‘I heard you say it once when you were in the view room. You looked at Nemesis, and it seemed to me, then, that Nemesis was mixed up in it. So I asked the computer what Nemesis meant and it told me. It's something that relentlessly destroys, something that inflicts retribution.’
‘That wasn't the reason for the name,’ cried Insigna.
‘You named it,’ said Marlene quietly, inexorably.
That was no secret, of course, any longer, once they had left the Solar System behind them. Insigna had then taken the credit for the discovery and for the name.
‘It's because I named it that I know that that wasn't the reason for the name.’
‘Then why do you feel guilty, Mother?’
(Silence - if you don't want to tell the truth.)
Insigna said at last, ‘How do you think Earth will be destroyed?’
‘I don't know, but I think you know, Mother.’
‘We're speaking at cross-purposes, Marlene, and let's let it go for now. What I want, though, is to make sure you understand that you are not to talk about any of this to anyone - not about your father, and not about this nonsense of Earth's destruction.’
‘If you don't want me to, of course I won't, but the destruction bit is not nonsense.’
‘I say it is. We'll define it as nonsense.’
Marlene nodded. ‘I think I'll go view for a while,’ she said with seeming indifference. ‘Then I'll go to bed.’
‘Good!’ Insigna watched her daughter leave.
Guilty, thought Insigna. I feel guilty. I wear it on my face like a bright banner. Anyone who looks can see it.
No, not anyone. Just Marlene. She has the gift of doing so.
Marlene had to have something to compensate for all she didn't get. Intelligence wasn't enough. It didn't make up sufficiently, so she had this gift of reading expression, intonation, and otherwise invisible bodily twitches, so that no secret was safe from her.
How long had she kept this dangerous attribute to herself? How long had she known about it? Was it something that grew stronger with age? Why did she allow it to emerge now, to peep out from behind the curtain she seemed to have drawn over it, and to use it as something with which to beat her mother?
Was it because Aurinel had rejected her, finally and definitely, according to what she had seen in him? Was she striking out blindly in consequence?
Guilty, thought Insigna. Why shouldn't I feel guilty? It is all my fault. I should have known from the start, from the instant of discovery - but I didn't want to know.
6. Approach
How early had she known? From the moment she had named the star Nemesis? Had she felt what it was and what it meant, and had she named it appropriately without conscious thought?
When she had first spotted the star, it had been only the act of finding it that counted. There had been no room in her mind for anything but immortality. It was her own star, Insigna's Star. She had been tempted to call it that. How glorious that had sounded, even as she had reluctantly avoided it with a hollow internal grimace of mock modesty. How unbearable it would have been now if she had fallen into that trap.
After the discovery, there had come the shock of Pitt's demand for secrecy, and then the furious preparation for the Leaving. (Would that be what it would be called in the history books someday? The Leaving? Capitalized?)
Then, after the Leaving, there were two years in which the ship skipped steadily and barely into and out of hyperspace - and the endless calculations that were involved in that hyper-assistance, for which astronomical data was constantly required, with herself supervising the supply. The density and composition of interstellar matter alone-
At no time in those four years had she been able to think of Nemesis in detail; not once could she zero in on the obvious.
Was that possible? Or did she simply turn away from what she did not want to see? Had she deliberately sought refuge in all the secrecy and scurry and excitement that presented itself to her?
But there came a time when the last hyperspatial period was behind them; when, for a month, they would be decelerating through an initial hail of hydrogen atoms, which they struck with such speed that those atoms were converted into cosmic ray particles.
No ordinary space vehicle could have endured that, but Rotor had a thick layer of soil around it that had been thickened for the trip, and the particles were absorbed.
There would come a time, she had been assured by one of the hyperspatialists when one would enter and leave hyperspace at ordinary speeds. ‘Given hyperspace in the first place,’ he had said, ‘no new conceptual breakthrough is required. It's just engineering.’
Maybe! The remaining hyperspatialists, however, considered the notion so much star exhaust.
Insigna hurried in to see Pitt when the appalling truth descended upon her. He had had little time for her in the last year, and she had understood. There was a certain tension that became more and more evident as the excitement of the trip wound down, as people realized that in a matter of months they would be in the neighborhood of another star. They would then have the constant problem of having to survive over a long period in the vicinity of a strange red dwarf star without any guarantee of reasonable planetary material to serve as a supply source, let alone a living place.
Janus Pitt no longer looked like a young man, although his hair was still dark, his face unlined. Only four years had passed since she had come to him with the news of Nemesis' existence. There was, however, a harried look in his eyes, a sense of having had his joy rubbed away and his cares left naked to the world.
He was Commissioner-elect now. Perhaps that might account for a great deal of what might be troubling him, but who could tell? Insigna had never known true power - or the responsibility that accompanied it - but something told her it might have the capacity for souring one who did.
Pitt smiled at her absently. They had been forced to be close when they had shared a secret that at first no-one - and then almost no-one - had shared with them. They could then talk unguardedly with each other, when they could not do so with anyone else. After the Leaving, however, when the secret was revealed, they had grown apart again.
‘Janus,’ she said, ‘there is something eating away at me and I had to come to you with it. It's Nemesis.’
‘Is there anything new? You can't say you've found out it isn't where you thought it was. It's right out there, less than sixteen billion kilometers away. We can see it.’
‘Yes, I know. But when I first found it, at a distance of two-plus light-years, I took it for granted that it was a companion star, that Nemesis and the Sun were circling a common center of gravity. Something that close would almost have to be. It would be so dramatic.’
‘All right. Why shouldn't things be dramatic now and then?’
‘Because as close as it is, it is clearly too far away to be a companion star. The gravitational attraction between Nemesis and the Sun is terribly weak, so weak that the gravitational perturbations of nearby stars would make the orbit unstable.’
‘But Nemesis is there.’
‘Yes, and more or less between ourselves and Alpha Centauri.’
‘What has Alpha Centauri got to do with it?’
‘The fact is that Nemesis is not much farther from Alpha Centauri than it is from the Sun. It's just as likely to be a companion star of Alpha Centauri. Or, more likely, whichever system it belongs to, the presence of the other star is now disrupting it, or has already disrupted it.’
Pitt looked at Insigna thoughtfully and tapped his fingers lightly on the arm of his chair. ‘How long does it take Nemesis to go around the Sun - assuming it's the Sun's companion?’
‘I don't know. I'd have to work out its orbit. That's something I should have done before the Leaving, but there were so many other things occupying me then, and now, too - but that's no excuse.’
‘Well, make a guess.’