David was torn between staring in awe and giggling as the tiny, adorable beastie stared up out of its cryotank and intoned in a deep voice, “You're overdue, Entropy. Anything to report?"
"False alarm,” Nashira said, and asked for a beam. Moments later, a spot of laser light appeared in the middle of nowhere, Hubpoint distortion scattering enough of its light to make it visible from any direction. Nashira piloted the Entropy until it aligned with the beam and rode it back through the Hub.
"Do us both a favor,” Nashira said once they were in the Shell again. “Get off now and take Don Wannabe here with you. You're not going to find anything."
"We've barely even started,” David said. “And I, for one, would love to see our galaxy from a few dozen more angles."
She turned to David's backer. “How about you, Rynyan? We've been doing this for nearly fifteen minutes. We must have exceeded your attention span by now."
"I am never bored so long as I have your beauty to gaze upon,” he said. “Though honestly, that jumpsuit doesn't let me gaze upon nearly enough of your beauty. I'll buy you some Earth lingerie to wear for me tomorrow."
Nashira spun the ship around sharply to redock on the launch rail, sending Rynyan into the bulkhead. “Ooh, I love it when you get physical,” he said.
"Last chance to get off, save us all some grief,” she told David.
"I don't give up that easy,” he replied. “Let's dive."
The second dive was on the same trajectory as before, but a centimeter per second faster. They came out a good hundred kiloparsecs from where they'd been, this time seeing the Milky Way edge-on from the other side. Over the next few dozen jumps, David certainly got his wish to see his home galaxy—and the various satellites and clusters that shared its dark-matter halo—from every possible angle.
On the second day, Rynyan's generous donation of lingerie items was jettisoned eight thousand parsecs beyond the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy. On the third day, they actually materialized inside the Virgo Stellar Stream, the remnant of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy being torn apart as it slowly merged with the Milky Way's disk. Despite his fascination with the extragalactic vistas, David was somewhat relieved to see a starry sky, even a sparse one like this. “I'm picking up energy readings,” Nashira reported. “Looks like radar transmissions."
David perked up. “A new species? First contact?"
Her eyes were wide as she studied the readings, narrowing in on the source. “Maybe. If we're lucky..."
"I bet you get a huge bonus for this!"
"Wouldn't suck..."
After a moment, she slumped. Then she socked David in the shoulder, hard. “Damn you! You sodding moron, trying to get my hopes up!"
"What is it? No aliens?"
"Oh, there are aliens, all right! Great big sodding technical civilization, colonies all over their system."
"Then what—"
"They're eight light-years away, that's what! We can't go there! We can't make contact! This is even worse than finding nothing! Do you get now why I hate this job?"
"Hey, it's not a total loss. I'm sure they'll want to set up a science outpost here to study them."
"Oh, great, scientists. No tourism, no trade. I'll be able to buy new shoes with my bonus.” She grimaced. “And now I have to fall further behind schedule so I can collect preliminary readings. A little present for the grandkids I'm never gonna have at this rate."
"Hey, doing science. That sounds exciting."
"You want to do science? You want to help?"
"Do I!"
She pointed. “Push that button."
He did so. “Now what?"
"That's it. It's done. The ship's taking readings. What do you think, I have xenology degrees? I'm a bloody pilot.” She crossed her arms. “Nothing to do now but sit and wait."
She went back to get a sandwich. David heard Rynyan moving to intercept her. “If you'd like a way to pass the time, I've been studying this book called the Kama Sutra. I think its proposals would be very adaptable to a merging of our species."
"You remember David's theory, Rynyan? About how the particles in all our bodies are really the same particle looping back on itself?"
"Yes,” he replied, nonplussed.
"Well, if he's right, then if you want to have sex with me ... you can just go fuck yourself."
* * * *
"These are acceptable results,” Vekredi told Nashira as he reviewed her reports. “I'll forward them to Research for eventual follow-up. The size of your bonus will be contingent on how these results pan out."
