“How?” Kwarive asked. She held the kit closer as she said so, wrapping a wing around it, Darvin noticed.
“The Sight is on the case,” Bahron said. “What the Height intends to do has to be kept secret from the public until the last minute. That’s all I can say for now. I would advise you all very strongly to say nothing on the subject.”
With that ominous admonition he left.
Darvin had last spent time at the observatory when he was a student. The popular image of the astronomer as nightly stargazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less. Observation was still the basis, but the long-exposure camera had become a much more fruitful source of observation than the telescope alone. Much observation could be done by poring over photographs and spectroscope readings, and besides, it was in the application of mathematics to the results that such progress as occurred was being made. The science was in one of its difficult periods, when new observations didn’t so much solve problems as raise them. What fuelled the stars? Why did they show such a regular sequence of colours? What was the nature of the nebulae? What subtle property of the ether made the light of distant stars and nebulae shift toward the red end of the spectrum? Compared with such questions as these, Darvin’s search for the outermost planet had been triviaclass="underline" a postgraduate project carried too far into the early part of his professional career, more out of a certain stubbornness — and the lure of knowing that, if he did find the planet, it would forever be associated with his name — than any true scientific urgency.
Now he had his fame, for what that was worth.
In the observatory, what it was worth was that he had had complete control over the telescope for four outer-months. All other work had been set aside for the project’s priorities. Night after night Darvin and his colleagues scanned the skies and took photographs. Day after day they inspected the plates in a blink comparator. The diminished Object — the cylinder, according to the Southern data — remained close to the orbit of the Warrior. Of the two cones that had broken away, no trace could be found. None of Orro’s calculations — and there had been many — had successfully predicted their new location. There had been moments of excitement, whenever a new body was found among the Camp-Followers. But when its location was sent by radio to the Southern Rule, to be viewed through the superior telescopes of the antipodean astrologers, it was always resolved as yet another natural asteroid.
While Darvin cursed his luck, every other aspect of the project raced ahead. The treaty proclamation had been greeted more with relief about the prospect of a lasting peace with Gevork than anxiety about the aliens. People still, Darvin suspected, didn’t quite believe in the aliens. Not even the publication of pictures from the aliens’ indecipherable message had shaken the popular complacency. The existence of aliens had for so long been the subject of a lax assent — or article of faith, for cults and pulps alike — that its confirmation unsettled no prejudice and provoked no panic. It was quite possible that what people thought they saw in their everyday lives was progress stimulated, perhaps inspired, by the aliens, rather than the massive, coordinated military mobilization that it was. Taxes had gone up, prices risen, but the great manufactories and their penumbra of backstreet workshops had full order books. The sight of an aeroplane over a town no longer brought all activity to a halt. The most visible sign of great change was the sight of the tethered balloons that had sprung up on every horizon as TK relay stations. All the larger towns now had at least one huge public screen, upon which every night telekinematographic pictures were projected. They showed the work at the desert camps and proving grounds: the rockets rising and crashing, the vast arrays of etheric aerials, the test flights of experimental airframes; they gave nightly glimpses of the day’s debates in Seloh’s Roost; they had begun to carry lighter, more trivial news items and even theatrical performances later in the evening.
Whatever was going on among the trudges had stirred no unrest. The question was never raised in the Roost, nor discussed in the papers. The Sight was no doubt kept busy. What it was busy doing, Darvin did not want to think about. He felt himself a coward for that. In the cluster of buildings around the observatory, there seemed no grounds for worry. Handful had become something of a mascot. Kwarive’s instructions for her part of the project had simply been to go on studying the infant trudge’s language acquisition, and she had moved to the same accommodation block as Darvin in order to study it discreetly. Handful flew around freely indoors and out, picked up new words and formed short sentences, and thrived. The only danger he faced, and that was slight, was of being attacked by one of the long-winged, long-necked flitters — carrion-eaters and opportunistic predators — that circled the thermals of the high desert.
It was a hot evening, after a hotter day, near the turning of the outer-month. The sun had set, and the pylons of the cable-car system clicked and rang as their metal cooled. Nocturnal animals stirred and chittered in the scrub and sand. Soon the sky would be dark, the air chill. Darvin looked forward to it as he prepared the night’s observations. His eyelids were gritty with lack of sleep, his fur damp with sweat. The technician working beside him was equally exhausted.
Handful flew in through the open window and perched on the telescope’s circular railing.
“Darvin! Darvin!”
“Hello, Handful.”
“New moon! New moon!”
Darvin smiled, the technician laughed. “That’s a smart trudge all right.”
“Clever Handful,” said Darvin. He reached over and scratched the trudge’s ear. “Clever boy, Handful.”
“No,” said Handful, grabbing the hair on Darvin’s wrist and tugging. “New moon. See new moon.”
“I’ve seen them lots of times, Handful. Please go away. Be a good boy.”
“New moon!” The tugging became painful.
“Give me a minute,” said Darvin to the technician. “I’ll just take the little pest back to his — back to Kwarive.”
He scooped the trudge into the crook of his elbow and stalked out. Handful pointed to the blue-black sky, in which the first stars pricked into visibility and, just above the last glow of sunset, the Fiery Jester burned bright. Darvin’s exasperated glance followed the pointing finger to the south. The inner and outer moons hung like sections of white rind. Close to them and a little above, a tiny but distinct triangle glinted like a faceted gem brighter than the Queen.
“New moon,” said Handful.
19 — A Full and Frank Exchange of Views
14 366:02:25 11:37
Even after two days—
There are several lines of thought and conversation that could begin with these words.
So let me start with the easy one.
Even after two days, crew quarters are a strange environment. It’s unlike the habitat or the settlements. The habitat is a ground environment, a pseudogravity environment, an imitation — strange as it may seem — of a planet’s surface. Yes, the ground curves up and over your head, which I know from the virtualities would seem as strange to anyone from a real planet as a real planet with sky overhead would to us. But that difference is less than it might seem — all on the surface, you might say. Think of the things they have in common, lakes, vertical building, plains, forests and parks, tame and wild animals roaming about, trees growing upward, rain falling downward, sun(line)-light from above. The eye and the inner ear tell you the same thing, most of the time.
The microgravity homesteads were different again. The living spaces are small. They feel like site huts, not yet like homes. Everything was a bit raw, even though we were beginning to grow plants. Everywhere smelled of rock dust, except where it stank of leakage from organic cycles. And no, living in spacesuits or smart-fabric clothes all the time is not a solution.