She recalled Rudy’s comment when they had asked whether he planned on making the flight. This is going to be remembered as the Silvestri mission. But they’re going to remember the crew, too. And I like the idea of having my name associated with yours. “I think we should continue,” she told him. “Taking the body home accomplishes nothing. He wouldn’t want us to turn back.”
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
Matt knew Hutch was right, that he wasn’t really responsible for Rudy’s death. And the knowledge helped. But in the end he also knew that if he’d performed better, Rudy would still be alive. And there was no getting around that.
He refused the meds she suggested. Taking them would have been an admission of something. They all stayed on board the McAdams the night of the ceremony, huddled together, herd instinct. Antonio told him in front of Hutch and Jon that it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d reacted differently. “I jumped into him, too, and nothing you did would have stopped that. When that snake head showed up my reflexes took over, and all I could think of was to get out of there. So stop beating yourself up.”
During his years as a pilot, Matt had never faced a day like this. He’d never lost a passenger, had never even seen one in danger. He’d always thought of himself as a heroic type. Women had automatically assumed he was a couple of cuts above ordinary men. Antonio, he’d known from the start, was ordinary. If there was anybody who’d been run-of-the-mill, an average middle-aged guy, it was Antonio.
But at the critical moment, Antonio had grabbed the gun and blown the serpent away. He’d stood up while Matt flinched. That fact would be hard to put behind him.
Matt couldn’t sleep. He kept replaying the sequence over and over. What he remembered most vividly was that there’d been no place to hide, that he feared the creature would swallow him whole. Gulp him down like a piece of sausage.
He got up to use the washroom. Hutch must have been awake as well because moments after he returned to his compartment there was a soft knock at the door.
“Matt, are you okay?” She was still in her uniform.
“My God,” he said, “don’t you ever go to bed?” It was after three.
“I’m reading.”
“Couldn’t put it down?”
“Nope. It’s Damon Runyon.”
“Who?”
“Twentieth century.” She smiled. “You’d like him.”
He got his robe and joined her in the common room. She made coffee, and they talked about Runyon’s good-hearted gangsters, and the black hole at Tenareif, and whether they should start tomorrow on the next leg of the flight. Jim broke in to report that the samples brought back from the tower and the buried building—he had analyzed the tabletop piece to which the book had been frozen—indicated that both structures were about three hundred years old.
That brought up another question: The signal received at Cherry Hill had been transmitted fifteen thousand years ago. The space station went adrift, got knocked out of orbit, whatever, also in ancient times. But they’d still had a functioning civilization within the last few hundred years. What had happened to them?
Maybe the same thing that had happened at Makai? They’d learned how to live too long? Got bored?
“No,” said Hutch. “This feels more like a catastrophe.”
“An omega?”
“That would explain the fused circuits on the station. A few good bolts of lightning.”
The conversation inevitably wandered back to Rudy, but it didn’t touch on Matt’s role in his death. They were still there at five, when Jon came out to see what the noise was.
“Rehearsing for Guys and Dolls,” Matt said.
They stayed in orbit two days, making maps and taking pictures of the world. Meanwhile they thawed the book and gave it to Jim. He analyzed it and reported that he was able to translate some of the material. “Matt was right. It was a hotel. The book is a listing of services, of menus, of the contents of the hotel library, which seem to have consisted of both books and VR. And of attractions available in the area. You were right also that the place was a center for skiing.”
“Great,” said Matt. “That’s what he died for? A hotel package?”
“There’s more. More difficult to translate, but seemingly unconnected with the hotel. I’ve been able to do some translation, but the overall meaning tends to be elusive.”
“Explain.”
“Let me give you an example.”
“Okay.”
“‘The sea is loud at night, and there are voices in the tide. At another time, in another place, the moon did not speak. We were amused.’”
He stopped and they looked at one another. “Is that it?” asked Jon.
“That is a single piece of text, separated from the others.”
Jim put the lines on-screen. Matt frowned at it. “‘The moon did not speak’?”
“Are you sure you have it right?” asked Hutch.
“Reasonably certain. The word appears several times in the hotel directory. ‘If you need something, speak to any of the service people.’ ‘Speak the word and we will respond.’ And so on.”
“We might need more time with the translation,” said Jon.
The moon did not speak.
Did not.
It was hard to miss the past tense.
“What are you thinking, Hutch?” asked Matt.
“I don’t think ‘did not speak’ quite captures it.”
Jon looked baffled. “How can you make any kind of sense out of a talking moon?”
She focused on the screen:
At night the sea is very loud,
And voices ride the tide.
At another time, in another place,
Beneath the silent moon,
We laughed together.
“My God,” said Matt.
Jon nodded. “It’s a poem.”
Jim reported other structures under the snow near the landing site. “More towers,” he said. “Upslope.”
They nodded to each other. The rest of the ski lift.
They broke the translation effort down to a system. Jim provided the most literal rendition possible, and Hutch interpreted as best she could. Sometimes it became necessary to infer meaning, as in the case of the adjective in
…The relentless river
Carrying us toward the night.
It might have been lovely, or idyllic, or any of countless other possibilities. But the context provided evidence for a good guess.
One line was straight out of The Rubaiyat:
…This vast gameboard of nights and days.
The poems seemed primarily, almost exclusively, concerned with lost love and early death. They were scattered throughout the book, located perhaps between a description of the hotel restaurant and an advertisement that might have had to do with sexual services.
The Preston AI broke in. “Hutch.”
“What do you have, Phyl?”
“There are three omega clouds in the area. Outbound at a distance of 1.8 light-years. Moving toward NGC6760.”
“Moving away from here?”
“Yes. What makes them interesting is that they are traveling abreast, in formation, along a line 6.1 light-years long. Straight as an arrow. The interior omega is two light-years from the end of the line.”
She waited, apparently expecting Hutch to respond. “You’re suggesting,” she said, “there’s one missing.”
“Exactly. We know these things tend to travel in orchestrated groups. Either the interior cloud should be in the middle, or there should be a cloud two light-years from the other end.”
“The missing cloud—” said Jon.
“Would have passed through this area. Three hundred years ago.”