“I hope you all had a good night’s sleep,” he began.
Hazzard’s image on the screen scowled slightly. “Cut the platitudes, Brandon. We have some major decisions to make.”
Nodding tightly, Brandon said, “My brother, here,” he put a hand on Jordan’s shoulder, “wants to go to the city.”
Before anyone could object, Jordan explained, “We have a lot of questions that need to be answered. Adri knows the answers. I want to go to him and have a full and frank discussion.”
“B’god, Jordan,” Thornberry rumbled, “you sound like a stripey-pantsed diplomat.”
Jordan smiled at the Irishman. “I am a diplomat, Mitch, despite my clothing. An ambassador, if you will.”
Meek said, “And you expect Adri to be truthful?”
“He always has been.”
“Up to a point.”
“It’s up to us … to me, actually, to get the entire truth from him. We get along well together and—”
“And you want to see your girlfriend,” Brandon snapped.
Jordan felt as if Bran had slapped his face. Holding back the angry retort that he wanted to make, he answered carefully, “I want to clear up any doubts you have about Adri, and find out what’s behind all this.”
Longyear looked as if he wanted to say something, but he stayed silent. The rest of them glanced uneasily at one another.
“Well,” Jordan challenged, “you want to wring the whole truth out of Adri. Here’s your chance.”
Thornberry said, “I want to know how those energy shield generators work. That’s the biggest invention since the wheel, by damn.”
De Falla wondered, “Did they actually build this whole planet? I mean, from scratch? Or did they just terraform the top layers of the crust?”
“Just?” Yamaguchi asked. “Just terraform the top layers? That’s a helluva ‘just.’”
“You’re all missing the point,” said Meek. “Their technology is interesting, of course—”
“How pale a word, interesting,” murmured Elyse.
“I don’t need vocabulary lessons, Dr. Rudaki,” Meek snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It’s just that … we have so much to learn from these people. To study a white dwarf close up. To learn how they shield the entire planet from radiation bursts, how they built an entire planet. We have the opportunity of a lifetime here, the opportunity of a thousand lifetimes.”
“But why have they done all this?” Meek demanded, getting to his feet, his lanky body unfolding like a carpenter’s ruler. “If what Adri’s told us so far is the truth, there’s a presence—a purpose—behind everything they’ve done. Who are these Predecessors Adri spoke of? What about the other intelligent races they claim they’ve met? Where are they? Why haven’t we met any of their representatives?”
Tanya Verishkova tried to answer. “Because they are not human, and they could not survive on a planet built for humans?”
“Because it’s all a tissue of lies,” Meek insisted. “Because Adri’s telling us what we want to hear, while hiding his real purpose from us.”
“And what might that purpose be, Harmon?” Jordan asked dryly.
“To absorb us. What was the term you used, Dr. Rudaki? Assimilate us. Just as the Europeans assimilated the Native Americans. And they’re getting us—some of us—to help them.”
Brandon asked, “If that’s true, then what should we do about it?”
Meek didn’t hesitate an eyeblink. “Get back aboard our ship and leave. Go back to Earth and warn them. Tell them we’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves against these … these aliens. These invaders.”
Jordan felt a growing anger simmering inside him. Anger at stupidity. Anger at unreasoning fear. If Meek has his way, he thought, we’d greet any visitors from other civilizations with nuclear bombs. And they’d retaliate with technologies so superior to ours that we’d be crushed.
Brandon seemed equally incredulous. “Leave?” he asked Meek. “Just pack up and run away?”
“That’s the best thing we can do,” Meek insisted. “The survival of the human race depends on us.”
“Let me point out something to you all,” said Jordan, feeling like a stern schoolmaster facing a room full of fractious students. “We can’t leave.”
“You mean you don’t want to,” said Meek. “Very well, you can stay behind if you want. The rest of us—”
“You don’t understand, Harmon. We cannot leave. Adri won’t permit us to go.”
“He can’t stop us,” Hazzard growled.
“Can’t he?” Jordan asked.
Thornberry got Jordan’s point. “He can disable the ship’s engines? Like he disabled my rovers?”
“If he wants to,” Jordan said. “If he feels he has to.”
Meek gasped. “You mean we’re his prisoners?”
Almost smiling at the astrobiologist, Jordan replied, “We’re his guests. For the time being.”
“Prisoners,” Meek insisted. Several of the people around the table nodded somberly. On the display screen, Hazzard looked grim, Trish Wanamaker shocked, the astronomer Zadar troubled.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Jordan continued, “I want to go to the city and face Adri with what we know. I’d appreciate it if you’d instruct the robots to let me through.”
SATURN ORBIT
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
Habitat Goddard
It was originally a prison ship, built at a time when most of Earth’s governments were repressive, authoritarian, in response to the disasters of the first wave of greenhouse floods. It was designed to hold ten thousand dissidents and political undesirables, troublemakers in the eyes of their governments, and carry them into exile far from Earth, to an orbit around the giant ringed planet Saturn, ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. Far enough so that they would no longer cause political unrest at home.
Habitat Goddard was a huge metal cylinder. From afar it looked like a length of sewer pipe incredulously hanging in orbit around gaudy, beringed Saturn. But this “sewer pipe” was twenty kilometers long, nearly the length of Manhattan Island, and four kilometers across. It rotated along its axis every forty-five seconds, which produced a centrifugal force almost exactly equal to normal Earth gravity. Its exterior was studded with air lock hatches, sensor pods, observation bays, photovoltaic solar panels, and long windows that allowed sunlight to brighten its interior and power its farmlands.
The interior was beautifully landscaped, with hills and brooks, compact little villages and neatly tended squares of farmland. A prison ship it might be, but it was a comfortable prison for its ten thousand inhabitants. Trees and flowers bloomed everywhere; the exiles had no reason to complain about their surroundings.
Yet it had taken some time for the inhabitants to get accustomed to living inside a giant cylinder. There was no horizon. The land simply curved up and up, until one could stare directly overhead and see—four kilometers above—more neatly landscaped farmlands and whitewashed villages.
When handed a lemon, make lemonade. The inhabitants of Goddard, permanently exiled by their governments on Earth, worked out their own society. And they worked out a way not merely to survive, but to grow wealthy enough to begin to build new habitats to house their growing population.
They mined comets for their ices and sold the precious water and other volatile chemicals to the burgeoning human settlements on the Moon, among the rock rats of the Asteroid Belt, and the research stations on Mars and in Jupiter orbit. Originally they had started to mine Saturn’s brilliant rings, but soon found that the chunks of ice that composed the rings were strewn with nanomachines: millions of virus-sized machines that maintained the rings, kept them from falling apart—and sent signals into deep space.