by Paul Preuss
—Homer, The Odyssey, Book VIII
(translated by E. V. Rieu)
PROLOGUE
Klaus Muller stamped his soft boots on the deck of the rented chalet in an attempt to warm his numb toes. The snows of the Jungfrau never melted, and even though it was an early summer evening, a cascade of cold air had spilled down the pass after sunset. Klaus didn’t mind a bit; he felt he’d been transported back a century and a half or more to a time when nights like this were ordinary—just as beautiful but not so rare.
In the valley below, the clustered lights of the village, bisected by the black thread of a mountain stream, showed warmly among dark and fragrant meadows. The lingering aroma of new summer grass mingled with the astringent perfume of pine and the subtler mineral scent of ice water spilling over granite. The night sky was crystal clear, a dark blue hemisphere trembling with silver stars, like an old glass Christmas tree ornament seen close.
A small boy’s scornful voice broke Klaus’s reverie. “You’re taking forever. Let me do it.”
“No!” came a younger child’s frantic reply. “You made me miss.”
At the comer of the deck Klaus’s two sons, red-cheeked and runny-nosed, were jostling each other, contending for the remote control unit of a portable telescope. When Hans, the younger boy, bumped into it the instrument nimbly skittered sideways on its smart-tripod legs.
Papa Klaus hoped he wouldn’t have to interfere, but Hans and Richard were laughing, only pretending to fight. They vied for the telescope’s controls, both of them eager to find the object that for three nights now had dominated radio and video news throughout the solar system.
That object was an enormous spacecraft, now leaving the orbit of Jupiter on a column of bright flame, diving toward Earth. The ship was thirty kilometers long, the largest artificial construction any human had ever seen, far larger than the mighty space stations that orbited Earth and Venus and Mars, larger than most asteroids, or the moons of Mars. Still, it was invisible to the naked eye, even on such a night of rare good seeing. But its trajectory, readily extrapolated, had been widely broadcast, and with an amateur instrument as fine as the Muller family’s a searcher could find it easily.
“There! That’s it!” cried the younger boy, finally managing the simple program instructions despite his brother’s impatient interference. With a whir of tiny motors the telescope had settled itself on its spindly legs and steered its objective to the designated target; it began tracking. And on the monitor…
“Oh, oh, oh,” cried the boys together, taken with wonder. Then they both fell silent.
Klaus came closer, drawn by the sharp image on the screen. He drew in his breath, then let it out in a wisp of vapor. He’d seen clearer pictures of the thing earlier in the evening, on the video news, but there was something about seeing for oneself, through the agency of a personal instrument, that made the fantastic real.
“They said there were things sticking out before,” Hans said.
“It retracted them,” Richard informed him.
“Why?”
Young Richard paused only an instant before he said, “They’re aliens.” A perfectly good explanation—and one identical, if more economically expressed, to that given by most self-proclaimed adult experts on the subject.
Certainly the ship looked like nothing human. There were no bulbous fuel tanks or blunderbuss engine nozzles, no earlike radio dishes or bristling communications masts, no stuck-on cargo holds or miscellaneous knobs of machinery; there were no painted-on flags or symbols or numbers. The object on the screen was a perfect silver egg, featureless as a falling raindrop. Only its deceptively slow, steady movement against the background of fixed stars revealed its awesome velocity.
Just a day earlier the ship could still have been taken for a remnant of Jupiter’s shrinking moon Amalthea. A year ago that long quiescent moon had sprouted a network of foaming geysers and had begun shedding its mass. When all the ice was gone, this gleaming object was left.
Early in the extraordinary process an expedition had gone to investigate. Its leader, Professor J. Q. R. Forster, late of King’s College, University of London, was renowned for deciphering the ancient language of Culture X, the alien civilization which had left fossilized remains and fragments of writing on Venus and Mars. With him were six other men and women, including Inspector Ellen Troy of the Board of Space Control.
