Tamara took the report over to the relay station and began checking the digest herself.
“You don’t trust me, now?” Ada complained.
“Anyone can hit the wrong button by mistake.”
“And I did, twice,” Ada retorted. “But you know what that gives you.” The odds against an error making a forgery look authentic were astronomical.
The machine shuddered and declared the digest valid.
Tamara said, “They should autopsy the other arborines.”
“That sounds good in principle, but who’s going to identify them?” Ada replied. “Amanda just has to point out some healthy specimens instead of the real ones—”
“I don’t believe this!” Tamara punched the desk. “You know what kind of state Carla must be in! Someone’s fooled her, that’s all!”
Ada jokingly feigned a flinch away from her. “All right! Stay calm! I never said that was impossible.”
Tamara gave up arguing the point. “The only way to sort this out is with new research,” she said. “That’s more important than ever now.”
Ada eyed her warily. Tamara said, “Don’t you dare tell me you’re changing your vote!”
“I’m not!” Ada assured her. “But let’s be honest: it’s a lost cause now.”
Roberto entered the office, back from his shift, so Tamara dropped the subject. The last time she’d raised the vote in his presence his discomfort had been palpable.
“Anything interesting out there?” she asked him.
Roberto stretched his shoulders wearily. “What do you expect?” he replied. “You only get one Object in a lifetime.”
In the observatory Tamara sat harnessed to the bench, dutifully searching the sky for passing rocks, but as the shift wore on it grew harder for her to keep her mind on the star trails in front of her. She was tired of having her future dictated by people and events beyond her control. She needed to take her fate into her own hands.
If she gave up on co-steads—and gave up on children—wouldn’t that set her free? It was what she should have done the moment she escaped from Tamaro. If she kept taking holin and nothing went wrong, she might live for another six or seven years. What was there to regret in that? She wasn’t afraid to go the way of men when the time came.
But a part of her still balked at the decision. She’d never obsessed about the children she’d had no hope of seeing—never named them, never even pictured them—but when she thought about relinquishing all hope of their existence she felt a kind of hollowness pervading her flesh. It was as if she’d spent her life tacitly aware of them, not as ideas but as a physical presence: two latent bodies nestling under her skin, waiting to be born.
She looked away from the telescope, intending to rest her eyes for a moment, but as she gazed out through the transparent dome she caught sight of something that her narrower search had missed. About a third of the way up from the horizon, there was a visible break in the bright orange streak that usually formed part of a single long star trail. The gap was about half an arc-lapse—half the width of her thumb held out at arm’s length. If it was a passing rock it was either phenomenally large or phenomenally close; the saner interpretation was that a small piece of detritus had somehow adhered to the clearstone of the dome itself. But she had barely had a chance to ponder the fastest way to test that possibility when the star trail abruptly became whole again.
Tamara cranked the telescope as quickly as she could to the point where she’d seen the thing, estimating the coordinates from half a dozen surrounding features. There was nothing visible at the original location—and nothing nearby on the azimuthal arc along which any obstruction stuck to the rotating dome would have traveled.
After a frantic sweep she finally found it: a silhouette against the background of stars, absurdly huge under this modest magnification. She ran her fingertips over the dials of the clock, then wrote the time and the coordinates on her forearm. The silhouette was moving rapidly, blacking out each streak of color behind it for no more than four pauses. It was hard to discern its precise shape, as it seemed to be spinning as it moved, complicating its outline.
This was no interloper; any object crossing the sky so rapidly had almost certainly come from the Peerless itself. Tamara reached over and pulled a lever to ignite the shielded sunstone lamp that powered the coherent light source. The device was just a test rig that Romolo had loaned the astronomers, to try out on the first of Marzio’s new beacons. The tuning mirrors tended to slip out of alignment, and she had to spend a couple of lapses adjusting them until the monitoring screen showed a steady pin-prick of red light. That was from a tiny portion of the beam; the full radiance would have blinded her. She slipped the mirror into place that sent the beam to a second small telescope mounted parallel to the main instrument.
A red spot appeared in the center of the silhouette—bright enough to prove that the thing was small and close, not large and distant. Tamara guessed it was at most a few strides across—a rock that had broken away from the mountain’s slope, or something discarded from an airlock.
But that made no sense. The mountain’s spin could cast objects away, but they’d always be traveling at right angles to its axis. Anything flung off by centrifugal force would, in short order, end up motionless against the stars, a retreating image fixed on the observatory’s horizon. Not only was this thing above the horizon, it was ascending. Another force must have altered its trajectory after it had left the mountain.
It was a person, Tamara realized. Someone must have fallen from one of the fire-watch platforms. They’d tried to use their air jet to get back, but they’d panicked and become disoriented.
She tore off her harness and scrambled for the exit.
Ada was still in the office. Tamara explained the situation, and gave her the times and coordinates she’d need to extrapolate the watcher’s trajectory into the future.
“I want you to go up and keep the light source trained on them. I’ll follow the beam out.”
Ada said, “No one’s been reported missing. There’s a dead-man alarm on every platform; people don’t just disappear into the void.”
“What did I see, then?” Tamara demanded. “Explain it to me!”
“I have no idea.” Ada’s expression changed suddenly. “Unless it was deliberate?”
Tamara understood her meaning: someone on fire watch who’d been advocating too loudly for the wrong kind of vote might have had a surprise visitor. The alarm would present no problem: the watchers themselves disabled it for every change of shift.
“Track the beam for me?” Tamara pleaded.
Ada said, “This is crazy! How are you going to see it?”
“I’ll improvise. Please?”
Ada gave up arguing. “Be careful,” she said.
She headed for the observatory. Tamara headed for the airlock.
Out on the slope, Tamara clambered along the guide rails leading up from the airlock until the dome of the observatory came into view. Even from this distance she could see a faint red glow on one of the clearstone panels: scattered light from the beam. She released the rails, waited a moment to fall safely clear of them, then used the air jet strapped to her body to cancel the sideways velocity she’d acquired on her way out to the airlock. The rails receded into the distance as the rock of the slope swept past beside her.
She fired the jet again, to take her toward the peak. Once she was level with the dome she slowed herself, then she used a quick burst to move straight toward the red glow. She struck the dome squarely on the panel she’d been aiming for and gripped the edge tightly with six hands, then glanced down and saw Ada gawping up at her. Tamara freed one hand to wave at her, then another to help tug an empty cooling bag out of her tool pouch and spread it across the panel. The beam showed up as a dazzling red disk half a dozen scants wide, shimmering through the fabric.