His smile left her feeling as if she were once again an undergraduate. Was it really that long ago he had led them in work songs from the era then under study, the terraforming years on Greenway? His classroom had rocked with “Granite John” and “Lay My Bones in the Deep Blue Sea.”
“I think there was a little more to it,” he said. “I think they found something.”
“Something? What kind of something?”
“What they were looking for.”
Had it been anyone else, she would have simply found a way to terminate the conversation. “Professor Tolliver, if they did, they forgot to mention it when they got back.”
“I know,” he said. “They kept it quiet.”
“Why would they do that?” She adopted her best let’s-be-reasonable tone.
“I don’t know. Maybe they were frightened by what they’d found.”
Frightened? The ship’s captain was Markis Kane. A war hero who had a wing of the Mighty Third Memorial Museum all to himself. He’d been killed a few years ago while attempting to rescue children during a forest fire in North America. “That’s hard to believe,” she said.
“Nevertheless, I think it’s what happened.”
There’d been only four people on the Hunter. Kane, Emily, Yoshi. And Kile Tripley, head of the Tripley Foundation, which had sponsored the missions. He too had vanished, and that was an odd business. Tripley and Kane had both lived in the Severin Valley in the western mountain region of Equatoria. Three days after the Hunter had returned from its mission, after the women had disappeared, a still-unexplained explosion had ripped apart the eastern face of Mount Hope, had leveled Severin Village and killed three hundred people. Tripley had never been found after the event and was presumed buried somewhere in the rubble.
Most of the experts at the Institute thought it had been a meteor, but no trace of the object had ever been found. The force of the explosion had been estimated at roughly equivalent to a small nuclear bomb.
“It’s all connected,” Tolliver said. “The Hunter mission, the disappearances, the explosion.”
There’d been stories to that effect for years. It was a favorite subject of the conspiracy theorists. And maybe there was something to it. But there was no evidence, and she hated sitting here with Sheyel Tolliver talking about Mount Hope. It saddened her to see her old teacher reduced to a believer in cover-ups and visitors from other worlds.
There were all sorts of lunatic theories about the incident. Some said that a micro black hole had come to ground. They’d searched the logs of ships and aircraft on the other side of Greenway looking for an indication that the hole had emerged from the ocean. Much as researchers had a thousand years before, after the Tunguska event. As it turned out, there had been a spout under a heavy sky, so the story had gained credence. Even though everyone knew there could be no such thing as a micro black hole.
Others were convinced a government experiment had gone wrong. The experiment was said by one group to have involved time-travel research; by another, mass transference. Still others thought an antimatter alien ship had exploded while trying to land.
“Kim,” he said, “how much do you know about Kile Tripley?”
“I know he was a wealthy freelance enthusiast who wanted to make a name for himself.” Tripley had been the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., which specialized in restoring and maintaining jump engines, which moved starships into and out of hyperspace.
“He was a tough-minded man, had to be in that business,” Tolliver said. “Have you by any chance read Korkel’s biography?”
She hadn’t.
“He made it quite clear that Tripley wasn’t going to be satisfied just bagging a bacterium somewhere. He wanted to find a thinking creature. A civilization. It was the whole purpose of the Foundation—the whole purpose of his existence.”
Like Emily.
One of the saddest places anywhere in the Nine Worlds was the abandoned radio telescope array on the far side of Earth’s moon, designed explicitly to search for artificial radio signals. Far more versatile than anything that had gone before, it had closed down its SETI function after something over a century and a half of futility, and was eventually diverted to other uses. By now, it was obsolete, standing only as a monument to a lost dream. We’re alone.
There’s never been a signal. Never a sign of a supercivilization building Dyson spheres. Never a visitor. There was really only one conclusion to draw.
She spread her hands helplessly, wondering how to break off the conversation. “Professor—”
“My name is Sheyel, Kim.”
“Sheyel. I’m inclined to accept whatever you say simply because it comes from you. But I’m reminded of—”
“—The danger of assigning too much credence to the source when weighing the validity of an argument. Of course, after this you may categorize me as an unreliable source.”
“I’m thinking about it,” she admitted. “You must know something you haven’t told me.”
“I do.” He rearranged the cushions. “The Hunter left St. Johns February twelfth, 573.” St. Johns was an outpost in the Cynex system, last water hole before leaping into the unknown. “They were bound for the Golden Chalice in the Drum Nebula. Lots of old, yellow suns. First stop was to be—” he looked down at something she couldn’t see, “—QCY449187, a class G. But of course they never got that far.”
“They had a problem with the jump engines,” said Kim.
“According to the record, yes. They came out of hyperspace in the middle of nowhere, made temporary repairs, and turned back.
“But they didn’t return to St. Johns. Kane decided St. Johns couldn’t manage the problem. So they came all the way home to Sky Harbor, arriving March thirtieth. It was ironic, of course, that the Hunter, whose owner had made a fortune repairing and maintaining jump engines, should suffer such a breakdown. But nevertheless—”
There it was.
