Emprise (29 page)

But no quick answer was expected. In the strange milieu of light-years and relativistic velocities, it would take the signal some seventy-five days to reach the alien ship.

Even were the message detected and answered immediately, which no one counted on, they could not possibly receive a reply until very near the end of the outbound deceleration phase of the intercept. More likely, they would not hear anything until after turnover, when the two ships would be less than five light-days apart and both inbound.

Nevertheless, with the activation of the beacon a leitmotif of rising expectations succeeded the regime of simple coping.

By the start of the velocity dump, the anticipation was almost palpable. But at a half-gee, the ship offered a completely new environment, and Charan was thankful for the diversion which relearning how to move through and work in it offered.

The diversion did not last long enough. By turnover,
Pride of Earth
was gripped by a permanent tension. With everyone aboard aware that an answer to their beacon could come at any time, all except Joanna were sleeping less and spending most of their extra waking hours on the bridge. To be only 25 billion kilometres from the alien ship was to be within spitting distance psychologically, as though they should be able to see it against the curtain of stars.

Counter to form, Wenyuan displayed a wry sort of cheer, as though he were both buoyed by the imminent meeting and at the same time amused by it. Rankin grew irascible, apparently overwhelmed by the burden of the experimental program instead of overjoyed by the opportunity to carry it out. Joanna’s self-imposed, isolation deepened as she readied herself for the rapture to come.

Then, three days after turnover, the Senders sent an answer of sorts: their own beacon fell silent.

From the timing of it, Charan could only take the event as an acknowledgement that
Pride of Earth
’s message had been received. With their open call answered, the Senders had rightly decided to waste no more energy broadcasting it. But when no new message came on its heels, Major Wenyuan lost his cheeriness.

“We told them where we’d be and when,” Wenyuan worried aloud. “But now we have no way of knowing where they’ll be.”

“They’ll be where we expect,” Charan said.

. “We could ask them to resume transmitting.”

“We could. But it would be ten days until they could do anything about it for us, and by then we’ll be nearly at meet-point. I tell you again, these are not fighter planes which can wheel about the sky at will. Both ships are committed to their courses and any significant change would light up Dr. Rankin’s instruments with the energy that would be evolved. Don’t worry, Major,” Charan said with a half smile. “We haven’t come all this way just to miss them—nor they us. They’ll keep our date.”

“We should do more than trust to that,” Wenyuan grumbled. “If you or Dr. Rankin cares to start a search program with the telescanner, you have my blessing.”

At Wenyuan’s insistence such a program was begun, though Rankin was a reluctant party to it. Every hour they scanned the Sender’s ship’s predicted position for a visible object, a process which took five minutes. Every twelve hours, tiny scanned all the positions it might have achieved since the termination of the beacon, a process which took nearly an hour.

They were so engaged when, three days from meetpoint and with no forewarning at all, Joanna came to Charan’s cabin and asked him to make love to her.

At first it was nothing but self-disclosure, a plea for someone to listen from someone with something to say.

“You know that I was chosen for this because they thought I was a good person, maybe even a blessed person, even though I never shared that feeling. But I went along because I thought that being blessed was maybe something that you were, not something that you felt. The First Scion said that a lamp could not know how bright it was because all the light flowed outward.

“They sent me because they thought I was a good example of their faith. And maybe I am. But shouldn’t I be something more than that? Shouldn’t I also be a good example of what a human being can be? Is one the same as the other?”

Charan said nothing.

“There’s so little joy in the Book of Deeds,” she burst out in protest. “It’s full of stories of people who had one only part of their lives in order. They were right with God, but they still let themselves be cold or selfish or cruel to other people. They lived by the faith but they didn’t learn from it.

“Like me.

“Only part of me is alive. Someone killed the rest in a hotel room in Chicago and I never troubled myself to bring it back to life. I told myself I felt no anger and believed it, that I wasn’t even changed by what happened. It wasn’t true. When Major Wenyuan treated me as though that part of me were alive, I got angry at him as if there were something wrong with him for thinking so or for having that part alive in him. ”

“Did you know, they wrote up my story for the Book of Deeds? It’s the very last one in it. I don’t know who wrote it. It wasn’t me, and it isn’t the way I told it. They sanitized it, took away all the rough edges. Reading it didn’t touch me, not my memories or my feelings. It was as though I were reading about something that happened to someone else, a someone else that I didn’t even particularly care about.

“Someone like I used to be.” Charan remained silent. Joanna did not need his advice; she needed a sounding board so that she could hear her own.

