Tamara gathered six new beacon sightings, then merged them with Ada’s to sharpen their estimate of the Gnat’s trajectory. A few brief squirts of air from the attitude-control jets reoriented the craft so the engines could deliver a small push in the required direction. She set the parameters of the burn into the controlling clockwork, then the crew donned their helmets and strapped themselves into their couches again.
The glare from the exhaust through the windows was as bright as it had been at the launch, but Tamara had barely registered her weight against the couch when the burn was over. She’d been worried that using the engines again might exacerbate Ivo’s problem, but he assured her that he was completely unharmed this time.
A bell later, the observations showed their modified trajectory to be as good as they could have wished for. There was no point trying to aim the Gnat down to the last saunter yet, when they still hadn’t pinned down the rock they were aspiring to reach with the same precision. The infrared color trails taken from the Peerless could only tell them so much—but they’d soon be able to make a fresh determination of the Object’s trajectory, with the aid of some decent parallax at last.
Looking out at the familiar stars, Tamara realized that she’d never even searched the sky for the Peerless. It would have been invisible to the naked eye, but she’d felt no urge to hunt for it, no pang of separation at its disappearance. And why should she have felt lost? The light from the beacons and the stars formed a grid of intangible guide ropes, transforming the void around the mountain into a solid, traversable realm.
If they could find a way to hold this ground, building a permanent framework of beacons and observatories, the sky from the Peerless need never be flat again—need never revert to the kind of painted dome that befitted a pre-scientific culture. Whatever triumphs or disappointments the Object had in store, if they could just retain the hard-won benefits of parallax, at least her generation would have that much to its name.
“Four different kinds of rock, at least!” Ada declared excitedly. “Different hues, different textures, different albedos.”
Tamara hung back and let Carla and Ivo take their turns at the telescope first. She didn’t mind waiting, listening to their descriptions before she saw the image; it was like savoring the odor of a seasoned loaf for as long as possible before finally taking a bite.
“The more variegated the better,” Ivo said, squinting through the eyepiece. “Ah… wouldn’t it be perfect if just one of these minerals set calmstone on fire, and the others were inert? Then Silvano could have his new farms out here, alongside the liberator mines.”
He moved aside, and Tamara prepared to take his place. From the Peerless, the best view of the Object had given them its rough dimensions but little else. For two days now, she and Ada had been tracking it through their theodolites, treating successive locations of the blurred ellipse as one more set of navigational data, their sightings building up to a family of lines that would complete the elegant geometrical construction that made the rendezvous possible. But now they were close enough for the Gnat’s largest telescope—barely the size of Tamara’s own body—to show her the whole point of the exercise.
Tamara closed three eyes and pressed the fourth to the instrument. The ellipse was now a crisply rendered, idiosyncratic oval with a pinched and tilted waist. About a third of one lobe was as red as firestone, but the rest bore patches of brown, of gray and of white. Everything was pale and subdued in the starlight—and any comparisons she made with the sight of mineral samples in a well-lit workshop or storeroom would be unreliable—but the brown outcrops more or less matched the calmstone slopes of the Peerless, viewed under similar conditions. There was a sprinkling of small impact craters everywhere—structures Tamara had only ever seen before as sketches in astronomy books, recorded by the ancestors when they’d observed the inner planet Pio.
“We finally have our own sister world,” she said.
“Sister or co?” Ada replied.
“It almost matches us in size,” Carla pointed out. “A co should be smaller.”
Ivo said, “It’s what happens when the two come together that counts.”
“Either way,” Tamara said, “it doesn’t look like a stranger.” After three generations alone in the void, the travelers could hardly dismiss any companion as mundane. But these rocks did appear to be ordinary rocks, old and pitted as they were after a long journey. If their origins really could be traced all the way around the history of the cosmos, back to the primal world’s past-directed disintegration, that only made their similarity to the stuff of the Peerless all the more striking. Matter was matter, shaped by the same rules and forces everywhere—and it looked no different even when you encountered it backward.
Two small burns nudged the Gnat’s trajectory toward the rendezvous point. The crew kept returning to the telescope as the Object’s slow spin revealed its whole surface: more of the same minerals, more small craters.
“The only thing missing is life,” Carla said. “Not one patch of weed, not one speck of moss.”
“Pio, Gemma and Gemmo were dead worlds too,” Tamara reminded her. “Chemistry might be universal, but life must still be rare.”
Ivo took his turn at the eyepiece. “Forget life,” he said. “I’d be happy with any sign of rubble.”
Tamara felt the same. If the Object had been nothing but a loose pile of stones then they would have had no hope of altering its trajectory—but enough fragmentation to save Ivo from having to chip off samples himself would be a huge advantage. The Object’s spin was slow enough that even its weak gravity could, in theory, maintain a tenuous grip on pebbles scattered across its surface, but the creation and persistence of such things would depend on the whole detailed history of the body. Over time, the radiation pressure of starlight should have pushed away the very tiniest dust grains, but that was no loss: anything too small to see and avoid would only have posed a hazard.
While Tamara had been locked away on the farm, Ivo had been working on his sampling techniques. By now he was able to get decent results with powderstone as the target and pure air as the blade, and with calmstone as the target and traces of hardstone in the airflow to act as an abrasive. The first was easy enough, but the second could take more than a day.
He had also tried to carve firestone using air flecked with its liberator. Burning furrows into the firestone hadn’t been a problem, but getting an intact sample free of the main body had proved impossible.
People had been studying firestone since antiquity. But if Ivo had to hack a piece of the Object loose using its own kind of fire as his only cutting tool, he would need to learn to do it in a matter of days.
The deceleration was planned to take place in three stages. Tamara put aside every distraction and devoted herself to the navigator’s arts. She didn’t care about the jagged beauty of their companion world any more; all that mattered was the geometry and timing of the encounter.
The first and longest burn rid the Gnat of most of its velocity relative to the Object—but it was impossible to aim the engines perfectly, and observations soon revealed that in slowing the craft they’d also pushed it slightly off course.