‘Are we still in orbit?’ he asked.
‘Now that we’ve got you?’ Sajaki shook his head. ‘That would be pointless. We have no more business with Resurgam.’
‘You’re worried about the colonists trying something?’
‘They could inconvenience us, I admit.’
For a moment they were silent, before Sylveste said, ‘Resurgam never interested you, did it? You came all this way just for me. I find that singleminded to the point of monomania.’
‘It was only the work of a few months, if that.’ Sajaki smiled. ‘From our perspective, of course. Don’t flatter yourself that I’d have chased you for years.’
‘From my perspective, of course, that’s just what you did.’
‘Your perspective isn’t valid.’
‘And yours is? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s… longer. That has to count for something. Now; to answer your earlier question, we’ve left orbit. We’ve been accelerating away from the ecliptic ever since you came aboard.’
‘I haven’t told you where I want us to go.’
‘No, our plan was simply to put an AU or so between us and the colony, then lock into a constant-thrust holding pattern while we think things over.’ Sajaki clicked his fingers, causing a robotic seat to angle down beside him. He boarded it, then waited while another quartet of seats appeared for Sylveste and Pascale, Hegazi and Khouri. ‘During which time, of course, we anticipated that you’d assist with the Captain.’
‘Did I say I wouldn’t do it?’
‘No,’ Hegazi said. ‘But you sure as hell came with some unanticipated fine print.’
‘Don’t blame me for making the best of a bad situation.’
‘We’re not, we’re not,’ Sajaki said. ‘But it would help if you were a little clearer on your requirements. Isn’t that reasonable?’
Sylveste’s seat was hovering next to the one holding Pascale. She was looking at him now, as much in expectation as any of the crew who had captured him. Except that she knows so much more, he thought, almost everything there was to know, in fact — or at least as much as he knew, however insignificant a part of the truth that knowledge actually constituted.
‘Can I call up a map of the system from this position?’ Sylveste asked. ‘I mean, of course I can, in principle — but will you give me the freedom to do so and some instructions?’
‘The most recent maps were compiled during our approach,’ Hegazi said. ‘You can retrieve them from ship memory and project them into the display.’
‘Then show me how. I’m going to be more than just a passenger for some time to come — you might as well get used to it.’
It took a minute or so to find the right maps; another half a minute to project the right composite into the projection sphere in the form Sylveste desired, eclipsing the realtime image of Resurgam. The image had the form of an orrery, the orbits of the system’s eleven planets and largest minor planets and comets denoted by elegant coloured tracks, with the positions of the bodies themselves shown in their current relative positions. Because the scale adopted was large, the terrestrial planets — Resurgam included — were crammed into the middle; a tight scribble of concentric orbits banded around the star Delta Pavonis. The minor planets came next, followed by the gas giants and comets, occupying the system’s middle ground. Then came two smaller sub-Jovian gas worlds, hardly giants at all, then a Plutonian world — not much more than a captured cometary husk, with two attendant moons. The system’s Kuiper belt of primordial cometary matter was visible in infrared as a curiously distorted shoal, one nubby end pointing out from the star. And then there was nothing at all for twenty further AU, more than ten light-hours out from the star itself. Matter here — such as there was — was only weakly bound to the star; it felt its gravitational field, but orbits here were centuries long and easily disrupted by encounters with other bodies. The protective caul of the star’s magnetic field did not extend this far out, and objects here were buffeted by the ceaseless squall of the galactic magnetosphere; the great wind in which the magnetic fields of all stars were embedded, like tiny eddies within a vaster cyclone.
But that enormous volume of space was not completely empty. It appeared at first only as one body — but that was because the default magnification scale was too large to show its duplicity. It lay in the direction in which the Kuiper halo was pointing; its own gravitational drag had pulled the halo out of sphericity towards that bulged configuration, betraying its existence. The object itself would have been utterly invisible to the naked eye, unless one were within a million kilometres of it; at which point seeing the object would have been the least of one’s problems.
‘You’ll know of this,’ Sylveste said. ‘Even though you might not have paid it very much attention until now.’
‘It’s a neutron star,’ Hegazi said.
‘Good. Remember anything else?’
‘Only that it has a companion,’ Sajaki said. ‘Which doesn’t in itself make it unusual, of course.’
‘Not really, no. Neutron stars often have planets — they’re supposed to be the condensed remnants of evaporated binary stars. Either that or the planet somehow managed to avoid being destroyed when the pulsar was formed during the supernova explosion of a heavier star.’ Sylveste shook his head. ‘But not unusual, no. So — you may be asking — why am I interested in it?’
‘That’s a reasonable question,’ Hegazi said.
‘Because there’s something strange about it.’ Sylveste enlarged the image, until the planet was clearly visible, streaking around the neutron star in its ludicrously rapid orbit.
‘The planet was of extraordinary significance to the Amarantin. It appears in their late-phase artefacts with increasing frequency as one approaches the Event — the stellar flare which wiped them out.’
He knew he had their attention now. If the threat to destroy their ship had appealed to them on the level of self-preservation, now he had fully snared their intellects. He had never doubted that this part would be simpler than with the colonists, for Sajaki’s crew already had the advantage of a cosmic perspective.
‘So what is it?’ Sajaki said.
‘I don’t know. That’s what you’re going to help me find out.’
Hegazi said, ‘You think there might be something on the planet?’
‘Or inside it. We won’t know for sure until we get a lot closer, will we?’
‘It could be a trap,’ Pascale said. ‘I don’t think we should dismiss that possibility — especially if Dan’s right about the timing.’
‘What timing?’ Sajaki said.
Sylveste steepled his fingers. ‘It’s my suspicion — no; not a suspicion, my conclusion — that the Amarantin eventually progressed to the point where they could achieve space travel.’
‘From what I gathered on the surface,’ Sajaki said, ‘there’s very little in the fossil record to substantiate that.’
‘But there wouldn’t be, would there? Technological artefacts are inherently less durable than more primitive items. Pottery endures. Microcircuits crumble to dust. Besides, it took a technology comparable to our own to bury the city under the obelisk. If they were capable of that, we’ve no grounds for presuming they weren’t also capable of reaching the edge of their solar system — perhaps even interstellar space.’
‘You don’t think the Amarantin reached other systems?’
‘I don’t rule it out, no.’
Sajaki smiled. ‘Then where are they now? I can accept one technological civilisation being wiped out without a trace, but not one spread across many worlds. They would have left something behind.’