PART FOUR
Mordecai Zone
Chapter 32
The omega clouds seemed to originate from a single source, located approximately fifty-seven light-years from the galactic center and in orbit around it. It was the Mordecai Zone, named for the guy who’d done the math twenty years ago. It also had a numerical designator, RVP66119. The more sensational news media commonly referred to it as the Boiler Room. Whatever one chose to call it, no one had ever seen it. The area was obscured by enormous clouds of dust and hydrogen.
The jump from Tenareif would take them across seven thousand light-years, and require nearly four weeks.
Jon was annoyed. For him, Tenareif was to have been the highlight of the mission. But Rudy’s death had cast a pall over everything, which even the discovery of the mysterious marker, with its implication of cosmic goodwill, had failed to lift. Especially for Matt. In the end, Jon understood, Matt had looked into the black hole and seen a metaphor for the meaning of existence.
Conditions were not helped by the fact that riding his star drive was something less than exhilarating. Jon had always enjoyed travel. He’d been around the globe several times, had represented Henry Barber at distant forums and conferences whenever he could, had learned to sail when he was a boy, and had always known that one day he would go the Moon.
To the Moon.
But travel should include motion. Movement. The sense of getting from one place to another. Journeys are not about destinations, they are about the route. They are about mountain passages and cruising around the horn and riding the Northwest glide train along the Pacific rim. They are about sailing past Jupiter and drinking toasts as Centaurus grows brighter on the screens. (Okay, that last was strictly his imagination, but that made it no less true.) It was not, most certainly not, sitting for weeks inside a constricted container that passed nothing. That didn’t rock in the wind, or throw on the brakes, or even glide slowly through the eternal mists of Hazeltine space.
It was early February back home. The All-Swiss Regional Bridge Tournament, in which he’d played last year, where he and his partner had almost won, had opened its qualifying round the day they’d left Tenareif. Pitchers would be reporting for spring training. And the streets of Washington would be filled with lovely young women.
There was a time he’d taken all that for granted.
He’d given up all pretense of trying to work. Before coming, he’d thought the atmosphere for finding ways to improve the Locarno, to make it more efficient, to give it more range on less fuel, to make it even more precise, would be ideal. But it hadn’t played out that way. For one thing he’d found it hard to work when there was no break, no chance to wander off and hit a local bistro. For another, as the situation on board deteriorated, he couldn’t simply abandon Matt, leaving him to entertain himself through the endless days and nights. So they watched VR and played bridge and worked out, and the lights dimmed and brightened, marking the hours.
The AI had an extensive translation by then of the Sigma Hotel poems, but neither of them was much into poetry. When Jim announced he could find nothing in the book about automated deep-space missions or about omega clouds, they lost interest. There were, Jim said, occasional references to clouds, as in creating moody skies or bringing rain, but there was nothing about clouds that rolled in from the outer darkness, pouring down the wrath of the gods on baffled city dwellers.
Jon spent a fair amount of time going over the details they’d compiled on Tenareif. He wasn’t an astrophysicist, and black holes were a long way from his field of interest, but nevertheless he spent hours peering down into the funnel, wondering what conditions were really like, what the odds were that the thing actually opened into another universe. Such a possibility was counterintuitive, but everything about black holes was counterintuitive. So much about the structure of the universe at large was counterintuitive.
He amused himself by calculating the distance to Earth. Technically, of course, while it was in Barber space, there was no such thing as a range between the McAdams and anything in the Milky Way. Each existed in its own spatial continuum. Nevertheless, he proposed the question to himself in terms of where they would be if they exited now.
At the beginning of the second week, they were twenty-two thousand light-years out. “Pity we don’t have a telescope big enough to look back,” he told Matt. “Imagine what we’d see. They won’t build their first pyramid for another fifteen thousand years or so. Babylon, Sumer, none of that exists. There’s nobody there except guys living in caves.”
Matt had been paging through his notebook. “It’s a bit like riding a time machine.”
“As close as we’ll get.”
Jim was invaluable. He was always ready to play bridge or produce a show. Matt especially enjoyed Government Issue, which portrayed the misadventures of three female interns in a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent Washington. Jon had seen it before, a few episodes, but he grew to enjoy it more than anything else they watched, not because of the assorted buffooneries, or even because of the nubile young women. It was rather because, for reasons he could not understand, it didn’t seem quite so far as everything else.
So the weeks passed, and the final days dwindled away. And at last they were ready to make their jump into the Mordecai Zone. Matt sealed the viewports and the hatches against the radiation and told him they had three minutes.
Chapter 33
Twenty-eight thousand light-years from Earth.
Jon was looking at the navigation screen when they made the jump. He had become accustomed to the mild tingling sensation in his toes and fingertips when the ship moved from one state to the other. He felt it now and started breathing again when the stars blinked on. They provided a spectacular light show, as always, and it appeared as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch.
The night was ablaze, with stars that were points of light and others so close he could make out disks. Still others were radiant smears, trapped in clouds of gas and dust. Brilliant jets and light-years-long streaks of glowing gas arced across the sky. In their immediate rear lay a cloud filled with hot red stars. If you lived here, on a terrestrial world, it would never get dark. He decided at that moment on the title of his autobiography: 28,000 Light-Years from Earth. Except that twenty-eight didn’t work. Round it off. Make it thirty. 30,000 Light-Years from Earth: The Jon Silvestri Story. Yeah. He liked that. It had a ring to it.
They sealed the viewports, so the only external views now were by way of the displays.