The two gas giants in the system are pretty much identical in mass and size, and both have rings. They’re close together, only about three million klicks, and they’re caught in a gravitational dance. If you watch them from the Retreat, you can see them rise every twenty-some hours, circle each other, and set. It’s a hell of a show. I understand, when they reconstruct the place in Arlington, they’ll be able to recreate the effect in the oculus.
Their equatorial diameters measure 65,000 and 63,000 kilometers. Cobalt is the smaller of the two, and the brighter. It’s a jewel of a world, with silver and blue and gold belts. The blue is the result of methane slurry and ice crystals on the outer shell of the atmosphere. Cyclonic storms float deeper down, swirls of yellow and red with golden eyes. It’s gorgeous.
The companion world, Autumn, is darker. It also has a collection of storms, which appear to be larger and less well defined. Naturally they named the system Gemini.
At the center of mass, between the Twins, there’s a cloud larger than either. It’s dark and heavy, lit with internal fires, a cosmic thunderstorm marking the point around which everything else, planets, rings, and moons, orbits. It looks like a planet, creating the illusion of three worlds in a line.
To complete the symmetry, there’s a third ring, circling the entire system. It’s enormous, less well-defined than the individual planetary rings, a shining highway that, seen from our position near Vertical, passed into infinity in one direction and dipped below the horizon in the other. Earlier, George had laughed while he admitted he couldn’t begin to pin down the local directions. Who knew which way was east when the sun was lost amid all the moving lights?
Vertical’s orbit was extremely unstable, and the experts said the chances of its having happened naturally were remote. Almost nonexistent. Most of them thought that within a few thousand years it would lose its unique position, which lifts it away from everything else and provides it with extraordinary views of the Twins.
The Retreat was perched on a ledge near the top of a mountain in some of the roughest terrain I’ve ever seen. It’s got drapes and carpets, all pretty much washed out. And beds and chairs and sofas. All the furniture’s too big by half for humans. And there’s something else about it, something dark and gloomy in the design that tells you right away it wasn’t designed for us. It gave me the chills, for reasons I couldn’t explain. Brownstein, who specializes in these sorts of things, says that the symmetries are slightly off, and that the equivalences don’t quite match up. I don’t understand yet what he means, but he says it’s visceral. And it is.
The place looks almost like a Victorian mansion. Lots of windows, a tower at one end, and a courtyard. It was perched on a shelf high up one of the taller needle peaks. And it had apparently been abandoned for over a thousand years. We had the remains of its two occupants. They were humanoid, but definitely not human. Not someone you’d have invited over for dinner.
Tall, with gray flesh, dark eyes, fangs, long narrow hands that ended in claws. We even had a portrait of one of them. The thing was wearing a robe and looking every bit like the grim reaper.
At the time, they were just beginning to take the Retreat down. The plan was to move it to Arlington and put it back together along the Potomac. George had had a big argument about that with Sylvia, the director. He thought the Retreat should be left where it was. He’d been grumbling for weeks. It was sacrilege, he thought. I think it was the convenience store that really got him. “Tee-shirts and monogrammed whiskey glasses. Is there anything we won’t do for money?”
I’m not sure how he thought the Academy got its funds, or whether he’d have been upset if they’d held up a couple of his paychecks because no cash was available. I myself saw no problem with it, but the idea sure had him lit up.
After a while, we reached apogee and started to fall. That was a bad moment. We were moving fast, and that put us in a kind of lopsided semi-orbit, soaring out and then cutting back in fairly close to the ground, and getting closer with each pass around the moon. Somewhere in the middle of all this my sensors came to life and it became a little easier to judge our flight parameters. But it was tricky because the ground ahead kept rising and I never knew where perigee was.
“Mountains,” said George, who must have thought I was blind.
He’d been quiet for several minutes while we moved across a wide corrugated plain. I’d been watching the peaks grow and kicking the thrusters to get more altitude. Fuel by then was getting scarce. “We’ll get over them,” I told him.
“Kellie,” he said, “we’re so close to the ground. Why not try to land?”
If we’d had a set of wheels and a runway it might have been possible. “We’d hit too hard,” I explained. “There’d be no chance.”
“You’re talking about us. What would happen to the cargo?”
“Everything back there is frozen, George. Brittle. It would shatter.”
I could see his mind working, trying to come up with something to save the payload. I wished he would give it up. “What happens after the other lander takes us off?”
“We go back to the Bromfield.”
“I mean—.” He nodded at the cargo door.
I knew what he meant. “It’ll go down.”
“Can we set it to try for a soft landing?” It was a cry for help and I felt sorry for him, sorry I’d come aboard, sorry I had anything to do with this.
“If we could get Bill up and running, yes, we could make the effort.” Bill was the AI. “But he doesn’t respond. I’ve been trying.”
“Try again, Kellie.”
I did. Bill wasn’t even a blip.
“There must be something we can do,” George said.
The Retreat had at one time been protected by a Flickinger field, or something very much like it. But when it failed, the individual volumes had frozen. After the initial attempts, no one had tried to open them. Or even to remove them from their shelves.
George was the expert. He’d come with some heat lamps, had used them to break the books free so they could be loaded and taken to orbit, where a team of specialists waited anxiously to begin probing their secrets. He was a little guy, thick brown hair, bushy mustache, a bit overweight. Not the sort of person you’d meet and remember. He had a wife somewhere but he never talked about her. I suspected she’d broken his heart. Don’t know why I thought that, he never said anything that I can recall. Still, there it was.
He’d been positively glowing while he separated the volumes and we began storing them into shipping containers and stacking the containers in Delta’s cargo hold. “Here,” he’d said, rapping on the cargo hatch after we’d sealed it, “with a little luck, we should have their heart and soul. For the first time, Kellie, we’ll see what the universe looks like through someone else’s eyes.”
We were on internal air. I started to depressurize the cabin.
The Delta cleared the mountains, close enough that I could have put a foot out and dragged it across a couple of the peaks. Somewhere in there we must have hit perigee—I really had no way to know exactly where. But Tod told me we were gaining altitude again. That we’d be okay and he would get to us in time.
I looked back for him. Our telescopes weren’t working, but it wasn’t hard to find Alpha, which kept getting brighter. It had gotten close enough that I could almost make out its shape.
“How you holding out?” Tod asked.
“Okay. We’re packed and ready.” I tried not to sound too relieved. “What’s your TOA?”