Rogue Powers

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Neither of them spoke for a long time. The sky grew darker, and the stars came out in all their glory. Meteors zipped across the firmament as lights came on across Ivory Tower, subdued enough not to disturb the splendid skies, but artfully placed and aimed to set the great buildings off from the surrounding darkness.

  "The stars are different here," George said.

  "That much, we know," Metcalf replied with gentle sarcasm. None of the Guardians had recognized the night sky as seen from any world. "I remember back at Annapolis, back on Earth. I had put in for Space Fighters the first moment I could, and the night the word came through! We all went down to the shore and pointed out the stars to each other. We kept telling each other—'see that one to the left of the Big Dipper? I'll be there!' "

  "The Big Dipper?"

  "One of the constellations as seen from Earth."

  "Okay, I’ll bite. I forget what a constellation is."

  "Whoa. You're kidding. You know, connect-the-dots between the stars and imagine a picture there."

  "Oh, okay. That's right. Mac explained that, and the Intelligence guys asked me about 'em once. Didn't seem surprised when I couldn't quite place the term."

  "Wait a minute. You guys don't even have constellations?" Metcalf asked. Every culture made up constellations. Anyone with a normal imagination would find patterns in the sky and name them.

  "Yeah we did. We just don't call 'em that. Called 'em sky pictures. We didn't have any official ones, of course, but all the kids made up their own.'

  Metcalf grunted. That made sense, in a twisted Guardian sort of way. If you didn't want people to learn astrogation, you didn't teach them astronomy. If you didn't want them to learn astronomy, you didn't encourage people to make up pretty pictures in the sky. But they'd do it anyway. Who could enforce a rule against looking at the sky?

  "Doesn't really matter, anyway," Metcalf said. "Stars is stars, and stars is pretty."

  They were both quiet for a while.

  "I wonder what the new stars will look like," George said at last.

  Metcalf suddenly sat bolt upright. He had the feeling that George had just said something very important. "What do you mean, George?"

  "You know, the new stars that appear in the southeast."

  "It's summer here, now. Do you mean the winter stars? These stars will come back next summer, and so on."

  "No, but come to think of it, that might be what the interrogators thought I meant, too."

  "Well, what do you mean?"

  "I mean the sky pictures—the constellations—that no one has seen yet. Every year there isn't just the move back and forth between the winter and summer stars. Every year, every summer, New Stars that no has seen appear east, and Old Stars vanish in the west. They used to tell us kids that the Old Stars were old dreams, and the New Stars were new dreams. The old dreams pass through the northern lights and are reborn as new dreams, new stars to wish on."

  "Hold it. Northern lights? You said you lived in the southern hemisphere and the north was unsettled. And you said you had northern lights. That'd mean lights coming from the equatorial sky, and that doesn't make sense. Northern and southern lights are linked to the magnetic poles. Charged particles are pulled in from outer space by the planet's magnetism and sucked in toward the poles. The charged particles zip into the atmosphere, and hit an air molecule, and that sets off sparks of light—the aurora.

  If there were enough charged particles hitting the equator so they could be seen in the south, then the whole planet would glow in the dark—and so would the people. The radiation would kill everything."

  "I could say you're glazing my eyes over, but I’ll leave it at a simple 'huh?' "

  "Sorry. Trust me, equatorial aurora don't make sense."

  "Whatever you say, but every night back home, there was always a strong glow of orange light, all along the northern horizon."

  "Always the same brightness?"

  "Pretty much. It follows the same pattern every night: The northern sky starts out pretty bright, gets darker until the middle of the night, and then gets lighter again, until it's lost in the glare of the rising sun. The lights get hidden by weather, of course, but they're more or less always the same."

  "Hmmm. That's not aurora, anyway. Aurora aren't constant, they come and go, flicker for a few hours or days and then fade."

  "Fine. Now I’ll know aurora when I see it. Why are you all excited about this stuff?"

  "Because it all sounds very unusual. It means there's something odd about the skies of Capital. And that means there might be something odd, maybe even unique, about Capital, or space around it—"

  "And that might help us find Capital."

