“I’ve something more important for you to drink to.”
She laughed and put down her glass and kissed him and rubbed her breasts against him, warming to see the light come into his eyes. “What could be more important?”
“Kim,” he said, “I know this is a special circumstance, and I don’t want to read more into it than what’s there. But I want you to know that, when we go home, wherever we go from here, I’m not going to want things to go back to being the way they were.”
It was the moment she’d both feared and hoped for. “I don’t think we ought to make any decisions like that out here,” she said.
“Why not? Or is that a no?”
They were sitting on their impromptu bed, both in underclothes. A Nelson adventure was running, full-masted naval warships blazing away at one another. They’d turned off the sound and reduced the images so that the vessels simply floated in the middle of the room.
“No, it isn’t. I just don’t think we should rush into this.” She wondered why she was saying something so at odds with what she was feeling.
“Okay,” he said.
“Solly, let’s let it go for now. Enjoy what we have.”
“Okay.” He looked unhappy.
“I mean, hey, how long’s Ann been gone?”
“Seven years.”
“That’s how long you waited to make your move.” She was surprised at her own sudden anger. Where the hell had that come from?
Solly said nothing for several moments. Then he excused himself and left the room.
Goddamn it. A lover’s quarrel.
It hadn’t taken long.
18
We could never know who we truly were until we heard the whispers of the stars.
—CHANG WON TO, Mind and Creation, 404
Never go to bed angry.
They slept together that night as they had every night since Raven. But the lovemaking was perfunctory, reserved, cautious. One might almost say politic.
“Are you okay?” she asked, when they’d finished and lay quietly, aware that the tension had not eased.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Solly, I don’t want you angry with me.”
“I’m not angry.”
And so it went. The odd thing was she’d never seen him this way before. She’d known him to sulk, to take offense, and even on occasion to turn cold. But there was something deeper here, a degree of resentment that both surprised and hurt her.
It might have been that he also regretted the lost years, and that he was holding her responsible. Being bottled up in the ship didn’t help. Everything was too closed in. There was too much solitude.
In the morning things were better. He apologized and agreed that of course they should wait, should not rush into commitments that maybe neither of them was ready to keep.
During the days that followed they supplemented their impassioned evenings by creating love by proxy, staging romances in which their alternate selves indulged in exotic exploits. But only with each other. No outsider was permitted to join the party.
The climax of the first phase of the flight came during the late afternoon of March 7, the thirty-ninth day. The Hammersmith’s automatic systems warned them that transition into realspace was imminent. They’d been waiting in mission control, drinking coffee, full of anticipation for the hunt.
“Five minutes,” said the AI.
Kim brought the harness down over her shoulders.
“Zero hour,” said Solly. “Good luck.”
The ship was always alive with the sound of power, of ongoing maintenance, of life support, of the engines even when they were in an inactive mode, which was most of the time. Kim had quickly become inured to it and heard it only when she deliberately listened for it, or when the tone changed. Now, as they approached their destination twenty-seven light-years off Alnitak, the jump engines began to build and power flowed through the walls.
Kim’s eyes drifted shut. She imagined herself going home with the evidence, showing Agostino proof that an encounter had taken place, calling press conferences, accepting the congratulations of the world. A thousand years from now people would still speak in hushed tones of the flight of the Hammersmith.
The real challenge, she suspected, would be to create a second meeting.
It all seemed very promising, and she was luxuriating in the glory to come when the jump engines took hold and they crossed back out into realspace.
“Okay,” said Solly. “That’s it. We’ve arrived.” He brought the forward view up on the overhead screen. It was filled with stars.
“Time to get to work,” she said, so anxious she could scarcely contain herself.
He reached over and clasped her hand. “We should have thirty hours or so before the signal will be arriving here. But since we can’t trust the clocks, let’s get to it.”
Constellations tend to dissolve when one moves a considerable distance toward them. Stars that appear in home skies to be close to one another are seldom so in reality. But Orion’s Belt was a brilliant exception. Its three superluminous components remained in their classic relationship to each other, except that here, at a range of less than thirty light-years rather than the approximately fifteen hundred across which humans customarily saw them from Greenway, they dazzled the eye and utterly dominated the night.
Mintaka, “The Belt,” is the westernmost. It’s officially Delta Orionus, the least brilliant of the three, with a luminosity 20,000 times that of Sol or Helios. It has a relatively dim companion, not visible at this range, which orbits at about half a light-year.
Epsilon Orionus, in the middle, is also known by its Arabic name Alnilam, “Belt of Pearls.” Its luminosity is twice that of Mintaka. A haze surrounds it, caused by the irregular nebulous cloud NGC 1990, glowing in the way that cloudy skies do when they reflect light from cities.
And finally, on the east, Zeta Orionus. Alnitak.
The Girdle.
She watched it move to center screen in the mission control center as the Hammersmith turned toward it. Alnitak too had collected a haze, contributed by the Flame Nebula and the emission nebula IC434.
