Cavanaugh considered the question, as if the answer required serious thought. “That’s correct,” he said. “But if you want to ask me about the moonriders, do it. Don’t stand there and screw around.”
“Okay.” Wolfie was too professional to get annoyed. “I’m sorry. I guess you get hassled a lot these days.”
“You could say that.”
“So tell me about the moonriders.”
“I doubt I can add anything to what you’ve already read. Or seen.”
“Tell me anyhow.”
“Okay. There were nine of them. They were round. Black globes.”
“They weren’t carrying lights of any kind?”
“Didn’t you see the pictures?”
“I saw them.”
“What did you see?”
“Not much.” Wolfie hunched over the bar and looked at his own image in the mirror. He looked like a guy who could use some time off. “And they were in formation.”
“Went past us one after the other, then lined up into a vee.”
“You didn’t see them again?”
“No.” Cavanaugh was on the small side. Black hair, dark skin, carefully maintained mustache. Dark eyes that concentrated on the beer.
“How did the passengers react?”
“Only a couple of them saw anything. At the time it was happening, I don’t think they thought anything about it. Only afterward, when I told them what it was.”
“They didn’t get scared?”
“Afterward, maybe. A little bit.”
“How about you?”
“If I scared that easily, I’d find another line of work.”
Esterhaus had always assumed that people who saw moonriders were lunatics. That the visual records they came back with were faked. But Cavanaugh looked solid, unimaginative, honest. Utterly believable.
Still, it was hard to account for the images on the record. Dark globes in formation. Furthermore, they’d been seen since by others. Reginald Cottman, on October 3, while hauling cargo out to the Origins Project, halfway between 61 Cygni and 36 Ophiuchi. And Tanya Nakamoto, on another Orion Tours cruise, had seen them at Vega. A construction crew, four or five people, had reported a sighting a couple weeks ago at Alpha Cephei.
Physicists had been trying to explain them away without invoking extraterrestrials. The general public was excited, though of course it doesn’t take much to do that. It was why The National was interested. Gregory MacAllister, his editor, didn’t believe a word of it, but it was a hot story at the moment. And a chance to cast ridicule, which was what The National did best.
The reality was that this was a bad time for interstellar flight. Several bills were pending before Congress that would reduce funding for the Academy and other deep-space programs. The World Council was also talking about cutting back.
Meantime, the number of moonrider sightings was increasing. MacAllister suspected Orion Tours had tricked the passengers on Cavanaugh’s ship, had put together an illusion, and he’d hired an ex-pilot to demonstrate how it could be done. It was, after all, only a matter of running some images past a scheduled flight. How hard could it be?
“Could it have been rigged?” Wolfie asked.
Cavanaugh finished his beer. “No. I was there. It happened just like I said.”
“Jerry, how long have you been working for Orion?”
He looked at the empty glass, and Wolfie ordered more. “Sixteen years this November.”
“Just between us, what do you think of management?”
He grinned. “They’re the finest, most upstanding people I’ve ever known.”
“I’m serious, Jerry. It won’t go any further.”
“They’d stab one another for the corner office. And they don’t give a damn for the help.”
“Would they cheat?”
“You mean would they pull off something like the moonriders if they could?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. “Sure. If they thought it would help business, and they could get away with it.” The beers came. Cavanaugh picked his up, said thanks, and drank deep. “But there’s no way they could have made it happen.”
“Without your help.”
“That’s exactly right.”
…Yet there is palpable evidence for the existence of moonriders. There are visual records available to anyone who wants to look. It might be time to get serious and make an effort to find out what these objects are.
— The Washington Post, Monday, February 16, 2235
chapter 2
We have spent a half century now poking around the local stars. What we have found is a sprinkling of barbarians, one technological civilization that has never gotten past their equivalent of 1918, and the Goompahs, of whom the less said the better. Mostly what we have discovered is that the Orion Arm of the Milky Way is very big, and apparently very empty.
We have spent trillions in the effort. For what purpose, no one seems able to explain.
The primary benefit we’ve gotten from all this has been the establishment of two colonies: one for political wackos, and the other for religious hardcases. It may be that the benefits derived simply from that justify the cost of the superluminal program.
But I doubt it. Jails or islands would be cheaper. Education would be smarter.
