They slept late. Kim woke up excited, anxious to get through the day, and to launch the second round of FAULS devices. But she could find nothing to occupy her, and ended by playing chess in the rec room with the AI, whom she set at a beginner’s level and proceeded to hammer.
Solly, with his inimitable sense of what was needed, put together another candlelight dinner. She drank a bit more than she should have, and she was a bit woozy when the Hammersmith returned to realspace.
This time, because the jump had been much shorter, they arrived closer to their ideal site, and within an hour they were listening again to the Hunter trying to open a conversation with its invisible companion. Shortly after the intercept had begun, however, they lost the signal. They were gratified to see it appear fourteen minutes later, precisely on schedule. That seemed to confirm the speculation that it was passing behind the gas giant.
They knew there’d be several hours of futile signaling by Hunter before Valiant responded. So they settled in, alternately reading and napping, and occasionally cavorting like adolescents. “This is the way star travel was meant to be,” Solly told her.
Four hours after the first signals, the four-count, had been sent, the Valiant had apparently responded. Hunter replied with thirteen blips. Emily and her shipmates appeared onscreen, and sent greetings. And showed their open door.
As before, there was no further transmission.
But they had their second bearing. They compensated for stellar movement in the interim, and the lines intersected at a point three hundred AUs from Alnitak. Right on the orbit of the gas giant.
They waited nevertheless through two more days. Finally, there could be no question that the show was over, and Solly put a disk into the recorder and directed the AI to copy the intercept record from both sites. When it was completed he gave it to Kim. “With luck,” he said. “It’ll keep us both out of court.”
“We’ll see.” She looked at the disk. “It might be easier for someone to argue the entire crew of the Hunter went over the edge rather than that they actually saw something. That might be stretched to account for the missing women, as well. What we really need is a glimpse of whatever it was they saw.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess it’s time to go to phase two.”
“The scene of the crime?”
“Yep.”
“Why bother? What’s the point? They’re all long gone.”
“Solly,” she said, “put yourself in the place of the other ship. Look, for reasons we don’t understand, our people came back and didn’t say anything. Maybe there was a fight on board, a disagreement on how to handle the announcement, on who was going to get the credit—”
“—That doesn’t make sense—”
“Okay. But something happened. Maybe the experience scared them off. Maybe they saw something so terrifying it drove them all out of their minds—”
“—And we want to go there?—”
“We’ll be careful. And we won’t be taken by surprise. Look, the point is, both ships knew there’d been contact. It had to be as big an event for the celestials as it was for us. So what did they do afterward? What would you and I do?”
He propped his chin on one hand and gazed steadily at her. “Assuming no real conversation took place and the other ship just took off, we’d post a surveillance.”
“Can you see any possibility we wouldn’t do that? That we’d just ignore the incident?”
“No,” he said after a moment’s pause. “No, although we did ignore the incident. But I’d have expected we’d have put science teams out there right away.”
“And they’d have stayed for years, right?”
“I suppose. But twenty-seven years?”
“Well, maybe not that long. I don’t know. But we’d leave some automated systems in place.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’d establish a presence and keep it indefinitely.”
“Right. So all we have to do is show up at Alnitak and let whatever they’ve left behind get a look at us. We head for the gas giant and we do whatever we can to draw attention to ourselves. We look for anything that doesn’t belong there. And if we’re lucky, who knows what might show up?”
At three hundred AUs, the world was eight times farther out than Endgame was from Helios, or six times Pluto’s distance from Sol. It had seventeen satellites and a ring system divided into three sections. A permanent storm of the kind often associated with gas giants floated in its southern latitudes. It required roughly twenty-three centuries to complete an orbit around the central luminary, which even at this extreme distance, was fully a third as bright as Greenway’s noontime sun.
Solly set course toward the planet.
“The system,” said Kim, “has been surveyed once. That was a hit and run, in-and-out. They spent two days here. There are no really unusual features, unless you’re talking about the atmospherics.” She meant the vast interstellar clouds, cradles for new stars, turbulent and explosive, illuminated from within and also by Alnitak. The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light-years across that restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and interior fires. Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in place.
“Slow lightning,” said Solly. “Like the mission.”
Kim looked at the nebula. “How do you mean?”
“We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.”
On the other side of the sky, a long luminous bar, IC434, stretched away into a glorious haze. Presiding over it was the great dark mass of the Horsehead Nebula.
“It’s a place for artists.” She stood by a window looking out at the vast display. The brilliant rings of the gas giant angled past her field of vision, a glowing bridge to its family of moons, all in their first quarter. She looked again at the blowup of Kane’s mural. It was impossible to know whether this world was the one in Emily’s hand. But she’d have bet on it.
There were two other suns in the system, one too remote to pick out, the other bright enough to provide reading light. The nearer was approximately 1300 AUs from Alnitak. It too was superluminous, though not in the same league with its companion. “People used to think a binary star couldn’t have a planetary system,” she told Solly. “We know better now, but the planets tend to get tossed around a lot, and often thrown out altogether. Especially when both components are massive and there isn’t a lot of space between them.” She eased herself into a chair and gazed steadily at the rings and moons. “It won’t stay in orbit long. It’s just a matter of time before something jerks it loose.”
The planetary disk had an autumnal coloration. The storm was a darker splotch, a circular piece of night. “About one and a half Jupiters,” he said, using the standard measurement for gas giant mass. “I’m beginning to understand why they decided this was the place to stop while Kane did his patchwork.”