“That’s a blue-white star!” a tech shouted. “What’s he think it is?”
Someone got the fool shut down. Others hushed the ones that wanted to ask questions.
“… ask everyone to go about business as usual,” LaFarge was saying. “ And assist the technical crew while we try to establish position. We’ll be looking into our resources in this system for refueling. We’re very well equipped for dealing with this situation. That’s all. Stand easy.”
‘Establish position’ sounded comforting. ‘Refueling’ sounded even more hopeful. ‘Well equipped for dealing with this,’ sounded as if the crew already had a plan. Neill clung to that part of it, while a frantic part of him was thinking: This can’t be happening to us, not to us…
Things can’t go wrong with this ship, there were too many precautions, everything taken care of…
They’d been screened, their skills had been tested, they’d had to have recommendations atop recommendations even to come close to this job. They didn’t send foul-ups on a ship that carried Earth’s whole damned colonial program, and disasters didn’t happen to a mission as important as this one. People had planned too long. People had been too careful. Everything had been going so right.
“Establish position,” a tech said. “I don’t like that ‘Establish position.’ Are we talking about infall?”
“No,” a senior tech said. “We’re talking about where we are. Which is clearly not where we’re supposed to be.”
“Refuel, hell,” another tech said. “That’s a radiation bath out there.”
The pusher-craft aren’t shielded to work out there, Neill thought, with a sudden sick feeling, as the dynamics came clear to him. Jupiter was a radiation hazard. This thing… this double sun, with light that made the cameras flare and distort…
The miner-pilots couldn’t survive it. Not for any long operation. The miners couldn’t deploy here, not without an inevitable cost, as the exposure tags went dark, and the hours of running time added up. Pusher-craft were shielded for the environment they had to deal with, and their designated environment had been a mild, friendly G5.
He didn’t say that. Miyume looked scared. Probably he did. The numbers started adding up, that was what the pilots said when things started going wrong: the company might lie, and the captain the company hired might refuse you answers, but the numbers wouldn’t deceive you, no matter what.
They added, and the result didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t change from what it was. Wishes didn’t count.
IV
« ^ »
McDonough’s shadow arrived, hovered over Taylor’s chair, saying there hadn’t been a mistake. Taylor processed that datum in the informational void. Things came painstakingly slowly or not at all. Other inputs in his surroundings were irrelevant. His mind refused distraction to trivia. But the navigator he paid close attention to… and tried to ask him, although one had to slow the brain down incredibly to frame a single complex sound:
“What?”
Babble, then, unauthorized people touching him and talking to him. Taylor tuned the voices out until McDonough’s voice came back, telling him in its infinite slowness that they were fueled up.
That was something to process: they’d been at this star some months of realtime, then. Major datum.
The navigator said next that Greene was sick, something about an accident, about miner-pilots and crews dead or dying of radiation, pilots training pilots to do their job once they were dead… something about the star they hoped to go to. The navigator had one for him, and they were fueled and going now, away from this hellish vicinity, this double monster that sang to him constantly in his slow-moving dark. For the first time in a recent, lonely eternity, new data came in.
“Point,” Taylor managed to say, needing destination, and McDonough fed him coordinates that didn’t make sense off the baseline, or with where they had to be.
“Wrong,” Taylor said. But McDonough said then that they’d taken a new zero point, at this star, that they’d spotted a possible mass point by optics and targeted a G5 beyond it.
McDonough reeled off more numbers—Taylor grew drunk with them, the relief he felt was so great, but he didn’t process forward, he was still listening to McDonough with painful, slow attention. McDonough said the crew and the captain wanted him to know they were going to move. Said—McDonough wasn’t precise on the matter—they thought he might have some awareness of the ship’s motion.
Hell, yes, he did. Things were moving faster and faster. There were actual data-points in sight, more than one at a time. Taylor said, laboriously, at McDonough’s speed, “Bridge. Now.”
McDonough went away. The data stopped. Taylor waited. And waited. Sometimes it seemed to be years, and there was no sanity but to wait for that next point, that next, authorized contact.
But McDonough’s voice came back, after a long, long time, saying the captain wanted him to sit as pilot on the bridge. Goldberg would back him up. Greene, McDonough reminded him, was sick. Inoki was dead. Three years ago. Earth time.
Datum. He had to factor in Goldberg as backup. His mind wanted to race. He held it down. There would be numbers. At long last there would be data at speed, mission resumed.
He sat down. He felt the chair around him. Somebody said—it was an authorized voice, Tanaka, he thought—that he didn’t need the drug. That his brain manufactured it on its own now.
Interesting datum. It accounted for things. Goldberg talked, then, saying how they were clear to hell and gone from Earth and Sol, that they still didn’t know how they’d gotten there, but they’d gone through something they hoped wasn’t attached permanently to this star.
Watch it, Goldberg said. Are you hearing me?
“Yes,” Taylor said, with slow patience. But numbers had begun to proliferate.
He saw the destination mass. He had it. He couldn’t lose it this time.
Goldberg was with him. And the universe was talking to him again, at a rate he could understand. He skipped into the mass well and out again with a blithe disregard of gravity. He had a G5 in sight. Goldberg stopped talking to him, or had just gotten too slow to hear. He had the star and he reached for it, calm and sure now that those numbers were true.
He brought his ship in.
He shut down, system by system, in the light of a yellow sun.
Then he knew he could sleep.
BOOK TWO
I
« ^ »
The foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream-bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the o’o’o’clickof a small creature somewhere in the brush.
There were more unfixed stars now, tiny specks of light in irregular motion about the first. Sometimes the very sharp-eyed could count them, two and three motes at a time, shining before dawn or before the dusk, in proximity to the foreign star.