The Heffernan had backed away to 80 million klicks, the minimum range set by Hutchins. They were watching by way of a half dozen probes running with the omega, and they were maintaining jump status so they could leave in a hurry if the need arose. That used a substantial quantity of fuel and would require all kinds of refitting when they got back to Serenity. But that was the point: They were making sure they would get back.
“I don’t know how big this is going to be,” Sky told Em, “but they’ve got my attention.”
The overhead monitor carried a picture of the omega as seen from the monitors, a wall of churning mist streaked with bursts of incandescence. The cloud was usually dark and untroubled, but now it almost seemed as if the thing was reacting to the chase. Sky was glad to be well away from it.
Other displays provided views of the hedgehog and the forward section of the omega. He watched the range between them growing shorter. Watched the flow of black mist across the face of the cloud, the electricity rippling through its depths.
Emma refused to commit herself about what would happen. “Large bang,” she said. Beyond that, the data were insufficient. It was all guesswork. That was why they were out here doing this, to find out.
The cloud seemed almost to have a defined surface. Like a body of water rather than mist. Sky had looked at some of the visuals from researchers who had snuggled up against omegas and even on a couple of occasions penetrated them. The clouds looked thick enough to walk on.
A flash of lightning, reflected through the monitors, lit up the bridge. The pictures broke up and came back. “Big one,” he said.
The hedgehog had seemed enormous when the thruster packages had closed in on it two months before. Six and a half kilometers wide. Skyscraper-sized spines. Seen against the enormous span of the omega, it might have been only a floating spore.
More heavy lightning.
“Bill,” said Sky, “let’s buckle in.”
The AI acknowledged, and the harnesses descended around them.
“You know,” said Emma, “about twenty years ago they towed an old freighter up to one of these things and pushed it inside. One of the Babcock models. Looked like a big box.”
“What happened?”
“It got within about twenty klicks before a bolt of lightning took it out. All but blew it apart.”
“At twenty klicks.”
“Yep.”
“Won’t be long for our guy.” He tried to relax. Theirs was an unsettling assignment. God knew they were far enough away to have plenty of warning, and they could jump out of danger. But Hutch had explained there was a risk, they just didn’t know, she would understand if they’d just as soon pass on the assignment. In case the worst did happen, they were maintaining a moment-to-moment on-line feed to Serenity.
The range shortened to twenty kilometers, the range of the freighter, and then to fifteen. The cloud flickered, and Sky could have sworn he heard a rumble, but that was, of course, impossible, so he didn’t say anything but just watched the gap continue to close.
At twelve klicks Bill reported that electrical activity inside the cloud had increased by a factor of two over its normal state.
At ten, a lightning bolt leaped out of the roiling mist and touched the hedgehog. Embraced it.
One of the imagers went out. “I think it hit the package, too,” said Emma.
The hedgehog was by then so close that none of their angles showed separation. It was almost into the cloud.
A second bolt flickered around the hedgehog, licked at it, seemed to draw it forward. The mists churned. And the hedgehog slipped inside.
The pictures coming from the probes showed nothing but cloud. He checked the time. Sixteen forty-eight hours. Adjust for signal lag and make it 1644.
They waited.
Ragged bolts ripped through the cloud. It brightened. And then it began to fade.
“Well, Em,” said Sky, “that was something of a bust. Do we go around the other side to see if the hedgehog comes out?”
Emma was still watching the screens. “Not so fast,” she said.
For several minutes the omega grew alternately brighter and darker. Lightning flowed along its surface like liquid fire. Then it began to shine.
And it went incandescent.
One by one, the feeds from the accompanying probes died.
Emma’s eyes looked very blue.
“Bill,” said Sky, “be ready to go.”
“Say the word, Sky.” The engines changed tone.
It was becoming a sun.
“What’s happening to it, Em?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Bill, has it exploded?”
“I don’t think so. The sensors are gone, but the remotes haven’t detected a shock wave.”
“That’s good.”
“Readings are off the scale,” said Em.
He shut down the monitors.
“Sky, do you wish to leave the area?”
“This is goofy,” said Em. “How can we not be getting a shock wave?”
“I have no idea.”
“It shouldn’t be happening. I can’t be sure because everything we have is blown out. But the way it was going, I’d guess it’s putting out the light-equivalent of a small nova. Without the explosion. Without the blast.”
“Is that possible?”
“We’ll see what the measurements look like. Meantime, yes, I’d say we’re watching it happen.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“Think flashbulb,” she said. “And tell Bill we should go.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
. And then there are those who say there is no evidence of the existence of God.
Think about the universe. To understand how it works, one must grasp the significance of light. It is the speed limit, the boundary, the measure of physical reality. We use it as a metaphor for knowledge, for intelligence, for reason. We speak of the forces of light. It is so bound up in our souls that we think of it as the very essence of existence. And yet there is no definable necessity for a physical force that can be observed by sense organs. By eyes. If there is proof anywhere of an involved God, it is the existence of light.
— Conan Magruder
Time and Tide
chapter 24
Woodbridge, Virginia.
Sunday, June 29.