“We are on course toward Alnitak,” said the AI. “And accelerating to thirty-four kilometers per second.”
“Very good, Ham,” said Solly.
The ship’s normal operating antennas locked on the giant star. Others emerged from wells around the hull and lined up along the central axis.
“It really amazes me,” said Kim.
“What’s that?”
“I’d always thought of the ship’s captain bent over consoles, punching buttons, making adjustments, doing stuff. You could sit here with a good book and nobody’d know the difference.”
“We’ve got good public relations,” he said. “Maybe you should think about going to work for the pilots’ association.”
The engines shut off and they began to coast.
“Acceleration complete, Solly,” said the AI.
“All right, Ham. Launch FAULS.”
Twin ports that had originally been designed to accommodate probes ejected a pair of communications packages. Eleven minutes later a second pair were launched. And then a third, until sixteen of the devices had been released.
They waited several hours while the packages arranged themselves into a vast field, aimed at the target star. Then they unfolded, one at a time, great white blossoms opening up.
Kim never left the mission control center during the deployment, save for a couple of trips to the washroom and a quick meal. At around eleven P.M., Ham announced that FAULS had come online. They now had a radio dish whose effective diameter was roughly equivalent to that of the orbit of Greenway’s outermost moon.
Solly smiled at her. “Do you want to give the command?”
“Oh yes,” said Kim. “Ham, activate FAULS.”
Lamps blinked on. “FAULS activated.”
A storm of low-volume static spilled out of the speakers.
&nb
sp; An auxiliary screen on Kim’s right powered up. The system ID blinked on and stipulated it was working.
“Activate program search,” said Solly.
“Activated.” The static volume lessened.
“Now what?” she asked.
He looked up at the overhead monitor, which was locked on Alnitak, and increased magnification until the star became a disk. “We wait,” he said.
She diverted the input to her earphones and listened for a few minutes. The void was alive with radio waves, a cacophony of whimpers and squeals and murmurs, the fading shrieks of stars plunging into black holes, the staccato clatter of pulsars, the murmur of colliding hydrogen clouds. The FAULS search program would sort out anything that might be a coherent signal. If Hammersmith succeeded in picking up a broadcast from the Hunter (or by wild chance from something else), the AI would immediately sound an alarm.
Solly instructed Ham to kill the sound.
Kim wondered about the range of possibilities, whether they might not be able to travel one day to remote places and collect historically significant radio broadcasts. Of course, they’d have to get closer to home. At fifteen hundred light-years from Greenway, and sixteen hundred from Earth, no radio transmissions would yet have reached this far. It was fascinating to think what they could see if they had a telescope capable of looking at Earth, where at this relative moment Henry VI sat on the British throne and Joan of Arc was a schoolgirl.
Solly got up. “That’s as much as we can do for now. Want to go back to the workout room for a while?”
She was surprised he was willing to walk off at a time like this, even though the high-probability period was still hours away. “No,” she said, “I think I’ll hang on here.”
She was still there when he came back two hours later with sliced beef and fruit.
They lay awake talking long through the night, listening for the alarm. Now that they were here, on station in a place where she could see countless stars, clouds of stars, but no sun, she lost confidence. Silly to do that: she’d checked the math any number of times; the equipment was equal to the task; physical law was very precise about how radio waves traveled in a vacuum. But Hunter seemed so long ago, in human terms. And what evidence did she really have other than Kane’s sketch and a bogus set of logs?
Solly, who’d lived all his life in a star-traveling fraternity which assumed that the cosmos belonged exclusively to humanity, tried to encourage her, but his tone gave him away.
They spent most of the next day huddled over the instruments. Kim listened to the cosmic noise and watched the clock. She skipped lunch and tried to read, opening one book after another. Solly busied himself calibrating instruments that probably needed no attention.
They ate a light dinner and put on another King mystery. Just to watch, without participation. But Kim couldn’t keep her mind on it. They did not go to bed. At midnight Kim was sprawled on the couch, one arm thrown across her eyes, listening to the silence.
“It might take a couple more days,” Solly said. “Maybe even a week. Out here, we can’t be all that precise about where we are.” On the screens, the void rolled out forever. He was about to say something more when Ham spoke to them: “We have a hit.”
Kim came wide awake.
“Transmission acquired 12:03 a.m. No visual. It is an audio signal only. On standard frequency.”
“Run it,” said Solly. It was 12:06. “From the beginning.”
Kim sat up.
The speaker delivered a single blip.
Then, moments later, a pair of blips.
“Is it Hunter?” Solly asked the AI.
Three blips.
Four.
“Uncertain. It is artificial, with better than ninety-nine percent probability.”
Hammersmith had Hunter’s transmission characteristics in its files. Given time, and a sufficient sample, it would be able to establish identity beyond question.
“It couldn’t be anybody else,” said Kim, elated. “We’ve got them.”