Shortly after arriving, the Forster expedition had been joined under dramatic circumstances—details yet to be revealed—by the most celebrated video personality in the solar system, the distinguished historian Sir Randolph Mays … and his young female assistant.
Although Amalthea was the focus of frantic speculation, Professor Forster had done his best to keep his discoveries confidential; only the Board of Space Control knew for sure what he and his team had found in the weeks before the moon’s icy husk finally melted away, revealing the hard kernel at its center.
At that moment, according to the Space Board, all contact with Forster and the others was lost—scant minutes before the alien construction erupted in fiery life. No one knew what had become of them.
Now half the inhabitants of the solar system watched the speeding ship with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Soon—a matter of days at its present velocity—it would cross Earth’s orbit, approaching closer than any object its size in the memory of humankind.
As Klaus pondered these wonders, the chalet’s single phonelink chortled.
Klaus irritably wondered who would be calling at this hour of the evening. His time with his family was short enough; he had left strict instructions with his office against forwarding calls. A moment later Gertrud’s voice, quiet but strained, spoke from the doorway. “It is Goncharov. He says he must speak with you urgently.” She held the link toward him.
A chill colder than the night lifted the fine hairs on Klaus’s neck. Not that he was afraid, or angry at Goncharov, whom he’d known long enough to think of as a friend, but precisely because Goncharov would not have called him in anything less than a real emergency. For his wife’s sake he tried to keep his emotions from showing as he took the link.
“Klaus? This is Mikhail. I have a very urgent problem, and I can’t talk on the link.”
“I know it must be important, Mikhail, but can’t it wait a day? I’ll be back in the office on Monday.”
“Please come to the Embassy tomorrow—I’ll send a helicopter for you.”
“If it’s really that important I can drive down.” The North Continental Treaty Alliance’s consular offices in the Swiss Free Region were located in Bern, less than a hundred kilometers by road from the Mullers’ rented chalet.
“Yes…” Goncharov hesitated. “But then we would have to get your car back to your wife.”
Hearing that, Klaus could guess what the nature of the problem was—and that he would not be vacationing with his family the rest of this week.
“Very urgent, Klaus. Only you can help,” Goncharov urged.
Klaus sighed. “Pick me up at ten. I’ll be packed.”
“Perhaps you should also…”
“I’ll make the necessary calls, Mikhail, And I’ll see you in the morning.“
“Goodbye, my friend. And I am sorry.”
Klaus keyed off the link. He looked at Gertrud’s face, saw his wife’s pretty features knitted with disappointment and suppressed anger, and he could think of nothing to say.
Something in his expression softened hers. “Next time, liebchen, you must not tell the number to anyone.”
“Agreed, dearest.” Klaus glanced toward the telescope’s screen, at his two sons engaged in enthusiastic debate over the fantastic capabilities of the alien ship that the little telescope was faithfully tracking.
He turned back to his wife. “Next time.”
But there was to be no next time for Klaus in this world. Not by any fault of the alien ship. For when the alien spacecraft finally sped past the Earth, Klaus was underwater in one of his constructi
on firm’s deep-sea submersibles, far down in a subterranean canyon that opened from the mouth of Trincomalee harbor in eastern Sri Lanka. He was trying to diagnose the damage to a deep water project his company had spent many years and many hundreds of thousands of new dollars building there, and which on the eve of its official inauguration had spectacularly malfunctioned.
The alien ship had come within a few tens of thousands of kilometers of Barth but never slowed in its passage of the heavens. Whereupon those “experts” in alien affairs confidently predicted that the ship, once past Earth, would aim itself toward the constellation Crux in the southern skies. For it had long been supposed—and personalities such as Sir Randolph Mays had well publicized—that the home star of Culture X was in Crux.