Today, as we consider pouring more of the planet’s limited wealth into this financial black hole, maybe we should pause to ask what we hope to gain from this vast investment. Knowledge? Scientists say there are no privileged places in the universe. If that is so, we are now in position to calculate, as the fanatics like to say, what’s out there.
What’s out there is primarily hydrogen. Lots of nitrogen. Rocks. A few spear-carrying cultures. And empty space.
It’s time to call a halt. Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won’t need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.
— Gregory MacAllister, interview on the Black Cat Network, Tuesday, February 17
It’s a long way to Betelgeuse. One hundred ninety light-years, give or take. Almost three weeks in jump status. Plus a day or so at the far end to make an approach.
Abdul al Mardoum, captain of the Patrick Heffernan, usually had no objection to long flights. He read history and poetry and played chess with Bill, the AI, or with his passengers, if they were so disposed. And he put time aside for contemplation. The great void through which the Academy’s superluminals traveled tended to overwhelm a lot of people, even some of the pilots. It was big and empty and pitiless, so they tried not to think about it but instead filled their days with talk of whatever projects lay ahead and diverted their evenings with VR. Anything to get away from the reality of what lay on the other side of the hull. But Abdul was an exception to the general rule. He loved to contemplate the cosmic vastness.
They were, at the moment, in transdimensional space, which was another matter. The void was gone, replaced by eerie banks of mist and an absolute darkness illuminated only by whatever light the ship might cast. All ships necessarily moved through the cloudscape at a leisurely pace. It was a physical law that Abdul didn’t quite understand. The Heffernan might have been a sailboat adrift on the Persian Gulf. To Abdul, it was daunting, yet he accepted it as more evidence of the subtlety and providence of the Creator, of His care to leave pathways through a universe so vast that without their existence the human race would have been confined to its home sun.
It was the second week of the mission. Their destination was Betelgeuse IV, one of the oldest known living worlds. Intelligence had never developed there, at least not the sort of intelligence that uses tools and devises political arrangements. Because the biosystem was so ancient, it was of intense interest to researchers, who had established an orbiting station and were forever scrabbling about on the surface of the world, collecting samples to be taken to the orbiter and examined with relentless enthusiasm. The local life-forms did not use DNA, a fact of great interest to the biologists, though Abdul never understood that, either.
This flight, he realized, was going to be long. Usually he enjoyed these missions, took a kind of perverse pleasure in the solitude, looked forward to the conversations that the environment invariably stimulated. But this would be different.
The Heffernan was carrying four passengers, all specialists in varying biological fields. The senior man was James Randall Carroll, Professor Carroll, no casual intimacy, thank you very much. He was tall and a trifle bent. He was forever brushing his thin white hair out of his eyes. He smiled a lot, but you never got the sense he meant it. Despite his inclination toward formality, he wanted very much to impress his colleagues and Abdul. He did that by going on endlessly about the differences between terrestrial reptiles and their closest cousins on Betelgeuse IV.
There were, he would point out as though it really mattered, fascinating similarities in eye development, despite the differences in the local spectrum. Here, let me show you. And twenty minutes later they were into the feeding habits of warm-water reptiles. Or mating procedures. Or the curious and as-yet-unexplained diversity of propulsion methods by certain inhabitants of one of the southern swamp areas. Particularly annoying was his habit of periodically asking Abdul whether he understood, whether he grasped what the change in refraction really implied. The professor even followed him onto the bridge when he tried to retreat. (He’d made the mistake of inviting the four passengers to come forward anytime they liked, to see how the ship operated. It was a tradition, an offer he’d been making for years. But no more.)
Betelgeuse was approaching supernova stage. It would happen sometime during the next hundred thousand years or so, and Abdul found himself wishing it would happen while Carroll was in the vicinity. He’d like to see his reaction if the world, the swamps, and all its lizards, were blown to hell.
Abdul had been piloting Academy ships most of his career. He loved the job, loved carrying researchers to faraway places, loved watching their reactions when they saw the pale shrunken suns, or the supergiants, or the ring systems. He had no family, could not have had one and kept his career. It was the sacrifice he’d made. But it was well worth it. He treasured every mission. But Carroll was going to take this one from him.