  "Right. So let me ask a dumb question," Metcalf said. "How do you know for certain that north was north and south was south. Couldn't the Grand Wazoo or the Imperator of the Grand Bugaboo—"

  "You are referring of course to the Most Honorable Leader of the Combined Will, long may he lead us, etcetera, etcetera. Did you get the last pickle?"

  "Yes, sorry. Whatever you call him. Couldn't he or some guy a hundred years ago have decided to fool all of you and tell you south was north, just to confuse the issue if you tried to help us barbarian hordes find your home?"

  "Well, Mr. Barbarian Horde, they could have, but they didn't. The birds flew north when it got cold. Toward the equator. My mouth was all ready for that pickle."

  "Ah. They couldn't have fooled the birds, I guess. So let's see: We've got a glow in the sky toward the equatorial horizon and Old Stars that vanish over the southern, polar, horizon, never to be seen, and New Stars that pop up in the northern sky. I'd say that's weird enough to rate comment Gives me an idea, but I'm no expert. Let's go scare up an astronomer and see what he has to say."

  Metcalf left the job of finding an astronomer to George, and George had led him back to his office. Compared to the barren cell Metcalf hid himself in, George s workshop was a madhouse. George fell in love with every gadget and put them all to work in his office. The chairs were self-adjusting, the lights came on automatically, a grabber was ready to find any book on the shelf and hand it to George. There were keyboards and terminals hooked into a half dozen computer grids, and old coffee cups and printouts were everywhere. Metcalf found himself wishing George had one more gizmo—a cleaning robot. But before Metcalf could shove the magazines off the chair and sit, George had dipped into the professional directories and retrieved a list of the astronomers currently on-planet and in Ivory Tower. A hard copy of the fist in hand, they were ready.

  Metcalf toyed with calling one of them up, but then decided to just show up. It was always harder to say "no" to someone in person, and the odds of getting a "no" seemed pretty high with such sketchy information. Who'd want to waste their time on it? Besides, if they blew it, they could just try the next name on the list.

  Metcalf didn't realize it, but he was lucky to have such an embarrassment of riches. On any other planet, finding even one astronomer to consult would have been a challenge. Very few of them were on planets anymore. The opening of interstellar space had hurt astronomy in some unexpected ways: the discipline had become fragmented and specialized. The traditions of the old science were that of the utterly passive observer, cut off from the object of study by light years, forced to glean every scrap of information from whatever miserly number of photons the instruments could capture. Not anymore. People interested in planet formation or atmospheres didn't become astronomers at all—they went out and found a planetary system forming or an atmosphere that they could study. Stellarists interested in a particular star would load their instruments onto a ship and launch for the object of their interest. Scientists were widely scattered and communications weren't good enough. Results were frequently published long years after the work was done. Many results were lost altogether, along with the experimenter. Astronomers weren't good ship handlers, and they had an unfortunate tendency to get "just a bit closer" to some rather dangerous objects—like stars.
<
br />   The scientific establishment of Bandwidth couldn't do anything about vaporized stellarists, but it could correlate results, and the computers were there for number crunching problems where the number of variables was itself a large but variable number. The field astronomers looked down on their ground-based colleagues, the theoretical astronomers, and harbored a suspicion that they were little more than computer programmers and librarians—but then, scientists had never really understood how much they relied on those two professions. Dr. Raoul Morelles liked to think of himself as a spider at the center of its web, all the threads leading back to center. Bandwidth and Earth, there were the two places the data came, and maybe Earth has computers as good—but try getting at them! Bandwidth was the place to work. Interesting problems cropped up all the time. Morelles didn't look like a spider— closer to a praying mantis. Very tall and thin, with a shock of white hair that stood straight up from being endlessly shoved out of his eyes, large, serious eyes, and long arms and legs, with delicate, almost frail-looking hands. He seemed always to be deliberately holding himself very still, as if he was concentrating on something that might vanish if he looked away. His clothes were worn and spare, the old workshirt and the khaki trousers that he found most comfortable, a pair of slightly shabby slippers.