The ship confounded them. Seen from Earth, it disappeared in bright daylight. It had dived straight at the sun. Within half a day it was licked by solar prominences; a few minutes later it had passed unscathed through the sun’s searing outer layers. Using the sun’s mighty gravitational field to adjust its course, it accelerated again in a brilliant burst of fire that stretched across the heavens like a thread of molten glass. It shot out of the solar system, heading into the northern skies on a hyperbolic trajectory that was aimed—
—at nothing.
Or at least at no target known to the astronomers of Earth. For nine days, the enormous radio antennas at Farside Base on the moon tracked the ship as it continued to accelerate at ten times the force of gravity on Earth, until it achieved over ninety-five percent of the speed of light. What conceivable power source could have propelled the enormous ship to velocities hitherto observed only in subatomic-particle accelerators? Where did it derive the fuel and reaction mass for this incredible feat?
The theorists had no answers to these practical questions. What they could observe agreed with the expectations of relativity: the wavelength of light reflected from the ship shifted markedly toward the red end of the spectrum, and its receding image grew redder and dimmer. Nevertheless, that image was easy to follow with Farside’s immense telescopes. This they did for almost four years.
Then, suddenly, the ship seemed to come to a halt in space. It grew redder still, and darker, never moving…
Years—whole decades—passed on Earth while the barely visible alien ship hung motionless in the sky. Relatives and colleagues of Professor Forster and his companions grew old and died. The skies of Earth grew ever fouler, its land more eroded and barren, its seas more choked with oil, until the whole planet trembled on the verge of a global dying and only the precarious space stations and settlements on the moon and Mars and in the Mainbelt—a few hundreds of thousands of souls—could hope to survive the self-strangulation of the birthplace of their kind.
Long before this unhappy end, even before the alien apparition had departed the daylit skies of Earth, Klaus Muller had disappeared—lost in the depths of the Indian Ocean trying to fix what would have been the Earth’s first large-scale hydrothermal plant. From that valiant environmental effort the Swiss engineer never returned…
“Or so it might have been,” said Professor J. Q. R. Forster, his bright eyes gleaming with mischief. He watched the firelight glinting in his glass and swirled the smoky Scotch whisky, then took a slow, appreciative sip. “In the likeliest of all outcomes. ”
“How do we know it won’t happen still?” whispered the tall man by the fire, his voice like the rattle of surf on a beach of storm. “Maybe not all the details you’ve put in for us, Faster, but the broad outlines.”
“Kip’s right.” The woman among the four of them brusquely nodded her head. “Nothing leads me to hope we cm prevent the worst of all possible worlds resulting from this debacle.”
“But Ari, one might as well say we can do nothing to prevent the best of all possible worlds.” Jozsef Nagy was as earnestly optimistic as his wife was dour.
“We’ll do what we always have. Our best.” Forster cocked an amused eyebrow and studied the others, not unsympathetically. “One thing we can know. There are at least as many outcomes as there are new stars in the sky outside those windows.”
PART
1
ESCAPE
FROM
JUPITER
1
The mansion is made of basalt and granite; it stands on a high tor above the Hudson River. In the past it was a busy place. Now its long corridors and paneled halls are empty, its furniture taken away, its pantries and cupboards and shelves stripped of their contents. The wide lawns that surround the grand old house have grown wild and rank, and weeds have invaded from the neighboring woodlands.
It is evening, early winter; the hazy sky shines with a scattering of familiar stars. Among the known stars are dozens of strange new ones, much brighter, trailing columns of fire like comets. And like comets, the gleaming newcomers seem to quest after the sun, recently set.
Through the tall French doors of the old house, overlooking the lawn, a ruddy light suddenly flares and fades away, then flares again. Inside, in the library, oak logs blaze in the stone fireplace. The man named Kip—whom most people address as Commander—leans his tall frame over the fire, letting its warmth play over his weathered skin; glittering flames are reflected in his cold blue eyes.
