Meantime, they closed in on the oddball planetary system they had come to think of as the Twins.
The two giants were similar in size. Their equatorial diameters checked in at sixty-five thousand and sixty-three thousand kilometers. The smaller, the brighter one, flaunted belts of silver clouds with blue and gold tones.
The blue was the result of methane slurry and ice crystals on the outer shell of the atmosphere. Cyclonic storms floated deeper down, swirls of yellow and red with golden eyes. It was a jewel of a world.
Its darker companion, folded in October colors, was also sprinkled with storms. They appeared to be larger, less defined, more ominous than those on its companion. The names came automatically: The system would be Gemini; the bright world Cobalt, the dark, Autumn.
Each had its own rings. Cobalt’s was the more complex, threaded with shepherd moons and braiding effects. It had four Cassini divisions. Autumn’s rings were brighter, gold and burnt orange, with only two divisions. An observer could not resist being struck by the balance of light and dark at either end of the system.
Slightly more than 3 million kilometers separated them.
The entire system of worlds, rings, and central cloud was bounded by a vast outer ring, which was highly elliptical, rather like the track around a football field. It, too, had all the features of orthodox ring systems: Cassini divisions, shepherd moons, braiding effects. But it wasn’t as well defined as the other two. Rather than the sharp-edged appearance of the inner systems, it presented itself as a kind of luminous loop gradually dissipating into the night.
The satellites were cratered, frozen, sterile. No atmospheres there. They ranged in diameter from six thousand kilometers, the vertical moon, to twelve hundred kilometers.
The worlds, moons, and the big ring revolved around the center of mass, where the cloud had formed and the gravities of the two giants balanced. The Twins were high-speed bullets, roaring around each other in less than twenty-four hours. Both were considerably flattened by the centripetal forces, and Bill reported that he wasn’t certain, hadn’t been there long enough to get accurate measurements, but preliminary estimates suggested the two worlds were closing on each other. “Gradually,” he said. “The system isn’t stable.”
“They’ll collide?” asked George, already rubbing his hands at the prospect.
“It’s imminent.”
“When?”
“Less than a million years.”
“Your AI,” George told her, “has a vindictive sense of humor.”
The central cloud was lit from within by a constant infalling of dust and particles sucked from the ring systems on both sides. That was the activity causing the twisted necklace effect. The two streams collided within the cloud, exploding into a pyrotechnic display that sent jets millions of kilometers through the night before they were eventually dragged back down.
Bill continued posting real-time images on the various displays in mission control and throughout the ship. Hutch spent almost all her time on the bridge. Below, George and his people were glued to the screens.
They had moved inside the outermost moons when Bill reported another odd feature. “Autumn,” he said, “has a cyclonic white spot on the equator.”
“A white spot?” asked Hutch.
“A storm. But it doesn’t look like the other storms.”
“In what way?”
“Narrower. Longer. Slower wind velocities. Maybe it has something to do with being on the equator.”
They received a message from Outpost informing them that Captain Hutchins’s report on the loss of the Wendy Jay had been forwarded to the Academy. (Jerry sounded a bit severe, as if Captain Hutchins could expect to be called in, dressed down, and terminated.) Jerry was another one, she decided, who could look forward to a brilliant bureaucratic future.
THE MEMPHIS SPENT three days doing the survey. It was an extraordinary time. They saw the spectacle from every conceivable angle. The sky was at times full of light, of glowing planets and moons and rings. At other times it was dark and quiescent, when they were on the night side of the worlds, and the only illumination was provided by the necklace, which glowed softly against the background of stars.
Bill put it all on the wall-length screen in the common room, and they took to eating their meals on their virtual veranda, while the light show danced and fountained before them. An endless series of meteors, ripped out of the rings by shifting gravities, plunged down the skies and exploded in the upper atmospheres of the big worlds.
If ever there is a place, thought Hutch, that cries out for the existence of a Designer, this is it.
THEY ARRIVED IN the neighborhood of the vertical moon during the late morning of Christmas Eve.
It was a forbidding place, a world of Martian dimensions. But it lacked the wisp of atmosphere and the broad flat plains of Earth’s neighbor. Great slags of landmass had been pushed up, and vast canyons had opened. Craters were everywhere. It was a place of needle peaks and jagged rock formations and scrambled canyons, of cliffs, crags, plateaus, and rills. Of craters and escarpments. Like the other moons, it was caught in tidal lock, always presenting the same face to the cloud.
Vertical was out near the edge of the system, 24 million kilometers from the center of mass. From its vantage point, the system of rings and giant worlds was tilted about fifteen degrees, maybe the width of Alyx’s hand from thumb to outstretched pinkie.
Its path gave it a unique perspective. Instead of looking through the big ring, as the other satellites did, the vertical moon moved over and under the entire system, so that its sky, if one was on the correct side, provided a magnificent display. Everything was up there, the cloud, the Twins, the three sets of rings.
Originally, no one had taken Tor’s idea, that the vertical moon might not be in a natural orbit, seriously. But when they glided through its skies and looked up, the idea that this world had been moved, had been placed, seemed not so implausible.
