Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  "Shut you out of what?"

  "The credit, of course," she said, her lip twisting again. "That's what drives the academic world, Captain: the politely savage competition for credit and glory and peer recognition." She eyed me again. "It would be so much easier if would trust me. Safer, too, from my point of view. If this should get out..."

  She took a deep breath, still watching me, and let it out in a rush. "But if it's the only way to get your cooperation, then I suppose that's what I have to do. Tell me, have you ever heard of the Freedom's Peace?"

  "Sounds vaguely familiar," I said, searching my memory. "Is it a star transport?"

  She snorted gently. "You might say it was the ultimate star transport," she said dryly. "The Freedom's Peace was one of the five Giant Leap ark ships that headed out from the Jovian colonies 130 years ago."

  "Oh—right," I said, feeling my face warming. Nothing like forgetting one of the biggest and most spectacular failures in the history of human exploration.

  The United Jovian Habitats, full of the arrogance of wealth and autonomy, had hollowed out five fair-sized asteroids, stocked them with colonists, pre-assembled ecosystems, and heavy-duty ion-capture fusion drives, and sent them blazing out of the solar system as humanity's gift to the stars.

  The planetoids had stayed in contact with the home system for a while, their transmissions growing steadily weaker as the distances increased and there was more and more interstellar dust for their transmission lasers to have to punch through. Eventually, they faded out, with the last of the five going silent barely six years after their departure. The telescopes had been able to follow them for another five years or so, but eventually their drives had faded into the general starscape background.

  And then had come the War of Reclamation, ruthlessly bringing the Habitats back under Earth dominion and in the process wiping out virtually all records of the Giant Leap project. By the time humanity started riding flapblacks and were finally able to go out looking for them, they had completely vanished. "Okay—the Freedom's Peace. What about it?"

  "I've found it," she said simply.

  I stared at her. "Where?"

  "Out in space, of course," she said tartly. "You don't expect me to give you its exact location until you've agreed to take me there, do you?"

  "But it's somewhere near Parex?" I prompted.

  She eyed me closely. "It's accessible from Parex," she said. "That's all I'll say."

  I pursed my lips, trying to think, listening with half an ear to the Brahms playing in the background. At least now I understood why there was so much money involved. Never mind the academic community; a historical find like this would rock the whole Expansion, from the Outer March colonies straight up to Earth and the Ten Families. Not to mention putting the discoverers permanently into the history books themselves.

  Which did, however, bring up an entirely new question. "So why me?" I asked.

  "Your university could hire a much better transport than the Sergei Rock with the money you're willing to spend."

  Her thin lips compressed momentarily. "There are—competitors, shall we say—who want to reach the Freedom's Peace first. I know of at least one group that has been watching me."

  "You're sure they don't know the location themselves?"

  "I'm sure this group doesn't," she retorted. "But there are others, and some of them may be getting close." She waved a hand at the cabin around her. "I had to grab the first transport that was heading anywhere near it."

  "But you are authorized to use that money card?" I asked.

  She smiled coldly. "Trust me, Captain: if I succeed here, the university will gladly authorize ten times what's on that card. The historical significance of the furnishings alone will send shock waves through the Expansion. Let alone all the rest of it."

  "All the rest of what?" I asked, frowning. I'd have thought the historical artifacts they would find aboard would be all there was.

  "I thought I mentioned that," she said with a sort of malicious innocence.

  "When I asked about people needing assistance, remember? The Freedom's Peace isn't just drifting dead in space—it's still underway.

  "Obviously, someone is still aboard." The same rule book that said the musicmaster had to take a thirty-minute break every four hours also said that the crew was never to all be away from their posts at the same time, while in flight, except under extraordinary circumstances. I decided this qualified; and the minute Jimmy went on break, hauled the three of them into the dayroom.

  "I don't know," Bilko mused when I'd outlined Scholar Kulasawa's proposition.

  "The whole thing smells a little fishy."

  "Which parts?" I asked.