“I have to find that lost part of myself and take joy in it again. I have to be whole or I won’t be able to stand in the light. I can’t be like a cardboard wise man from a nativity set, one-dimensional. What if someone wants to see the other side?”

“What, then?” Charan asked cautiously.

She paused and took a deep breath.

“I need you to touch me. I need to touch you.”

Charan looked away from her to hide his surprise and did not answer right away. “What would the First Scion think of that, or does that matter at this point?” he asked gently.

“I think he would approve,” she said slowly. “It was important to him that I not hate my attackers. But even if he disapproved, I’ve come to understand that there’s more to being right with God than being right with any one church. Only those who hate the way God made them can find anything noble in chastity. Sex should be a celebration of God’s kindness to us.”

She unzipped the long center zipper of her flight jumpsuit and slipped it off her shoulders. “I can take the lead if you want, but I would rather just share.”

He smiled at last and opened his arms to her. They celebrated, at first tentatively, then tenderly, then fiercely. For the first two, an eye for impending collisions sufficed to overcome the novelty of weightlessness. For the last, they found the confines of Charan’s wall-mounted sleeping bag more accommodating.

They were still there, cradling each other in the afterglow, when Wenyuan burst in. Joanna’s discarded jumpsuit floating free in the compartment said everything. The look he gave Joanna seared her. But the anger passed quickly from Wenyuan’s face, to be replaced by an uncharacteristically vulnerable expression.

“Come when you can,” he said numbly. “Dr. Rankin has spotted the alien ship.”

For all the use that had been made of it during the outbound leg, mod E might as well have been sealed with a time lock. But then, none of its three compartments offered much utility. Had
Pride of Earth
set off with its planned complement of twelve and five-module design, claustrophobia and cabin fever would have made mod E a refuge—open space where no one lived, no one worked, and privacy might be had.

The aftmost compartment was crowded with the hardware needed to blend up to a dozen gases into a specialized atmosphere, then heat, cool, pressurize, or humidify the mixture as required. The central compartment, smallest of the three and the location of the single hatch connecting mod E with the core of the ship, boasted a computer terminal, storage for a waldoid and its supplies, and little else.

The meeting chamber took up the forward half of mod E. It was divided in two by a deceptively strong transparent wall capable of withstanding a fifteen-atmosphere differential between the human side and the Sender side. In the Sender half, a hull hatch led to a flexible ship-to-ship transfer tunnel.

Forced by Rashuri to make mod E part of the ship, Driscoll had determined to make it useful, designing three scenarios for contact with the Senders around it. Mounted in the dividing wall was a pressure hatch, allowing the Sender end to be used as an airlock. In the most probable scenario, Charan or Wenyuan would don the waldoid and jet across to the alien ship, carrying the self-powered communications link and leaving it there.

Alternately, or possibly at a later juncture, a member of the crew might use the transfer tunnel to go aboard the Sender vessel. Despite official expectations and technical provisions to the contrary, the use of the tunnel to bring a Sender aboard was considered both less likely and less desirable.

But even this close to meetpoint, mod E sat largely empty and silent. At times Joanna would go into the meeting chamber to pray, and Rankin had spent several hours conducting a test of the atmospheric system just after turnover. Other than those intrusions, mod E simply waited for its time.

Now, with the Sender ship spotted, its time had come. Rashuri had had more than Eddington’s followers in mind when he shepherded the idea of a meeting module through the gauntlet of scientific ridicule. Now, before Charan joined the others on the bridge, there was a small task to be performed at the mod E terminal.
logon user 00116
, he typed. The use of the extra zeroes told the operating system not to echo the transaction to the bridge or lab terminals. That such a function existed appeared nowhere in the general documentation.
ready run meetpoint password protected command
, replied the operating system.
enter password
.

Charan had chosen a phrase which would serve as both a cynical remembrance and a cautionary reminder.
fool
’s
mate
.
meetpoint enabled
, the OS replied as it reached deep into the ship’s autonomic systems to alter how they functioned. For the most part, the changes were anticipatory, readying new powers for when they might be needed.

In the case of communications, the change was immediate;
meetpoint
created a partition in memory and began to redirect into it all transmissions intended for Unity. Like its approaching counterpart,
Pride of Earth
abruptly fell mute, though the homeworld would not know it for nearly a year and Charan’s companions would not know it unless and until he chose to tell them.

His tools for the task ahead in place, Charan then hastened to the bridge.

