I blinked. “You have children?” I said. Why had I never asked him — her — about that?
“Yes,” Hollus said. “A son and a daughter.” And then, in a startlingly human act, the alien said, “Would you like to see pictures of them?”
I nodded. The holoform projector buzzed slightly, and suddenly two more Forhilnors were in the collections room with us, life-size but unmoving. “That is my son Kassold,” Hollus said, indicating the one on the left. “And my daughter Pealdon.”
“They are all grown up?” I asked; Pealdon and Kassold seemed to be about the same size as Hollus.
“Yes. Pealdon is a — what would you call it? One who works in the theater; she tells performers which interpretations will be allowed.”
“A director,” I said.
“A director, yes; part of the reason I wished to view some of your movies was to improve my sense of how human drama compared with Forhilnor plays. And my son Kassold is — a psychiatrist, I suppose. He treats disorders of the Forhilnor mind.”
“I’m sure you’re very proud of them,” I said.
Hollus bobbed up and down. “You have no idea,” the alien said.
Hollus had disappeared during the middle of the afternoon; he — no, she: for Pete’s sake, she was a mother — she’d said she needed to attend to some other research. I used the time to dig through the layers of paperwork on my desk and to reflect a little on what I’d done yesterday. Alan Dershowitz, one of my favorite columnists, once said, “It is while praying that I experience my greatest doubts about God, and it is while looking at the stars that I make the leap of faith.” I wondered if —
The holoform projector bleeped twice. It startled me; I hadn’t expected to see Hollus again today, but here she was, wavering back into existence in my office — and she looked more excited than I’d ever seen her before: eyestalks weaving rapidly, and her spherical torso bobbing as though it were being dribbled by an invisible hand.
“The last star we visited before coming here,” Hollus said as soon as her image had stabilized, “was Groombridge 1618, some sixteen light-years from here. The second planet of that star once had a civilization, like the other worlds we had visited. But the inhabitants were gone.”
I smiled. “Welcome back.”
“What? Yes, yes. Thank you. But we have now found them. We have found the missing inhabitants.”
“Just now? How?”
“Whenever we discovered a planet that had apparently been abandoned, we did a scan of its entire sky. The assumption is simple: if the inhabitants had vacated their world, they might have done so via starship. And the starship would likely be taking the shortest path between the planet and wherever it was going, meaning that its fusion exhaust — assuming it is powered by fusion — might be aimed back toward the home planet. We checked in the direction of every F, G, and K-class star within seventy terrestrial light-years of Groombridge, looking for an artificial fusion signature overlapping one of those stars’ own spectra.”
“And you found something?”
“No. No, we never did. Until yesterday. We had saved the whole scan in our computers, of course. I retrieved that scan and wrote a program to do a wider search through it, checking every star of every type, out to five hundred light-years — Forhilnor light-years that is, about seven hundred and twenty terrestrial ones. And the program found it: a fusion exhaust in a direct line between Groombridge and the star Alpha Orionis.”
That would be the brightest star in Orion, which is — “Betelgeuse?” I said. “You mean Betelgeuse? But that’s a red supergiant, isn’t it?” I’d seen the star countless times in the winter skies; it formed the left shoulder of Orion, my favorite constellation — I think the name was even Arabic for “shoulder of the hunter.”
“Betelgeuse, yes,” said Hollus.
“Surely no one would relocate to such a star. It can’t possibly have habitable planets.”
“That is exactly what we thought. Betelgeuse is the largest star visible in the night sky from any of our three worlds; if it were placed where Earth’s sun is now, its outer rim would extend well past the orbit of Mars. It is also much cooler than Sol, Delta Pavonis, or Beta Hydri; that is why it only glows red, of course.”
“How far away is Betelgeuse?” I asked.
“Four hundred and twenty-nine terrestrial light-years from Sol — and roughly the same from Groombridge 1618, of course.”
“That’s a heck of a long way.”
“It is just one half of one percent of our galaxy’s diameter.”
“Still,” I said, “I can’t imagine why they’d send a ship there.”
“Nor can we. Betelgeuse is a prime candidate to go supernova; it is not suitable at all for a colony.”
“Then why go there?”
“We do not know. Of course, it is possible that the ship is headed to some destination on the other side of Betelgeuse, or that it plans to use Betelgeuse either as a refueling stop — it might be easy to harvest hydrogen from the attenuated outer atmosphere of a low-density red supergiant. And, of course, the ship may wish to use Betelgeuse as a gravitational slingshot, giving it a speed boost as it angles off to some other destination.”
“Did you find evidence that the people from Groombridge had sent out other starships?”
“No. But if any of them had changed course even slightly, so that their fusion exhaust did not aim back toward the home planet, we would not be able to detect them.”
“How long ago was the ark launched? And how long until it gets to Betelgeuse?”
“Judging interstellar distances is very difficult, especially without a long baseline for measuring parallax. The ark has been under way for at least 5,000 years — they apparently never developed the near-light-speed fusion engines we have — and it is certainly more than five-sixths of the way to Betelgeuse.” She paused for a moment, her torso bobbing up and down the way it did when she was excited. “But do you see, Tom? Maybe what you proposed happened on the other five worlds we visited; maybe their inhabitants did upload themselves into computers. But the Groombridge natives did not do that. They have built an ark; they are still alive. And that ark lacks the speed of our own ships; it would be possible for us to overtake it. Meaning—” she bobbed some more — “there is another race for us to meet.”
26
The ROM had closed to the public at 6:00; Hollus and I were now walking alone again through the Burgess Shale exhibition.
“I have noticed,” the alien said, “that many of the fossils you have on display are casts.”
“Well, all of these are real,” I said, gesturing at the shales around us. “But, sure, we either trade with other museums, giving them a cast of one of ours that they want in exchange for something we want, or we simply purchase the cast from them.” I paused and pointed straight up. “That T. rex we’ve got in the Discovery Gallery is a cast. Meanwhile, our Parasaurolophus is our most popular trade; we just finished making a cast of it for a museum in Helsinki.”
“I am fascinated by these fossils,” said Hollus. “We do not make physical casts, but we do make high-resolution holographic scans of objects of interest.” She paused. “Would it be permissible for me to scan these fossils.”
“To scan the Burgess Shale specimens?”
“Yes, please,” said Hollus. “The process is noninvasive; no damage is done.”
I scratched where my right sideburn used to be. “I guess that would be all right, but—” For once I was the savvy businessman. “But, as I said, we usually trade or sell casts of our fossils. What could you give us in return?”
Hollus considered for a moment. “I offer you a similarly scanned library of the counterpart of Beta Hydri’s Cambrian explosion.”