“Yours, however—! Dust and gas so thick that not even a giant can be seen across many parsecs. Plenty of mainsequence stars, including blues which cannot be more than a few million years old, they burn out so fast. Spectra, not to mention planets your explorers visited, showing atomic abundances far skewed toward the high end of the periodic table. A background radiation too powerful for a man like me to dare take up permanent residence in your country.
“Such a cluster shouldn’t be!”
“But it is,” Graydal said.
Laure made bold to squeeze her hand, though little of that could pass through the gauntlets. “I’m glad,” he answered.
“How do you explain the phenomenon?” Hirn asked.
“Oh, that’s obvious . . . now that I’ve seen the thing and gathered some information on its path,” Laure said. “An improbable situation, maybe unique, but not impossible. This cluster happens to have an extremely eccentric orbit around the galactic center of mass. Once or twice a gigayear, it passes through the vast thick clouds that surround that region. By gravitation, it sweeps up immense quantities of stuff. Meanwhile, I suppose, perturbation causes some of its senior members to drift off. You might say it’s periodically rejuvenated.
“At present, it’s on its way out again. Hasn’t quite left our spiral arm. It passed near the galactic midpoint just a short while back, cosmically speaking; I’d estimate less than fifty million years. The infall is still turbulent, still condensing out into new stars like that blue giant shining on us. Your home sun and its planets must be a product of an earlier sweep. But there’ve been twenty or thirty such since the galaxy formed, and each one of them was responsible for several generations of giant stars. So Kirkasant has a lot more heavy elements than the normal planet, even though it’s not much younger than Earth. Do you follow me?”
“Hm-m-m . . . perhaps. I shall have to think.” Hirn walked off, across the great tilted block on which the party stood, to its edge, where he stopped and looked down into the shadows below. They were deep and knife sharp. The mingled light of red and blue suns, stars, starfog played eerie across the stone land. Laure grew aware of what strangeness and what silence—under the hiss in his ears—pressed in on him.
Graydal must have felt the same, for she edged close until their armors clinked together. He would have liked to see her face. She said: “Do you truly believe we can enter that realm and conquer it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, slow and blunt. “The sheer number of stars may beat us.”
“A large enough fleet could search them, one by one.”
“If it could navigate. We have yet to find out whether that’s possible.”
“Suppose. Did you guess a quarter million suns in the cluster? Not all are like ours. Not even a majority. On the other coin side, with visibility as low as it is, space must be searched back and forth, light-year by light-year. We of Makt could die of eld before a single vessel chanced on Kirkasant.”
“I’m afraid that’s true.”
“Yet an adequate number of ships, dividing the task, could find our home in a year or two.”
“That would be unattainably expensive, Graydal.”
He thought he sensed her stiffening. “I’ve come on this before,” she said coldly, withdrawing from his touch. “In your Commonalty they count the cost and the profit first. Honor, adventure, simple charity must run a poor second.”
“Be reasonable,” he said. “Cost represents labor, skill, and resources. The gigantic fleet that would go looking for Kirkasant must be diverted from other jobs. Other people would suffer need as a result. Some might suffer sharply.”
“Do you mean a civilization as big, as productive as yours could not spare that much effort for a while without risking disaster?”
She’s quick on the uptake, Laure thought. Knowing what machine technology can do on her single impoverished world, she can well guess what it’s capable of with millions of planets to draw on. But how can I make her realize that matters aren’t that simple?”
“Please, Graydal,” he said. “Won’t you believe I’m working for you? I’ve come this far, and I’ll go as much farther as need be, if something doesn’t kill us.”
He heard her gulp. “Yes. I offer apology. You are different.”
“Not really. I’m a typical Commonalty member. Later, maybe, I can show you how our civilization works, and what an odd problem in political economy we’ve got if Kirkasant is to be rediscovered. But first we have to establish that locating it is physically possible. We have to make long-term observations from here, and then enter those mists, and—One trouble at a time, I beg you!”
She laughed gently. “Indeed, my friend. And you will find a way.” The mirth faded. It had never been strong. “Won’t you?” The reflection of clouded stars glistened on her faceplate like tears.
Blindness was not dark. It shone.
Standing on the bridge, amidst the view of space, Laure saw nimbus and thunderheads. They piled in cliffs, they eddied and streamed, their color was a sheen of all colors overlying white—mother-of-pearl—but here and there they darkened with shadows and grottoes; here and there they glowed dull red as they reflected a nearby sun. For the stars were scattered about in their myriads, dominantly ruby and ember, some yellow or candent, green or blue. The nearest were clear to the eye, a few showing tiny disks, but the majority were fuzzy glows rather than lightpoints. Such shimmers grew dim with distance until the mist engulfed them entirely and nothing remained but mist.
A crackling noise beat out of that roiling formlessness, like flames. Energies pulsed through his marrow. He remembered the old, old myth of the Yawning Gap, where fire and ice arose and out of them the Nine Worlds, which were doomed in the end to return to fire and ice; and he shivered.
“Illusion,” said Jaccavrie’s voice out of immensity.
“What?” Laure started. It was as if a mother goddess had spoken.
