Infinity Beach (24 page)

“I’d like very much to hear what you’re currently working on.”

Webley’s brow creased. “I thank you for your interest,
but I really am a bit pressed just now.” He gazed at her as if she were a recalcitrant child, and then he wished her good day and closed the door.

She bowed slightly, turned, and left. “So much for my charm,” she told Solly a minute later.

He grinned. “The temptress strikes out, huh?”

“I guess so. He looked annoyed.”

“Ham,” he told the AI, “start the mains. Prepare for departure.”

“Confirm,”
said Ham, in a female voice.

Kim frowned. They did
not
want to kidnap this guy.

“The six o’clock shuttle is in,” Solly said, responding to her unasked question. “If Moritami and the others are on it, they’ll be here any—” He stopped and pointed at one of the displays. Three men and a woman had appeared at the far end of the approach tunnel. “Speak of the devil—”

“Solly, what do we do?”

“We need something that’ll burn,” he said.

“Burn? Why?”

“Ask questions later. What have we got that’s flammable?”

Starships weren’t good places to look for combustibles. Clothes, panels, furniture. Everything was fireproof.

“Hold on a second,” he said. He got up and went into the mission control center. She heard him open the panel to the kitchen. Two minutes later she smelled smoke.

“Toast,” he grinned. “Twenty pieces. Now, go down and stand outside Webley’s room. When things start to happen, help him leave.”

God, this was going to be one of Solly’s finest moments. She started back down the passageway as a Klaxon began to sound. The intercom switched on. “This is the captain. There’s no reason to panic, but we have a fire in the forward compartments. All passengers please leave the ship immediately. This is the captain. I say again, we are not in immediate danger. Do not panic—”

Webley’s door opened and he put his head into the corridor, looked both ways, saw Kim and scowled. He was about
to say something when he spotted wisps of smoke leaking into the passageway behind her. The smell of burnt toast had become pretty strong.

“We’re on fire,” Kim said.

“For God’s sake, young woman,” he complained, “how could
that
happen?”

“Let’s talk about it later, Professor. This way out.” But he turned back into the room, threw open a suitcase and started scooping his clothes into it.

“You haven’t time for that,” Kim said, letting her voice rise. And then, inspired: “This whole place could blow at any time.”

That was enough for Webley. He threw the lid down, hefted the bag under one arm, grabbed some clothes, and banged out of the room. “Incompetent,” he snarled. “Everywhere I go, people are so goddamn incompetent!”

“This way, sir.” Kim pointed him to the boarding tunnel. He disappeared into it.

Outside, an alarm had begun to sound.

“All clear,” she told Solly.

“Good. Close the hatch.”

“How?”

“Let it go. I’ll do it from here. Come on up and strap in. We’ll be leaving in a minute.”

“But Webley hasn’t had a chance to get clear.”

“Is he in the tunnel?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll be fine. The tunnel seals automatically when we button up. Don’t worry about it.”

Moments later she slipped into the pilot’s room and sat down beside Solly. “It strikes me,” she said, “that when this is over, I’m going to owe apologies to a lot of people.”

“Including me,” he said.

Kim got up again and looked at the seat. “See.” She pointed. “You
can
see an imprint.”

“Control,” Solly told the mike, “This is
Hammersmith
. We have an emergency departure. Request instructions, please.”

“
Hammersmith
, Control. State the nature of your emergency. We just got a report of a fire.”

“Negative that, Control. The report resulted from a communication problem at this end.”

“What is your emergency?”

Kim reclaimed her seat and the harness came down around her shoulders.

“Taratuba’s false vacuum has gone premature.”

Kim looked at him, surprised, and mouthed
What?

“Wait one,
Hammersmith
.”

“Solly,” she said, “do they even know what Taratuba is?”

“I doubt it. It’s better that way. Fewer questions.”

She scanned the bank of screens, which provided a 360-degree view. They were free of encumbrance save for a forward utility line. All Solly had to do was make the disconnect up front and there was nothing to stop their leaving. “Why don’t we just go?” she asked.

