Tamara tweaked the second burn to compensate. It would add its own errors, but the thrust would be less and the consequences smaller.
Before the third burn, she and Ada spent half a day sighting and re-sighting beacons and following the Object’s slow drift against the stars. Their target was growing visibly larger by the bell now, and though they were aiming for a suitable offset a small mistake could see them slam right into the rock. Tamara was duly meticulous—but it was hard to resist a kind of sneaking pride in the thought that it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. For the Gnat to become lost in the void would have been humiliating—quite apart from the unpleasantness of hyperthermia—but if they actually hit this lonely speck after crossing such a vast distance, their demise would at least be a testament to their almost perfect navigation.
Tamara set the clockwork for the burn, and when Ada had checked the dials she checked them again herself. She strapped herself into her couch and, for the first time, closed her front eyes.
The couch pushed against her back, the shuddering of the engines penetrated her bones. The glare of the exhaust came through her eyelids, two giant gray stars blossoming in the darkness where the windows would have been.
The gray stars faded. Tamara opened her eyes, took off her helmet and unstrapped herself from the couch. As she crossed the cabin, the Object’s now familiar terrain filled the view through the window on the left—neither approaching nor retreating, giving every appearance of perfect stillness.
That was impossible, but inasmuch as any one moment could be called an arrival, this was it. Trying to steer the Gnat into a well-defined orbit once and for all would have been too ambitious; the tug of the Object was so weak that orbital velocity and escape velocity were just two different kinds of brisk walking pace. But with careful observations and the odd gentle push from the air jets, they ought to be able to weave back and forth between a safe altitude and an unintended departure.
It was Carla who rose first to join her, chirping with delight at the landscape suspended below. “Well done!” she said, turning to include Ada.
Ada said, “Now that we’re here… why not just rest for a while, then go back and break the news that the Object was inert?”
She was joking, but the proposal did have a certain mischievous appeal. “We could probably get away with it,” Tamara replied. “Silvano might try to send a follow-up mission, but I doubt he could persuade the Council to back it. Dragging some giant self-contained engine, big enough to capture this by brute force…?” She swept an arm across the alarming arc the Object now subtended.
Ivo said, “They’d never do it, you can be sure of that. Our own plans are quite insane enough.”
24
Carla helped Ivo attach his spectrograph to the telescope, then watched him load the first sample into the catapult beside the window: the first small irritant with which they hoped to goad the Object into a revelatory response. The Gnat had no airlock as such—nothing large enough for the crew to come and go without depressurising the whole cabin—but Marzio had designed a miniature version, equipped with lever-operated scoops and pincers, that allowed them to move these tiny samples the short distance through the hull and into the catapult’s launch tube.
Back when the surface of the Peerless had been suffering the sporadic flashes attributed to orthogonal dust, no one had ever managed to observe—let alone record—the light’s spectrum. Before the centrifugal force of the mountain’s spin put an end to those displays, people had proposed spectrographs with such a wide angle of view that the inability to know precisely where the light would be coming from would cease to matter. The problem they’d never solved, though, had been the question of timing: no one could react quickly enough to open a shutter just as the flash occurred, and a prolonged wide angle exposure, even if it encompassed one of the rare events, would bury any signal from the flash itself in the accumulated background of reflected starlight.
No one had managed to find so much as a single tiny crater or other blemish left behind by the strange ignitions. With no more empirical clues, three generations of travelers had been left to speculate about the collisions. That the modest spin of the Peerless had been enough to brush the encroaching specks of dust aside ruled out sheer speed of impact as an explanation for the flashes, in favor of some kind of chemical reaction with the rock of the mountain itself. But no theory of chemical luminescence, no theory of fuels and liberators, no theory of light and luxagens, had ever offered a believable account of the events.
Ivo said, “One scrag of calmstone, delivered to the northern gray flats.”
He released the catapult.
Carla glanced across the cabin at Ada, who was resting a hand on the emergency lever that would fire the engines immediately to propel the Gnat out of harm’s way if the Object did a Gemma and began to transform itself into a star. Tamara, clinging to the rope beside Ada, was wearing a heavy blindfold. If the Object burned so fiercely that its radiance became injurious, this macabre precaution might at least spare the sight of one of their navigators.
Carla bent down and peered through the theodolite in front of her—willingly putting one eye at risk in order to cover the opposite contingency, that the flash might be too weak to see any other way—while her fingertips brushed the dials of the adjacent clock. They believed they knew how long it would take the speck of calmstone to reach the surface, but if the reaction itself was delayed the exact timing would be a valuable further datum.
“Opening the shutter,” Ivo said softly.
Carla stared at the starlit gray surface, expecting an anticlimax. The secret that had eluded generations couldn’t give itself up with the first grain of sand they tossed. She felt the dials reach the estimated impact time and move on: one pause beyond, two, three—
A dazzling point of light blossomed against the grayness, like a sunstone lamp seen through a pin-hole. Carla dutifully transcribed the precise time of the event onto her thigh even as she waited for the pin-hole to burst open, for the barrier between the realms to be torn apart and chaos to come spilling through.
The light faded and died. Carla quickly turned around and put an undazzled rear eye to the theodolite. There was no wildfire spreading from the impact site. The surface appeared completely unchanged.
Ivo said, “Tell me I didn’t hallucinate that.”
“Hallucinate what?” Tamara asked impatiently.
“It was bright but… contained,” Carla managed. “Just as they described it in the old fire-watch reports!” Just as Yalda herself had first seen it—looking back on the Peerless from the void, when a construction accident during the building of the spin engines had almost sent her to her death.
Ivo pulled the strip of paper out of the spectrograph. Carla lit a lamp so they could examine it properly. The paper had been darkened across the entire range of frequencies, showing a spectrum similar to that of the light from any burning fuel. But superimposed on this was a feature so sharp that Carla at first mistook it for a calibration mark on the paper—a line Ivo might have drawn for the purpose of alignment. It was no such thing. The paper had been blackened by the flash itself, along a narrow band corresponding to an ultraviolet wavelength of one gross, eight dozen and two piccolo-scants.
Tamara was keeping her blindfold on, so Carla explained the results to her.
“What could produce that?” Tamara asked. “A single, sharp ultraviolet line?”