Rediscovery (2 page)

beautifully, so she was much in demand for impromptu recitals in the Rec Room as well as the regularly scheduled concerts.

“Well, there are certainly enough people to appreciate them,” Ysaye laughed.

“And we do have our reputation to maintain; they say we’re the only ship in the fleet where the Captain chose his chief engineer because he could play the oboe.”

Elizabeth chuckled. Captain Enoch Gibbons’ eccentricities were known

throughout the Empire’s fleet. Anyone on
his
crew, ship’s personnel or otherwise, was, of course, chosen for his skills, but Captain Gibbons always seemed to find skilled crewmembers who just happened to have a passion for music. When challenged over the matter of the engineer, he had allegedly argued that good starship engineers were turned out wholesale by the military colleges; but good oboe players, on the contrary, were rather rare—the oboe having been characterized popularly as “the ill woodwind nobody blows good.” Captain Gibbons was also an opera buff, and if anyone on board did not have a fair knowledge of the Italian, German, and French languages, it was not from lack of exposure to at least some of their vocabulary. Not a bad thing, really, Ysaye reflected, when month followed month without planetfall. Not like having a ship full of amateur athletes going crazy trying to keep fit—or one full of inveterate games players who might turn competition into quarreling. At least on Gibbons’ crew, the personnel could find a harmony in music that they might otherwise lack as the strain increased with the length of the voyage.

“Nothing wrong with giving concerts, either,” David told her. “You’re a fine

singer, and you’re doing your part to keep us all from chewing our nails from boredom.”

“Good enough,” Elizabeth agreed diffidently. “No opera singer though.”

“Since I don’t really care for opera that much, I don’t mind,” he said. “And I

doubt if there are many of the crew who do, except for the Captain. Although I admit that anyone who actually hates it won’t last long on this ship.”

“Like your friend Lieutenant Evans?” Elizabeth inquired, with a wrinkle of her

nose. She didn’t like Evans; his manner put her off, although David liked him well enough. There was something vaguely disturbing about the Lieutenant, although Ysaye had once said dismissively, “Oh, don’t worry about Evans; he has a great career as a used aircar salesman ahead of him.” Somehow Elizabeth could not see him that

cavalierly.

“I don’t know about that,” David protested. “Yes, he makes rude comments about

opera, certainly, but that’s just his style. He talks like that about nearly everything.” He shook his head. “Anyhow, what on earth are we talking about music for, with a new planet to explore in a few days?”

“Because your new planet is a maybe, and it’s
days
away from us, and the crew concert is a certainty, I suppose,” Elizabeth answered with a sigh. “It’s hard to think of anything but the routine we’ve had when it’ll be days before we can even get close enough to get some decent pictures of the place. I promised my department I’d give them the low-down on the new planet, as soon as there was anything to tell; but if there isn’t, I’d better go. I’m due on duty.”

“All right, then, love,” he agreed, kissing her quickly. “See you later.”

David and Elizabeth left for their respective posts, and Ysaye turned back to her console. But instead of keying in anything which could only be answered by

“insufficient data,” she sat quietly, pondering the puzzle of the inhabited planet.

Who, or what, could those inhabitants be? Perhaps indigenous pre-space peoples,

in which case there would probably be no sign of civilization visible from orbit, at least not without a lot of clear sky for their optical telescopes to peer down through.

It
could
even be a lost colony, one of those founded from one of the pre-Empire Lost Ships. That would be fascinating, although Ysaye hadn’t heard of any of them out this far.

Yet,
she told herself. Just because no one had found one —well, that could be because no one had been looking in the right place.

One had been found only last year, and some of the really old Lost Ships seemed

to have gone amazingly far, the ones launched a couple of thousand years ago, before the Terrans had learned how to set up a ship for tracking. Ships lost after that were picked up within a couple of years. So if there
was
a Lost Ship colony here, it would certainly be one of the very early ones, on its own since long before the Empire.