There are no chairs in the empty place, but there are enough rolled-up Oriental carpets and pillows of exotic origin—camel bags, embossed leather poufs—to allow the little assembly to sprawl and make themselves comfortable. Ari sits regally on a Persian rag spread haphazardly on the floor near the fireplace, propped against mounds of pillows. There are enough refreshments on the silver tray in the center of their circle to make the evening congenial.
“More tea. Ari?” Jozsef is the oldest of them; his middle-European accent is heavy.
Ari nods briefly, swiping at her short gray hair—a habitual gesture from an earlier era, when her straight hair was long and glossy black and fell across her eyes. She lets her woolen shawl loosen around her shoulders—the heat from the fireplace is finally reaching into the musty places of the room—and takes the freshly filled cup on its saucer.
“Professor?”
“You have taken good care of me already.” Forster seems much younger than the others—until, seen close up, his wrinkled and sunburnt skin reveals itself, stretched tightly over his facial bones. He takes the thick glass with a brisk nod.
“Anything for you, Kip?”
The commander shakes his head. Jozsef pours himself a cup of black tea and cradles it, leaning back against a cylinder of rolled-up carpet, reclining like a Bedouin sheik in his tent. “It will be sad to bid goodbye to this house. It has served us well. But it is joyful to know Salamander’s work is complete. I hope that when we are through here this evening, we will have left a record that will serve future generations.” He raises his cup a few millimeters, an economical gesture. “To the truth.”
The others acknowledge him with stares and silent nods. Ari sips her tea critically, making a face. Forster sips from his whiskey glass and rolls the liquid on his tongue, then swallows. He seems lost in thought.
“You were saying, Professor…?”
Forster looks up as if reminding himself where he is. “Ah. Possibilities… But what I’m about to tell you now is not conjecture—or not wholly. It is based upon my personal experiences, upon records, upon my talks with the others.”
“No more fiction about the future, then,” Ari says tartly.
“Some of what I have to say is, I admit, guesswork. But then I am a xeno-archaeologist, accustomed to operating in the realm of uncertainty.” Forster sets his glass on the thick-woven carpet. “Guesswork has proved essential with regard to the actions of the one we call Nemo.”
“We know about Nemo,” says the commander from the fireplace. “We’ve run analyses on all the surviving works of the Knowledge. We’ve reconstructed what he did.”
Ari gives him a dark look. “And all still guesswork, Kip. As the professor says.”
“Some things we kno
w,” the commander says, his words husky, his voice barely audible.
No one contradicts him. The fire crackles and leaps in the fireplace; orange light dances on the coffered ceiling and probes the empty bookshelves.
The young-old man who is Professor J. Q. R. Forster resumes his tale. “So… We found ourselves caught up by the alien vessel, which had come to life and now imposed upon us its own imperatives. There was no argument. There could be none. We must conform—and quickly—or die…”
2
The pressure lock was a blister on the world-ship’s perfect diamond skin. Inside, it was a weirdly beautiful place, full of intricate and colorful things that seemed at once alive and machinelike, an alien tide pool at low tide—
—except that its floor was, just now, not so much a floor as an encrusted vertical wall parallel to the axis of the world-ship’s crushing acceleration. More than a kilometer across, designed to accomodate spacecraft up to the size of small asteroids, the lock’s aching emptiness diminished the only vessel it contained, our rugged little converted Jupiter tug Michael Ventris held fast by a knot of metallic tentacles—a small fish paralyzed by a gigantic anemone.
Without warning, acceleration ceased; suddenly the world-ship and everything it contained was weightless, falling freely toward the sun. Inside the Ventris, we began unbuckling ourselves from our couches. But the sudden onset of acceleration at Jupiter had caught some of the crew off guard, crushing them to the padded floors; now they strove to stop themselves from drifting away from the decks.
Josepha Walsh was our pilot—red-haired, slender to the point of skinniness, a youthful fifteen-year veteran of the Board of Space Control. “Let me hear from you, people.” She keyed the commlink and flicked switched on the videoplate monitors. “What’s the situation in the wardroom? Tony? Angus?”