  "All parts," he said. "For one thing, I find it hard to believe this race is so tight she had to settle for a transport like the Sergei Rock."

  "What's wrong with the Sergei Rock?" I demanded, trying not to take it personally and not entirely succeeding. "We may not be fancy, but we've got a good clean record."

  "And don't forget those boxes of hers," Jimmy put in. I didn't have to ask how he was leaning—he was practically bouncing in his seat with excitement over the whole thing. "She needed a transport that could carry them."

  "Yes—let's not forget those boxes," Bilko countered. "Did our esteemed scholar happen to tell you what was in them?"

  "She said it was her research equipment," I told him.

  "That's one hell of a lot of research equipment."

  "Historians and archaeologists don't make do with a magnifying glass and tweezers anymore," I said stiffly.

  "Why are we all arguing here?" Jimmy put in earnestly. "I mean, if there are people out there who are lost, we need to help them."

  "I don't think Scholar Kulasawa cares two sparkles about whoever's aboard,"

  Bilko growled. "It's Columbus Syndrome—she just wants the credit for discovering the New World."

  "Shouldn't it be the Old World?" Jimmy suggested.

  Bilko threw him a glare. "Fine. Whatever."

  I looked at Rhonda. "You've been pretty quiet," I said. "What do you think?"

  "I don't think it matters what I think," she said quietly. "You're the owner and captain, and you've already made up your mind. Haven't you?"

  "I suppose I have, really," I conceded. "But I don't want to steamroll the rest of you, either. If anyone has a solid reason why we should turn her down, I want to hear it."

  "I'm with you," Jimmy piped up.

  "Thank you," I said patiently. "But I was asking for dissenting opinions.

  Bilko?"

  "Just the smell of it," he said sourly. "I might have something solid if you'd let me look into those crates of hers."

  I grimaced. "Compromise," I said. "You can do a materials scan and sonic deep-probe if you want. Just bear in mind that Angorki customs would have done all that and more, and apparently passed everything through without a whisper.

  Other thoughts?"

  I looked at Rhonda, then at Bilko, then back at Rhonda. Neither looked particularly happy, but neither said anything either. Probably had decided that arguing further would be a waste of breath. "All right, then," I said after a minute. "I'll go tell Scholar Kulasawa that we're in and get the coordinates from her. Bilko and I will figure out our vector and then you, Jimmy, will work out a program. Got it? Good. Everyone back to your posts."

  Kulasawa accepted the news with the air of someone who would have found it astonishing if we hadn't fallen properly into line behind her. The location she gave me would have been a ten-hour trip from Parex, but as it happened was only about six hours from our current position. I couldn't tell whether she was genuinely pleased by that or simply considered it another example of the Universe's moral obligation to reconfigure itself in accordance to her plans and whims.

  Regardless, the distance was reasonable and the course trivial to calculate.

  By the time Bilko and I had the vector worked out, Jimmy was ready with several alternative programs. I got him start
ed on a four-hour program—he argued briefly for doing the entire six hours in one gulp, but I'd already stretched the rules enough for one trip—and had him get us underway.

  And then, when everything was quiet again, I headed back to the engine room to see Rhonda.

  Most of the engineer's job involved the lift and landing procedures, leaving little if anything for her to do while we were in deep space. Despite that, we almost never saw Rhonda in the dayroom. She preferred to stay at her post, watching her engines, listening to Jimmy's concert in solitude, and creating the little beadwork jewelry that was her hobby.

  She was working on the latter as I came in. "Thought I'd check and see how you were doing back here," I greeted her as I stepped in through the hatchway.

  "Everything's fine," she assured me, looking up from her beads.

  "Good," I said, stepping behind her and peering over her shoulder. The piece was only half finished, but already it looked nice. "Interesting pattern," I told her. "Good color scheme, too. What's it going to be?"

  "A decorated comb," she said. "It holds your hair in place in back." She twisted her head to look thoughtfully up at me. "For those of us who have enough hair to need holding, of course."