She chuckled. Whether deity or machine, she had the great strength of ordinariness in her. “You’re rather transparent to an observer who knows you well,” she said. “I could practically read your mind.”
Laure swallowed. “The sight, well, a big, marvelous, dangerous thing, maybe unique in the galaxy. Yes, I admit I’m impressed.”
“We have much to learn here.”
“Have you been doing so?”
“At a near-capacity rate, since we entered the denser part of the cluster.” Jaccavrie shifted to primness. “If you’d been less immersed in discussions with the Kirkasanter navigation officer, you might have got running reports from me.”
“Destruction!” Laure swore. “I was studying her notes from their trip outbound, trying to get some idea of what configuration to look for, once we’ve learned how to make allowances for what this material does to starlight—Never mind. We’ll have our conference right now, just as you requested. What’d you mean by ‘an illusion’?”
“The view outside,” answered the computer. “The concentration of mass is not really as many atoms per cubic centimeter as would be found in a vaporous planetary atmosphere. It is only that, across light-years, their absorption and reflection effects are cumulative. The gas and dust do, indeed, swirl, but not with anything like the velocity we think we perceive. That is due to our being under hyperdrive. Even at the very low pseudo-speed at which we are feeling our way, we pass swiftly through varying densities. Space itself is not actually shining; excited atoms are fluorescing. Nor does space roar at you. What you hear is the sound of radiation counters and other instruments which I’ve activated. There are no real, tangible currents working on our hull, making it quiver. But when we make quantum micro-jumps across strong interstellar magnetic fields, and those fields vary according to an extraordinarily complex pattern, we’re bound to interact noticeably with them.
“Admittedly the stars are far thicker than appears. My instruments can detect none beyond a few parsecs. But what data I’ve gathered of late leads me to suspect the estimate of
a quarter million total is conservative. To be sure, most are dwarfs—”
“Come off that!” Laure barked. “I don’t need you to explain what I knew the minute I saw this place.”
“You need to be drawn out of your fantasizing,” Jaccavrie said. “Though you recognize your daydreams for what they are, you can’t afford them. Not now.”
Laure tensed. He wanted to order the view turned off, but checked himself, wondered if the robot followed that chain of his impulses too, and said in a harshened voice: “When you go academic on me like that, it means you’re postponing news you don’t want to give me. We have troubles.”
“We can soon have them, at any rate,” Jaccavrie said. “My advice is to turn back at once.”
“We can’t navigate,” Laure deduced. Though it was not unexpected, he nonetheless felt smitten.
“No. That is, I’m having difficulties already, and conditions ahead of us are demonstrably worse.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Optical methods are quite unsuitable. We knew that from the experience of the Kirkasanters. But nothing else works, either. You recall, you and I discussed the possibility of identifying supergiant stars through the clouds and using them for beacons. Though their light be diffused and absorbed, they should produce other effects—they should be powerful neutrino sources, for instance—that we could use.”
“Don’t they?”
“Oh, yes. But the effects are soon smothered. Too much else is going on. Too many neutrinos from too many different sources, to name one thing. Too many magnetic effects. The stars are so close together, you see; and so many of them are double, triple, quadruple, hence revolving rapidly and twisting the force lines; and irradiation keeps a goodly fraction of the interstellar medium in the plasma state. Thus we get electromagnetic action of every sort; plus synchrotron and betatron radiation, plus nuclear collision, plus—”
“Spare me the complete list,” Laure broke in. “Just say the noise level is too high for your instruments.”
“And for any instruments that I can extrapolate as buildable,” Jaccavrie replied. “The precision their filters would require seems greater than the laws of atomistics would allow.”
“What about your inertial system? Bollixed up, too?”
“It’s beginning to be. That’s why I asked you to come take a good look at what’s around us and what we’re headed into, while you listen to my report.” The robot was not built to know fear, but Laure wondered if she didn’t spring back to pedantry as a refuge: “Inertial navigation would work here at kinetic velocities. But we can’t traverse parsecs except by hyperdrive. Inertial and gravitational mass being identical, too rapid a change of gravitational potential will tend to cause uncontrollable precession and nutation. We can compensate for that in normal parts of space. But not here. With so many stars so closely packed, moving among each other on paths too complex for me to calculate, the variation rate is becoming too much.”
“In short,” Laure said slowly, “if we go deeper into this stuff, we’ll be flying blind.”
“Yes. Just as Makt did.”
“We can get out into clear space time, can’t we? You can follow a more or less straight line till we emerge.”
“True. I don’t like the hazards. The cosmic ray background is increasing considerably.”
“You have screen fields.”
“But I’m considering the implications. Those particles have to originate somewhere. Magnetic acceleration will only account for a fraction of their intensity. Hence the rate of nova production in this cluster, and of super-novae in the recent past, must be enormous. This in turn indicates vast numbers of lesser bodies—neutron stars, rogue planets, large meteoroids, thick dust banks—things that might be undetectable before we blunder into them.”
Laure smiled at her unseen scanner. “If anything goes wrong, you’ll react fast,” he said. “You always do.”
“I can’t guarantee we won’t run into trouble I can’t deal with.”