At first glance, he saw nothing but the now-familiar redshifted starfield astern displayed on the bridge window. But by following the rapt gaze of Joanna and the hard stare of Wenyuan, he was able to spot a small blurred disc among the pinpoint stars. Joanna seemed to be trying to will it into greater revelations; Wenyuan seemed to be wishing it out of existence.

“Range?” Charan asked.

“Two point eight light-hours,” said Rankin, who was hunched over the telescanner controls. “About the distance from the Sun to Uranus.”

“Nice work,” Charan said appreciatively.

Rankin shook his head. “I didn’t seriously expect to see it until late tomorrow. But it stands out against the infrared background like a candle in a snowstorm.”

“How big
is
it?” Charan asked with growing alarm.

“Can’t tell until it’s closer,” Rankin said softly. “It’s less massive than the Jupiter star, but that’s no comfort. It could be
very
big. It’s certainly ten times the size of
Pride of Earth
.”

“When you cannot fight, the size of your enemy hardly matters,” Wenyuan said dourly. Charan rubbed his eyes. “I wonder why they haven’t answered our beacon.”

Wenyuan ticked off answers on his fingers. “They aren’t receiving it—they didn’t understand it—they aren’t equipped to answer—they prefer not to answer. Take you choice.”

“We’re still transmitting our message?”

“Yes,” said Rankin.

“I don’t doubt they received and understood it,” Charan said grimly. “And we know they are capable of responding.”

“Yes,” agreed Wenyuan. “They have chosen to keep us ignorant. The question is why.”

With the Sender ship still moving significantly faster than the accelerating
Pride of Earth
, its image grew steadily in size and detail. As the ship’s profile became more defined, it became more puzzling. The forward end appeared to be little more than a blunt, featureless disc; presently concentric rings and radial seams were visible on it, as well as an unidentifiable feature at its exact center.

Of the rest of the ship they could see little, in part because of its near head-on approach and in part because the disk was of greater diameter and masked the rest. Only in the last thirty hours before meetpoint, as the two ships closed and the angle of view changed with what seemed excruciating slowness, could they grasp the visitor’s true shape and dimensions.

Each drew the same conclusion, independently but inevitably: the Sender ship was a colossus.

The bow disc was nearly one hundred metres in diameter.
Pride of Earth
’s full length would span but a third of its face. Behind the disc the ship stretched for more than four hundred metres, rivaling the largest ships which had ever cruised Earth’s oceans. In its many-compartmented superstructure the alien vessel was more capacious than all of humankind’s spacecraft, from
Vostok I
through
Pride of Earth
, combined.

Joanna was unsurprised by the size of her Creator’s chariot. On the contrary, she found its scale a confirmation of her beliefs and was buoyant over the nearness of her Lord—a bare ten million miles, less than a light-minute physically, far less than that emotionally.

Nor did she concern herself with the host’s radio silence, placing her trust instead in the two-hour, twelve-language prayer of greeting she had memorized before departure. The sight of her tethered in mid-air before the mod E terminal window, chanting with head bowed, fast became a familiar one.

But to the others the Sender ship was a presence both ominously large and uncomfortably close. Rankin reacted as though the ship was a slap at all of Earth science’s achievements, and, quite unaware of it, spent considerable mental energy trying to escape the feelings of inferiority that the sight of it brought to him.

“SPS One is much larger, of course,” he said aloud in one early sally.

“SPS One is a kite,” Wenyuan said derisively. “That”—he pointed to the screen—“that is a dreadnought.”

Chastened, Rankin did not even give voice to a fleeting thought that
Pride of Earth
was the faster and more nimble ship. He did not know that it was true, and if it were, he was not convinced it mattered.

But a few hours later, Rankin made a more encouraging discovery. He had busied himself on the bridge, studying the Sender ship’s structure as closely as the telescanner would permit, trying to identify what type of propulsion it employed. The irregular hull offered no clue, and he kept coming back to the enormous bow disc, isolated from the rest of the ship by five massive cylinders in a circle—

“Orion!” he exclaimed suddenly.

Charan looked up. “What?”

“Dyson’s Orion. Oh, not his design, but the same idea. That’s why it showed up at the distance it did. The disc must be filthy with radioactive debris.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A nuclear-pulse starship. It accelerates by exploding small nuclear devices against a pusher plate. Very crude, but the numbers always looked promising. There’s the proof of it, out there. That’s the pusher plate out front, with an aperture for delivering the fuel pellets at the center. They’re flying backward, either for protection against micrometeoroids or in preparation for deceleration.”

“And those columns behind the disc—”

“Transfer the impulse smoothly to the ship.”

