“Some of us look pretty good right now,” said Alex, his eyes straying from Shara to me and back.
“Careful,” I said. “I wonder what Audree's thinking right now, with you locked away with two women.”
“She trusts me,” said Alex.
“And well she should,” said Shara. “I'm happy to be traveling with a man of such high moral character.”
We talked about whether either sex is smarter, agreeing that women generally communicate better. (Consensus was, as best I can recall, two to one.) We discussed politicians, and were not surprised that nobody had an unbridled enthusiasm for anyone currently holding high office.
And we wondered what life would be like if we possessed the Mute telepathic capability. Can't lie, can't hide your feelings. And, of course, the word diplomacy probably doesn't even exist.
And eventually we got around to God. I was surprised to learn that Shara is a believer. “Not in the angry, judgmental God that they teach in some of the churches,” she said, admiring the image of the Hourglass Nebula, which Belle had put on the auxiliary screen. (Belle routinely put images on-screen of what we'd see if we were actually traveling through normal space. Of course, nothing was visible through the Belle-Marie's ports.) “But I just can't believe the physical laws accidentally allowed something like that to happen, or us to happen for that matter, or that derived quantum mechanics. I know the basic theory, the explanation. But I can't buy it. If there were no God,” she said, “I just can't see there'd be anything.”
Alex's opinions on the existence of a conscious functioning creator tended to change with his mood. “It's just the size of it all,” he said, studying the Hourglass. “The notion that somebody could be behind that just seems to me”-he hesitated, searching for a word-”seems forced. We have a tendency to see design everywhere. And people desperately want to believe in a compassionate power higher than themselves. The possibility that we're all just accidents of nature is, for most of us, simply unimaginable.”
As for me, I've always found it much easier to be a believer when I'm adrift among the stars. It's easy to think there's an Artist God when you look at the Hourglass Nebula, or, from orbit, at forests and oceans. It's when you get close and see the violent side of nature, watch animals dismembering and swallowing one another, look back across humanity's long history of warfare and murder and general decadence, that it becomes hard to take any of it seriously.
We arrived in the target area, checked our position as best we could, and immediately began scanning.
Just as it was impossible to know precisely where the Alpha vehicle would arrive, so were we unable to determine exactly where we were. We could triangulate our position from various stars and confirm that we were at a given point, but that point took in a lot of empty space. It was a very big point. You can move a great distance out there without changing the apparent angle to any star.
That was one problem. Another difficulty arose from our inability to calculate exactly when the event would occur. “I think I have it within a week or so,” Shara had said before we left home, adding that she was sorry, but that it just wasn't possible to get better precision. Consequently, we'd timed things to arrive a week early. And we were prepared to stay more than a week beyond the target time. So we would be there three weeks altogether if nothing happened.
We also knew that, because of the size of the target area, the object might arrive, cruise through the neighborhood, and leave without our ever being aware of it. What were the chances of that?
“Maybe one out of three or four,” said Shara. “But those are decent odds.”
I wasn't sure how best to position us. We had arrived near the rear of the search area, which is to say that if and when Alpha showed up, we'd be trailing her. But it wasn't easy to remain stationary relative to the search area. If I attempted that, and Alpha appeared well in front of us, we'd need considerably more than a few hours to accelerate sufficiently to overtake it. If we simply went to a cruising speed, and it jumped in well behind us, we'd be faced with another set of problems. Best was to stay back and chase it down from behind.
So we settled in. I braked until we were barely moving, on a course that ran parallel to the one recorded for Alpha in its last appearance. In 1256.
There was nothing further to do except sit around and wait. We talked some more. We read. We played games. We watched shows. One of the more entertaining diversions was to pull a classic out of the library, say, Markazy, or Hamlet, and play it with our avatars in the title roles. I loved watching Shara as the malevolent wife in Markazy, who, at the height of the Rebellion, murders her husband (Alex, of course) for political reasons, then discovers that she loves him.
In Hamlet, if you'll allow me, I was brilliant as Ophelia. And Alex was utterly out of character in the lead. Not that the performance was weak, but it was hard to imagine him so indecisive. He looked great, though, in his Danish wardrobe.
We concluded the first week, as expected, with no sighting. Though Alex remained outwardly calm, I knew he was excited. Every time Belle broke into a conversation, I could see his eyes react. But it was always routine stuff. Recommendation that forward thrusters receive special service when we got back. A hitch in the rotational capability of one of the outboard scopes. Permission to make a change in the lunch menu.
Shara was emotionally invested also, and I'll concede that I dreamed of what it would be like to rescue a few people from a centuries-old flight. I rehearsed the scene constantly. Hello, Welcome to 1434. I bet you're glad to be off that ship. Everything's okay now.
“They won't believe us,” I said.
Finally, on the eleventh day, Belle delivered the message we'd been waiting for: “We have company.”
A marker appeared on-screen.
Shara smiled modestly. The resident genius.
“Any chance it could be somebody else?” asked Alex.
“Who else,” I said, “would be cruising around out here?”
“Range seventeen hundred kilometers.”
Shara and I took the seats on the bridge. Alex stood in the hatchway behind us. “Can we see it?” asked Shara.
The marker brightened. “It's too small to get an image.”
“What's her course?” I asked.
“Still working on it.”
I sat listening to everybody breathing.
“Parallel to ours.”
Shara literally squealed. “Beautiful.”
“It is, however, pulling away.”
“Okay,” I said. “No surprise there. Alex, grab a chair. Shara, buckle down.”
Shara got up. “You sit here, Alex,” she said. “This is your show.” She squeezed past him, back into the cabin. Alex said thanks and took her place. I switched over to manual and, when everybody was ready, began to accelerate.
Shara, speaking through the comm system, said something like whoa. “I never felt anything like that before.”
“Sorry. It has a big lead on us. Belle, did you see it actually appear?”
“Negative, Chase.”
“So,” said Shara, “we have no idea how long it's been here.”
“It can't have been here long. I would estimate no more than a few minutes.”
“Chase.” Alex's voice. “How long will it take us to catch them?”
I passed it over to Belle. “Two hours, thirteen minutes,” she said.
“That may not be good enough, Chase. How about a jump?”
The problem with the star drive, of course, is that it's not very precise. “We're in too close, Alex. We'd probably find ourselves farther away than we are now. And maybe in front of it somewhere. Belle, is it under power?”
“I can't tell from this range, Chase.”
“Try to contact her,” Alex said.
“Do it, Belle.”
“Complying.”
We waited. I looked out through the wraparound, as if I might be able to pick the thing out of the darkness with the naked eye. Of course there was nothing.