I ran a preflight check, reported to Ops that we were ready to go, and sat back to await clearance. Alex and Shara were back in the cabin. I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on back there until I became suddenly aware that they’d gone quiet.
Then Alex came in behind me and pointed at the auxiliary screen. “Put on WWN,” he said.
The Worldwide News Feed.
I switched it on and read the headline:SEVEN WOULD-BE RESCUERS KILLED ON VILLANUEVA
(Andiquar, 11 Mor.) Seven persons died this week during an abortive “rescue” attempt on Villanueva. Early reports indicate that the victims had entered a public building in an effort to retrieve ancient AIs. They were trapped inside the building by an onslaught of bots, construction devices, and vehicles, and ultimately died in a missile attack.
I caught my breath as I skimmed down for the names of the casualties. I didn’t know any of them. I half expected to see Doc Drummond among them. But he wasn’t. According to the report, they’d been led by one Matthew Po. Po and two others had survived.
The story recapped the running debate about AIs and sentience, and they cited Alex as the “instigator” for the movement, which was described as “controversial.”
I felt relieved at not seeing Drummond’s name. But you know what runs through your mind when you feel happy to replace one victim with another.
They put up pictures of the victims, five men and two women.
World News Live was also on the story. “We have reports,” said the anchor, “that six other expeditions are known to be en route in the effort to save the hardware.” He looked saddened by the tragedy. I turned it off, but Alex had switched over to it in the cabin. “It’s possible there may be as many as a hundred vehicles en route as we speak. Marcia, what do you think’s going on here?”
Marcia started to talk about mass hysteria. Then that one got shut off.
A few minutes later, we were cleared to go. Ordinarily, I’d have let Belle manage the departure, but I needed something to take my mind off Villanueva. We undocked and moved slowly out of the station. I remember looking down and thinking how much Rimway resembled that pitiful world. The same gauzy clouds, the wide green continents, the ice caps, the scattered storms. There’d been a large blizzard in the south when we’d first arrived there, and there was a large storm now on Rimway, though over the northern ice cap. Terrestrial worlds always induce, at least for me, a wistfulness, a sense of returning to a place I know well. Even a place like Salud Afar, expelled from the Milky Way millions of years ago, with almost no stars in its sky, nevertheless retained that domestic quality. You show up at one of these places, and it always feels like coming home. I mentioned it to Shara as we cruised past the Moon.
“I haven’t traveled the way you have, Chase,” she said, “but I’d be surprised if it weren’t true for everybody. It strikes me, though, that it could be a dangerous affinity. Some of these places are definitely not friendly.”
We were looking at four days to get out to our target site. Belle complained that we didn’t have a more specific location. “I’ll get you into the neighborhood,” she said. “But we’ll need some luck.”
Alex tried to keep busy, something to do with twelve-hundred-year-old abstract portraits, one of which was thought to be the work of Thiebold Marcetti. Unfortunately, he’d explained earlier, nobody could prove anything one way or the other. He thought he’d pinpointed a factor that indicated the portrait was genuine, and he was comparing brushstrokes. But he was still unusually subdued.
When we made our jump, I couldn’t help thinking about the lost ships. There was no indication of a black-hole track in the neighborhood. But I knew that doing the transit into hyperspace would never again feel quite the same.
On that first day, Shara moved up front with me, and we exchanged glances and eye contact and other nonverbals, relating our mutual concern for Alex, who was obviously stressed. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “I wish you guys had never gone near that place.”
“Me, too.” I kept my voice low. “These are not the best conditions for a long ride.”
She gazed down at the control panel. “Wish I could do something.”
“So do I. But he’ll be fine.” That was easy to say. People were dying as a result of something he’d started. It had to be painful.
Despite the uncomfortable beginning, the flight passed more easily than I’d expected. Once away from Rimway, Alex again became his affable self. Mostly, we just talked. The conversations ranged over a wide variety of topics, but mostly they concentrated on why creatures as smart as humans did so many dumb things. Alex thought that we’re wired to hold on to our opinions despite what the facts might show. “It’s more critical to survival than just being smart,” he said. “It always helps to be able to persuade other people to follow you, and to do that, you have to be consistent. And you have to be part of the tribe. It’s why beliefs are more important than facts.”
I wondered whether we’d ever develop a capability to cross to another galaxy. Shara said that we might be able to improve star-drive technology, but to get to Andromeda we’d need something completely new. “I’m reluctant to say we’ve exhausted the possibilities,” she said. “That always turns out to look like a foolish position a few years later. But it’s hard to see where we can go from here.”
“I’d be interested,” said Alex, “in coming back in, say, ten thousand years to see what the human race is like.”
“We’ll all be different by then,” I said. “We’ll probably have gotten rid of old age. We’ll have a complete map of the Milky Way. Everybody will have a 200 IQ. And we’ll all be impossibly good-looking.”
“Some of us look pretty good right now,” said Alex, his eyes straying from Shara to me and back.
