“You said there was more than one reason to wake me up now,” Johnson observed. He remembered. He was proud of himself for remembering. That said something about how fuzzy his wits had been before.
Mickey Flynn nodded. “That’s true. I did.”
“What’s the other one?” Johnson asked.
“In my ignorance, I thought you might be interested in seeing what the sky looks like out here as we turn the ship,” Flynn said. “No matter how good we get at flying between the stars, this isn’t something a whole lot of people will ever get to do.”
“I should say not!” Johnson exclaimed, eagerness blazing through him no matter how weak and woozy he felt. “Most of the passengers will stay frozen from start to finish.” He turned to Dr. Blanchard. “Can I go up?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Can you?”
“We’ll find out.” He tried to lever himself off the table where he lay, only to discover he was strapped on. Melanie Blanchard made no move to set him free. It’s a test, he realized. If I can’t undo the straps, I don’t deserve to do anything else. His fingers were clumsy and stupid. They took longer than they should have to figure out how the latches worked, but they did it. He sat up, torn between triumph and worry. “My brains will come back?” he asked her.
“They’re supposed to,” she said, which struck him as imperfectly reassuring.
The Admiral Peary ’s acceleration produced barely enough weight to keep him on the table. When he slid off, he glided ever so slowly to the metal floor. He would have had to go off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote to do himself any serious damage. He bounced from the floor toward Flynn. “Lead on, Macduff.”
“That’s, ‘Lay on, Macduff.’ ” Flynn looked pained. “Don’t tamper with the Bard.”
“At this late date and this distance, I doubt he’ll complain,” Johnson said.
“Oh, so do I,” the other pilot said. “That’s why I’m doing it for him.”
“Helpful,” Johnson observed, and Flynn nodded blandly. Johnson went on, “Well, anyway, show me. Show me around, too. This is the first time I’ve been conscious-as conscious as I am-on the Admiral Peary. Would be nice to know what I’m flying.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Flynn brachiated up the hatchway. The starship’s tiny acceleration wasn’t enough to worry about, not as far as motion was concerned. Feeling like a chimpanzee himself-an elderly, arthritic, downright spavined chimpanzee-Johnson followed.
The Lewis and Clark had had observation windows fronted by antireflection-coated glass. The Admiral Peary had an observation dome, also made from glass that might as well not have been there. Coming up into it was like getting a look at space itself. Johnson stared out. Slowly, his jaw dropped. “Jesus,” he whispered.
Mickey Flynn nodded again, this time in perfect understanding. “You’ve noticed, have you? It does hit home.”
“Yeah,” Johnson said, and said nothing else for the next several minutes.
There was no sun in the sky.
That hit home, sure as hell, like a left to the jaw. Johnson understood exactly what it meant. It wasn’t that the Sun was hiding, as it hid behind the Earth during the night. When it did that, you knew where it was, even if you couldn’t see it. Not here. Not now. There was nothing but blackness with stars scattered through it. And the closest of those stars was light-years away.
“And I thought the asteroid belt was a long way from home,” Johnson murmured at last. “I hadn’t even gone into the next room.”
“Does make you wonder why we thought we were the lords of creation, doesn’t it?” Flynn said. Johnson hadn’t thought of it that way, but he couldn’t help nodding. Flynn continued, “Look a little longer. Tell me what else you see, besides the big nothing.”
“Okay,” Johnson said, and he did. He knew how the stars were supposed to look from space. Not many humans-probably not many Lizards, either-knew better. As Flynn had said he would, he needed a while to see anything else by the absence of a sun. But he did, and his jaw fell again.
The outlines of the constellations were wrong.
Oh, not all of them. Orion looked the same as it always had. So did the Southern Cross. He knew why, too: their main stars were a long, long way from the Sun, too far for a mere five or six light-years to change their apparent position. But both the Dogs that accompanied Orion through the skies of Earth had lost their principal stars. Sirius and Procyon were bright because they lay close to the Sun. Going halfway to Tau Ceti rudely shoved them across the sky. Johnson spotted them at last because they were conspicuous and didn’t belong where they were.
He also spotted another bright star that didn’t belong where it was, and couldn’t for the life of him figure out from where it had been displaced. He finally gave up and pointed towards it. “What’s that one there, not far from Arcturus?”
Flynn didn’t need to ask which one he meant, and smiled a most peculiar smile. “Interesting you should wonder. I had to ask Walter Stone about that one myself.”
“Well, what is it?” Johnson said, a little irritably. Mickey Flynn’s smile got wider. Johnson’s annoyance grew with it. Then, all at once, that annoyance collapsed. He took another look at that unfamiliar yellow star. The hair stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. In a very small voice, he said, “Oh.”
“That’s right,” Flynn said. “That’s the Sun.”
“Lord.” Johnson sounded more reverent than he’d thought he could. “That’s… quite something, isn’t it?”
“You might say so,” the other pilot answered. “Yes, you just might say so.”
Tau Ceti, of course, remained in the same place in the sky as it had before. It was brighter now, but still seemed nothing special; it was an intrinsically dimmer star than the Sun. Before the Lizards came, no one had ever paid any attention to it or to Epsilon Eridani or to Epsilon Indi, the three stars whose inhabited planets the Race had ruled since men were still hunters and gatherers. Now everyone knew the first two; Epsilon Indi, deep in the southern sky and faintest of the three, remained obscure.
“When we wake up again…” Johnson said. “When we wake up again, we’ll be there.”
“Oh, yes.” Flynn nodded. “Pity we won’t be able to go down to Home.”
“Well, yeah. Too much time with no gravity,” Johnson said, and Mickey Flynn nodded again. Johnson pointed back toward the Sun. “But we saw this. ” At the moment, it seemed a fair trade.
Kassquit swam up toward consciousness from the black depths of a sleep that might as well have been death. When she looked around, she thought at first that her eyes weren’t working the way they should. She’d lived her whole life aboard starships. Metal walls and floors and ceilings seemed normal to her. She knew stone and wood and plaster could be used for the same purposes, but the knowledge was purely theoretical.
Focusing on the-technician? — tending her was easier. “I greet you,” Kassquit said faintly. Her voice didn’t want to obey her will.
Even her faint croak was enough to make the female of the Race jerk in surprise. “Oh! You do speak our language,” the technician said. “They told me you did, but I was not sure whether to believe them.”
“Of course I do. I am a citizen of the Empire.” Kassquit hoped she sounded indignant and not just terribly, terribly tired. “What do I look like?”
To her, it was a rhetorical question. To the technician, it was anything but. “One of those horrible Big Uglies from that far-off star,” she said. “How can you be a citizen of the Empire if you look like them?”
I must be on Home, Kassquit realized. Males and females on Tosev 3 know who and what I am. “Never mind how I can be. I am, that is all,” she said. She looked around again. The white-painted chamber was probably part of a hospital; it looked more like a ship’s infirmary than anything else. Home, she thought again, and awe filled her. “I made it,” she whispered.