“Were the numbers promising enough to allow a .15g acceleration?”

“Easily.” He shook his head. “It’s a real brute-force approach, but yes, it’s capable.” Rankin looked happy. “Could a ‘brute-force’ starship reach these velocities?” Rankin’s face fell, and he reached for a calc pad. “Only if they were capable of engineering a much more efficient design than Dyson was,” he admitted reluctantly. From that point on, faced with a choice between admitting his own error or human inferiority, Rankin lapsed into inconclusive ambivalence.

Wenyuan was a man without purpose, shaken thoroughly by having been forced to admit to the inadmissible. The Senders were not a Consortium faction, they were real—and, to judge by their vessel, unimaginably powerful. Wenyuan was emotionally disabled by having at last come up against a force which he could by no twist of calculation imagine overwhelming, a situation he felt powerless to manipulate.

As a consequence, he prowled the ship restlessly, as though mere random motion might bring him in contact with some outlet for his frustration. And he plagued the others with questions, as though hopeful that some unrevealed fact could reverse his grim appraisal.

For Charan, the realization was dawning that he had agreed to this final request from his father without truly grasping the dimensions of the task. He had treated it as a time-consuming errand, rather than the consummate individual challenge it now promised to be.

Earth and any support the Consortium might represent were now very remote, and it finally bore in on Charan that, no matter how prescient and detailed their instructions might be, it fell to his ship alone, and to him alone aboard it, to carry out those instructions. But when he looked at the Sender ship, he wondered how anyone who had not seen it could hope to anticipate the manner and motives of its builders.

From the moment the Sender beacon fell silent, the same sophisticated receiver that had been dedicated to listening to it listened instead for its resumption. The receiver took its input from a directional antenna pointed at the Sender ship’s presumed position and directed the signal to a pattern recognition routine in the computer regulating ship communications.

For more than two weeks it had scanned the spectrum without once detecting an emission coherent enough to warrant even a false alarm. As the days passed its failure to do so drew the curiosity of and then the concern of Charan, who probed its workings for possible faults. There were none; it was simply that, save for the fading echo of the big bang and the murmurs of distant suns, the ether was silent. There was nothing to detect.

But three hours from meetpoint, an influx of radio energy tickled the receiver into life. The computer studied the string of bits passed to it and pronounced it interesting. A moment later alarms sounded on the bridge, where Charan and Rankin were listlessly playing chess, and throughout the ship.

“Here we go,” said Rankin, galvanized out of his ennui. “It’s the recognition pattern we asked them to use.” He bent forward over the com display, his brow furrowed in concentration. “But there’re two parallel signals, and they’re way up the spectrum from their beacon—VHF band. One’s using frequency modulation—but I’ve never seen—”

He stopped short and cocked his head at an angle. “It’s a bloody telly broadcast, with an FM subcarrier.”

Wenyuan appeared in the pas sway at that moment. “From the Senders?”

“Yes. Where’s Joanna?”

“Communing. What are they saying? Why aren’t you listening to it?” he demanded.

“About twenty more seconds on the recognition pattern, then it’ll start. You won’t know what it means until the computer tells us, though,” Rankin said. “I can’t believe they’re sending broadcast video. I don’t think there’s any way we can look at it. No one ever thought—”

“I don’t care,” Wenyuan snapped. ‘Turn on the damn speaker.” At that moment the speaker hissed to life as the communications routine noted the beginning of the message.

Greetings, rocket ship
Pride of Earth.

The hair on the back of Charan’s neck stood erect. Wenyuan shivered as though suddenly chilled. Rankin gaped, mouth half-open. In mod E, Joanna pressed her eyes closed and hugged herself fiercely.

We of the Jiadur are made happy by your presence and your welcome, We are grateful for your companionship
.

“By the Chairman’s book—” breathed Wenyuan. “Of course! They’re trying to answer the way they first heard from us,” Charan said, leaning forward.

They fell silent as the message continued:
Our long journey has been with one purpose, to end at long last all fences between us. We have grown old with waiting and beg an end to waiting
.

We ask for,a meeting between us so that homage may be paid to the Founders and all that has been held in trust may be reclaimed
.

We await your consent
.

The subsequent conversation on the bridge was energetic and disjointed. “An evaluation on that voice?” Charan asked. “Someone get Joanna in here.”

“Artificially generated, of course. Possibly reedited from recordings of our broadcasts to them,” Rankin offered.

“The language is passable English broadcast standard, like the original beacon,” said Wenyuan. “The use of ‘rocket ship’ would seem to date it to the 1950’s.”