“Careful,” I said. “I wonder what Audree’s thinking right now, with you locked away with two women.”
“She trusts me,” said Alex.
“And well she should,” said Shara. “I’m happy to be traveling with a man of such high moral character.”
We talked about whether either sex is smarter, agreeing that women generally communicate better. (Consensus was, as best I can recall, two to one.) We discussed politicians, and were not surprised that nobody had an unbridled enthusiasm for anyone currently holding high office.
And we wondered what life would be like if we possessed the Mute telepathic capability. Can’t lie, can’t hide your feelings. And, of course, the word diplomacy probably doesn’t even exist.
And eventually we got around to God. I was surprised to learn that Shara is a believer. “Not in the angry, judgmental God that they teach in some of the churches,” she said, admiring the image of the Hourglass Nebula, which Belle had put on the auxiliary screen. (Belle routinely put images on-screen of what we’d see if we were actually traveling through normal space. Of course, nothing was visible through the Belle-Marie’s ports.) “But I just can’t believe the physical laws accidentally allowed something like that to happen, or us to happen for that matter, or that derived quantum mechanics. I know the basic theory, the explanation. But I can’t buy it. If there were no God,” she said, “I just can’t see there’d be anything.”
Alex’s opinions on the existence of a conscious functioning creator tended to change with his mood. “It’s just the size of it all,” he said, studying the Hourglass. “The notion that somebody could be behind that just seems to me”—he hesitated, searching for a word—“seems forced. We have a tendency to see design everywhere. And people desperately want to believe in a compassionate power higher than themselves. The possibility that we’re all just accidents of nature is, for most of us, simply unimaginable.”
As for me, I’ve always found it much easier to be a believer when I’m adrift among the stars. It’s easy to think there’s an Artist God when you look at the Hourglass Nebula, or, from orbit, at forests and oceans. It’s when you get close and see the violent side of nature, watch animals dismembering and swallo
wing one another, look back across humanity’s long history of warfare and murder and general decadence, that it becomes hard to take any of it seriously.
We arrived in the target area, checked our position as best we could, and immediately began scanning.
Just as it was impossible to know precisely where the Alpha vehicle would arrive, so were we unable to determine exactly where we were. We could triangulate our position from various stars and confirm that we were at a given point, but that point took in a lot of empty space. It was a very big point. You can move a great distance out there without changing the apparent angle to any star.
That was one problem. Another difficulty arose from our inability to calculate exactly when the event would occur. “I think I have it within a week or so,” Shara had said before we left home, adding that she was sorry, but that it just wasn’t possible to get better precision. Consequently, we’d timed things to arrive a week early. And we were prepared to stay more than a week beyond the target time. So we would be there three weeks altogether if nothing happened.
We also knew that, because of the size of the target area, the object might arrive, cruise through the neighborhood, and leave without our ever being aware of it. What were the chances of that?
“Maybe one out of three or four,” said Shara. “But those are decent odds.”
I wasn’t sure how best to position us. We had arrived near the rear of the search area, which is to say that if and when Alpha showed up, we’d be trailing her. But it wasn’t easy to remain stationary relative to the search area. If I attempted that, and Alpha appeared well in front of us, we’d need considerably more than a few hours to accelerate sufficiently to overtake it. If we simply went to a cruising speed, and it jumped in well behind us, we’d be faced with another set of problems. Best was to stay back and chase it down from behind.
So we settled in. I braked until we were barely moving, on a course that ran parallel to the one recorded for Alpha in its last appearance. In 1256.
There was nothing further to do except sit around and wait. We talked some more. We read. We played games. We watched shows. One of the more entertaining diversions was to pull a classic out of the library, say, Markazy, or Hamlet, and play it with our avatars in the title roles. I loved watching Shara as the malevolent wife in Markazy, who, at the height of the Rebellion, murders her husband (Alex, of course) for political reasons, then discovers that she loves him.
In Hamlet, if you’ll allow me, I was brilliant as Ophelia. And Alex was utterly out of character in the lead. Not that the performance was weak, but it was hard to imagine him so indecisive. He looked great, though, in his Danish wardrobe.
We concluded the first week, as expected, with no sighting. Though Alex remained outwardly calm, I knew he was excited. Every time Belle broke into a conversation, I could see his eyes react. But it was always routine stuff. Recommendation that forward thrusters receive special service when we got back. A hitch in the rotational capability of one of the outboard scopes. Permission to make a change in the lunch menu.
Shara was emotionally invested also, and I’ll concede that I dreamed of what it would be like to rescue a few people from a centuries-old flight. I rehearsed the scene constantly. Hello, Welcome to 1434. I bet you’re glad to be off that ship. Everything’s okay now.
“They won’t believe us,” I said.
Finally, on the eleventh day, Belle delivered the message we’d been waiting for: “We have company.”
A marker appeared on-screen.
Shara smiled modestly. The resident genius.