“We could hit something,” he said. “And anyway somebody would immediately call the Patrol. Moreover, if we somehow escaped being jailed for theft, it would guarantee my loss of license.”

“
Hammersmith
, Control. Departure is authorized. Data is being fed now.”

Solly acknowledged, watched his array of lamps flicker with the download, and then spoke to the ship’s AI. “Ham, disconnect mooring and let’s go.”

“Complying,”
said the ship.

“
‘Let’s go’?
That’s all there is to it?
‘Let’s go’?
”

The ship began to back away from the Marlin facility.

“I guess I’ve just revealed a trade secret, Kim. And when we get where we’re going, I’ll tell it ‘okay.’”

“Seriously—?”

“Seriously, human pilots are only on board to deal with problems. Emergencies. And probably to soothe the concerns of passengers, who’ve never been happy with the idea of purely-automated vehicles.”

“Taxis are pure automation,” she said. “Nobody minds those.”

“You know how to fly the damned thing yourself if you have to.”

They were easing away from the orbiter, lining up with their marker stars.
“Acceleration will commence in one minute,”
said the AI.

“
Hammersmith
, Control.” It was a new voice, deeper, with authority.

“Go ahead, Control.”

“This is the supervisor. You are directed to return to the dock.”

“Solly.” Kim pointed at one of the displays, on which a long ominous greyhound of a ship was moving in close.

“I see it.”

“They know.”

“Sure they know. Our passenger has been talking to them.” He opened the mike: “Control, we are unable to comply.”

“Solly—”

“Ham,” he said, “proceed with programmed acceleration.”

“Proceeding.”

Kim felt a gentle push into her seat as the ship swung around to its heading and began to move forward.

“We’ll be okay, Kim,” he said.

The push became more pronounced and the station slid off the screens.

Another new voice, female, irritated: “
Hammersmith
, this is Orbital Patrol. You are directed to return to port immediately.”

“Hang on,” said Solly. Acceleration was increasing.

“We better make our jump, right?”

“The jump engines feed off the mains. We need to build more reaction before they’ll kick in.”

“How much? How long are we talking?”

“About twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes?”
That was ridiculous. “Damn Worldwide and its paneling. Solly, we don’t
have
twenty-five minutes.”

“
Hammersmith
, return to the station or we will take appropriate action.”

“Do they have any way of actually stopping us?”

“Short of blowing us up?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Only a Tursi field.”

“The damper.”

“Right. It would shut down our mains. But it’s a bluff.”

“How do you know?”

“Rev up an engine and then turn it off, just like that, you risk an explosion. Damn near a fifty-fifty chance. They won’t use it without getting permission first from the Institute. And that’ll take time. Anyway Agostino would never agree to it. He doesn’t want to lose a ship.”

The comm system was crowded with incoming voices: the Patrol warning them again to stand down; the supervisor at Marlin insisting they return; and, oddly, Webley, demanding what in God’s name did they think they were doing?

“Just relax,” Solly said, “and enjoy the ride. In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell me precisely where we’re going.”

“Zeta Orionus. Alnitak. Or rather, I want you to pick a spot twenty-seven and a fraction light-years from Alnitak.” She dug in her pockets and pulled out a data disk. “Here,” she said. “Put us anywhere on the bubble.”

“Alnitak,” he said. The easternmost star in the belt of Orion. “Why? A guess? Or do you know something you haven’t told me?”

“You remember asking if I knew how long the trip would take?”

“Sure. You gave me a fairly specific answer.”

“Forty days, seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes. It’s the total elapsed return-trip time on the
Hunter
logs.”

“The
bogus
ones?”

“Yes. But I couldn’t imagine any reason why they’d change the elapsed time from the originals. The time frame, if it’s correct, gives us Alnitak. And there’s something else.”
She showed him a blowup of Kane’s mural. “See this?” She pointed at the Horsehead.

“Yep.”

“It’s visible from Alnitak.”

The Patrol moved into a parallel course on their starboard side, at a distance of only a few hundred meters.

Solly shut down the comm system and the voices died. “Makes me nervous,” he said.

“You think that’s a good idea, right now?”