“Okay,” said Kim, in a tone that suggested she saw nothing out of the way in any of this.
He produced another picture. Yoshi, Tripley, and Emily in Foundation jumpsuits. Yoshi had chiseled cheekbones and riveting dark eyes. A white scarf highlighted her youth. Kim saw a monogram on the scarf and asked about it.
“It’s a crescent,” he explained. His gaze turned inward. “She liked crescents. Collected them. Wore them as jewelry and monograms.
“Anyway, an hour or so after they docked at Sky Harbor, Yoshi called me.”
That got Kim’s attention. “What did she say?”
“‘Granpop, we struck gold.’”
“Gold?”
“That’s right. She said that she’d be in touch, but she couldn’t say anything more for the moment. Asked me to say nothing.”
“Sheyel—”
“It can only have one meaning.”
Kim tried to hide her frustration. “She might have been talking about a romance.”
“She said ‘we.’”
“Did you talk to Kane?”
“Of course. He maintained that nothing unusual happened. He told me he was sorry about the others, all three missing within a few days of the return, but he had no idea what had happened to them.”
She sat watching him a long time. “Sheyel,” she said at last, “I don’t know what you want me to do about any of this.”
“Okay.” His expression revealed nothing. “I understand.”
“To be honest, I haven’t heard anything that persuades me they made contact. That is what you’re implying, isn’t it?”
“I appreciate your time, Kim.” He moved to cut her off.
“Wait,” she said. “We’ve both suffered losses in this incident. That’s painful. Especially since we don’t know what happened. My mother was haunted by it until the day she died.” She took a deep breath, knowing this would be a good time to break away. “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”
He watched her for a long moment. “You mentioned contact. I think they brought something bac
k with them.”
The conversation had already been too exotic for anything to surprise her now. But that statement came close. “What kind of something?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes flickered and seemed to lose focus. “Read the accounts about the aftermath in the Severin Valley. For years after the explosion, people have claimed they’ve seen things in the woods. Lights, apparitions. There were reports of horses and dogs showing signs of restlessness.”
Kim felt embarrassed for him, and he saw it.
“They abandoned the town,” he persisted. “They left.”
“They abandoned it because the explosion weakened a dam. The dam was too expensive to repair so the authorities just encouraged everyone to move out. Anyway people had bad memories.”
“They took down the dam,” said Sheyel, “because everyone was leaving. Kim, I’ve been there. There is something loose up there.”
She listened to the air currents circulating through the room. “Did you ever see anything, Sheyel?”
“I’ve felt it. Go look for yourself. After dark. Do that much. It’s all I ask.”
“Sheyel—”
“But don’t go alone.”
2
We may never know what really happened at Mount Hope. Those who maintain that a secret government project hidden on the slopes went terribly awry on that April night have to explain how a government notoriously unable to keep any kind of secret could have kept this one for so many years. The theory that the area was struck by a micro black hole seems equally indefensible until someone proves that such an exotic object can even exist. As to the antimatter explanation, the board, after exhaustive investigation, can find no conceivable source. For now, at least, the cause of the Mount Hope event cannot be satisfactorily explained.
—Report of the Conciliar Commission, March 3, 584
In effect, Kim and her charges, a combination of commentators, contributors, and political heavyweights, were afloat in the void at relatively close range to Alpha Maxim. They were seated in four rows of armchairs, some sipping coffee or fruit juice, one or two pushed back as if it might be possible to fall. The sun’s glare was muted. Its apparent size was about twice that of Helios at noon.
Two clocks, positioned among the stars, counted down to ignition.
Kim, in the rear, was doing a play-by-play. “The LK6 is now two minutes from making its jump into the solar core. When it does, it will try to materialize in an area already densely packed with matter.” Canon Woodbridge, seated up front, was talking on a phone while he watched.
“This alone would be enough to create a massive explosion. But the LK6 is loaded with a cargo of antimatter. The reaction will be enough to destabilize the star.”
Beside her, a technician signaled that the operation was still on schedule.
“We have a report from the McCollum that the last crewmembers have left the Trent, and that they have begun to pull away.”
One of the observers wanted to know about safety margins. How long would it take before the shock wave hit the Trent?
“There’s no danger to any of the personnel. They’ll be gone long before the first effects of the nova reach their former location. Incidentally, the Trent won’t be destroyed by the shock wave. The light will get there first, and that’ll be quite enough.”
Could she explain?
“A nova puts out a lot of photons. Think of a near-solid wall moving at lightspeed.”
The clock produced a string of zeroes.
“Insertion is complete,” she said.
“Kim.” It was the representative of a corporation that almost routinely underwrote Institute activities. “How long will it be before we start to see the first effects?”
“That’s a gray area, Ann. To be honest, we have no idea.”
There were skeptics among the witnesses, some who believed that the Institute had overreached, that blowing up a star was simply beyond human capability. Several, she knew, would have been pleased to see the effort fail. Some did not like the Institute; some did not like its director. Others were simply uncomfortable at the prospect of human beings wielding that kind of power. Woodbridge was among these. Despite his remarks the previous evening, Kim knew that his real misgivings flowed from a basic distrust of human nature.
