And now her own species, trying to help where it could. They were in good company. And she felt a modicum of pride. If Darwin ruled on planetary surfaces, it appeared that a concern for one’s neighbor was a working principle at higher levels.
Unless, of course, one counted the agency behind the omegas.
She’d have liked to talk with representatives of those three races, but nobody knew where the chindi had originated, the Hawks were lost in time, and the few remaining members of the race that had spawned the Monument-Makers were savages on a backward world with no knowledge of their former greatness.
Charlie Wilson must have been alerted she was coming. He met her in the corridor and escorted her into the lab. “Now understand,” he said, “I don’t really know what any of this means.”
“What any of what means?”
Charlie was still filling in as acting lab director. He was doing a good job, but eventually she’d have to bring in somebody with an established reputation.
He took her into the tank, which was a small amphitheater. Thirty-two seats circled a chamber. Like so much of the Academy, it had been designed with public relations in mind. But it had turned out the general public wasn’t all that interested. Usually, it was used by only one or two people at a time, but it occasionally served visiting groups of schoolchildren.
They sat down, and Charlie produced a remote. The lights faded to black, the stars came on, vast dust clouds lit up, and they were adrift somewhere in the night. The sensation that they were actually afloat among the stars, the two of them and their chairs, was broken only by the presence of gravity and a flow of cool air.
“We now have forty-seven tewks on record. You know that.”
“Yes.”
“All forty-seven are in places where we would have expected to find omegas. So we can assume they are all the same phenomenon.”
He shifted in his chair, turning so he could face her. “Some of the Weathermen were close enough to the events to allow us to look for purpose. That is, what was the explosion supposed to accomplish? All of them took place in interstellar space. No worlds nearby. So it’s not an attempt to cause general havoc. It’s not somebody being vindictive.”
“Tell that to Quraqua.”
He nodded, conceding the point. Civilization on Quraqua had been obliterated. “All the clouds we’ve checked, each one is programmed to follow the hedgehog at a slightly higher velocity. When it overtakes the thing, it attacks the hedgehog, which then explodes, triggering the cloud, and you get the tewk.”
“Okay. But why?”
“Who knows? Anyhow, it puts out as much light as a small nova. Somebody else will have to figure out why. We just know it happens.”
“So what’s the point? Why has someone gone to all this trouble?”
“I can’t answer that question. But I can tell you that these things happen in bunches. Harold saw that from the first. Even when we only had a handful to look at. There’s a pattern. There are six distinct areas where we’ve had events. But that’s not to say we won’t find others as Weatherman proceeds.
“The yellow star on your right is the supergiant R Coronae Borealis. Seven thousand light-years from here.” He touched the remote. A hand’s width to one side of the supergiant, a new star sizzled into existence. “Coronae 14,” he said. “The fourteenth recorded event.”
And a second new star, a few degrees away. “Coronae 15.” And, a few degrees farther on, a third. Sixteen.
If there were to be a fourth, she could have guessed where it would be. But there wasn’t.
“They’re all this way,” he said. “We get five here, six there. All within a relatively short time span. Maybe a thousand years or so. And each series is confined to a given region.”
“Which means what?”
He looked frustrated. “Hutch, it’s a research project of some sort. Has to be.”
“What are they researching?”
“I don’t know. It must have to do with light. Some of our people have made some guesses, but we don’t have anything yet that makes sense. But you understand that would be the case if they were on a level sufficiently beyond us.”
“Like Kepler trying to understand gravity fluctuations.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
NEWSCOPE
(Extract from Eric Samuels Press Conference)
New York On-line: Eric, can you tell us precisely what happened to the al-Jahani?
Samuels: There was a problem with the engines. With the jump engines. Uh, Bill?
Cosmo: A mission as important as this, with so much hanging on it: Weren’t they inspected before it left port?
Samuels: We always do an inspection before ships leave the Wheel. In fact, this one was due for routine maintenance, but there wasn’t time to finish. Jennifer.
Cosmo: Wait. Follow-up, please. Are you saying it was sent out in a defective condition?
Samuels: No. I’m not saying that at all. Had we known there was a problem, we would have corrected it, no matter how much time it took. In this case, we didn’t see a problem, we were pressed for time, so we went ahead. We just got unlucky. Jennifer, did you want to try again?
Weekend Roundup: Yes. If there was a question about this one, why didn’t you send another ship?
Samuels: We didn’t have another ship. Not one with the carrying capacity we needed. Harvey, did you have something?
London Times: You’re saying the Academy didn’t have another ship?
Samuels: That’s correct.
London Times: How is that possible? The Council and the White House both claim they’re doing everything they can to support this effort.
Samuels: Well, there are limits to what can be done on short notice. Lookout is extremely far. Janet.
UNN: Eric, what is the prognosis for the Goompahs?
Samuels: We’re still hopeful.
In the morning she hauled Charlie out of the lab for a walk along the Morning Pool.
The forty-seven events, he said, were concentrated in a half dozen widely separated areas. None of the areas was even remotely close to the bubble of space through which humanity had been traveling for the past half century. “Which is why,” he told her, “we haven’t seen these things in our own sky. But a few thousand years from now, when the light has had time to get here, there’ll be some fireworks.”
Two of the areas were out on the rim, one near the core, and three scattered haphazardly. “And none anywhere else?” she asked.
“Not yet. But the Weathermen are still arriving on station in a lot of places. We’ll probably find more.”
There was something solid about Charlie. He wasn’t going to get caught up in wild speculations, and in his presence Hutch always felt things were under control. It was a valuable quality in a man so young. Charlie lacked his former boss’s genius, but everybody did. And you don’t need genius to have a bright future. You need common sense, persistence, and the ability to inspire others. And she could under no circumstances imagine him telling her he understood what the omegas were, then leaving her to wait while he gathered more evidence. He wouldn’t even have set it up as a big announcement. He’d have simply told her what he knew. Or suspected.
She looked at the sky and wondered who would be there when the light show began.
Harold had been at the Georgetown Gallery, he’d said, when the epiphany came. When he decided he knew what was happening. But if Charlie were right, if they were doing advanced research, research on areas currently beyond human understanding, how could that have happened?