"It's not jealousy," Sork began heatedly, and then stopped himself. "All right, it's jealousy," he admitted, looking astonished at a new discovery. "But what did you expect? We've waited a long time for you to make a choice between us, Sue-ling."
"Why does this have to come up now?" she asked plaintively.
Sork said angrily, "Why not now? Why not settle it before you get too deeply entangled with this Krake character and we both lose out?"
"Oh, God," said Sue-ling, raising her palms to her temples, "don't you think you're a little crazy? Here we are out in space, on this mystery' cruise to nowhere, and all of a sudden—"
"It is definitely not all of a sudden," Sork corrected her. Then he took a deep breath. "Sue-ling," he said, his voice firm, "you know I love you. So does Kiri. It hurts not to know who you're going to choose."
"But Sork, dear," she said, trying to make her voice as kind and loving as she felt ... or thought she felt, "don't you see that it's hard for me to choose? We've been very close together, all three of us. To pick one of you means refusing the other, and how can I do that? What would it do to the three of us?"
"What's it doing now?" Sork snapped. "No! Decide, Sue-ling. Pick me, or pick Kiri, if that's the way you want it to be. But, please, do it now."
"I can't," Sue-ling whispered.
"You must," said Sork. "You can flip a coin if you want to do it that way. But, one way or the other, it's time for you to make up your mind."
Later on, on her shift at the state-of-the-ship board, with Francis Krake standing approvingly behind her, Sue-ling was very conscious of the fact that he was so close.
But there was nothing wrong with that, she told herself. To think anything else was simply foolishness. There was no reason why she should let Sork's jealousy make her self-conscious about what was a perfectly normal, not at all sexual, relationship between colleagues and friends. To prove this to herself, she moved a bit closer to Krake as she concentrated on the screens and the ship.
The sight the screens displayed was spectacular. Since the ship was in wave-drive, the walls of the control chamber had disappeared entirely. From Sue-ling's point of view, they seemed to be inside a huge, hollow globe that simulated the midnight of space.
She looked around wonderingly, trying to understand what she saw. She did have some idea of the Turtle technology involved, because Captain Krake had explained it to her. The navigation system had to keep track of thousands of stellar reference points—most of them stars, but some of them actually distant external galaxies themselves—as benchmarks. Automatically "fingerprinting" each object by analyzing its spectrum, the system could consult its datastore and pinpoint the location of The Golden Hind anywhere within hundreds of light-years of the Turtle planet. She could see the results on the screen.
The view was not static. The star patterns were changing as she watched. The Milky Way and the Pleiades and a few giant stars stayed the same, but the burning Sun of Earth had long since dimmed behind them until she lost it. Slowly, the nearer stars crept past the ship and slid into new constellations.
Krake touched her shoulder. "We're almost there," he said, pointing. "See that object? That's the Turtle star. I'd better start calling the others so they can be here when we shift into mass-drive."
Sue-ling studied the frosting of stars in the area Krake had indicated. It wasn't rewarding. No particular object looked any great deal different from any other. "Well, it didn't take us long to get here," she observed. It wasn't until she noticed that he wasn't responding that she looked up and saw the expression on his face.
"It took seventy-three years," he said simply.
She swallowed, raising the back of her hand to her lips. "I —forgot," she whispered.
Krake nodded somberly. "It's easy to forget," he said. "But that's the hard fact. We're committed now. It's been seventy-three years since we took off, and most of the people we left behind arc dead now—and everything will be all changed, in ways we couldn't have guessed." He watched her expression for a moment, then said gruffly, "Tough idea to get used to at first, isn't it? Well, there it is." He leaned forward to the communicator again. "Excusc mc for a minute while I let the others know we're coming into mass-drive range."
Sue-ling found her eyes blurring as Krake spoke into the ship's communications system: "Marco? Daisy Fay? We're almost ready to power down from wave-drive. Report in, please."
Seventy-three years. . . . Sue-ling wasn't listening, barely noticed as he turned back to her. Seventy-three years.
What they had done, she saw at last, was one of the few truly irrevocable acts of her life.
Krake said, with sympathy, "It hits you hard at first, doesn't it? But here we are. I'll zoom in on the Turtle system so we can get a better look."
She forced herself to pay attention as Krake began to explain what she was looking at—anything to take her mind off those eternally lost years. There was, she saw as Krake pointed it out, one single pale fleck that began to stand out as that section of the sky swelled as though it were racing toward them. (Seventy-thru years!) Then she saw that the star was double. (And almost everyone dead! She shuddered and forced her mind to focus on what she was seeing.) Krake was pointing out that one member of the double was a hot blue point, the other a misty disk. He upped the magnification still more, and now the fuzzy disk showed thin blue plumes jutting from its hot blue-white center. It spun so fast—or seemed to—that her eyes could make out the motion, as the blue-lit plumes wound into spirals around it, joining into a wide ring of creeping fire.
"There's a black hole at the center of that," Krake said grimly. "You know what a black hole is? Sork does; we've talked about it. A black hole is the last cinder of a giant star that's gone supernova. What we see is the accretion disk around the black hole. Of course, you'll never see what's left of the star itself; that's why it's a black hole."
"Then what's that light coming from?"
"I told you. It's the accretion disk. Some matter gets trapped in the black hole's intense gravity field. Then the matter is torn into hot plasma as it falls closer to the hole—and that is really mean stuff, Sue-ling. The radiation from it would kill us, right through our shielding, if we went into orbit too close."
Sue-ling gazed at the frightening object, trying to take it in. "And the other star?" Even magnified, it was only a hotter, brighter point.
"That's a queer one, too. It's a neutron star, Sue-ling. It's more massive than our sun, but only about a dozen kilometers through. Probably it went supernova too, some time—they must have traded mass with each other until both went up. But that one was just a little smaller, so it didn't go all the way to black hole . . . not that either one of them is anything you want to get too close to."
She turned and looked up at him. "And the Turtles live there?"
"It's their home," he confirmed wryly. "You'd think nothing could survive in a system like that, wouldn't you? But the Turtles do. They love it." He reached for the controls again, saying, "Wait a minute—let's see if we can screen out the stars and get a look at their planet—"
As the screen blurred something touched Sue-ling on the back of her neck. Startled, she turned and saw the mech-woman, Daisy Fay McQueen. The face on her belly screen was smiling up at Sue-ling, and trailing behind Daisy Fay was her crewmate.
But Marco Ramos wasn't smiling. Both of his tentacled eyes were fixed on the Turtle star, as he said sharply, "What's the matter with the screens, Francis?"