“Depends on whether you want to listen to the threats.”

He set the timer to count down to jump status. Kim stared at it, willing the numbers to hurry along.

They were still several minutes out when the AI announced an incoming transmission from a new source. From one of the satellites.
“From the Institute.”

“It’ll be Agostino,” said Kim.

“You want to talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “We’ll talk when we come back. When we have something to negotiate with.”

The patrol vessel was still there when power began to flow to the jump engines, and Solly took them out of their range.

Solly’s analysts thought the Hunter logs were accurate to the point where the vessel experienced engine trouble. Allow approximately a day or so for Kane’s repair work, and that puts Tripley and his party at Alnitak roughly February 17 or 18. Those estimates also fit with the timing of the return to Greenway. “If all that’s correct,” said Kim, “then getting proof should be easy.”

It was now January 28 in Seabright. Assuming February 17 as the base date for the event, for the contact between the
Hunter
and the celestials, and assuming further that radio transmissions would certainly have been involved, she had calculated precisely where the radio waves would be at this moment, and had derived an intercept course for the
Hammersmith
. All very simple.

“There’s really only one feasible scenario,” she told Solly. “They ran into another ship out there. That means there would have been at least an
attempt
at radio communication.”

“You’re hanging an awful lot on the fact that the turtle-shell showed up in the mural. There could be other explanations. They might have found a ground-based civilization.
Maybe preindustrial, no lights, no radio, nada. Just torches and the local equivalent of horses. In that case—”

“It couldn’t have happened that way,” she said. They were seated in the mission control center, chairs angled toward each other, drinking coffee.

“Why?”

“Alnitak’s too young, for one thing. It’s not ten million years old yet. So no local life. And it puts out too much UV. Millions of times what Helios does.”

“Oh.”

“Right. It would fry everything in sight. Anybody they ran into out there would have had to be star-travelers.”

A survey ship had looked at Alnitak two centuries before. As planetary systems went, it didn’t have much: one world, a captured gas giant far out in the boondocks.

“It’s been a long time for a radio transmission,” Solly said. “You get a lot of spread over three decades. FAULS is a good system, but it might not be good enough to pick up a signal that weak. Or to sort it out from the general babble.”

But Kim had spent time with the specs for the flexible array. “If it’s there,” she said, “we’ll find it.”

They spent the first day housekeeping, arranging their quarters, exploring the ship. Solly was already familiar with it, of course, but he enjoyed showing it off to Kim. She wondered whether her initial failure to be impressed with the vehicle might have insulted him. But it
did
remind her of the Institute’s Special Quarters, where non-VIP visitors were housed.

They wandered from floor to floor, and he demonstrated the features of the recreational facilities and the VR section. They inspected the two sets of engines, the mains, which propelled the
Hammersmith
through realspace, and the Transdimensional Interface, the jump engines. The TDI was small enough to hold in her hands.

Kim was pleasantly surprised to discover that the transition into hyper had come with no side effects.

She’d never experienced transdimensional flight as an
adult. She was aware, as she hadn’t been as a child, that some people got ill during the jump; that others experienced changes in perspective, that walls seemed less solid, that the grip of artificial gravity lessened or tightened, that people claimed to become aware of the thoughts of those around them. There were accounts of unearthly dreams and severe bouts of depression and of sheer exhilaration. Solly told her there was some truth to it. All interstellars, he said, carried a generous supply of antidepressants and sedatives. He had seen people stricken with severe headaches, stomach cramps, toothaches, all deriving from no discernible physical cause. “But it’s never been more than an irritant,” he said. “Like seasickness.

“Some of the effects, though,” he added, “can be eerie. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid. And I’ve seen other odd stuff. I remember a woman who thought she’d regressed to her childhood, and a man who claimed to have seen through to the end of his days. Alternate personalities show up sometimes. One elderly passenger swore she’d become possessed. Another insisted he’d been followed on board by a werewolf.”

“A werewolf?”

Solly’s blue gaze locked on her. “You haven’t been seeing anything out of the ordinary, have you?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” She was quietly proud of herself.