Nashira declined to hold her breath. It was a big galaxy, plus eight small galaxies, and there was already plenty to keep the universities and research centers of the Network worlds busy for centuries. If she were lucky, she might see the bonus before she retired. If she lived that long.
"Meanwhile, I trust Mr. LaMacchia has made no progress?"
"Of course not, Kred."
He peered at her through his goggles. “Then you have taken action to ... neutralize his equipment?"
"His equipment is off-the-shelf junk, and he barely knows how to use it. Even if there were something to find, I'm not gonna bother sabotaging something that has no chance of finding it. I don't kick people when they're already down for the count. Not worth the pain in my toes."
"Very well,” Vekredi said after a moment. “Since your position is clear, the subject will not be raised with you again."
"It better not be.” She didn't tell him how close she'd come to sabotaging David's equipment anyway. That bonus would have done her some real good, even if it had been for a pointless act. But if she'd let Kred and his bosses use her that way once, she'd never be free of them.
And maybe, on some level, she didn't like the idea of betraying David LaMacchia. Not that she was getting sentimental; if she'd felt it was in her best interests to screw him over, she would've screwed him over and had no trouble living with it. But she was just a little bit glad she didn't have to.
They soon settled into a daily routine, with David improvising new scan techniques with his instruments while Rynyan “supervised” and flirted, and Nashira tried her best to ignore them both. Each morning she advised them to give up and leave her to her sullen solitude, and each morning they climbed aboard with unrelenting enthusiasm.
But after a week in which none of the three made any progress toward their respective goals, David was beginning to think a change of tack was needed. “We need to go through the Hub as slowly as possible,” he told Nashira. “Just drift into it. Maybe a slower passage will get me better readings."
"The jump's instantaneous,” Nashira said.
"But it can't be. The front of the ship enters the Hub before the back does. There has to be some kind of transition."
"The controllers won't like it. A slow dive means delays for other ships."
And David turned to the Sosyryn. “Rynyan?"
"Not to worry. I'm wiring the bribes into their accounts as we speak."
And so, thanks to Sosyryn generosity, one controller was able to buy a lavish anniversary meal for each of his six spouses, another was able to decorate her hothouse-dwelling with the finest K'slien pornographic topiaries, and Nashira was able to read insulting and threatening instant messages from a dozen fellow pilots before the Starship Entropy finally crept through the Hub.
She was still composing suitably scathing replies when they reached the other side, hoping to provoke a good brawl in the pilots’ lounge later on and get enough bones broken to justify a medical leave. So she ignored David's gasp of amazement. Then she ignored Rynyan's gasp of amazement.
Then Rynyan grabbed her head from behind and tilted it up to the viewing wall. And she gasped in amazement.
"I've never seen anything like that,” David said.
"Neither have I,” Rynyan said, “and I'm not even a backwater hick."
"I don't know if anyone has,” Nashira said.
What they saw, so the Entropy computer told them
after digesting a few minutes of scans, was a red giant star a few AUs in front of them. But not just any red giant. This star had not one or two, but four hot Jovians in close orbits around it. All four had been engulfed by the star's expanding atmosphere as it swelled past its main-sequence confines. But they had not been fully vaporized, for they were large, and the extremely hot hydrogen around them was also extremely tenuous. Rather, they had carved out gaps in the vast hydrogen cloud, bulldozing their orbital paths clear. Their gravity had concentrated the star's hydrogen into the zones between their orbits, confining it against the outward push of the stellar wind from the white-hot, dying core. Friction with the stellar atmosphere had eroded their own atmospheres, which had coursed behind the planets like cometary tails and been blown outward to mingle with the confined hydrogen in between them, spiking it with trace amounts of ammonia, methane, ice crystals, hydrocarbons, and organic compounds.