  "Funny." I came around to the front of the board and pulled down a jumpseat.

  "I wanted to talk to you about this little side trip we're making. You really don't like it, do you?"

  "No, I don't," she said. "I have no quarrel with locating the Freedom's Peace or even going there, though reneging on a contract is going to damage that clean record you mentioned in the dayroom."

  "I know, but we'll make it right," I promised. "Kulasawa's given us more than enough money to cover that."

  "I know," Rhonda said sourly. "And that's what's really bothering me: your motivation for all of this. Altruistic noises aside, are you sure it's not just the money?"

  "If you'll recall, I turned down the money when she first offered it," I reminded her.

  "But was it the money or the fact you didn't know anything about the job?" she countered.

  "Some of both," I had to concede. "But now that we know what we're doing—"

  "Do we?" she cut me off. "Do we really? Has Scholar Kulasawa thought through—I mean really thought through—what she intends to do once we get there? Is she going to volunteer the Sergei Rock passenger cabin to take them all back to Earth? Make grandiose promises of land on Brunswick or Camaraderie or somewhere that she has no authority to make?"

  She waved a hand in the general direction of the passenger cabin. "Or maybe she doesn't intend to bring them home at all. She could be planning to leave them out there like some lost rain-forest culture for her academic friends to study.

  Or maybe she'll organize weekly tour-groups for the public and sell tickets."

  "Now you're being silly," I grumbled.

  "Am I?" she countered. "Just because she's a scholar and has money doesn't mean she's got any brains, you know." She cocked her head slightly to the side.

  "Just how much above our expenses is she offering you?"

  I shrugged as casually as I could. "Seventy thousand neumarks."

  Her eyes widened. "Seventy thousand? And you still don't see anything wrong with this?"

  "There's prestige involved here, Rhonda," I reminded her. "Prestige and academic glory. That's worth a lot more to any scholar than mere money. Remember, we know next to nothing about the Great Leap colonies—all that stuff went up in dust when the Ganymede domes were hit late in the war. We don't know what kind of astrogation system they had, how you create a stable ecosystem that compact, or even how you set about hollowing out eighteen kilometers' worth of asteroid in the first place. Scholars go nuts over that sort of thing."

  "Yes, but three hundred thousand neumarks worth?"

  I shrugged again. "It's the bottom line of being the ones who go down in history," I reminded her. "And remember, the Tower's own records showed that we were the only transport headed for Parex for over a week. If her competitors have their own ship, then we're her only chance to get there first."

  Rhonda shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I find that utterly incomprehensible."

  "Frankly, so do I," I readily admitted. "That's probably why we're not scholars."

  She smiled lopsidedly. "Besides being from the wrong end of the social spectrum?"

  I shrugged. "Besides that. So I guess we'll just have to concentrate on the fact we're going to be helping to rescue some people who've been marooned in space for the past century and a third."

  "And hope Kulasawa isn't planning to renege on her deal if we lose the race,"

  Rhonda warned. "I don't suppose that topic happened to come up in conversation, did it?"

  "As a matter of fact, it didn't," I said slowly, feeling my forehead wrinkling.

  "Maybe I'd better introduce it."

  "You can do that when you ask about her cargo," Rhonda suggested helpfully.

  "Incidentally, assuming we get it, I trust you'll be spreading that seventy-thousand bonus around equally?"

  "Don't worry," I assured her, standing up and stepping to the hatchway. "What I've got in mind will benefit all of us."

  "New engines, maybe?" she asked hopefully, her eyebrows lifting.

  I gave her an enigmatic smile and left. Bilko's materials scan on Kulasawa's crates was quick and not terribly informative. It revealed the presence of electronics components, some pretty hefty internal power supplies, magnetic materials, and some stretches of rather esoteric synthetic membranes. The sonic deep-probe was more interesting; from two directions on each of the crates the probe signals got bounced straight back as if from solid plates of conditioned ceramic.

