The Fleet of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  In the afternoon she jarred to another quick stop. "Wait," she exclaimed. "This isn't right." After studying her pathfinder display: "Oh-oh. Also snarl, growl, moan, and snivel."

  He came to her side. "What's the trouble?"

  "This slope ahead that we're supposed to cross. The broken rock spread everywhere over it." Some of those shards and fragments looked as if they had been partly melted. "Not on the map," Kinna said.

  "But you told me—"

  "Yes, satellite imaging, resolution in centimeters, including altitudes. But that was then. Since, something happened. Large meteorite strike, I'd guess." She studied the scene. "Correct. When you search out the traces— there and there and there—you can see how the blast tried to form a crater, except conditions weren't quite suitable for it."

  "M-m, yeh, now that you've shown me. Nothing like this on Luna." Different rocks, different world. "Now what?"

  "Well. I've lost my childlike faith in the slope. We could find ourselves suddenly sliding, accompanied by a lot of hard, heavy, sharp-edged objects. No, thanks. Sit down, relax, and I'll puzzle out a way around them."

  "Aye, skipper." Yes, he thought, he would not have made it without her. He didn't want to be without her, ever.

  But that evening, mercurially, she laid leadership aside.

  The detour had not simply delayed them; it caused them to stop early, since they could not reach their planned campsite before dark and must take the only other usable one along the way. A ridge to the west gave it a high horizon. By the time they had set up, shadows lay long and cold and the sun glared just above that black wall.

  Fenn and Kinna were still outside. The tent would be more comfortable, in its spartan fashion, but it was cramped, windowless, essentially featureless. Here they had sky and spaciousness. He could imagine standing with her on an alp of Earth; snows whitened blue-gray heights, wind ruffled soft, damp grass, and what he breathed was not airwarm and body-odorous but a cool breeze and a faint fragrance of pine.

  Besides, he thought, and maybe she did too, the two of them sitting idle and lightly clad within centimeters of one another, not exhausted as they were yesterday, that could be too strong a temptation, when tomorrow they would reach their goal. He didn't suppose he'd sleep deeply or much, unless it could be in her arms, and it shouldn't be. How clean her profile was against desolation and heaven.

  Suddenly she said, "Look east, will you?"

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Because."

  He obeyed. "Because you want me to."

  "Stay put a couple of minutes. I'm hoping to give you a surprise."

  "You're surprises enough yourself," he laughed, unexpectedly carefree. "Pop, pop, pop, like fireworks."

  She leaned against him. Their suits were between. "I've got to keep you interested, don't I?"

  They stood glove in glove, viewing empty immensity.

  Murk engulfed them. "Now!" she cried. "Turn around, quick!"

  They both did. Above the ridge, against the deep violet sky, stood a small flame of opalescent white. Its edges were lace, and a scarlet thread traced up from its heart.

  The solar corona, he realized, and a prominence at the limb of the hidden disk. The air here was sufficiently thin and pure for an undazzled eye to behold it.

  The vision slipped on downward, out of sight. Kinna danced on the rock. "We caught it, we caught it!" she jubilated. “I never have before. And I got to share it with you."

  He would not tell her that he had often observed the phenomenon on Luna, at leisure, and that this glimpse had been tiny, pallid, as brief as life. Her wish for him made it special. "You're sweet," he said awkwardly.

  "No," she answered. "I'm in love, that's all."

  Darkness drew closer around them. Vanguards of night ran ever longer down the mountain. Kinna became hardly more to him than a dear shadow. He heard her voice, gone sober: "That moment the other day—we were talking about change, remember? It's been going through my head ever since."

  On the trail? he thought. Amazing.

  "It's hard finding words for what I mean," she went on. "But I've been trying. For you."

  After another pause:

  "They say the poles of Mars

  Careen across the stars

  And one day Phobos must,

  Like any airborne dust

  That reddens yonder sky

  Whirl downward from on high.

  Nor is there constancy

  In our geology.

  Where once great rivers raged,

  Their remnants now lie caged

  Below the dunes and drifts

  The wind forever shifts.

  My love for you will stay

  Unchanged in any way

  Through all the years I live.

  I have no more to give."

  23

  THE LAST STAGE Fenn made alone. "Be careful," Kinna pleaded. "It's not worth dying for or—or losing you any other way. It isn't."

  "Don't be afraid," he answered. "I've told you I'll" be in no danger of anything except failure. I'll get in touch just as soon as may be." He hesitated. He wasn't practiced in sentimentality. "You see, I love you."

  "Love you right back." The two skinsuited forms embraced. "All right, boy, go."

  He left her and stole forward. Night had fallen, again brilliant with stars. When he glanced around the concealing spur of rock, he saw across a stretch of bareness, lightened by dust, darkened by scattered stones, to the station. Above black hulks that were buildings, masts and domes and telescope dish stood skeletal against the sky. His breath sounded unnaturally loud.

  Nobody would hear. This wisp of air scarcely carried sound, and he had shut off his radio. Ultrasensitive sonic detectors or instruments monitoring ground vibrations would have registered something, but he didn't think there were any. The published plans had shown none, and why should the builder have anticipated a need?