“Tell me about Alnitak.”

Kim pushed back in her chair. “It’s a class O. Pretty hot, about thirty-five thousand times as bright as Helios.”

“Wear your sunglasses.”

“I’d say. It has two companion stars, both a long way out, but close enough to ensure that planets will probably never form. Or if they do, that they’ll be unstable.”

“But you said there
is
a planet.”

“Captured,”
she reminded him.

“Alnitak.”
He tasted the word.

“From the Arabic for ‘girdle.’”

They took over the briefing room for their first onboard dinner and put out a few candles. The windows, had they
been
real
windows, could have revealed nothing other than the glow of the ship’s running lights, had Solly chosen to put them on. Instead he programmed a view of the Milky Way as it would have appeared to an approaching intergalactic vehicle.

The meal itself was quiet. Solly usually carried more than his share of the conversation, but he had little to say that evening. The candles and the wine and the galactic disk provided an exquisite atmosphere. The food was good. Yet Kim felt the weight of her decision, and worried that she might be wrong, that she might have overlooked something, that she might have destroyed Solly’s career. And her own. They were probably swearing out warrants at this moment. “I wish,” she said, “that I could come up with any kind of explanation why they would have kept it quiet. I mean, contact would be the story of the age.”

“Don’t know,” said Solly.

She looked up from a piece of corn. “We’ve more or less assumed that everybody feels the same way about celestials that we do. That everybody wants to find them if they’re out there. Except maybe Canon Woodbridge and probably the Council. But there might be a lot of people who’d prefer the status quo. Who’d just as soon we
not
discover that we have company.”

Solly’s face was framed by the candles. “I’m one of them,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid. Look, Kim, life is pretty good right now. We have everything we could possibly want. Security. Prosperity. You want a career, it’s there. You prefer lying around the beach for a lifetime, you can do that. What can celestials give us that we don’t already have? Except things to worry about?”

“It might be a way to find out who we are.”

“That’s a cliché. I know who I am. And I don’t really need philosophy from some
thing
that may in fact look on me as a potential pork chop. There’s a real downside with
this, especially considering your experience in the Severin. And I’m sorry, but I can’t see much
up
side. For you and me, maybe, if this pays off. But I think the human race, in the long run, would not benefit.”

She pushed back from her food and stared at him. “Considering how you feel, I can’t understand why you came.”

“Kim, if they’re out there, then it’s just a matter of time before we meet them. I don’t like it, and I’d stop it if I could. But it has the feel of inevitability about it. If it happens, it’ll be a big moment. I’d just as soon be there. And we’re probably better off if we know it’s coming.”

“Hunter instinct,” said Kim.

“How do you mean?”

“Hide in the bushes. Kill or be killed. Are those the kind of conditions you really think would exist between interstellar civilizations?”

“Probably not. What I said was, it
could
happen. And since things are pretty good right now, I can’t see why we’d want to change anything. Why take chances? Leave well enough alone.”

“Solly, why do you think we went to Mars?”

He dipped a roll into his soup, bit off a piece, and chewed it thoughtfully. “We went to Mars,” he said, “because we recognized that exploitation of the solar system would have long-term economic benefits.”

“You really think that was the motivation? Long-term economic benefits?”

“It’s what the history books say.”

“The history books say Columbus headed out because he wanted to establish trade routes to India.”

“Last I heard, that was the explanation.”

“It was a
cover
story, Solly. It was intended to help Isabella make the right decision. To hock her jewels, have an argument ready for her councilors, and at the same time to follow the call of her DNA.”

“The call of her DNA?” He looked amused. “You always did have a talent for poetry, Kim.”

She waited patiently while he finished his wine.

“So,” he asked at last, patting his lips with his napkin, “what was the call of her DNA?”

“It wasn’t trade routes,” said Kim.

“So what was it?”

“Outward bound,” she said. “Exploration. To set foot, either in person or by proxy, in places that have never been seen before.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Solly. “But we’ve done that. We’ve set foot in a lot of places over the last few centuries. What’s that have to do with celestials?”

“We’ve accepted the notion we’re alone.”