HUTCH SAT ON a rocker on the front deck watching Maureen and Tor tossing a beach ball back and forth. Maureen’s tactic, when she had the ball, was to charge her father, giggling wildly, while he ran for cover. But she inevitably lost control of the ball, popping it in the air or squirting it sideways or kicking it into the rosebushes.
It was an early-summer day, filled with the sounds of a ball game a couple of blocks over, and the barking of Max, their neighbors’ golden retriever, who wanted to get out to play with Maureen, but they weren’t home and nobody was there to unlatch the screen door. So Max whined and barked and snuffled.
The warning from Alex, from the al-Jahani, had come in only moments ago. If you have an alternate plan, you might want to implement.
Yes, indeed. Send in the second team.
Alex was citing a fifty-fifty chance that she could make it to Lookout. But Hutch knew she didn’t really believe that. Captains were expected to be both accurate and optimistic. It was a tradition that probably went back to Odysseus. But it didn’t take much insight to see how she really felt.
The problem was that, other than the Hawksbill, there was no alternate plan. If the al-Jahani broke down, she’d have nothing left but the kite.
Maureen was charging her daddy again, trying to raise the ball over her head. Max was barking. Somebody must have just belted a long one at the ballpark because the crowd was roaring. Maureen tripped over her own feet and went rear end over beach ball. She came up screaming, rubbing her eyes. Tor hurried to her side and scooped her up and returned her to the deck, where Hutch soothed her and checked her for scratches and handed her a glass of lemonade.
“You all right?” Tor asked.
It took a moment before she realized he was talking to her and not to Maureen. “Sure. Why do you ask?”
He sat down beside her and looked at her in a way that said she was wearing all her emotions.
She shrugged. “Maybe it’ll get there. Sometimes I tend to assume the worst.”
Tor nodded. “That’s what I’ve always heard about you.”
Maureen was trying to gulp her lemonade. “Take your time, sweetie,” said Hutch.
Cathie Blaylock came out of her house across the way, waved, picked up something on her deck, and went back inside. Maureen put the lemonade down, said, “Daddy, again,” and started tugging at her father’s knee. Ready to go another round.
“You don’t have anybody you could send after them?” he asked. “Pick them up if they get in trouble?”
“No,” she said quietly, “nobody who could do that and get them to Lookout on time.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Only one thing we can do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Hope our luck holds. And alert Digger that he might have to get inventive.”
WHILE SHE WAS on the circuit, the watch officer told her that the results from the Heffernan had just come in.
Hutch held her breath. “What happened?”
“It lit up,” he said. “The cloud became a torch.”
“Is it a tewk?”
“Too soon to tell. The lab just got it. But they’re pretty excited.”
Two hours later she had confirmation from Charlie. “No question,” he said. “It’s the same spectrogram.”
ARCHIVE
COSMIC MARKER. It now appears that the omega clouds, which have mystified scientists for thirty years, and have spawned a whole new branch of research, may be only an experimental device themselves. Although their purpose remains unclear, according to Dr. Lee MacElroy of the International Research Center in Edinburgh, they may well be part of an experiment gone awry.
— Science News
June 30
LIBRARY ENTRY
Priscilla Hutchins’s Diary
(Reaction to above)
MacElroy never got anything right in his life.
— July 3
chapter 25
Lookout.
On the ground at Brackel.
Wednesday, August 13.
DIGGER HAD BECOME fascinated by the Goompahs, had learned to enjoy the shows, would have gone down every day to mingle with the crowds, to visit the temple, to stand outside the cafés, wishing he could take a place at one of the tables and join in the conversation.
Kellie told him he had cabin fever. But it was more than that. He had never been anywhere before where the inhabitants seemed to enjoy themselves so thoroughly. The nights were filled with laughter and music, and the downtown area played host each evening to happy crowds.
So they took the lander down regularly, and, to the extent they were able, mixed with the locals. Some nights they strolled along the beaches. Others, they went to concerts and visited sporting events, and sometimes they just sat in one of the parks.
Had they been able to set aside the coming storm, and the haunting memory of Jack’s death, it would have been a golden time. Kellie was bright and upbeat. She shared his fascination, had picked up enough of the language to understand much of what was going on around her. And he knew that the day would come when he’d look back on these evenings with a sense of wistfulness and loss.
The omega had by then become visible in the sense that a small patch of stars had gone missing. Occasionally Digger overheard conversations about it, conversations that grew more frequent as the weeks passed and more stars blinked out. The Goompahs admitted to each other that they’d never seen anything like it. There was no record of any such occurrence in the histories, and Digger could see they were getting nervous. He wondered how they’d be when it filled the sky.
The thing rose at night a few hours after sunset, and dropped into the sea just before dawn. And the Goompahs watched.
Where was Melakar?
Where was Hazhurpol?
Behind the cloud, he was tempted to tell them. They’re there, and if you folks know what’s good for you, you’ll start thinking about packing up and heading for the hills.
It might have been the sense that Athens, Brackel, with its theaters and its parks and its scrolls, was approaching its demise: It might have been this realization that drove him through its streets like a ghost, savoring its life and its fragile beauty.
