The Sun seemed a little brighter, a strong yellow-white. And it was a double pinprick now, two jewels on a setting of velvet. The light was actually so bright it hurt his eyes, and when he looked away there were tiny double spots on his retina, bright yellow against red mist.
It wasn’t the Sun, of course. It was a binary star system. There was a misty lens-shaped disc around the twin stars: a cloud of planetary material, asteroids, comets — a complex inner system, illuminated by double starlight. Even from here, just from that smudge of diffuse light, he could see this was a busy, crowded place.
He worked his controller and swiveled. Beyond the gate, the Perry was gone.
No. Not gone. Just parked a few light-years away, is all.
He had no idea how the artifact had worked its simple miracle. Nor, frankly, did he care. It was a gateway — and it had worked, and had taken him to the stars.
Yes, but where the hell, Malenfant?
He looked around the sky. The stars were a rich carpet, overwhelming the familiar constellations.
After some searching he found Orion’s belt, and the rest of that great constellation. The hunter looked unchanged, as far as he could see. Orion’s stars were scattered through a volume of space a thousand light years deep, and the nearest of them — Betelgeuse, or maybe Bellatrix, he couldn’t recall — was no closer than five hundred light-years from the Sun.
That told him something. If you moved across interstellar distances your viewpoint would shift so much that the constellation patterns would distort, the lamps scattered through the sky swimming past each other like the lights of an approaching harbor. He couldn’t have come far, then — not on the scale of the distances to Orion’s giant Suns. A handful of light years, no more.
And, given that, he knew where he was. There was only one system like this — two Sol-like stars, bound close together — in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood. This was indeed Alpha Centauri, no more remote from Sol than a mere four light-years plus change. Just as he had expected.
Alpha Centauri: the dream of centuries, the first port of call beyond Pluto’s realm — a name that had resonated through a hundred starship studies, a thousand dreams. And here he was, by God. He felt his mouth stretch wide in a grin of triumph.
He blipped his thrusters and swiveled, searching the sky until he found another constellation: a neat, unmistakable W shape picked out by five bright stars. It was Cassiopeia, familiar from his boyhood astronomy jags. But now there was an extra star to the left of the pattern, turning the constellation into a crude zigzag. He knew what that new star must be, too.
Suspended in immensity, here at the rim of the Alpha Centauri system, Malenfant raised his visor and looked back at the Sun.
The Sun is a star — just a star. Giordano Bruno was right after all, he thought.
But if it took light four years to get here, it had surely taken him at least as long, however the portal worked. Suddenly I am four years into the future. And, even if I was to step home now — assuming that was possible — it would be another four years before I could feel the heat of the Sun again.
How strange, he thought, and he felt subtly cold.
Movement, just ahead of him. He rotated again.
It was a spider robot like the one he had seen on the other side of the portal. There was a puff of what looked like reaction-control engines, little sprays of crystals that glittered in the remote double light. Crude technology, he thought, making assessments automatically. It was heading toward the gate, its limbs writhing stiffly.
It seemed to spot him.
It stopped dead, in another flurry of crystals, a good distance away, perhaps a kilometer. But distances in space were notoriously hard to estimate, and he had no true idea of the robot’s size.
Those articulated limbs were still writhing. Its form was complex, shifting — obviously functional, adaptable to a range of tasks in zero gravity. But overall he saw that the limbs picked out something like a W shape, like the Cassiopeia constellation, centered on a dodecahedral core. He had no idea what it was doing. Perhaps it was studying him. He could barely see it, actually; the device was just an outline in Alpha Centauri light.
Malenfant calculated.
He hadn’t expected a reception committee. This was just a workaday gateway, a portal for unmanned robot worker drones. Maybe the Gaijin themselves were off in the warmth of that complex, crowded inner system.
He reckoned he had around five hours life support left. If he went back — assuming the portal was two-way — he might even make it back to the Perry.
Or he could stay here.
It would be one hell of a message to send on first contact, though, when the inhabitants of the Centauri system came out to see what was going on, and found nothing but his desiccated corpse.
But you’ve come a long way for this, Malenfant. And if you stay, dead or alive, they’ll sure know we are here.
He grinned. Whatever happened, he had achieved his goal. Not a bad deal for an old bastard.
He worked his left hand controller; with a gentle shove, the MMU thrust him forward, toward the drone.
He took his time. He had five hours to reach the drone. And he needed to keep some fuel for maneuvering at the close, if he was still conscious to do it.
But the drone kept working its complex limbs, pursuing its incomprehensible tasks. It made no effort to come out to meet him.
And, as it turned out, his consumables ran out a lot more quickly than he had anticipated.
By the time he reached the drone, his oxygen alarm was chiming, softly, continually, inside his helmet. He stayed conscious long enough to reach out a gloved hand and stroke the drone’s metallic hide.
When he woke again, it was as if from a deep and dreamless sleep.
The first thing he was aware of was an arm laid over his face. It was his own, of course. It must have wriggled free of the loose restraints around his sleeping bag.
Except that his hand was contained in a heavy space suit glove, which was not the way he was accustomed to sleeping.
And his sleeping bag was light-years away.
He snapped fully awake. He was floating in golden light. He was rotating, slowly.
He was still in his EMU — but, Christ, his helmet was gone, the suit compromised. For a couple of seconds he fumbled, flailing, and his heart hammered.
He forced himself to relax. You’re still breathing, Malenfant. Wherever you are, there is air here. If it’s going to poison you, it would have done it already.
He exhaled, then took a deep lungful — filtered through his nose, with his mouth clamped closed. The air was neutral temperature, transparent. He could smell nothing but a faint sourness, and that probably emanated from himself, the cramped confines of a suit he’d worn for too long.
He was stranded in golden light, beyond which he could make out the stars, slightly dimmed, as if by smoke. There was the dazzling bright pairing of Alpha Centauri. He hadn’t come far, then.
Were there walls around him? He could see no edges, no seams, no corners. He stretched out his feet and gloved fingers. His questing fingers hit a soft membrane. Suddenly the wall snapped into focus, just centimeters from his face: a smooth surface, overlaid by what felt like cables the width of his thumb, but welded somehow to the wall. The cables were a little hard to grip, but he clamped his fingers around them.
Anchored, he felt a lot more comfortable.
The wall itself was soft, neither warm nor cold, smooth beyond the discrimination of his touch. It curved tightly around him. Perhaps he was in some kind of inflated bubble; it could be no more than a few meters across. And it wasn’t inflated to maximum tension. When he pushed at the wall it rippled in great languid waves, pulses of golden light that briefly occluded the stars.