If I could move a world, Hutch thought, looking at a pair of needle peaks on the edge of a mountain range, this is where I’d put it.
She was alone on the bridge when Bill blinked on in front of her. He’d traded in the lab smock he’d been wearing during the last few days for a formal tie and jacket, and looked as if he were going to dinner at the Makepiece. “Hutch,” he said. His eyes sparkled and a mischievous smile played across his lips.
“What?” she asked.
“There’s a building down there.”
You’re kidding. She looked up at the screens, and there it was! Sheer joy surged through her, and she decided she’d been hanging around George too much.
A jagged mountain rose out of a series of ridges. Near the top, she could see a wide shelf. And there, on the shelf, rested a house.
Well, a structure.
It was an elongated oval, open in the center, running lengthwise along the face of the cliff. She could make out windows, but they were dark. There was no shell protecting it from the vacuum, suggesting it used, or had used, something like a Flickinger field. “Any power readings, Bill?”
“Negative.”
“So it’s empty.”
“I would say so.”
Poor George.
“I would point out that it’s on the equator,” said Bill. “Perfect for sight-seeing.” He showed her. Autumn was in the southern sky, Cobalt to the north. The cloud floated directly overhead.
The shelf was about a thousand meters up the wall. Hutch passed the word to George, and then went down to mission control to be with her passengers when Bill relayed the pictures.
“How about that?” said Tor, when the oval appeared on-screen. “What’d I tell you people?”
They went through yet another round of congratulations. Up and down, thought Hutch. We’re doing either celebrations or memorials.
George took her aside and thanked her. “You’re a wonderful warm human being, Hutchins.” He laughed.
“It was Tor,” she said. “He’s the one wh
o thought the vertical moon was worth a closer look.”
The Memphis by then had gotten a better angle, and Bill’s telescopes were providing more detail.
The building was two stories high. It had a front door and lots of windows. The architecture was plain, without any attempt at ornamentation, unless you counted setbacks and abutments. (“Who’d try to put a fancy house in a place like this?” asked Alyx. “It would get overwhelmed by the scenery.”) A couple of benches had been placed in the open central section. There was a cupola, exactly the kind of cupola you might expect to find on one of those twenty-first-century Virginia country houses. It was made of gray stone, undoubtedly quarried out of the surrounding cliffs. It was achingly beautiful.
“That’s odd,” said Nick.
“What is?” asked George.
“Antennas. I don’t see any sign of a receiver.”
HUTCH SENT OFF the contact message to the Academy, as required by the regulations. She disliked doing it, because she knew they’d rip a copy for Mogambo at Outpost. And the news would bring Mogambo running.
Pity, but there was no help for it. Meanwhile, she was feeling pretty proud of herself. During the decades since humanity had first developed FTL travel, it had taken literally hundreds of missions to find a world that had been—or was still—home to an intelligent species. The Memphis, on this flight, was three for three.
They were paying for it in blood, but when they got home, she expected that the president herself would be on the Wheel to shake hands with George.
AT NO TIME had there been any doubt the place was empty.
Two large dishes were mounted on the roof. Solar collectors, although they weren’t aimed at the sun. Weren’t aimed anywhere, actually. They pointed in different directions, one out toward the big ring, the other directed down into a canyon. Nonfunctional.
The space in the center of the oval had once been a courtyard. She looked at the images, studied the benches, saw a walkway. And there was an open deck under the cupola.
“Look!” said Alyx. “Off to the left!”
Outside the building, along the shelf.
“Enhance, Bill,” Hutch said. “Left side.”
It was a spacecraft! Probably. Hard to tell for sure. It could as easily have been a grain storage shed with windows.
“Why would they leave a ship behind?” asked George.
Hutch didn’t know, but she wondered if the occupants hadn’t exactly left.
The grain storage shed, the ship, the lander, glittered in the uncertain light of that impossible sky.
“We’ll want to go down and take a look,” said George.
“Of course.” That was Tor. She could see him getting his easel out.
“Who wants to come?”
ALYX WASN’T SURPRISED when Hutch suggested caution, reminded them that they’d made assumptions before, and people had died.
“But surely,” George said, “this place is empty. It’s hard vacuum down there.”
It was hard to argue with that. It was like the moonbase at Safe Harbor, Nick pointed out. There’d been no danger there. This was perfectly safe.
Alyx thought so, too. She liked Hutch, but she seemed a tad reserved. Too cautious. Not at all the dashing sort of person one would expect to be piloting a superluminal. She’d been right about the angels, but this was surely different. Still…
They debated the issue for several hours. There was never a question about whether they would go, but rather who would go. George and Hutch to make sure everything was okay? George, Nick, and Tor because it was best to have guys out front when there was danger? Alyx suggested Hutch and herself because women were smarter.
The men laughed because they thought she was joking.
In the end, after it was clear everyone wanted to go, Hutch conceded, and they all piled down to the lander and strapped on e-suits. Alyx enjoyed the feel of the energy surge around her when she activated the Flickinger field. It was warm and clean, and it embraced her like a soft body garment.