Kellie tried to slow him down. She told him he was becoming obsessed. Maybe, she said, he should think about going back. Going home. Get away from there.
But he would not do that. Wouldn’t consider it.
Kellie thought the kite might work. She knew Hutchins well and had a lot of confidence in her. Digger didn’t point out that Hutchins hadn’t hidden her feeling that the al-Jahani/Hawksbill mission was a long shot.
Now that they could wrap a lightbender field around the lander, it was much easier getting in and out of Brackel. Kellie usually brought them in among the orchards and open ground on the north side of the city. One day, she picked instead a glade a short distance off the isthmus road. “Breaks the monotony,” she said, as the invisible craft descended.
Digger looked at the woods, hunting for Goompahs, but Kellie reassured him. “Bill can’t see anybody down there,” she said. “It’s okay.”
Anybody.
It was, as far as he could recall, the first time.
HE EXPECTED THIS to be an interesting evening. Even more popular among the Goompahs than the theater was an event that was part lecture, part free-for-all. A speaker, usually a visiting authority of one kind or another, attempted to present a point of view on a given topic while the paying customers engaged him in open debate. (Or agreed with him, as the case might be, though, in Digger’s experience, it seldom was.) The visitor might be discussing the health benefits of sunlight, an abstract ethical issue of one kind or another, the merits of a drama that had recently been hooted out of town, or a supernatural visitation she had undergone and which had led to a spiritual awakening and the sure and certain knowledge that the members of her audience were groping through moral darkness and needed to get their act in order. It was all great fun, and Digger was often left in doubt whether any of the Goompahs on either side of the issue were serious. The attendees paid for the privilege, the speakers looked for subjects that would provoke outrage, and everybody had a good time.
They were called sloshen, for which there is no completely accurate English translation. Call it a felicitous quarrel, a happy argument, a glorious difference of opinion.
That evening’s guest speaker, according to notices that had been posted for several days, would be Macao Carista, who was described as a cartographer. Macao was from Kulnar, a city immediately northwest of Brackel. According to the displays, she was widely known throughout the Intigo.
While lingering several days earlier in the lobby of the building that would be used for the presentation, Digger had overheard enthusiastic patrons commenting that she always brought maps of places to which no one had ever journeyed, or sometimes of which no one had even heard.
She used the evenings, apparently, to talk about her travels, describing various kinds of fantastic creatures she’d seen, armored terps as tall as she was, bandars that spat venom at a range exceeding the diameter of the hall (which was considerable), flying solwegs, talking bolliclubs. Last time out, she was reported to have described two-headed Goompahs, which she’d seen on an island in the eastern ocean. One head, she’d said, always spoke the truth, and the other always lied. But you never knew which was which.
And there was Yara-di, the city of gold.
And the bridge across the bottomless Carridan Gap, built by unknown hands, using engineering principles beyond the grasp of any alive today. The bridge was so long that, when she crossed on the back of a berba, i
t had taken three days.
She’d spoken of the Boravay, the carnivorous forest, from which no traveler, save Macao, had ever returned.
“Sounds like a hell of a woman,” said Kellie.
Goompah, thought Digger. She’s a Goompah. Not a woman.
A strict and formal decorum was observed during the slosh. No hooting, no raised voices. “If the honored speaker would pause for a moment,” one might say, “before we wander farther into confusion—”
It was a cool night. A brisk wind blew off the sea, and management needed several fires to warm the hall to a comfortable level. Macao was obviously popular because Goompahs filled the building, and sat talking quietly to one another while they waited for her to appear.
The audience, about two hundred strong, were seated above the stage, amphitheater style, but restricted to three sides. Kellie and Digger, who had long since planted a pickup near the stage, lurked in the roped-off section, well out of the way. At the appointed hour, two workers pulled a large armchair into view, made a great deal of fuss getting it aimed in the proper direction, and returned with a frame on which Digger assumed Macao would put her maps. Then they brought out a roll of animal skin and leaned it against the side of the chair. They added a table and a lighted oil lamp, and when they had everything arranged to their satisfaction, they scurried off. A bell tinkled, the audience quieted, and a Goompah in red and gold entered from the side. He placed his palms together, the equivalent of bowing to the audience. Digger missed part of his comments, but it came down to, Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, please give a hand to our world-traveling guest, Macao Carista.
The audience rapped politely on any available flat surface, and Macao made her entrance. To Digger’s eyes she was pretty much indistinguishable from the other females. She wore a bright yellow blouse with fluffy sleeves. Green leggings. And animal-hide boots. A gold medallion hung on a purple ribbon about her neck.
“Well,” she said, “this looks like a desperate bunch.” And they were off and running. Macao, it seemed, had just returned from a long overland journey to the north. Through the desert and beyond the jungle where, she claimed, it grew cooler again. She regaled her audience with tales of the mystical Lyndaia, where the gods had placed the first Goompahs; of attack bobbos and the flying groppe, and a giant falloon, which had half a dozen slithery tentacles, and “only last year, as we all know, dragged a full-masted ship to the bottom.” And finally she spoke of Brissie, the city on the edge of forever. “From its towers, one can see the past and the future.” She recognized a hand in the audience. “Please give us your name,” she said.
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