Michael Asquith was the Academy commissioner, her boss, and a man who believed that scientific considerations were necessarily secondary to rewarding the Academy’s supporters and punishing its critics. He called it taking the long view. “We have to give preference to our friends,” he told her in strictest secrecy, as if it weren’t a transparent policy. “If a little science doesn’t get done as a consequence, that’s a price we’re willing to pay. But we have to keep the Academy in business and well funded, and there’s only one way to do that.”
The result was that when a program that deserved support on its own merits didn’t get it, Hutch took the heat. When a popular initiative went through and provided serious results, the commissioner got the credit. During the three months since she’d accepted the assignment, she’d been bullied, threatened, harassed, and hectored by a substantial representation of the scientific community. Many of them seemed to believe they could take her job. Others promised reprisals, and there’d even been a couple of death threats. Her once benign view of academics, formed over more than two decades of hauling them around the Orion Arm, had gone downhill. Now, when they contacted her, she had to make a conscious effort not to get hostile.
She’d had a modicum of vengeance against Jim Albright, who’d called her to threaten and complain when his turn at one of the Weatherman units had been set back. She’d responded by indiscreetly mentioning the incident to Gregory MacAllister, an editor who’d made a long and happy career of attacking academics, moralists, politicians, and crusaders. MacAllister had gone after Albright with a bludgeon, depicting him as a champion of trivial causes and his program as “one more example of squandering the taxpayers’ money counting stars.” He hadn’t mentioned Hutch, but Albright knew.
That didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that she didn’t hear from Albright again, although she learned later that he’d tried to have her terminated. Asquith understood what had happened, though, and warned her to call off the big dog. “If it comes out that we’re behind any of that, we’ll all be out on the street,” he told her. He was right, and Hutch was careful not to use the MacAllister weapon again. But she’d enjoyed watching Albright go to ground.
She was in the middle of trying to decide how to persuade Alan Kimbel, who was currently at Serenity doing research on stellar jets, that he could not stay beyond the original timetable and would have to come home. Kimbel had appealed to her on the ground that there’d been a breakthrough discovery, and he and his team needed a few more weeks. Please. The man had been almost in tears.
The problem was that it happened all the time. Space on the outlying stations was scarce, and there were already people en route and more in line. Extensions could be granted under certain conditions, and her advisors had told her that Kimbel was correct in his assessment. But if she granted the extension, she’d have to tell another group already a week into their mission that, when they arrived at Serenity, they wouldn’t be able to stay. She couldn’t very well do that. And the only alternative was to cut someone else short. She’d looked at the possibilities and, for various reasons, there was no easy pick. In the end, she’d denied the request.
She was recording a response to Kimbel when her link chimed. Harold Tewksbury on the circuit.
Harold was the senior member of the astrophysics staff. He’d been with the Academy when Hutch had toured the place as a high school senior. He was an organization freak, a fussy little man with a penchant for order and procedure. His reputation in the field wasn’t good. His colleagues thought him quarrelsome and uncommunicative, but no one seemed to doubt his capabilities. And he was always nice to Hutch.
“Yes, Harold,” she said. “What are you up to this morning?”
“You busy at the moment?”
She had a hatful of problems. “It isn’t like the old days,” she said. “But I can make time.”
“Good. When you can, stop by the lab.”
SHE FOUND HIM sitting at his desk staring out into the courtyard. He shook his head when he saw her, signaling bewilderment. But he also managed a smile. “Something odd’s going on,” he said.
She thought he was talking about equipment. There had been recent problems with spectrometers. Replacing them would have been expensive, so they’d gone with upgrades. Harold didn’t like upgrades, didn’t like not having the top-of-the-line. “Spend all this money to send out packages,” he’d grumbled to her just a few days earlier, “and then skimp on the retrieval-and-analysis gear.”
But he surprised her. “You know about the quasi novas,” he said.
The tewks. She knew, more or less. It seemed a bit esoteric to her, events a thousand light-years away. Hardly a matter of concern for any but the specialists.
He leaned toward her. His white hair was plumped up and one wing of his collar stuck out sideways. He presented the classic image of a researcher. His blue eyes became unfocused rather easily; he frequently lost his train of thought: and he was inclined often to stop in the middle of a sentence when some new idea occurred to him. In the bright midday sunlight, he looked like an ultimate innocent, a man for whom physical law and mathematics were the only realities. Two cups of coffee arrived.
“They’re almost in a line,” he said.
“And the significance of that is—?”
“It shouldn’t happen naturally.”
She just didn’t know where to go with it. “What are you telling me, Harold?”
“I don’t really know, Hutch. But it scares me.”
“You’re sure they’re not novas?”
“Positive.” He tried his coffee, examined the cup, sighed. “Among other things, there’s too much energy in the visible spectrum, not enough in the X-ray and gamma.”
“Which means—?”
“You get more visible light for the amount of energy expended. A ton more. It’s brighter. By a lot.”
“A lightbulb.”
“You could almost say that.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll pass it on. You recommend any action?”
He shook his head. “I’d give quite a lot to have a Weatherman in place the next time one goes off.”