In short, the newly dead white dwarf was surrounded by a system of immense, multicolored rings, so vast that the Jovian planets functioned as shepherd moons. These rings were encased within the tenuous remains of the red giant's outer atmosphere, minus the layers that had already sloughed off to begin forming a planetary nebula around it, nested shells encasing the nested rings.
"This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” David said.
"The hell with that—this is gonna make me rich!” Nashira replied with glee. “Oh, we'd better get back so I can stake a claim on this place! Wing's Rings, they'll call it!"
"You can do that?” Rynyan asked.
"If I'm quick about it. If I can do an end run, get the paperwork done in my name before I have to report this to Kred. I'll still have a ton of debt to work off, but eventually I should be able to get out of this shitty job and rub my success in their faces and assorted sensory clusters. One quick scan and then we go back!"
"Whoa, what's your hurry?” David asked. “Come on, Nashira, look at it! You've found something incredibly beautiful, something that nobody has ever seen before. How can you not be thrilled by this? How can you not give yourself a little time to be moved by it?"
She glared at him. “You're right. This is an amazing place. It's gorgeous. Anyone would give a fortune to retire here. And I can never see it again. That's a Hub scout's life, understand? We try the new vectors, the ones nobody's been to before. Well, we've been here now, and that means I'm not coming back. So where's the percentage in letting myself give a damn about it, except as a way of maybe someday getting out of this life?"
He was nonplussed. “But ... if you did get out, you could still come back."
"If I'm lucky,” she told him, reality setting back in. “If nothing else goes wrong. If I don't materialize inside a brown dwarf tomorrow. That's my life, kid."
David was quiet for a time. “I'm really sorry,” he said, and it sounded like pity, so she hated him for it.
She spent a few minutes ignoring him, studying the scans to make sure there was nothing here to jinx her find. Once she was satisfied, she jumped out of her chair and headed to the comm shack, pushing past Rynyan, who was loitering in the hatchway and clearly relished the close contact. “I'm calling for the beam. Sooner you two dreamers are out of my hair, the better.” And out of my head.
A few moments later, she screamed. “What is it?” David cried, rushing in after her with Rynyan behind him. She just pointed and let them see for themselves:
The quantelopes were dead.
A quick investigation showed that the cryotank's supposedly failure-proof systems had failed. The quantelopes had boiled alive well before reaching room temperature. “Well!” Rynyan declared. “I shall certainly complain to the manufacturer when we get back."
"When we get back?!" Nashira cried. “How exactly do we do that? We have no way of contacting the Hub!"
"Won't they send a ship to find us when we don't report in?” David asked.
"In about five years, maybe. For all they know, we're inside a planet or got caught in a war or a supernova wavefront. They'll give it time for the danger to move past the Hubpoint."
"Oh.” He paused. “Well, we'll have to figure something out ourselves, then."
"Don't you get it?! We're dead! There's nowhere habitable in this system. The ship's got less than a week's supplies for three. God, it'd be better if we'd come out right inside the bloody star, been flash-vaporized."
She went back to the cockpit and took her seat, tempted to fire up the drive and fly the Entropy into the star. Instead, she just clunked her head down on the console and wrapped her arms around it. I never thought I'd go this way. I thought I'd never even know I'd died. She damned the Universe for getting her hopes up just before it killed her.
She felt a hand on her shoulder—a human one, at least. “Maybe there's another way,” David said. “Maybe the scans I took can let us figure out a way back, or at least a way to contact the Hub."
"Stop deluding yourself, kid. You ... are going ... to die."
He sat down beside her. “I don't think it's deluded to go on trying. If you try, at least you have a chance. If you don't try, you have none.
"That's the whole point of what you do, Nashira. It's why I admire you so much. Your job, it's all about playing the long odds, risking it all to find things you have only the tiniest chance of finding. The fact that you do this job at all tells me that there must be a part of you that believes in hope."
"Hope just sets you up for disappointment, David."
"I don't believe in disappointment,” Rynyan said. “Just delayed gratification. We'll be home by dinnertime.” He rubbed his belly. “That reminds me, I need a snack."