On the other hand, even if her hunch was wrong and the place was uninhabited—

not that she really thought it was, but until she had hard evidence it was a good idea to consider all possibilities—it was a good location for a transfer point spaceport, right near where the spiral arms of the galaxy joined, give or take a billion miles or so. So as long as it was habitable, if David and Elizabeth were willing to exercise their secondary specialties instead of their primaries, there would be work enough here for them for a lifetime, provided the Powers That Were decreed that such a spaceport should be built here.

The chime for shift change sounded just as the chief technician for the next watch came in, striding easily across the gravity-gradient to the console terminal. Ysaye logged out, he logged in, and she left the computer room.

As she went down the corridor she found herself stretching aching muscles, and

realized that her shoulders, arms, and hands were cramped and stiff. Obviously she had spent more time curled up over finicky little adjustments in the core than she had realized. She decided to wander around for a bit before going to her quarters.

As she passed the door marked “Port Viewer” she decided to stop in. “Come to

have a look at our new system?” the young man there inquired as she entered. He was one of the ship’s scientific crew, Ysaye knew, so he wouldn’t stay on the planet unless they decided to set up a spaceport here. His current job was to survey the planet as much as possible before they landed on it—and right now all their information was coming from the probe. “Thanks for finding the glitch, Ysaye, it was driving us all crazy,” he continued. “Or rather, crazier.”

She shook her head dismissively. “Nothing special,” she said diffidently. “If I

hadn’t found it, someone else would have.”

The young man gave her a skeptical look, but didn’t comment. “I suppose you

know there’s at least one habitable,” he continued, “the fourth. The fifth maybe, but that’s stretching it a bit—the fifth is mostly frozen; ice caps all year, and the year’s five Standard years long. Four is just barely habitable though: pretty rough climate, but carbon-based life-forms could live there. No major unfrozen seas, one continent. I wouldn’t want to live there, and I doubt you would either; it’s cold as Dante’s hell. But it’s definitely within limits.”

“Not bad, Haldane,” Ysaye said—then grinned. “Rehearsing for your report to the

captain?”

“You guessed it,” John Haldane replied cheerfully. “Oh— did I mention that it has four moons, each a different color?”

She shook her head at him, and made a
tsk
-ing
sound. “No, you forgot them; you need to organize your material better. Isn’t four moons a record for a planet this small?”

He nodded, half of his attention on his console. “You may be right; if a planet has more than that, it’s usually a big fuzzy, and the moons are planetlike. Like Jupiter in the old solar system. I forget how many moons they finally decided it had; seemed to capture every bit of flotsam that came anywhere near it. But there were at least eleven major ones.”

Ysaye peered down at the screen. The object of all their perusal was singularly

unprepossessing at this range. “Four moons. Hmm. Wonder how it managed that?”

Haldane shrugged. “Who knows? That’s not my specialty. I think Bettmar’s World

has five, but there is a limit: mass of the combined moons must be less than that of the planet for a habitable. Usually less than a fifth its combined weight. Also there is a limit to size; too small and they escape the primary and become asteroids.” He gestured at the view. “The white one there is just about at the lower limit for size.”

“Elizabeth was saying something about how much material there would be for

ballads on a world with four moons,” Ysaye told him.

Haldane adjusted the focus, and the white moon all but leapt out of the screen at them. “At a guess, I’d say they must do strange things to the natives’ mythology, if there are any natives, that is. With four moons, I’d say the concept of monotheism wouldn’t have much chance of occurring! They must look like something from the surface of the planet—all different colors. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Definitely anomalous.”

Ysaye narrowed her eyes and tried to make out more details of the planet itself, but it was a cloud-sheathed enigma. “Are they really different colors, or is it just some effect of the sun that makes them look that way?”

Haldane shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine; I never saw anything

like—oh, I said that. I know one thing though,” he added. “I’ll bet that no matter how advanced the natives are, they still play a substantial part in whatever religion there may be down there. Moons always do.”

“Do you know if we’re going to land on any of them?” Ysaye asked.