She listened intently for more, but the speakers remained silent. Solly asked, “Is that all?”
“Yes. The signal arrived four minutes ago.”
“Ham, if you get any more, pipe it directly through.”
“They counted to four,” Kim said.
It started again.
One. Two.
“What the hell is that all about?” asked Solly.
Three.
“They’ve seen something.”
Four.
Kim wanted to scream for pure joy. “Something they can’t talk to. They’re trying to say hello.”
And again. One—
“What kind of hello is counting to four?”
“It’s the only common language they have. If it’s really a celestial, it can reply by counting to five.” She pressed her palms together and whispered a prayer to whatever power controlled such matters. Then she threw herself into his arms. “Solly,” she said, “It’s really happening.”
“Let’s hold on before we start to celebrate—”
The signal stopped. Kim let him go, pressed her palms together, and waited.
“If they’ve really got somebody else out there,” she said, “we’ll only get one side of the conversation.” That was because the other vehicle would almost certainly be using a directed signal, as opposed to Tripley’s omnidirectional broadcast.
“Do you think they’re getting an answer?” asked Solly.
It began again. Same pattern.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.” Her heart was pounding. The sequence stopped. And started again.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Characteristics of the signal have been analyzed,” said the AI. “Confirm it is the Hunter.”
She visualized the scene: somewhere near Alnitak, the Tripley vessel was busily making repairs, had been making repairs—it was at the moment hard to separate past from present—when they’d encountered something. The flared teardrop. The turtle. The Valiant.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Come on,” she pleaded.
Solly watched her. “You still figure they’re getting no answer?”
“I think so. As soon as the other ship responds, they’ll switch to something else.”
“What would they switch to?”
“I have no idea, Solly. Anything—”
One—
“Why doesn’t the celestial answer?” she demanded.
“Maybe they don’t know how.” Solly too was caught up in the confusion between past and present. They had, in a sense, retreated into time.
“They’d have to know, Solly. How could they not?” She prayed for a visual. Had she been onboard Hunter, she’d have taken the Valiant’s picture and sent it across to the other ship, inviting the stranger to do the same. A nice friendly gesture. One that would put an image into the transmissions. And tell her without any question what was going on.
The four-count continued to come in. The durations between individual blips varied, indicating they were manually tapping out the signal. The complete count usually ran about eight seconds. The sequences were divided by almost a minute.
“Are we using the multichannel?” Kim asked. Just in case the celestials transmit and their antenna happens to be pointed in the right direction, Ham would be able to hear it.
“Yes. We’ve got them covered. But don’t bet the lunch money.”
They were between signals. Kim tried to imagine the state of mind in the Hunter, and wondered what they were seeing in their scopes, what they had found. Had it been possible, she would have cheerfully killed Markis Kane. Hadn’t it occurred to them that an event like this might generate future interest on the order of a later intercept of the original signals? That therefore they should provide for posterity?
Solly looked at the timer. “They’re late.”
The silence stretched out. It went to five minutes. Seven minutes.
“Maybe they gave up,” he said.
&nbs
p; “No.” That couldn’t happen. You don’t give up if you’re sitting there looking at a celestial. “They wouldn’t do that.”
“They might if the celestial took off.”
Her stomach sank. It was a possibility she had never considered. She’d assumed that a star-faring species would necessarily show the same raging curiosity in this type of situation that she would. Call it the Brandywine Fallacy.
But if there had been a meeting, and if it had been terminated abruptly, it wouldn’t explain the subsequent events. No, it couldn’t be that simple.
“They’re probably trying something else,” she said.
“Something that’s not showing up in a transmission.”
“For example?”
“If I were there and I got no response on the radio I’d start flashing my lights. There’s even a possibility that a connection has been made, that they’re getting ready to exchange gifts and pledge mutual friendship. Maybe they’ve opened hatches and are waving at each other. None of that would show up on FAULS.”
“That last is a possibility you can discard. There hasn’t been time for anybody to get into a pressure suit.” He looked into her eyes and frowned: “Are you all right?”
“If this goes on, Solly, I’m going to be an emotional wreck.” She stared hard at the image of Alnitak as if by an act of will she could make out what was happening. At this moment, hidden in the light show coming in from the giant star, were the images of the Hunter and the other. “Got a question for you,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Would there be a way to know whether there are life-forms on another ship? That is, if we ran into something, but it stayed quiet, do we have sensors that could reach in there and determine somebody’s on board?”
“No,” he said. “Any ship in close to Alnitak would have to be heavily insulated against radiation. The Hunter would have no way of knowing directly whether it had a crew, or whether it was automated. The only way to be sure is to talk to them. And even that wouldn’t tell you definitely because you could be dealing with an AI.” He thought about it some more. “I think you’d have to go over physically and shake hands.” He grinned. “Or shake whatever. Until then it’s strictly guesswork.”
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