“Can we do that? Can you predict the next one?”
Now he was looking at the spoon. “Unfortunately not. I can take a stab.”
“A stab? What are the odds?”
“Not good.”
“Harold, let’s do this: Let’s watch for a while. If you reach a point where we know an event is coming, where you can give me a target with a reasonable degree of certainty, we’ll take a serious look. Okay?”
IT WASN’T SOMETHING she could get excited about. She made a mental note to suggest that Eric Samuels, the public relations director, get in touch with Harold to see whether the Academy couldn’t squeeze some publicity out of it. Meantime, she was looking at a busy afternoon.
She had lunch with the president of the SPA, the Superluminal Pilots’ Association. They wanted more money, a better retirement system, better career opportunities, you name it. She knew Ben Zalotski well, from her own days on the bridge. Ben was a decent guy, and a hard charger for the pilots. The problem was that he had no compunctions about taking advantage of their long association to get what he wanted. In reality, it wasn’t even Hutch’s area of responsibility. Jill Watkin in Personnel was supposed to handle all this stuff, but Ben had framed the hour as an opportunity for old friends to get together. She’d known what was coming, but couldn’t very easily refuse to see him. She might have simply gotten busy, but she didn’t like being devious. In the end she had to tell him she couldn’t help, refused even to concede that she sympathized with his objectives, even though she did. But she was part of the management team and her loyalties lay in a different direction. Ben quoted some of her past comments back at her, the pilots are overworked, they can’t keep their families together, and nobody gives a damn for them. They’re just glorified bus drivers and that’s the way they get treated. He allowed himself to look disappointed,
and even implied that she’d turned her back on her old comrades.
So she returned to her office in a foul mood, listened to an appeal from Hollis Gunderson, “speaking for the University of the Netherlands,” to have his pet project put on the docket. The project was a hunt for a white hole, which Hutch’s scientific team had advised her didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, and would be a waste of resources. Gunderson had gotten past the appointments secretary by claiming someone had misunderstood his intentions. Hutch had made time to talk with him, on the assumption it was easier to see him while he was here than to call back and cancel him. Anyhow, there was something to be said for not making enemies unnecessarily. Her now-retiring boss, Sylvia Virgil, had commented on Priscilla’s most recent evaluation that she had a tendency to put off confrontations. She’d suggested Hutch was too timid. Hutch had wondered how Virgil would have done on Deepsix, but let it go.
She heard Gunderson out and concluded the “misunderstanding” to which he’d referred was semantic rather than substantive. Call it by any other name, he still wanted to go looking for a white hole. She told him that, to have the project even considered, he’d have to provide a written statement supporting his views from two of the thirteen physicists certified by the Academy to rule on such matters. “Until you can satisfy two of them, Professor,” she said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you.”
A young man had a complaint concerning one of the pilots. He’d been gruff, he said, and rude and generally not very talkative. All the way back from Outpost. Did Hutch have any idea what it was like to ride for weeks with a ship’s captain who kept to himself? He was talking about Adrian Belmont, whom she’d like to get rid of because there were always complaints, but the SPA would come down hard on the Academy if she terminated him. Better to hire a hit man. Cleaner.
In any case, it wasn’t an operational matter. “I’m terribly sorry,” she told him. “You should be aware that the pilots frequently make those voyages alone. Some of them have simply learned to get along without a social life. We ask the passengers to be understanding. But if you really want to press the matter, I’m afraid you have the wrong department. You’ll want Personnel. End of the corridor, turn right, thank you very much.”
She gave an interview to a journalist working on a book about Moonlight, arranged special transportation to Paradise for Abel Kotanik, who’d been requested by the field team, juggled shipping schedules to get a load of medical supplies (which had been mistakenly dropped and left on the pier at Serenity) forwarded to the Twins, and decided to fire the chief engineer at Pinnacle for sins of commission and omission that stretched back three years.
Her final meeting of the day was with Dr. Alva K. Emerson. It was another example of granting an interview she would have liked to hand off to someone else. Anyone else. Hutch didn’t intimidate easily, but she was willing to make an exception on this occasion.
Alva Emerson was an M.D., well into her eighties, and one of the great figures of the age. She had founded and led the Children’s Alliance, which had brought modern medical care to hundreds of thousands of kids worldwide during the past forty years. She’d mobilized the wealthy nations, gotten legislation passed by the World Council and in sixty countries around the globe to provide care for the forgotten peoples of the Earth. While we reach for the stars, she’d said in her celebrated remarks twenty years before at the Sudan Memorial, a third of our children cannot reach for a sandwich. The comment was engraved in stone over the entrance to Alliance Headquarters in Lisbon.
The world loved her. Political leaders were terrified of her. Everywhere she went, good things happened. Hospitals rose, doctors poured in, corporate donations swelled the coffers. (No one wanted to be perceived as stingy or mean-spirited when Dr. Alva came knocking.) She was credited with saving millions. She’d won the Peace Prize and the Americus, was on first-name terms with the pope and the president of the NAU, and had stopped a civil war in Argentina simply by putting her body in the way. And there she was to see Hutch. Not the commissioner. Not Asquith. But Priscilla Hutchins. By name.
