Jack McDevitt
Infinity Beach
For the Brunswick Five: Ted Barton, John Goff, Jack Kraus, Ron Peiffer, and George Tindle
They haven’t quite worked out the secret of life, but they know it has something to do with lunch.
We have always stood along a beach opening onto an infinite sea. That sea beckons us, but for ages we were limited to looking across its expanse with our telescopes and our imaginations. In time, we learned to build outriggers and we got to a few of the barrier islands. Today we have finally in our hands a true four-master, a ship that will take us beyond whatever horizons may exist.
We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for eleven hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome or gentle, as impossibly strange or remarkably familiar, as godlike, as remote, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.
Dates, unless otherwise indicated, are given in the Greenway calendar, whose Year 1 coincides with the first landing on that world in 2411 of the common era. The Greenway and terrestrial year are almost identical in duration, which is one of the reasons that world was selected for terraforming.
The Map of Equatoria
Prologue
“Don’t do it.” Kane, covered in blood, stood framed in the doorway.
“—no choice—” Tripley called as the flyer lifted off the pad. “Do what you can for her.”
As he’d feared, the bastards did not show up on his screen. But he could see their eerie companion, the spectral thing that floated through the moonlight. It was tracking northwest, toward Mount Hope. He had to assume it was escorting them. Riding shotgun.
The village fell away, and he was out over the lake. He switched to manual, climbed to fifteen hundred meters, and gave it everything it had, which wasn’t much. The flyer rattled and creaked but got up to two hundred fifty klicks. To his surprise he saw that he was gaining ground.
Was that possible? Or had the thing slowed down, to lure him on?
Three of Greenway’s moons, in their first quarter, floated in a cloudless sky, illuminating the distant peaks, the cool, dark lake, the dam, the fleeing cloud.
What was it anyhow?
It had drawn itself almost into a sphere, trailing long, hazy tendrils. Like a comet, he thought; unlike any other that had sailed past the world. Lethal and efficient and starkly graceful, framed against the snowcapped mountains.
But the sensor return was getting louder. He was gaining.
In these first quiet moments since everything had come undone, he listened to the wind and the burble of his electronics, and he wished desperately he could go back and change everything.
Ahead, the comet-shape was moving ever slower. And beginning to dissolve.
Tripley braked.
He knew that the ship would be continuing straight on. He laughed, thinking of it in those terms. A ship that no one could see, that didn’t show up on the screens, that could lose itself out there without any fear of being found.
And there lay the problem. He could not follow without the telltale cloud to lead him. And he would have to kill the cloud to survive himself. How in hell had things gotten so desperately out of hand?
Kill the cloud.
Was the damned thing even alive?
They’d passed over the northwest shore. Dark forest lay below, the Gray Mountains rose ahead.
It turned to confront him.
He watched it spread across the night, opening for him, expanding into a kind of blossom, waiting to receive him. It had filaments, backlit by the moons, through which something, a nutrient, a life force, pulsed steadily.
He hesitated briefly, suddenly fearful, and then accelerated again to full throttle. He would kill the bastard or die himself.
Close the vents. Check windows and doors. He didn’t want any part of it getting into the cabin.
The night was full of regrets. He’d made the wrong call at every turn, had gotten people killed, and God knew what he’d unleashed on the world. But maybe he could start making amends now.
The wind roared across his stubby wings, and the creature floated in the moonlight, waiting. He could see the constellations in its veils.
It was unspeakably lovely, a mixture of mist and starlight, moving easily with the wind. He aimed directly at the center of the thing. He’d plow through and come around and rip into it again and keep slicing it apart until it was scattered across the sky.
And when that was done, he’d get back on the base course of the fleeing ship. There had to be a way to run it to ground. But one thing at a time.
The comm buzzer alerted him that someone was trying to reach him.
Kane.
The apparition began to move, tried to draw aside. Tripley felt a surge of joy. It was afraid of him. No, you son of a bitch. He adjusted course to keep it in his mental crosshairs.
The buzzer sounded again.
He knew what Kane would say. She’s dead. And: Let it go. But it was too late now for common sense. Wasn’t that what Kane had been saying from the beginning: Use common sense? But it had been hard to sort out, to know what to do—
Tripley braced himself, not knowing what to expect. The cloud was growing thinner as he approached, but that might have been an illusion, the way mist seems to dissipate when one plunges into it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not sure to whom he was speaking.
And then he ripped into the cloud. Through it. Came out into clear starlight.
He looked back and saw that he’d blown a hole through its center. Parts of it were drifting away.
He went hard right, circling around for a second pass. He was confident now that it couldn’t hurt him. Its suppleness appeared to be gone. It was struggling.
He raced through it again from a different angle, hurling its fragments into the night, exhilarated by the taste of vengeance.
That was for Yoshi.
And this—
Everything failed. The soft murmur of the magnetics changed to a whine and died.
The instrument panel lights blinked out. And suddenly the only sound was the whisper of the wind.
The flyer fell through the night.
He fought the controls, trying frantically to restart as the trees rushed up. Above him, silhouetted against Glory, the largest moon, the cloud was trying to re-form. And in those last moments, riven with fear and despair, a brilliant white light erupted on the slopes of Mount Hope. A second sun. He watched it expand, watched it engulf the world.
And he felt a final rush of satisfaction. It had to be the ship. The thing’s masters, at least, were dead.
And then it ceased to matter.
1
It seems safe now to assume that the terrestrial origin of life was a unique event. Some will quibble that we have, after all, seen only a few thousand of the billions of worlds drifting through the gently curving corridors we once called bio-zones. But we have stood on too many warm beaches and looked across seas over which no gulls hover, that throw forth neither shells, nor strands of weed, nor algae. They are peaceful seas, bounded by rock and sand.
The universe has come to resemble a magnificent but sterile wilderness, an ocean which boasts no friendly coast, no sails, no sign that any have passed this way before. And we cannot help but tremble in the gray light of these vast distances. Maybe that is why we are converting the great interstellar liners into museums, or selling them for pans. Why we have begun to retreat, why the Nine Worlds are now really six, why the frontier is collapsing, why we are going home to our island.