  When he answered the doorbell to find two slightly embarrassed young men, he had a hunch that he was about to find himself in the middle of a very interesting problem indeed. They didn't seem the usual sort of visitor. They weren't grad students trying to butter him up in his capacity as a professor, anyway. No naval officers at the school.

  Mostly out of curiosity, he let them in. They got the introductions out of the way, Morelles ordered the kitchen to make coffee and deliver it to his study, and they sat down to talk.

  "It's this way, Dr. Morelles," Metcalf began. "As you might know, there's a lot of effort being put into finding the planet Capital, where the Guardians come from."

  "I don't follow the war news much, but I have heard something about it, yes. Do go on."

  "Well, George here is from Capital, but he's working with us. He and I were talking tonight, and it struck me that we've been going about it all wrong. The Intelligence teams wave star charts and ask about spectral types and so on, but it doesn't do any good. The prisoners they're interrogating don't know any of that stuff I was talking with George, and he got to describing the night sky, the way the people see it and understand it, and their assumptions about the sky and how it worked. What I want is to work backwards. I want to figure out what must be in the sky for it to look and move the way it does. Like the ancients figuring out the Earth is in orbit by seeing the Sun rise. I want to find the pattern to fit the facts, instead of just casting blindly about waving star maps at the prisoners."

  "It would have to be a very unusual sky for that to work," Morelles said doubtfully.

  "I think it is, Doctor. Tell him about it, George."

  George, with plenty of interruptions from Metcalf, and many questions from Morelles, described the strange behavior of his planet's night sky.

  "Hmmmm. All right," Dr. Morelles said. "If that isn't strange enough to give us some clues, than it certainly ought to be. I must say, though, that the strangest thing is that none of this came out from all that interrogation you mentioned."

  "Well, maybe the powers that be were smarter than anyone thought in putting me on this damned planet," Metcalf said. "I'm the only pilot, the only person who makes his living—and stays alive—by looking at the sky and wondering what's out there. The Intelligence teams are trying to backtrack by figuring out the travel times and the number of C2 jumps the prisoners experienced between Capital and New Finland. That won't do them much good. I think that if we can figure out what all this stuff about equatorial lights and vanishing stars means, what sort of objects moving how in the sky are required to make things look that way, we can dig through the computer commander and maybe find a system that matches it."

  "Yes. I see. You have something there. Please help yourself to more coffee. Let me work on this."

  George expected Morelles to go to a computer terminal and start tapping in queries, or at least pull some huge book down from a shelf and mutter to himself as he flipped through it. But Morelles simply leaned back, propped his elbows on the chair arms, cupped his chin in his hands, and stared at the ceiling. The astronomer didn't move but to breathe or blink for a disturbingly long time, until George had thought Morelles might have had some sort of silent stroke and died.

  "Were any formal star charts made by the people on Capital?" Morelles asked, interrupting the long silence so abruptly that both George and Metcalf jumped. "Did anyone keep permanent records?"

  "Ah, no. It wouldn't have been allowed. We aren't supposed to make up stories about the sky, in the first place. The Central Guardians ruled that folk tales and superstitions were misleading and time-wasters and declared them illegal."

  "That sounds like the most un-enforceable law I've ever heard," Morelles growled. "Either your leaders were very sensitive about such things, or they know nothing about psychology."

  "I suppose, sir," George said uncomfortably. It was okay when Randall kidded him about home, but he still squirmed when a stranger sneered at the Guardians like that. The evidence of his own eye had forced him to decide the Guardians did bad and dumb things, but he couldn't admit they were bad, or dumb.

  "Do you have any rough idea of the average life span of people on your planet?" Morelles asked.

  This guy Morelles must have learned to ask oddball questions in that same place Metcalf had, George thought. "Not really. Not more man seventy or seventy-five in Earth years, I guess. It's news when someone reaches the equivalent of eighty-five or ninety."

  "I see. Than we can take perhaps seventy years as the basic upper limit for the survival of Knowledge about one certain patch of sky. Do you see why that's important?"

  "No sir," George said.

