted saying anything, contenting himself with looking out at Cygni A. And at the firmament of stars surrounding it. “Where’s the monument?” he asked.
SITTING ON THEIR front porch in Baltimore, he and Jenny had contemplated how exhilarating it would be to do an interstellar tour. Jenny had talked of seeing the four stars at Capella. (Was that right, she’d asked? Was it four? Or five?) And she’d wanted to see a living world. The nearest was at 36 Ophiuchi. But she’d had something more dramatic in mind. She wanted Quraqua, where a civilization had once thrived. She’d talked about visiting the ruins. But there was no easy way to get there. The tour services didn’t exist then. Even now nobody went out that far.
Most of all she’d wanted to see the monuments, those magnificent works of art scattered through the Orion Arm ten thousand years ago by a race that had since gone out of existence, leaving only a few savage descendants who possessed no technology and had no memory of their great days.
The first monument had been found in the solar system, on Iapetus. It was a statue, a self-portrait of its creator. A lone female standing on that bleak moonscape, its eyes turned toward Saturn, which remained permanently fixed above a nearby ridge. It was, in fact, the discovery of the Iapetus statue at a time much like the present one, during which the space effort was losing momentum, that had led to the suspicion that somebody had FTL, that it was possible to build an interstellar drive.
He’d promised Jenny they would go to Iapetus. And they’d eventually visit two or three of the other monuments. (That was a time when there seemed no limit to what they could do together.) But the illness had struck shortly after, and they never got beyond Baltimore.
“The Cygni monument,” said Amy, apparently in answer to a question, “was discovered in 2195 by Shia Kanana.”
“It was a follow-up mission,” said Bill.
“The first mission missed it?” asked Eric.
“Passed right by it and never noticed.” Amy seemed delighted that adults could be such buffoons.
“Of course,” said Eric, “there was no Academy then.” MacAllister’s eyelids sagged. The guy was breathtakingly loyal. “The way they were operating in those days,” he continued, “everything was hit-or-miss. And the truth is, despite what they said, they were really only looking for two things: habitable worlds and aliens.”
“There’s something I never really understood,” said MacAllister.
“What? Habitable worlds? For settlement.”
“Right. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why? You know the damned places won’t be comfortable. What sort of idiot wants to live on a frontier? Would you, Amy?”
“Not really,” she said. “I just want to ride around out here.”
Eric smiled benignly. “There are a lot of people who’d like to get away from the cities,” he said. “Away from all the fuss at home.”
“Well, my God, Eric, move to the country.”
“You’re so narrow-minded, Mac. You know, eventually we’ll terraform a lot of these places, turn them into garden worlds.”
“That’s something else that could cost an arm and a leg. And it’s typical. We tried to terraform Quraqua, and all we did was destroy an archeological treasure house.”
“Mac, you’re a cynical cuss.”
“You can’t really deny that it’s true.” MacAllister sighed. “So where’s the monument?” he asked.
Bill responded: “The second planet. It’s just a large piece of ice and rock. There’s a moon, about a third the size of Luna. The monument’s in orbit around the moon.”
“The monuments were usually put in orbit,” said Amy.
Bill had the last word: “There are only four on the ground.”
TWO OF THE seventeen known monuments were images of their makers. Five others were depictions of creatures that might have been either biological or mythical. (One was known definitely to be mythical.) The rest were geometric designs.
The one at 61 Cygni fell into the latter category.
Valya was feeding images from the ship’s telescopes to the two displays mounted in the common room. One was centered on the sun; the other gave them a picture of the target world, Alpha II, and its moon. Alpha II constituted as sorry-looking a piece of real estate as MacAllister had ever seen. He knew there’d be no green areas. There were also no seas, no deserts, nothing but a gray-black mantle of what appeared to be solid rock. In some areas there’d been eruptions and lava flows. But the surface was, for the most part, smooth and featureless
. No craters, no ridges, no mountains, no river valleys. It was as if the planet were simply one oversized boulder.
Its moon was a pale crescent, and lay at a considerable distance, half again as far as Luna was from Earth. It, too, seemed composed of the same featureless rock.
“They’ve seen moonriders out here?” asked Eric.
Valya nodded. “Three tour flights have reported them in the last month.”
“Where were they?” asked Amy. “Were they here? Near the monument?”
Valya needed a moment to consult her screen. “Yes,” she said. “This is the area.”
“Maybe,” Amy continued, “they were just sightseeing. I mean, they’ve been at all the places along the tour route, right?”
“It could also mean,” said MacAllister, “that they’re only seen close to the tour sights because that’s where the ships are. They could have an entire invasion fleet sitting over at the other star. What’s its name again?”
“Cygni B,” said Amy.
“Beta. Okay. There could be a fleet there, and we’d never know it because nobody ever goes there.”
Amy looked at him, not sure whether to laugh. “An invasion fleet? I’ve seen that in sims.”
MacAllister chuckled and did his best private eye impersonation. “Just kidding, Sweetheart. No, I don’t think we need to worry about invaders.”
“Why not, Mac?” she persisted. “Just for the sake of argument, how would we know? It’s possible.” He got the impression she would welcome an invasion.
“Sure it’s possible, Amy. Anything’s possible. But ask yourself why anybody would bother.”
“How do you mean?”
“We don’t have anything that anybody would want.”
“How about real estate?” asked Eric.
MacAllister shrugged. “Plenty of places out here if anybody wants one. Truth is, I think the one thing we can be sure of is that the moonriders, whatever they are, do not pose a threat.” He looked over at Valya. “By the way, are we watching out for them? Just in case?”
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