“Probably we’ll want a weather station on one of them,” he said. “That would be

the first step in any case. And if it’s a pre-space aboriginal culture, that’s about all we can do, observe the weather. We wouldn’t be allowed to affect anything they do;

primitive people have to be left to evolve in their own way.”

“If there’s any kind of culture down there, just landing on the planet would affect them,” Ysaye pointed out.

“True,” Haldane said blithely, “but anything we do before we make an official

evaluation of them doesn’t count. My God! Look at that!” He broke off suddenly,

fussing with his instruments. “No, I can’t focus any closer, damn it—the clouds down there are something awful.”

“What is it?” Ysaye leaned over his shoulder for a closer look. “Signs of life? A beacon saying ‘We’re here, come and get us’?” When he didn’t answer, she added,

flippantly, “A giant alien advertisement sign?”

“Nothing so definite,” Haldane replied, “Great Wall of China effect—but that was a deliberately created structure. I suspect this one is a natural formation.”

“Like what?” she asked. “What kind of formation would be big enough to see

from this far away? The probe isn’t even in orbit yet!”

“A glacier,” he said. “Something bigger than any glacier in any of Terra’s ice ages.

One which goes halfway round the world. A wall around the world.”

A wall around the world? That certainly caught her imagination. “Who could have

built it?”

“No one; it’s a natural phenomenon,” he said positively.

“A natural formation?” she replied skeptically.

“Why not?” he retorted. “Earth’s Great Wall can be seen, under proper

magnification, from the moon. There was even some debate about whether the Great Wall of China was made that way on purpose, and then the society that built it dwindled down to pre-technical—or do I mean post-technical?”

“Whichever you mean,” Ysaye said repressively, “I wouldn’t advise you to run

that particular theory past the Captain. Haven’t you heard his standard speech about ‘the pseudoscience of psychoceramics’?”

“Several times,” Haldane admitted, wincing. “All right, then: while I am

assuming
this glacier is natural, given the hideous climate down there, I can’t be
certain
whether this glacier is natural, made by resident Intelligent Beings, or left over from a previous or visiting society of IBs. For all I know, it could be the equivalent of a school science project for the proverbial bug-eyed monster. Or even an art project.”

“All right, enough theories,” Ysaye laughed. “Any signs of travel on any of the

moons?”

He shook his head. “Nothing obvious. Nothing the probe can pinpoint, anyway.

We left footprints and assorted garbage on ours, but it’s too soon to tell about this one. If we really search, we might find a stray beer can or so, and that’s proof of a sort. Ah, look! The clouds are clearing!”

He fussed with the instruments until the glacier was neatly centered in the viewer.

“At least this will serve for a landing marker, although the terrain there might be fairly rough and mountainous. There’s a higher oxygen content than normal, so the hyper-Himalayas there would still be climbable, believe it or not. If you like that sort of thing.

Personally, I think if God had wanted us to climb mountains, He’d have given us hooves and pitons instead of hands and feet.”

“Climbable by what?” Ysaye asked dubiously. “Do you think the planet’s

inhabited?”

Haldane shrugged. “Can’t tell from here. Unless it’s heavily industrialized, we

couldn’t see anything from out here anyway, and it doesn’t seem to be industrialized. If we find it’s inhabited, we may have to set up a weather station on one of the moons and go home without disturbing them.”

“And if they’re a Lost Colony?”
Why did I ask that?
she wondered. She had already dismissed the idea once, yet here it was again, cropping up and making her feel vaguely disturbed.

“I don’t know,” he said, uncertainly. “There are no real rules for dealing with Lost Colonies. Every time we’ve run into one, the situation has been different. They’re us—

and yet, they’re not us, if you get my meaning.”

“Not really,” Ysaye replied. “What are the odds, though?”

Haldane shook his head. “It’s really unlikely; but I understand there are a couple of ships that are still unaccounted for. It’s funny to think if it is, we’ll only be legends to them. Or maybe a religion—my, I wonder how
that
would mix in with four moons!

Would we be gods returning, I wonder, or something horrible out of the Utter Night?”