Orro opened his eyes and stared at him; it seemed, through him. “Speculation.” It wasn’t clear to just what Orro applied the epithet. He waved a hand. “Ignore that. We can only describe what we incontestably have evidence for. So let us describe it.”
“How?”
Orro jumped off the perch, strode forward, and clasped Darvin’s hand. “A joint note to the journals? Or failing that, the physics wire? Does not ‘A Distant, Decelerating Celestial Object: Some Observations,’ by Darvin and Orro, of Five Ravines, have a certain ring to it?”
“It does,” said Darvin. He returned the handshake. “If only I didn’t suspect that we’ve both made some ghastly mistake, which some undergraduate will spot straight away, in which case it’s a title that’ll ring in our ears for the rest of our lives.”
They finished checking the calculations that evening. By midnight they had written the paper. It was brief, detailed, mostly mathematical, and included no speculation whatever about the nature of the decelerating object.
“You know,” Darvin said, glancing it over one last time, “I can’t help thinking this looks a bit trashy and sensational.”
Orro didn’t laugh. “When I close my eyes, I see its title as a screaming headline in large black type.”
“That’s fatigue,” said Darvin. He helped himself to some tea. “But yes, I do worry about the effect on public opinion. In engineering tales, the arrival of aliens is invariably followed by mass panic.”
“That’s fanciful,” said Orro. “It has never been tested.”
“Well, in the nature of things, no,” said Darvin. “However, there was one incident back in the Dawn Age, when the first observations of signs of life on the Queen were published. That led to, if I recall my history books, a stock market bubble, a subsequent collapse, and a brief frenzy of religious persecution.”
“That was the Dawn Age,” said Orro. “We are now in the Day.”
“So we like to believe. A day in which dirigibles almost too high to see patrol our skies above the Broad Channel. When the Broad Channel itself is patrolled by warships from both shores. A day in which war with Gevork is openly spoken of, and not just in engineering tales.”
“And a day in which many such as you and I cooperate like civilised men.”
“That’s true,” said Darvin. “Perhaps a new kind of comet — even if it was thought to be an alien spaceship — would result in wonder rather than fear.”
“How long,” Orro mused, “before amateurs with telescopes notice it?”
“Several eights of eight-days, even with the best private telescopes, I should imagine.”
“So there is no risk, really, of our discovery’s being preempted. We could hold back for a little while—”
“I said ‘private,’ ” said Darvin. “I’m not willing to see Seloh’s Reach being beaten by Gevork on this discovery. Or by any other country.”
“Nor me,” said Orro. He gave Darvin a troubled look. “Surely you don’t think I—”
“Oh, no, not at all,” said Darvin. “But some of your — their astronomers may already have noticed the anomaly.”
“I doubt it,” said Orro. “Gevorkian astronomy is focused, you might say, on the stars. Even the planets, leave alone comets, are regarded as almost beneath the notice of serious scientists.”
“The other realms—”
“Astrologers!”
“That’s the problem,” said Darvin. “The sky-watchers of the Court of the Southern Rule pay a great deal of attention to comets as portents — their priorities are rather the reverse of your Gevorkians’. And their telescopes — say what you like about the beliefs and motives of their builders — are of the highest craft. They were producing detailed sky maps before our Dawn Age — we have one in the university’s museum. I should take another look at it, to see if it shows any earlier comets in the Daughters region. It might suggest how the sky-watchers would interpret this one.”
“Well,” said Orro, with a shrug, “I doubt that we need worry about their panicking the populace. Or preceding us into print, for that matter.”
Darvin was not so sure about that. “Some of their younger sky-watchers are talented and educated men, and they do have their own version of a popular press,” he pointed out. “They invented it, after all.”
Orro wiped a hand across his tired eyes. “There’s one more thing we can do,” he said. “That is, to project the path of the… object, check it against your latest plates, and work out exactly when it will become visible to amateur astronomers, and indeed to the naked eye.”
“The naked eye!” Darvin had all along assumed that the comet that now bore his name would one day be visible to everyone, but the thought now brought him up short. Since confirming Orro’s calculations he’d begun to think of it almost as a secret.
“Why not?” said Orro. “A year or so from now, I’d guess. Let’s check it.”
’Tomorrow,” said Darvin.
In the morning a low fog from the sea overlay Five Ravines. Darvin had to rely more than usual on his proximity sense as he flew to the university. The world was a grey haze interrupted by red flashes. On one sideways turn he noticed how the fog curled away from his wing tip, and reflected on how something like fog — smoke? steam? — might be used in Orro’s wind-tube experiments.
But there were to be no such experiments that day. When he’d stepped along the hall, shaking drops of moisture from his fur, Darvin found Orro hanging asleep from the ceiling outside his door. Darvin tapped his wing joint. The other man shuddered, unfolded his wings, and blinked up. Inside his wings, he’d been clutching a satchel.
“Have you been here all night?” Darvin asked.
“No,” said Orro. “Not long. But I needed the sleep.”
He bent upward, caught the wooden slats of the ceiling with his hands, let go with his feet, and dropped upright and caught the satchel before it reached the ground. Scratching himself, he followed Darvin into the office. It took them an hour or so to work through Orro’s calculations and find where to look for the comet on the more recent plates, those from the past couple of eight-days. Darvin set up the pair of plates, adjusted the blink comparator, and found the comet, brighter than before. Orro noted the degrees of displacement along the vertical and horizontal axes, scribbled in his notebook, and nodded. “On target,” he said.
They repeated this for nine pairs of plates. The comet’s path was exactly as Orro’s calculation predicted.
On the tenth pair, there was no jump. Instead, the comet seemed to flash on and off in the same position. On closer examination, Darvin found that it was present on the earlier plate, but not on the later. On the eleventh pair, and all subsequent pairs, it was altogether gone.
5 — Fast Probes
14 364:07:06 08:12
It’s strange when something you have been unaware of all your life goes away. Something is missing, and you don’t know what it is. But of course, we know what it is. It’s the minute sideways tug of deceleration, that insensible inclination toward the forward wall that all our lives has troubled our inner ear. You couldn’t spot it with a plumb line and the unaided eye. But now it’s gone, and we notice it. We’re in orbit around the Destiny Star. It’s hard for me to believe that the journey is over, that we’ve arrived. It’s even harder, I think, for the adults. Four hundred years is a long time to live in one place, even if the place is changing all the time as cities get demolished and landscapes get torn up and thrown into the drive, and new cities and landscapes built, and these in turn… So those of us who’ve known only the final form of the world and who’ve lived less than a couple of decades in it should be patient with them.