“Can you estimate the odds on that for me?”
Jaccavrie was silent. The air sputtered and sibilated. Laure found his vision drowning in the starfog. He needed a minute to realize he had not been answered. “Well?” he said.
“The parameters are too uncertain.” Overtones had departed from her voice. “I can merely say that the probability of disaster is high in comparison to the value for travel through normal regions of the galaxy.”
“Oh, for chaos’ sake!” Laure’s laugh was uneasy. “That figure is almost too small to measure. We knew before we entered this nebula that we’d be taking a risk. Now what about coherent radiation from natural sources?”
“My judgment is that the risk is out of proportion to the gain,” Jaccavrie said. “At best, this is a place for scientific study. You’ve other work to do. Your basic—and dangerous—fantasy is that you can satisfy the emotional cravings of a few semibarbarians.”
Anger sprang up in Laure. He gave it cold shape: “My order was that you report on coherent radiation.”
Never before had he pulled the rank of his humanness on her.
She said like dead metal: “I have detected some in the visible and short infrared, where certain types of star excite pseudoquasar processes in the surrounding gas. It is dissipated as fast as any other light.”
“The radio bands are clear?”
“Yes, of that type of wave, although—”
“Enough. We’ll proceed as before, toward the center of the cluster. Cut this view and connect me with Makt.”
The hazy suns vanished. Laure was alone in a metal compartment. He took a seat and glowered at the outercom screen before him. What had gotten into Jaccavrie, anyway? She’d been making her disapproval of this quest more and more obvious over the last few days. She wanted him to turn around, report to HQ, and leave the Kirkasanters there for whatever they might be able to make of themselves in a lifetime’s exile. Well . . . her judgments were always conditioned by the fact that she was a Ranger vessel, built for Ranger work. But couldn’t she see that his duty, as well as his desire, was to help Graydal’s people?
The screen flickered. The two ships were so differently designed that it was hard for them to stay in phase for any considerable time, and thus hard to receive the modulation imposed on spacepulses. After a while the image steadied to show a face. “I’ll switch you to Captain Demring,” the communications officer said at once. In his folk, such lack of ceremony was as revealing of strain as haggardness and dark-rimmed eyes.
The image wavered again and became the Old Man’s. He was in his cabin, which had direct audiovisual connections, and the background struck Laure anew with outlandishness. What history had brought forth the artistic conventions of that bright-colored, angular-figured tapestry? What song was being sung on the player, in what language, and on what scale? What was the symbolism behind the silver mask on the door?
Worn but indomitable, Demring looked forth and said, “Peace between us. What occasions this call?”
“You should know what I’ve learned,” Laure said. “Uh, can we make this a three-way with your navigator?”
“Why?” The question was machine steady.
“Well, that is, her duties—”
“She is to help carry out decisions,” Demring said. “She does not make them. At maximum, she can offer advice in discussion.” He waited before adding, with a thrust: “And you have been having a great deal of discussion already with my daughter, Ranger Laure.”
“No . . . I mean, yes, but—” The younger man rallied. He did have psych training to call upon, although its use had not yet become reflexive in him. “Captain,” he said, “Graydal has been helping me understand your ethos. Our two cultures have to see what each other’s basics are if they’re to cooperate, and that process begins right here, among these ships. Graydal can make things clearer to me, and I believe grasps my intent better, than anyone else of your crew.”
“Why is that?” Demring demanded.
<
br /> Laure suppressed pique at his arrogance—he was her father—and attempted a smile. “Well, sir, we’ve gotten acquainted to a degree, she and I. We can drop formality and just be friends.”
“That is not necessarily desirable,” Demring said.
Laure recollected that, throughout the human species, sexual customs are among the most variable. And the most emotionally charged. He put himself inside Demring’s prejudices and said with what he hoped was the right slight note of indignation: “I assure you nothing improper has occurred.”
“No, no.” The Kirkasanter made a brusque, chopping gesture. “I trust her. And you, I am sure. Yet I must warn that close ties between members of radically different societies can prove disastrous to everyone involved.”
Laure might have sympathized as he thought, He’s afraid to let down his mask—is that why their art uses the motif so much?—but underneath, he is a father worrying about his little girl. He felt too harassed. First his computer, now this! He said coolly, “I don’t believe our cultures are that alien. They’re both rational-technological, which is a tremendous similarity to begin with. But haven’t we got off the subject? I wanted you to hear the findings this ship has made.”
Demring relaxed. The unhuman universe he could cope with. “Proceed at will, Ranger.”
When he had heard Laure out, though, he scowled, tugged his beard, and said without trying to hide distress: “Thus we have no chance of finding Kirkasant by ourselves.”
“Evidently not,” Laure said. “I’d hoped that one of my modern locator systems would work in this cluster. If so, we could have zigzagged rapidly between the stars, mapping them, and had a fair likelihood of finding the group you know within months. But as matters stand, we can’t establish an accurate enough grid, and we have nothing to tie any such grid to. Once a given star disappears in the fog, we can’t find it again. Not even by straight-line backtracking, because we don’t have the navigational feedback to keep on a truly straight line.”
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 62