  "I think I've got it, Doctor. Stars don't just appear and disappear. They're permanent. There must be some cyclical pattern of motion of Capital's sky that makes new stars appear and the old ones vanish. This year's new stars had to have come by before. If no one remembers seeing the new stars, a human lifetime gives you a lower limit for how long it takes the stars to move once completely around the sky.

  "Exactly. I assume that if a person saw a constellation vanish in the west one year and saw an identical pattern appear in the new stars of the east, many years later, he could realize that they were one and the same. That seventy years gives me a lower limit for a cycle, three hundred sixty degrees of motion."

  "Aha," George said. These guys had lost him again. George was smart enough, plenty smart enough, to understand the motions of the sky, and once he thought about it, it was obvious that stars didn't just vanish. It was just that he never had thought about it. Just as the Central Guardians intended, he had never really believed that the points of light in the sky were mighty suns.

  "So what is that cycle?" Metcalf asked.

  "I should think that would be fairly obvious."

  "So call me stupid, Doctor," Metcalf said evenly. "What is it?"

  "I would say that Capital's sun is one of a binary pair."

  "But sir!" George objected, "even I know what a binary sun is—two stars in orbit around each other. No one back home has ever seen another sun—or even particularly bright star."

  "Oh yes you have. What about that glow coming from the north, from over the equator?"

  "That's from another sun?"

  "I expect so. Does all this make sense to you, Commander Metcalf?"

  "Yes sir." Metcalf paused and thought it through. "Except what you're saying is that Capital's north pole is always pretty much pointed at the other star. That's the only way the other star would never be visible from the southern hemisphere of Capital."

  "You're quite right, and that does suggest a rather odd structure to Capital's star system," Morelles agreed. "But I don't see anything else th
at fits the facts."

  "Sir, if you don't mind my asking," George said, "what sort of odd structure are you talking about?"

  "Let me see if I can sum it up. Capital's sun—what do you call it?"

  "Nova Sol."

  "There must be a dozen stars with that local name in the League. People aren't very original. Very well, Nova Sol is in a binary relationship with another star: The two of them orbit around each other, or more accurately, around an empty spot of space midway between them, where the gravitational attraction of the two stars is exactly balanced. That central balance point is called the barycenter. The two stars revolve around each other in no less than seventy years. Do you understand that so for?"

  "Yes. But I can't see how the other star would be hidden all the time."

  "Wait a minute, Doctor," Metcalf said. "I think I've got it. Capital's orbit—not the planet, but the orbit itself—is precessed, so the orbit is always face-on toward the other sun."

  "Precisely!" Morelles grinned with delight. He wished this young naval person was in one of his classes. He was a good thinker.

  "Sir," George cut in, "I hate to say it again, but 'huh?' "

  Morelles sighed. That was more what he was used to. No wonder he preferred research. "Let me see if I can explain." He got up suddenly, went into the next room, and returned with a big sheet of stiff posterboard paper, a pair of scissors, and a marking pen. "I keep this stuff around for notices and posters in the class," he explained. Morelles shoved everything else off his big round coffee table, and George and Metcalf rescued the coffee cups just in the nick of time. Morelles lay the sheet of posterboard down on the table. "All right, now I'll draw this out on cardboard, since I left my blackboard at the classroom."

  Morelles, already sketching rapidly on the posterboard, didn't notice that neither of his listeners laughed. "Now then. The usual thing for a solar system is for everything to move in the same plane. I've sketched some of the major element of Earth s solar system here. If you want to represent the orbits of all the planets, except for Pluto, you can just draw them on a flat piece of card as I have done. Within a degree or two, all the orbits are in the same plane. Pluto is the exception that helps explain the rule. Pluto's orbit is, oh dear, what is it? Oh yes, about seventeen degrees away from the plane of the others. If I wanted to show its orbit accurately I'd have to take a loop of wire or something and poke it through the cardstock so half the wire loop was above and half was below my flat plane, and then I'd have to set that orbit—that loop of wire—so it was at a seventeen-degree angle to the paper representing the plane of the solar system. Does that give you an idea about the planes of orbits?"