Hutch set the rules while they waited for the air pressure outside the lander to go to zero. Nobody was to wander off without a partner. Don’t touch anything unless you poke it first with a stick. Keep in mind the gravity’s different. It’s low, but if you fall off the mountain, you’re just as dead. “And please keep in mind,” she added, “that everything in that place is of immense value. Try not to handle stuff. And don’t break anything.”
Nick sighed and wished everyone a Merry Christmas.
Hutch turned that penetrating blue gaze on him. “I know how it all sounds, Nick. But I really don’t want to lose anybody else.” The lights on the control board went green. “Okay, Bill,” she told the AI. “Launch at will.”
The vehicle rotated, the door opened, and they slipped out into the night.
Hutch did a single orbit, while Alyx watched the rugged terrain flow past. The surface was not dark, as she’d expected. Rather, there was a kind of musty half-light, like the interior of a church near sundown, lit only through its stained-glass windows. It was ominous and lovely and mystical and silent, and she wondered how she could capture its essence with lighting and choreography.
“You can’t,” Nick said, and she realized she must have been giving voice to her thoughts. “You need a holotank for this.”
But that wouldn’t do it either because you knew you were in a holotank and as long as you knew that, knew you were sitting in a safe warm place and that the images were only images and nothing else, the effect wasn’t quite complete. The audience had to be made to forget where it was. It had to be made to believe this was all real rock. The twin globes and that spectral cloud between them and the rings, those magnificent rings, had to be real. She’d never seen so much light in the sky, and yet it didn’t filter down onto the landscape. It only cast shadows, but they were God’s shadows, and when you were out here really out here cruising over them you knew that.
No. Simulations would be inadequate. She glanced over at Tor, who smiled at her. He understood that. It needed expression. It needed to be captured and made to live for an audience in the way only a theater troupe could do.
She saw a wisp of smoke down among the crags, as if somebody was tending a campfire, and pointed it out to Nick. “Trick of the light?” she wondered.
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s volcanic activity. Maybe old Vertical is geologically alive.”
She sat back and let the gentle vibrations of the engines enfold her while she visualized dancers performing under the Twins. While she began to put together a musical score.
Hutch announced that they were beginning their descent. Alyx looked outside again, looked for the house, the oval, with its courtyard and its cupola, but she could see only the tortured landscape and the Halloween glow.
But they were going down. The seat was falling away from her, the harness tugging on her shoulders and legs, restraining her. Then she heard George say, “There it is,” but she still couldn’t see it, had to be up front looking out through the windscreen. (Did they call it a windscreen when the vehicle moved through vacuum?)
A solid sheet of rock appeared out the window, gray, craggy, gaunt, moving steadily upward. It was close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched it if she could have gotten her hand through the window. She wanted to tell Hutch to be careful but she knew how that would be received so she kept quiet but couldn’t suppress a smile when George delivered the fatal phrase.
“Look out,” he said. “We’re pretty close.”
Hutch assured him in a flat voice that everything was okay. George stiffened and turned away to stare out at the cliff. Then he made a show of shrinking down in his seat and cowering with one hand drawn over his head.
Hutch laughed, but Alyx held her breath, hung on, gripping the arms of her chair, squeezing them tight. The upward movement of the cliffs slowed and almost stopped. Then she felt the jar of the landing treads. Hutch held it briefly aloft, gradually transferring weight to the vehicle, all
owing it to settle slowly, probably wanting to assure herself the shelf would support them before she committed. Then they were down, and the drone of the engines changed, softened, and cut off.
She released her harness and stood up so she could see out the front. And there it was! It looked like an abandoned skating rink, a train terminal, maybe, the hind end of a mall, sitting out here as part of the spectacle.
The place where God comes when he needs a break.
They switched over to their air tanks, and Alyx looked out the right side, the starboard side, that was the correct way to say it, and she couldn’t see whatever it was they’d landed on. Instead she was looking down into a chasm, hundreds of meters down, where everything got dark and she couldn’t see bottom.
Hutch was standing in the airlock, watching to see that nobody tripped getting out. “Stay away from the edge,” she was saying, as each of them climbed down the short ladder and moved out across the barren ground.
The short stubby wing of the lander was a finger length from the rock wall. She looked up and caught her breath. The face of the cliff rose as far as she could see, maybe a couple of kilometers, maybe ten. It looked like Kilimanjaro up there except it didn’t have the snow, just smooth gray rock going up forever.
And the sky, my God, the sky. Autumn on one side and Cobalt on the other, each with its family of rings, and the big cloud between them like a Chinese globe. And the rim of the big ring, a misty highway arcing through the night.
She stared at it for several minutes. They all did. And then, finally, they began to talk again. Alyx slipped around in front of the lander, moving behind Nick, still watching the sky, and bumped into him when he stopped without warning. He was looking at the other vehicle, the one they’d seen on the Memphis’s screens, safe and mundane and ordinary from far away. But up close it was gray and black and different. There was something in its lines, in the way the hull curved back on itself, that their lamplight burrowed into the row of dark windows and seemed to get lost, that suggested a manufacturer they would not have recognized.
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