  Optical and infrared systems were certainly present. Fenn unfolded his cold shield. On all fours he crawled out in view, holding it slanted before him. It was a simple thing—his own idea, back on Earth when he'd first considered this venture. His right hand clutched a bar attached to a disk of insulating material. Ahead of this, held by thin struts of the same stuff, was a larger piece of highly conductive alloy, irregular in outline and dull in hue. Eyeholes barely enabled him to see where he was going. He advanced centimeters at a time, motionless in between, alone with the throbbing of his blood.

  As chill as the night, the metal should radiate no differently from its background. To a scanner using visible light, which might happen to sweep across it, it should look like another shadowy boulder or pockmark or whatever. A human or sophotectic observer might well have noted it as a new feature and, watching closer, seen it move. The station was robotic, though. Its master program and the various subprograms were high-capacity, adaptable, capable of drawing conclusions, but only within the limits of what the programmers had foreseen: Fenn was betting they had not imagined this.

  He had spoken truth to Kinna. If somehow it did come alert, the station would not destroy him as it had destroyed the Inrai—especially after that episode—when he didn't pose an obvious threat. It would heighten its vigilance and defenses, it would shoot a report to constab-.ulary headquarters, and that would be the end of Fenn's attempt. He and Kinna might then be caught and interrogated, but they would not have managed to commit any crime.

  What might do him in was Mars. His suit wasn't meant for this kind of work. No matter how hard the thermostats tried, cold began to gnaw through glove and knee joints. He felt it first as discomfort, then as sharpening pain, then as numbness eating its way in toward his marrow.

  He held his teeth together and crawled on.

  He reached the gate.

  Rising, the shield at his feet, he stood for a while and shuddered. Presently he was able to look around. Here, up against the entrance, he should be safely inside the viewfields of the scanners that surveyed the perimeter. But there we
re other instruments in the fence itself—he saw where the damage done by the raiders had been repaired—and still others within the compound. All were connected to the central director.

  That meant that the locking system integral with the gate, code-sensitive and discriminatory, was a point of entry into the entire guardian complex. The right device could nullify everything, without affecting any other circuitry. It was like slipping a shot of local neuroblock into a man's hand when he wasn't looking, by a skin-penetrant injector that he didn't feel. The hand would lose grip and sensation without his being aware of it. (Or, no, not quite like that. The man would notice that something strange had suddenly happened there. The robot was probably not programmed to be so versatile. Who could have guessed it would ever have any reason to be?)

  A device existed that could do such tricks. Only police were supposed to have access to it, and then only by special permission in extraordinary emergencies. lokepa had contacted certain persons. They had deputized Fenn to carry a unit of this kind. Given in secret, the sanction might be of questionable validity, but in itself wouldn't be worth a legal battle with the influential Lahui Kuikawa.

  He slipped off his backpack and took out the boxlike object that was, for now, the sole contents. It ought to let him in, unless someone had taken precautions that were never made public. He grinned a hunter's grin. He was about to find out.

  The device was not the same as the one he remembered,from his days on the Lunar force. It had needed modification to operate under these conditions. Fenn mentally rehearsed his practice runs while he flexed his chilled fingers back to usefulness. Under any circumstances, the work was delicate, exacting, slow. He lost himself in it. The stars wheeled overhead.

  When the gate slid aside and no lights flared, no alarm howled through the radio spectrum, it was like falling off a cliff. He stood for a moment without quite grasping what he had done.

  If he had. Alertness resurged. The night was utterly still—too still? He returned the unit to his pack, the pack to his shoulders, and tuned his receptors high, checking every band. Silence hummed. He stepped through into the compound, crouched tense, peered around. Nothing stirred. He stole over the wanly lit ground, ghost-puffs of dust rising from his boots, to where the building loomed. A door retracted at his touch. A bare corridor' illuminated itself. He turned about and sought the airlock to the human-conditioned section. Its outer valve opened likewise for him. A display flashed: ENTER. ORDER A CYCLE WHEN READY.

  He left that too, ran to the gate, switched on his transmitter, and whooped, "Kinna, we're in! Come quick!" His helmet rang "with the noise.

  The long waves reached around the spur and she burst into sight. He thought how even in her suit, under a grotesque burden of apparatus, she sped with antelope grace. They fell into one another's arms. Hardnesses clacked together, they laughed and she blew him a kiss, he saw her face clearly by starlight, tousled hair, big eyes, pert nose, sweet mouth.

  "You did it, you did it," she sang.

  "We did," he replied. "But we're not done yet. Let's go."

  The station layout stood sharp in his mind. He led her to the airlock and they passed through. Hoarfrost formed immediately, blindingly, on their outfits. An automatic blast of hot air cleared it off. They undogged h«lmets, swung them back, and breathed an odorless atmosphere. Nothing here was alive but them.

  “Wow you can kiss me," Kinna said.

  He obliged, though hastily. "We'd better leave our suits on," he said. "May have to scramble in a hurry. Just take gloves off."

