“Okay.”
“Margin of error is less than two percent.”
Alex was delighted. “Excellent, Shara. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
“We’ll be going out there once we get everything together. You want to come?”
“No, thanks. I like stuff that’s predictable.”
I worked late that evening, doing a survey: None of the touring companies were going to YL69949. None had a record of ever having been there. When I was about to leave, I opened my channel to Alex to say good night, but Jacob alerted me that he was outside the house.
We were keeping the blinds down, as a security measure. I went over and looked through them. Alex was standing in the moonlight near the edge of the forest. Just standing there. I knew his security guard couldn’t be happy about it.
Considering the mood Shara’s success had engendered, I was surprised to see him out there. I hung on until he and the guard came back inside. “You okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just going for a walk.”
“Part of your exercise routine?”
“Pretty much.” The guard retired to his station, which was directly across the corridor from my office. Alex looked at the clock. “What are you doing in here at this hour?”
I told him. Checking to see whether anybody goes out to Echo.
He nodded. “Go home.”
“Okay.”
He stood near the foot of the staircase. “Chase,” he said, “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“It’s okay. Not your fault.”
“I wish we’d never seen the damned thing.”
PART III
Echo
TWENTY-EIGHT
There is nothing that quite captures the spirit as does that which stands alone, a lighthouse on a rocky shore, an observatory on the dark side of a moon, an eagle perched on a rocky shelf at dawn.
—Yashir Kamma, At the Edge of the World
When you make the jump from hyperspace into the middle of a system that is uncharted, it takes a while to figure out what the system looks like. We had nothing on the star that was recorded in Shara’s catalog as YL69949. The contest submission had shown us an asteroid, a gas giant and a set of rings, and, most spectacularly, a pair of comets. I’d never seen twin comets before, and of course they were gone. Maybe they’d be back in a couple of centuries. Fortunately, all these pictures had also given us a starry background.
Other than that, it had been all partygoers, people wearing funny hats and offering toasts to Uncle Albert and somebody who kept saying I told you so.
We were on the edge of the Veiled Lady. The sun was a class-G yellow dwarf, like the suns found in the home systems that had given birth to the two known technological civilizations. What else actually orbited Echo, the number of planets, their parameters, and so on, was of no interest. Save those worlds that were warm enough for life to have evolved.
The sun floated serenely off to starboard. About twenty minutes after emergence, Belle reported it was somewhat more than three hundred million klicks away. We were on the outer edge of the biozone.
“Any planets yet?” I asked.
“Working on it,” she said.
Alex let me see that he perceived the question as of little consequence. “Are we getting anything that might be an artificial radio signal?”
“Negative,” she said.
“Let us know if you hear anything.”
“Of course, Alex.”
It was a bad beginning. Had there been a technological civilization anywhere in the system, we would almost certainly have been picking up electronic signals of one kind or another. Belle needed almost five hours before she could report a planet. “It’s a gas giant. A sun skimmer, barely twenty million klicks out. No rings. It doesn’t seem to have any moons.”
“Probably pretty warm at that range,” I said.
“What else can you see, Belle?”
“That’s all for the moment. Trying to confirm other possibilities. But it’ll take a while.”
We sat quietly in the cockpit. The sky was filled with stars, and the Cricket Nebula floated directly overhead. “Where’s Rimway’s sun?” asked Alex. “Can you tell?”
“It’s not visible from here,” I said.
If we continued to explore the Veiled Lady and its neighborhood for the next million years, I suspected we still wouldn’t have seen half its worlds. And with so much real estate, it was impossible to believe there was no place anywhere that did not provide a haven for somebody. Something out there was looking at the same spectacle we were. Had to be.
The hours crept past. We sat listening to the vents and the just-audible flow of power and the bleeps and clicks of the various systems. Alex was reading while I played cards with Belle. I leaned over but couldn’t see the title.
“Down and Out on Radford III,” he said.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s about six hundred years old.”
“What’s Radford III?”
“It was an early colonization attempt that went wrong.”
“Oh.”
“At the beginning of the Interstellar Age, more than half of them failed during the first thirty years.”
“Why?”
“Usually bad planning. Lack of foresight. Relying on luck. Don’t worry about it; God will see us through. That sort of thing.”
Then Belle had more news: “We have one world eighty-five million klicks from the sun, and I suspect another one is in the biozone on the far side.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “How long to confirm the one on the far side?”
“We need to change our angle.”
“We could be talking a few days, Alex,” I said.
Alex nodded. “All right. Let’s take a look at the one we can see.”
It was a terrestrial world, a little bit larger than Rimway, lots of clouds and storms. It appeared to be mostly dry land. No globe-circling oceans. A few big lakes and a lot of small ones.
While we made our approach, a message arrived from Robin. I went back to my cabin and started it. He blinked on, sitting on the sofa in his living room, one leg crossed over the other. “Wish I’d been able to go along,” he said. He looked good. “Life around here just isn’t the same without you. I’ll confess I have a date this evening with a woman I’ve known on and off for years. Her name is Kyra. We’re going to have dinner at Bacari’s, then probably go to a show. I keep thinking it’s really not fair to her, because the whole time I’m with her I’ll be thinking of you.”
The message was six days old. I responded that I was sure he and Kyra had enjoyed themselves, but I hoped not too much. (I tried to turn it into a joke, but in fact I was annoyed. And he knew I would be.) “We’ve arrived at our destination,” I said, “but at the moment we don’t know anything about the place. Right now we’re just afloat, looking around. It might take a couple of days before we really know what our prospects are. And by the way, I miss you, too.”
Okay. It’s hard to capture our state of mind while everything was in the air. The world, Belle had decided, was the second one out from the sun. Henceforth it would be known as Echo II. “There is no indication,” she said, “of artificial construction anywhere yet. Be aware, though, that we are still a considerable distance away. Even a city, at this range, might not be visible. But, unfortunately, there is no evidence of electronic activity.”