In that moment, the magnification switched on its own, and they were far out, away from the immediate effects of the blast, where the sun looked sickly pale and the sky was full of fire. Abruptly the chamber went dark.
Tor understood that these were the products of the stealth satellites, images captured by orbiting recorders and transmitted forward, relayed through other systems circling other worlds.
“Cosmic Snoops,” said Nick, who’d been watching from the Memphis.
Alyx switched on her wristlamp. “I don’t believe this is happening. We travel all over the Arm and find a few ruins, and the Noks, while these people have all this. George, we have to find out how this works and duplicate the record.”
“Or make off with it,” Nick said.
His chair shook.
He looked at Alyx.
“What was that?” she said.
George took a deep breath.
The room trembled again, a shudder, a spasm. As if something were happening deep in the ship.
“SOMETHING’S GOING ON, Hutch.”
A cloud of objects was expanding from the underside of the chindi. Bill locked in on one. It looked like a sack. It was generally shapeless, more or less rounded, a little wider at one end than at the other. It had no visible means of propulsion.
“Where are they going?”
Below, Autumn’s upper atmosphere was calm.
“I’ve no idea. They’re all headed in different directions at the moment. I’ll track them and let you know when I have something.”
George’s voice came in over the circuit. It was weak and far away. “—Are they getting ready to leave?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Hutch. “They’ve just ejected a bunch of sacks.”
“Say again please.”
“Sacks. Packages.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you ought to get out of there. Just in case.”
“Let’s not panic,” he said. “We just got set up over here. Keep an eye open. Let us know if you see anything else.”
“HUTCH.” SYLVIA WAS so excited she could barely speak. “You’ll be interested in knowing that the Academy has had a breakthrough. We are now reading the transmissions on the star web. We’re getting pictures of previously unknown alien civilizations, we’ve got a black hole rolling through the atmosphere of Mendel 771, we’ve got a cluster of artificial bubble structures orbiting Shaula. It’s really incredible.” She brushed her hair back from her eyes and literally glowed. “We’ve unlocked the grail.”
Well, the metaphor seemed strange, but that hardly mattered.
“You’ve unlocked it,” she continued. “You and the Contact Society. Who would’ve thought? Pass my congratulations along to George.”
ALYX SMILED AT him. He could almost read her mind. They’d been inside barely ten hours and, at the first suggestion of activity, they’d run like rabbits. No, they’d told Hutch, let’s not panic. Don’t pick us up. We’re just getting started. But nevertheless they’d left the VR chamber and hurried back down Barbara Street, toward the pocket dome. One of the wheeled robots had passed them, paying no attention, just rolling past as if they weren’t there. Tor wondered where it was going.
Back at the dome, they’d refilled their air tanks, taken turns using the washroom, and waited for more signs that the chindi might be getting ready to leave. Hutch thought it was something else, a launch of some kind, but that was okay for her. She wasn’t going to get stranded if the damned thing took off. So they were ready to clear out at the first sign.
After a while, they decided they were probably okay, and they’d relaxed a bit and had dinner.
Tor was accustomed to the twenty-four-hour cycle on the Memphis, where the lights dimmed at night and brightened in the morning. In the chindi, of course, it was always dark. The light from the dome illuminated the outer chamber somewhat, but there were still gloomy recesses. The place felt remote, abandoned, spooky. He wondered whether he could capture the mood on canvas.
That evening, they again took to the passageways. There were more empty chambers, of course, but increasingly they found displays, many with objects they readily recognized, weapons and furniture, tapestries and musical instruments, electronic equipment and sleeping gear. Two chambers contained libraries, one limited to scrolls, the other to chapbooks with brown pages rendered inflexible by the cold.
Sometimes they saw broken shards and collapsed tables and shreds of clothing, carefully preserved in display cases that prevented an observer from getting too close to them. Lovingly preserved, one might almost think. At other times, the artifacts were new, as if they’d just been gathered from a shop, brought here, and put on display.
One exhibition of absolutely unfathomable objects, which might have been a series of geometric puzzles, was enclosed by magnificent russet curtains that could have come directly from a well-appointed terrestrial dining room.
Sometimes there were figures, presumably representing those from whose world the artifacts had been salvaged. They came in countless shapes and types, mammalian and avian and reptilian and others for which there was no category. Their aspects often suggested a kind of placidity and congeniality. A creature with a crocodilian skull and teeth seemed to possess the serenity of a Socrates. Others were majestic, still others terrifying. The most unsettling, for Tor, was a dark-eyed horror inhabiting what appeared to be a drawing room directly across from the chapbook library.
They debated splitting up. There was too much to see and too little time to continue as they were. George suggested that the forty-eight-hour limit they’d imposed on themselves was unrealistic. That they had an obligation to stay longer, to survey the place as thoroughly as they could. After all, they really didn’t know the chindi was going to leave. It was possible it had been there for years.
“It’s refueling,” said Alyx. “That tells me we don’t have forever.”
Tor agreed. “If I thought we could do it,” he said, “I’d suggest sabotaging it. Prevent it from going anywhere. I hate to think of this thing getting away from us.”
“But it won’t get away,” said Alyx. “Hutch says we can follow it. It’s not as if it’s going to go somewhere we can’t.”
By then they were exhausted. They’d been awake more than thirty consecutive hours, and had gone through the night. It was late morning back on the Memphis. Tor suggested they quit for a few hours, return to the dome, and get some sleep.
“Why don’t you two go back?” George suggested. “I’m not really tired yet.”
“No,” said Alyx. “We all need a break. You get tired, you get careless.”
AFTER A SECOND sleepless night, Hutch went up to the bridge, where Bill was still tracking the sacks. Not all of them, because they’d continued to disperse, and there were more than the sensors could handle. But the dozen they were monitoring were reaching the inner ring.
“One of them,” Bill said, “is about to impact.” He put the image on-screen, a cluster of rocks and the sack. “Here’s the target,” Bill said. He highlighted it for her. “Predominantly iron and ice.” It was shaped like a potato. “Roughly thirty meters down the long axis. Maybe half as wide.”
The sack glided through the rubble, skimmed past a boulder, and splashed against the target, dashing a gray-white smear across its surface.
Hutch poured herself some coffee. “The rock will be orbiting out of view shortly,” said Bill. “Do you want to follow it?”
“What about the other sacks?”
“We’ll have another impact in six minutes.”
“Okay, Bill,” she said. “Let’s just sit and watch. I want to stay close to the chindi.”
Nick wandered in on his crutches. He seemed to be feeling better. The painkillers had rendered him unusually jovial, to the point where he’d been telling jokes about his profession. Talk to us and you’ll never need to talk to anyone else. You can rely on us, Hutch, to be with you until the end.