“Any chance it could be somebody else?” asked Alex.
“Who else,” I said, “would be cruising around out here?”
“Range seventeen hundred kilometers.”
Shara and I took the seats on the bridge. Alex stood in the hatchway behind us. “Can we see it?” asked Shara.
The marker brightened. “It’s too small to get an image.”
“What’s her course?” I asked.
“Still working on it.”
I sat listening to everybody breathing.
“Parallel to ours.”
Shara literally squealed. “Beautiful.”
“It is, however, pulling away.”
“Okay,” I said. “No surprise there. Alex, grab a chair. Shara, buckle down.”
Shara got up. “You sit here, Alex,” she said. “This is your show.” She squeezed past him, back into the cabin. Alex said thanks and took her place. I switched over to manual and, when everybody was ready, began to accelerate.
Shara, speaking through the comm system, said something like whoa. “I never felt anything like that before.”
“Sorry. It has a big lead on us. Belle, did you see it actually appear?”
“Negative, Chase.”
“So,” said Shara, “we have no idea how long it’s been here.”
“It can’t have been here long. I would estimate no more than a few minutes.”
“Chase.” Alex’s voice. “How long will it take us to catch them?”
I passed it over to Belle. “Two hours, thirteen minutes,” she said.
“That may not be good enough, Chase. How about a jump?”
The problem with the star drive, of course, is that it’s not very precise. “We’re in too close, Alex. We’d probably find ourselves farther away than we are now. And maybe in front of it somewhere. Belle, is it under power?”
“I can’t tell from this range, Chase.”
“Try to contact her,” Alex said.
“Do it, Belle.”
“Complying.”
We waited. I looked out through the wraparound, as if I might be able to pick the thing out of the darkness with the naked eye. Of course there was nothing.
“Negative,” said Belle. “No response.”
Alex exhaled and sat back, saying nothing, but I could feel the tension.
“How long,” Shara asked, “before we can get an image?” She was watching on the cabin display.
“We’re still losing ground. That’ll stop in about thirteen minutes, and we’ll start to close the gap. After that, it looks like maybe another twenty or thirty minutes before we can get a look at it.”
That pretty much ended the conversation. Alex sat with his arms folded, not unlike a frustrated parent. Shara asked me to be sure I relayed any images back to the cabin display. Then she, too, went quiet.
I stared at the auxiliary screen. The marker continued to blink. On and off. On and off.
What are you?
The pressure of acceleration pushed us deep into our seats. “How about we move a bit faster?” said Alex.
“We’d burn too much fuel.”
“Burn it.”
“We could wind up stranded out here, Alex.”
“Maybe we could just turn it up a little?”
“If we go roaring after it, we’ll have a major braking problem at the end. Let me handle it, okay?”
I’d have preferred to have him in the cabin.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after several minutes of stony silence.
“It’s okay.” We weren’t going to get a second chance, but there was nothing we could do that wasn’t being done.
Belle knew when to keep quiet. She said nothing as the minutes ticked off. Until, finally, she could give us some good news: “Chase, we have begun to close on the target.”
“Thank God,” said Alex. “Next time we do something like this, we need to rethink the strategy.”
“We need more than one ship,” I said. “The area’s too big.”
“I’m sorry,” said Shara. “It’s my fault. I should have realized—”
“It’s not anybody’s fault, Shara.” Alex’s voice was tense. The silence returned. Alex remained restless, adjusting his position, adjusting it again, checking the time.
“Switching to cruise,” said Belle.
The pressure generated by constant acceleration went away.
Shara appeared in the ha
tchway. “How we doing?”
The blinker shut down, and we were looking at a dim light on screen. A ship at the edge of vision. Belle tried to enhance the image, but nothing changed.
Gradually, it became several lights. We were able to make out a hull. “Still has power,” said Alex, “after two thousand years. Incredible.”
The hull acquired some definition. Alpha had twin thrusters. And a blunt prow. “Large vehicle,” said Belle.
The lights continued to separate. Some were interior.
And, moments later, Belle was back: “Ninety minutes to intercept.”
The bridge was lit up. As were a double line of ports, from front to rear. We could see movement inside.
Belle’s voice: “Incoming traffic.”
Alex gripped my wrist and squeezed. “My God,” he said. “We’ve done it.”
My heart was racing. “Put it through, Belle.”
We got a voice, a male, speaking a strange language. But the desperation was clear enough. Code five. Require assistance. Help us, please.
“We’re getting a vid transmission, too, Chase. But the system is not compatible.”
“Can you make an adjustment?”
“Trying.”
“Open a channel.”
“Done.”
“Hello. This is the Belle-Marie. I know you can’t understand me, but we will endeavor to assist.”
“Chase, the language is Standard.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It’s a two-thousand-year-old version.”
“Oh.” I would never have known.
Behind me, Alex was climbing into a suit. Shara was digging hers out.
“Can you translate?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Tell him to stand by. We’re coming.”
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