They reached Mars in fourteen to sixteen days, depending on which ship you were rooting for. The Galaxy Roamer was now in the lead by seven hours, with the Silver Streak and McGinty’s Marvel five minutes apart in second place, and the Argo still bringing up the rear.
The first five ships followed a predetermined route to get to Ganymede, which was their next checkpoint. It was a reasonable route, and a safe route. They had to go through the Asteroid Belt, of course, but bad stories and worse videos to the contrary, most of the asteroids are so far apart that actually seeing two or three while traversing the Belt breaks the monotony (and monotonous it is, for Jupiter is a lot farther from Mars than Earth is).
But not all the Belt is like that. Some of it is what you might call densely populated, not by people but by asteroids, and in fact there are a few places where there are so many and they are moving so swiftly, that they can be damned dangerous. Moreover, there’s a lot of rubble out there, rocks the size of bricks, or footballs if you prefer, that are so small and so fast that a ship’s sensors will miss half of them, but any one of them, if it hits the right spot at the right angle, can put a ship out of commission …and I mean permanently.
Of course you’ve figured out by now what I’m going to tell you, and you’re right: FarTrekker decided the only way to make up lost time was to take the shortest route to Ganymede, a route the other five ships had avoided because of the danger involved.
A number of media ships had been posted along the route, reporting back on the race, but when the Argo changed its course they followed it only long enough to determine where it was going, and then wisely refused to follow it. As they reported, only a crazy man would take this route, and especially in a ship with a solar sail, which presented a much bigger target to the myriad of flying rocks, and of course once the sail was destroyed the ship would be without motive power. (“What will they do then?” asked one of the self-appointed pundits. “Row?” Twenty-seven other pundits used that same line during the next day, and eleven presented it as their own, which is of course what self-appointed pundits do.)
The Argo entered the Belt, and Knibbs the navigator—no one ever knew his first name—went to work, charting all the asteroids that were big enough to chart, and trying to position the ship so that anything too small to chart was more likely to hit the hull than the solar sail. They figured to be eight days crossing the Belt, but if they made it to the other side, they’d have picked up more than a week on their rivals.
And, oddly enough, they were not touched by so much as a pebble for the first five days. The sail remained intact, they actually were running two hours ahead of schedule, and Knibbs announced that they’d passed through the worst of it, that the asteroids were starting to look like baby planets again, rather than large rocks and small boulders.
And then, on the sixth day, the co-pilot (whose first name was Vladimir, and I won’t bother with his surname since no one could pronounce or spell it anyway), Vladimir was sitting at the control panel when he fell asleep, and his head or his hand—they never knew which, and it doesn’t really matter anyway—brushed against some of the buttons and switches and knobs, and suddenly the Argo was filled with this haunting sound, like a melody you heard when both you and the world were younger and more innocent, and try as you would you could never quite remember it, though you knew it had brought tears to your eyes the one time you’d heard it. In fact, you probably looked for it on and off for years, but privately, because you didn’t know quite how to tell anyone you were looking for a melody that made you cry.
“What is that?” asked FarTrekker, suddenly alert.
“I don’t know,” said Vladimir, blinking his eyes. He checked the control panel, but while a number of the switches and buttons had been flicked and pressed, none of them had anything to do with the ship’s radio.
“I know that song,” said Knibbs wistfully. “I heard it once, a long time ago.”
FarTrekker shook his head. “No, that’s my Leucosia’s song.”
“I didn’t know you had a girl,” said Vladimir. “At least, I’ve never seen you with one.”
“I had one once,” said FarTrekker, staring sadly at the viewscreen. “She was coming home when her ship was lost. They never found her.”
“Surely they looked for her?”
“They did,” said FarTrekker. “But it’s a big solar system.” He sighed deeply. “That was her song.”
“It’s my Peisinoe’s favorite song, too,” said Knibbs. “Or it was, before I lost her.”
Suddenly FarTrekker frowned. “And that’s Leucosia’s voice!”
He examined the speakers, but the sound was not emanating from them. He then turned to Vladimir. “You’re our engineering expert,” he said. “Where the hell is that sound originating, and how can we be hearing it if it’s not being broadcast by the ship’s speaker system?”
Vladimir shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Theoretically we can’t be hearing it.”
“Spare me your theories,” said FarTrekker. “Can any external source be bypassing the speakers and broadcasting that melody directly into the ship, anything we can trace?”
“No,” said Vladimir. “We’re maintaining radio silence. However the sound is reaching us, it’s not through any mechanism on the Argo.”
The three men fell silent then, as the melody washed over them, caressing them with emotions and memories, some real, some they only wished were real.
“She’s alive,” said FarTrekker at last. “She’s alive, and she’s found a way to get to me!”
Knibbs agreed, except the “she” was his Peisinoe, and Vladimir, who remained silent, knew that the voice he heard, conjuring feelings he thought he’d forgotten, belonged to his Ligeia.
“We must be close!” said FarTrekker. “I never heard her on Earth, or in orbit, or even as we passed by Mars.”
“And Jupiter is still farther from us than Earth,” noted Vladimir.
“So she must be close by,” concluded FarTrekker, and the other two agreed with him, though each silently substituted a different name for “she.” “What’s the largest asteroid in the vicinity?”
Knibbs checked his computer. “Got one, maybe eight hundred miles in diameter, about ten thousand miles off to the right, and getting closer every second.” He paused. “Got a bit of an atmosphere, but nothing any human can breathe.”
“Does it have a name, or just the usual numbers and letters?” asked FarTrekker.
“Yeah, this one’s got a name: Anthemoessa.” Knibbs frowned. “Seems somehow familiar, though I’ll swear I never saw it referred to before.”
“I have,” said Vladimir. “But I’ll be damned if I can remember where.”
The strangest expression crossed FarTrekker’s face. “I can remember.” Then he fell silent.
“Well?” demanded Knibbs.
“It’s the island where the Sirens lived,”
“You’re not suggesting Sirens are singing to us!” scoffed Vladimir.
“Besides, Anthemoessa, if it existed at all, was in the Mediterranean, remember?” added Knibbs. “Near Greece somewhere.”
“Maybe whoever named this asteroid knew something we don’t know,” said FarTrekker, and added “yet” silently.
“Ridiculous!” said Vladimir.
“Okay, maybe not,” said FarTrekker. “You explain the song.”
“I can’t.”
“But you can hear it, and you’ve heard it before,” persisted FarTrekker.
“I think so.”
“You know so,” said FarTrekker. “Admit it: don’t you recognize the voice?”