  Kulasawa's explanation, once I asked her, cleared up the confusion. The crates, she informed me, contained a set of industrial-quality sonic deep-probes.

  Though tradition said that each of the Great Leap Colonies had consisted mainly of a single large chamber hollowed out of the center of the asteroid, there was no solid evidence to back up that assumption; and if the Freedom's Peace proved instead to be a vast honeycomb of rooms and passages, it wouldn't be smart for us to start exploring it without first mapping out the entire network.

  The first four-hour program ended, Jimmy chafed and groused his way through his regulation-stipulated break, and then we were off again. The transit time to the spot Bilko and I had calculated came out to be a shade over one hour forty-eight minutes, and Jimmy had worked up a program that nailed us there dead center on the nose.

  The music stopped, the flapblack unwrapped itself, and Bilko and I gazed out the forward viewport.

  At exactly nothing.

  "Where is it?" Kulasawa demanded, leaning over our shoulders to look. "You said we were here."

  "We're where your data took us," I said, resisting the urge to lean away from her in the cramped space. Her breath was unpleasantly warm on my cheek, and her lip perfume had clearly been applied with a larger room in mind. "We're running a check now, but—"

  "My data was accurate," she snapped. From the suddenly increased heat on my cheek, I guessed she had turned a glare my direction. Fortunately, I was too busy with my board to turn and look. "If we're in the wrong place, you're the ones to blame."

  "We're working on it, Scholar," Bilko soothed in the same tone of voice I'd heard him use on card partners suddenly suspicious by how deep in the hole they'd gotten themselves. "In any astrogate calculation there's a certain margin of error—"

  "I don't want excuses," Kulasawa cut him off, the temperature of her voice dropping into the single digits. "I want results."

  "We understand," Bilko said, unfazed. "But those results may take time." He threw her a sideways glance. "And we do need room to work."

  Kulasawa was still radiating frustration, but fortunately common sense prevailed. "I'll be in the passenger cabin," she said between clenched teeth, and stalked out.

  The flight deck door slid shut behind her, and Bilko and I looked across at each other. "The lady's d
eadly serious about this, isn't she?" Bilko commented.

  "I'll bet you could bargain us up a little on the deal." "I'd say she's at least two stages past deadly," I countered. "And I think trying to shake her down for more money would be an extremely poor idea right now. Rhonda, are you listening?"

  "I'm right here," Rhonda's voice came over the intercom. "I presume you've both figured out the problem, too?"

  "I think so," Bilko said.

  "It's obvious in hindsight," I agreed. "Her location was based on raw observational data from Zhavoronok and Meena, both of which are ten light-years away from here."

  "Right," Bilko added. "Obviously, she fed us the location directly without realizing that she was looking at where the colony was ten years ago."

  "You got it," I said. "Hard to believe a scholar would make such a simple error, though."

  "Unless she didn't realize they were still moving," Rhonda offered.

  "No, she told me they were still underway," I said. "That's how she knew there was still someone aboard, remember?"

  "She's a historian," Bilko said, waving a hand in dismissal. "Or maybe an archaeologist. Probably doesn't even know what a light-year is—you know how rampant upper-class specialization is."

  "And someday all of us in the tech classes will take over," Rhonda echoed the populist slogan. "Dream on. Okay, we know the problem. What's the solution?"

  "Seems straightforward enough," Bilko said. "We know they were headed away from Sol system, so we figure out how much farther they could have gone in ten years and go that far along that vector."

  "And how do we figure out what speed they were making?" I asked him.

  "From the redshift in their drive spectrum, of course," he said. "Assuming, of course, that Kulasawa was smart enough to bring some of the actual telescopic photos with her." He smiled at me. "You can be the one to go ask for them."

  I grimaced. "Thanks. Heaps."

  "Don't go into grovel mode quite yet," Rhonda warned. "Even if she has photos they won't do us any good, because we don't know what the at-rest spectrum for their drive was."

  "Why not?" Bilko asked, frowning at the intercom speaker. "I thought it was just a standard ion-capture drive."