Asquith had asked her why, but Hutch had no idea.
“Whatever she wants,” Asquith had instructed her, “don’t commit the Academy to anything. Tell her we’ll take it under advisement.”
He didn’t offer to sit in.
HUTCH HAD SEEN Dr. Alva numerous times, of course. Everyone had. Who could forget the blood-soaked images of her kneeling over a dying girl during the aftershocks of the Peruvian earthquake of ’21? Or leading the Counselor himself through the wreckage of Bellaconda after the Peacekeepers finally put down the rebels? Or charging out of the flyer in plague-ridden South Africa?
But when she came through the door, Hutch would not have recognized her. She seemed smaller somehow. The windblown hair was under control. There was no sign of the no-nonsense attitude that was such a large part of the legend. She was reserved, polite, almost submissive. A woman, perhaps, headed out shopping.
“Dr. Emerson,” said Hutch, rising to greet her, “it’s a privilege to meet you.” Her voice went a few decibels higher than normal.
“Priscilla?” Alva stretched out her hand. “It’s my pleasure.”
Hutch directed her to a wing chair and sat down beside her. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the office.”
Alva wore a pleated navy skirt and a light blue blouse beneath a frayed velomir jacket. Part of the image. Her hair had gone white, “in the service of the unfortunate,” as Gregory MacAllister had once put it. She was probably the only public figure for whom MacAllister had ever found a kind word.
“None at all, thank you.” She arranged herself, glanced around the office, and smiled approvingly. It was decorated with several of Tor’s sketches, images of the Twins and of the Refuge at Vertical, of the illuminated Memphis gliding through starlight, of Hutch herself in an antique Phillies uniform. She smiled at that one, and her eyes settled on Hutch. They were dark and penetrating. Sensors, peering through the objects in the room. This was not a woman to be jollied along.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” she asked.
“Priscilla, I need your help.”
Hutch wanted to shift her weight. Move it around a bit. Force herself to relax. But she sat quite still. “In what way?”
“We need to do something about the omega.”
At first Hutch thought she’d misunderstood. Alva was of course talking about the one headed toward Earth. When people said the omega, that was always the one they meant. “It won’t become a problem for almost a thousand years,” she said uneasily. “Were you suggesting—?”
“I was suggesting we find a way to stop it.”
That was easy to say. “We’ve been doing some research.”
“It’s been more than twenty years, Priscilla. Or is it Hutch?”
“Hutch is good.”
“Hutch.” Her tone softened. “Somehow, in your case, it is a very feminine name.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Alva.”
Hutch nodded and tried the name. It was a bit like sitting with Washington and calling him George.
Alva leaned forward. “What have we learned so far?”
Hutch shrugged. “It’s loaded with nanos. Some of our people think it can create gravity fields. To help it navigate.”
“And it doesn’t like artificial objects.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a lot of dust and hydrogen. The clouds vary in size by a factor of about 30 percent. They coast along at a pretty good clip. In the range of 20 million klicks an hour.”
“That’s how fast it’s coming? Our cloud?”
“Yes.” Hutch thought for a minute. “Oh, and they seem to come in waves. We don’t know how wide the waves are because we can’t see the end of them. The local waves are 160 light-years apart, give or take, and one of them rolls through the solar system approximately every eight thousand years.”
“But they’
re not always the same distance apart? The waves?”
“No. It’s pretty erratic. At the beginning, we assumed that the local pattern held everywhere, and that there were literally millions of clouds drifting throughout the Orion Arm. But of course that’s not true. Fortunately.”
“Anything else?”
“The waves are arcing outward in the general direction that the galaxy is turning. Joining the flow, I suppose.”
“And that’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
“It strikes me there’s not much we didn’t know twenty years ago. As to the questions that come to my mind, we don’t know where they come from. Or why they behave the way they do. We don’t even know if they’re natural objects.”
“That’s correct.”
“Or how to disable them.”
Hutch got up. She could feel energy radiating out of the woman. “They’re not easy to penetrate,” she said.
Alva smiled. “Like a virgin.”
Hutch didn’t reply.
For a long moment, neither spoke. The commlink blinked a couple of times, then shut off. Incoming traffic. Hyperlight from Broadside, personal for her.
Alva smiled politely and fixed Hutch with those dark eyes. The woman looked simultaneously amused and annoyed. “Are we making a serious effort?”
“Well,” said Hutch. “Of course.”
“But we’ve nothing to show. After twenty years. Thirty years, actually.”
“We’re working on it.” She was floundering.
Alva nodded. “We have to do better.”
“Alva—” She had to struggle to say the word. “There’s no hurry. I mean, the thing’s a thousand years away.”
Alva nodded again. But it wasn’t a concession, an acknowledgment that she had a point. Rather it was a recognition that Hutch was behaving exactly as expected, saying precisely what Alva had known all along she would say. She straightened her collar. “Hutch, you’ve been to Beta Pac.”
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