Minutes passed and nothing happened. She heard something fall and strike the invisible floor. They grew restless. In their experience, explosions were supposed to happen when they were triggered.
The first signs of stress showed up at zero plus eighteen minutes and change. Bright lines appeared around Alpha Maxim’s belt. The chromosphere became visibly turbulent. Fountains of light erupted off the solar surface.
At zero plus twenty-two minutes the sun began to visibly expand. The process was slow: it might have been a balloon filling gradually with water. Enormous tidal forces started to overwhelm the spherical shape, flattening it, disrupting it, inducing monumental quakes.
At twenty-six minutes, eleven seconds, it exploded.
It was often possible to make a reasonable guess at a person’s age from the physical characteristics his or her parents had selected. Different eras favored different skin tones, body types, hair colors. Concepts of beauty changed: women from one age tended to be well developed, their centers of gravity, as Solly Hobbs had once remarked, several centimeters in front of them; another era favored willowy, boyish women. Men’s physiques ranged from heroic to slim. The current fashion was to consider bulk as somehow in poor taste. Males born during the next few years were going to resemble a generation of ballet dancers.
During the eighties, parents of both sexes had opted for classic features, the long jawline, eyes wide apart, straight nose. Teenage girls now looked by and large as if they’d stepped down from pedestals in the Acropolis. Kim had come from an earlier time when the pixie look was in vogue. She tried to compensate by maintaining a straightforward no-nonsense attitude, and by avoiding a programmed tendency to cant her head and smile sweetly. She also adapted her hair style to cover her somewhat elvin ears.
Solomon Hobbs was from an age that had favored biceps and shoulders, although he had allowed things to deteriorate somewhat. Solly was one of the Institute’s four starship pilots. Kim had come to know him, however, not through an official connection, but because of their mutual interest in diving. Solly had been a member of the Sea Knights when Kim joined.
He had clear blue eyes, brown hair that was always in disarray, and a careless joviality that contrasted with a culture that thought of having fun as serious business, something one did to maintain a proper psychological balance.
After the lights came on and her guests had drifted away, Kim caught a cab which deposited her at the foot of Solly’s pier. The dive on the Caledonian was to be their way of welcoming the new year. They’d been looking forward to it for weeks, but as they rounded Capelo Island, riding a cold wind, Kim began to describe her conversation with Sheyel. It wasn’t a story she enjoyed telling, because it cast her former teacher as a crank. Yet she felt driven to talk about it. When she finished, he asked gently how much confidence she had in Tolliver.
“If you’d asked me two days ago—” she said.
“People lose touch as they get older.” Solly squinted at the sun. The sloop rose and fell. “It happens.”
They listened to the sea.
“I almost feel,” said Kim, “as if I owe it to Emily to do something.”
“Emily would tell you to forget it.”
Kim laughed. That was funny. Emily was by no means a mark for every weird idea, but there had been something in her that wanted to get beyond the merely physical universe. Given a choice between daylight and darkness, she’d have opted for the night every time. “No,” she said. “Emily would have wanted me to do something. Not just let it go.”
“Like run up to Severin?”
She made a face. “I know. It’s dumb even to think about it.”
Solly shrugged. “Turn it into a vacation.”
“I’m going to have to get back to him. To Sheyel. I don’t like the way we left things.”
“And you don’t want to call him and tell him—”
“—Right. That I didn’t bother to check out the woods.”
They both laughed. The wind brought some spray inboard.
“Solly, I’ll just say I didn’t have time to go. That I’ll get around to it when I can.”
“Didn’t you tell me this guy was a good teacher?”
“Yeah. He was good.”
“And you’re going to tell him you didn’t have time to check something out for him? That you were too busy? Even though your sister was involved?”
“Solly, I don’t really want to get caught up in this.”
“Then don’t.” His sensors picked up the wreck, and he tacked a few points to port. “Moving up on it,” he said.
“I mean, what happens to my reputation if it gets around I’ve gone ghost hunting?”
“Kim, why don’t you take him at his word? We both know you’re not going to sleep until you do. Look, it’s only a few hours to Severin. Do it. What did he say was out there? A spook?”
“He didn’t exactly say. ‘Something’s loose.’”
“Well, that could be pretty much anything.”
“I think he was suggesting I’d know it when I saw it.”
“Give it a chance. When nothing happens you can tell him you tried.”
He dropped anchor and they changed into their wet suits. Kim folded her clothes carefully on the cabin bunk, then removed her silver earrings and laid them on top of her blouse. They were dolphins, given to her years ago by an otherwise forgettable amour. Then they sat down on the deck and resumed the conversation while they pulled on flippers and adjusted thermostats. Kim knew that the dive could not be made until the Tolliver issue was settled.
“You think I owe him that,” she said.
“I think you owe it to yourself.” He put his mask on, adjusted it, attached the converter, and took a deep breath. “I’ll go with you, if you want.”
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