“We probably are.” Solly reached for the decanter and refilled their glasses. “Maybe there’s somebody out there somewhere, but they’re probably so far away it’ll never make a difference. Yes: for practical purposes, I think we can proceed as if we’re alone.”

“The problem with that,” she said, “is that we’ve become complacent and self-satisfied. Bored. We’re shutting down everything that made us worthwhile as a species.”

“Kim, I think you’re overstating things.”

“Maybe. But I think we need something to light a fire under us. The universe has become
boring
. We go to ten thousand star systems and they’re always the same. Always quiet. Always sterile.”

“Is that why Emily was on the
Hunter
? Is that the way she felt?”

“Yes,” said Kim. “She tried to explain herself to me when we used to go down to the beach.”

“You remember
that
?”

“She asked me if I knew why ships always traveled along the coast? Why they never put out to sea?”

“Oh,” said Solly. It was because there was nothing there. Just water for thousands of kilometers, until you’d rounded the planet and arrived at the western side of Equatoria. Back where you started.

“That’s where we are, Solly. On the beach, looking out at an ocean that doesn’t go anywhere. As far as we know.” Her
eyes slid shut. “But if there’s really nowhere to go, I don’t think we have much of a future.”

After dinner they watched
On the Run
, an irreverent chase comedy in which several unlikely characters discover they’re clones of some of history’s arch criminals and find themselves the targets of a desperate manhunt. An interactive version was available, but they were both tired and satisfied just to sit and watch.

She fell asleep toward the end and woke after midnight, alone in the room. The projector had shut itself off, Solly had apparently gone to bed, and she sat for a time staring at the Milky Way.

For meals, they eventually took over the mission control center. It was small and consequently more intimate than the dining area. They spread a tablecloth over one of the consoles and discovered it worked very nicely.

Solly varied the views in the windows. Sometimes she looked out at star fields or at generated worlds, sometimes at waterfalls or a mountainscape or even downtown Seabright.

“What’s it really like outside?” she asked.

“Utterly black,” he said. “No stars, of course. Ship’s lights seem to lose some of their intensity.”

“Anybody ever actually been outside during hyperflight?”

“No,” Solly said. “Not that I know of.”

There was no sense of movement in this environment, which seemed more like a condition than a
place
. Seven weeks to Alnitak. It would be a long time to spend cooped up with a single person. Even Solly.

Vessels traveling in hyperspace were completely cut off from the outside world. They could receive no sensor information, no communications, no data of any kind. Nor could they transmit. Solly could have brought them out to satisfy their curiosity as to whether the Taratuba mission had got off okay. He thought they’d have used the
Mac
. And they were curious whether the theft of the
Hammersmith
had been made public, whether the Institute was trying to communi
cate with them. But it would have taken time, they’d have had to adjust the clocks, and Kim would have had to correct the program to get the calculations right for the intercept. So they let it pass.

One of the more curious aspects of hyperspace was that time seemed to run at an indifferent rate. Timekeeping devices on a transdimensional flight always had to be reset later. Sometimes forward, sometimes back. No one knew why this was so, but fortunately the differential was never more than a bare fraction of a percent, so that it did not unduly interfere with navigation. This was essential because TDI flights could navigate only by dead reckoning.

They fell quickly into a routine. They ate breakfast whenever they got up, and took their other meals at regular hours, ending with a late-night snack. Kim read through the mornings, a wide diet that included political and scientific biographies. She devoured two classics that she’d been meaning to get to since college: Blackman’s
Beyond Pluto
, an account of the cultural changes which flowed from the penetration of distant systems; and Runningwater’s
Narrow Horizons
, a history of the decline and eventual collapse of organized religion. She added some novels and some essays. And, of course, she read extensively in her specialty.

After lunch during the early days of the flight they often played chess, but Solly won all the time so they gave that up and substituted poker, with three or four virtual opponents. And they participated in virtual seminars with Julius Caesar, Isaac Newton, Mikel Kashvady, and other classic personalities. One of the highlights of the early weeks came from watching Henry Mencken and Martin Luther talking past one another.