"Go ahead,” Nashira told him. “No point in rationing our food anyway."
"Nashira..."
"Don't, David. You just go play with your toys until you figure out we're buggered."
He spent a few hours with his instruments before growling in frustration. “Let me guess,” Nashira said.
"It's not hopeless,” he insisted. “Just difficult."
"There's nothing there."
"There's some data ... I just have to figure it out."
"Random noise."
"I'm not giving up. At least...” He sighed. “At least it's something to keep me occupied if..."
"So you're finally starting to admit it."
He returned to his seat next to hers. “Okay. Maybe we are going to die here."
She stared. “How can you be so calm about it?"
"Are you kidding?” He gestured to the display. “I got to see that."
"You're not disappointed that you'll never get to crack the Hub and make the galaxy sit up and notice humanity?"
"At least I tried. I set a goal for myself, a big goal. Something more than just working a nine-to-five and watching the vidnet. That's not enough of a life anymore, not when there's a whole universe for us to reach for. I know a lot of people back home who dream of coming out here. But they'll never actually do it. Because they're not stupid or crazy enough to risk everything to try it. But I was. I was stupid. I was crazy. And so I really tried. And I made it out here. Maybe I'm going to die, but at least I actually lived first.” He turned back to admire the rings. “Just look at it, Nashira. We get to see something nobody else has ever seen. And it's all ours, for the rest of our lives. That's not so bad a way to go, is it?"
Nashira looked into his eyes for a while. Then she turned to the display and really saw the rings for the first time.
After a while, the rings blurred, and she realized she was crying. In wonder. “It really is beautiful."
"It's an amazing universe,” David said.
"Yeah ... I guess sometimes it is.” She found herself looking into his eyes again ... and found herself not wanting to look away. She felt herself moving closer to him, closer...
And then the proximity alert went off. Nashira spun back to the console in bewilderment. “What? There—there's a ship coming! It just came through the Hub! We're saved!"
"Well, it's about time they got here,” Rynyan spoke up. “The snacks on this ship aren't very good."
Nashira heard something more than his usual cluelessness in his voice. She turned to face him. “'They’ who?"
"Oh, just some friends of mine. Business partners, really. They're here to secure my claim."
She stood. "Your claim?"
He grinned and gestured toward the glorious vista beyond. “Welcome to Rynyan's Rings. I'm going to donate them as a federal park, so the entire Network can benefit from them!"
"You—you! You—when the hell did you ... How did you ...?"
"Oh, I called them hours ago! While you were doing the system scan. The quantelopes were fine when I used them. Oh, I do hope I didn't break something. If so, I'll pay for—"
"You bastard!” She pinned him against the bulkhead. “You come aboard my ship and you have the gall to jump my claim?!"
"I prefer to think of it as saving your life. Which I'm sure you'll agree is a much more generous act than letting you have the claim to the Rings. Along with my donation of the Rings themselves, I'll be the envy of all Rysos come tallying season!"
"Saving my—you didn't even know we'd be in danger when you made that call!"
"The intent doesn't matter,” he said with the serene smile of the bodhisattva who'd eaten the canary. “The meaning lies in the gift itself."
* * * *
"The failure of the cryotank is being investigated,” Vekredi told them upon their return to Hubstation 3742. “Naturally the reliability of our quantelope communication is of the highest priority to us. But I hope this incident has driven home to you, Mister LaMacchia, that Hub scout missions are intrinsically dangerous. If you continue your ... researches in this vein, the Hub management cannot be held liable for the consequences. Do you understand me, sir?"
"Yes, thanks,” David said. “Your translator's working fine."
Vekredi nodded in satisfaction and waddled away. Once he was out of earshot, Nashira punched David in the shoulder. “Don't you get it, kid? Translated or not, that was a threat. No way that tank just happened to fail. It was sabotaged."
Analog SFF, March 2010 Page 18