  The entry and the hall beyond were as barren as everything else. A couple of rooms stood furnished for human occupancy, but the time must be long since anyone had sat in those seats, drunk from those taps, or rumpled those beds. Farther on was a chamber more intricately equipped. “To house visiting sophotects that prefer these conditions," Fenn explained. Kinna shivered and scurried on by.

  They came finally to a larger space, which also held seats and a table, plus desks with terminals along the walls. At the far end a control console reached the width of the room below a set of screens, flanked by two vivifers. "Here we are," Fenn said.' His voice sounded flat in this echoless quiet. "Communications and command center."

  "It... isn't very fancy ... is it?" Kinna whispered.

  "A sophotect will have everything extra it needs in itself, or by linkage to the cybercosm outside," Fenn reminded her. "Humans seldom come, and only to input questions that can't easily go over the phone." The station could transmit, but received on audiovisuals unconnected to anything else. That precaution against takeover had seemed ample.

  Kinna straightened. She would not let the surroundings daunt her. "You know what to do," she said.

  "I hope so." Fenn tugged his beard. "But as I told you before, I've got to proceed ultracautiously. I don't expect the program will display data classed as top secret simply on request. I'll feel my way forward." He cast her a rueful smile. "Amuse yourself as best you can, heartling. This will likely take hours."

  —When he came out of his concentration for a moment, an uncounted time later, he saw that she had managed to curl up, bulky gear and all, in a leanback seat and was catching some sleep. He thought he could see what she looked like when she was a child.

  —Query by query, test by test. This was in fact a working scientific installation, a node in the interferometry that spanned half the Solar System and measured fire-clouds at the edge of the observable universe. Data unrolled readily for Fenn, mostly strings of numbers that he was not competent to interpret.

  Knowledge from other sources was archived here too, for study before correlation into a single grand understanding. Findings from across the whole electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves kilometers long, microwaves, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X ray, gamma ray—particles sleeting through space, torn off atoms, born of hard quanta, flickeringly nascent out of the vacuum—gravitational waves, spoor of monster stars awhirl or in their sundering death throes, crash of neutron dwarfs or black holes colliding—images made by lenses that were galactic clusters, galaxies, dark bodies in the halo of our galaxy, our sun—

  The structure and turmoil of galactic center, travailing with the trillion-year future—

  Blank. "Termination of this series," said the impersonal robotic voice. "Do you wish to continue with data from the other stations?"

  "Yes," said Fenn harshly, because a visitor would.

  He asked for explications and got them. The solar lens in Draco had captured indications of planets in the Smaller Magellanic Cloud, transiently but confirmed thus and so by interferometry, reference SMG.j.175.... The solar lens in Virgo had—

  Not only the Taurus lens series was stopped. That was completely, but for three more lenses, the data were showing unmistakable gaps. "Is there a problem with these?" Fenn dared ask.

  "The reported observations are anomalous," the robot said. "Investigation is in progress. The results will be published in due course."

  You lie in the teeth you haven't got, Fenn thought. But you've been ordered to. How comprehensive are those orders?

  His fingers moved over the console. So far, he hoped, he'd acted well enough the role of a legitimately inquiring human scientist. How much further could he carry it?

  Such a man would not normally ask for the withheld information. If he did, the robot would contact headquarters and inquire whether it should be released to him. Fenn must key in an override command, without triggering what he might as well call suspicion. Could he? The robot did have judgment, and that judgment was powerful in its limited, algorithmic fashion. If it sent an alarm, or simply a query, headquarters would surely tell it to take immediate action—shutting down if nothing else, and maybe denying egress to the intruders. And law officers would be on their winged way.

  Fenn had studied everything available before he left Earth. It had been a brutal cram job, chemical and electrical psychostimulants driving the material abnormally fast into his brain. He had none of the intuit
ion, the easy skill, that grows from experience. However, as a detective, and later as a spaceman, he had acquired knowledge and abilities not too dissimilar. The machine and the program here were not unfathomably unfamiliar.

  He touched keys, spoke words, watched what appeared on the screens, and saw a pattern. Dry-mouthed, he set the code for Override. Do not communicate elsewhere, and executed it. "We require the anomalous data for a new study," he grated.

  "Permission to inspect," said the voice. His heart slammed. He felt momentarily dizzy.

  "Do you wish a display?" continued the robot. "At average human reading speed, that will run approximately thirty hours."

  Of course, Fenn thought. No proper scientist would baldly ask for an account of what the data meant, when they were supposed to be in his field of research. He, Fenn, must get them as they were, and trust some qualified person to interpret them for him afterward.

  "No," he said. His pulse still thuttered. "Download into a card and we'll take the material with us."

  "That is inconsistent with confidentiality."

  Perm's spirit toppled. He had not broken the basic restriction.

  "I'll have to think about that," he said, and logged off.

  For minutes he paced, swore, dropped into seats and bounced up again, threshing through a wilderness that shifted about and jeered at him. He got no instant of insight. Piece by piece, he dredged forth what might or might not serve, weighed its worth, threw it away or hammered it more or less into place until at last he had a scheme to go by. Maybe the robot would deem his next keystrokes and questions plausible. Maybe it wouldn't freeze up or call for help, but respond to him.

  He muttered a final oath and went back to the console.