The Mouse gazed across the stars. “I remember that sometimes the gypsies used to curse by him.” He thought a moment. “Without plugs, I guess we would.”
“There were factions who resisted Clark’s ideas, especially on Earth, which has always been a bit reactionary. But they didn’t hold out very long.”
“Yeah,” the Mouse said. “Only eight hundred years. Not all gypsies are traitors like me.” But he laughed into the winds.
“The Ashton Clark system has only had one serious drawback that I can see. And it’s taken it a long time to materialize.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Something professors have been telling their students for years, it seems. You’ll hear it said at every intellectual gathering you go to, at least once. There seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity today. That’s what the Vega Republic was trying to establish back in 2800. Because of the ease and satisfaction with which people can work now, anywhere they want, there have been such movements of peoples from world to world in the past dozen generations that society has fragmented around itself. There is only a gaudy, meretricious interplanetary society which has no real tradition behind it—“ Katin paused. “I got hold of some of Captain’s bliss before I plugged up. And while I was talking I just counted in my mind how many people I’ve heard say that between Harvard and Hell3. And you know something? I think they’re wrong.”
“They are?”
“They are. They’re all just looking for our social traditions in the wrong place. There are cultural traditions that have matured over the centuries, yet culminate now in something vital and solely of today. And you know who embodies that tradition more than anyone I’ve met?”
“The captain?”
“You, Mouse.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve collected the ornamentations a dozen societies have left us over the ages and made them inchoately yours. You’re the product of those tensions that clashed in the time of Clark and you resolve them on your syrynx with patterns eminently of the present—“
“Aw, cut it out, Katin.”
“I’ve been hunting a subject for my book with both historical import and humanity as well. You’re it, Mouse. My book should be your biography! It should tell where you’ve been, what you’ve done, the things you’ve seen, and the things you’ve shown other people. There’s my social significance, my historical sweep, the spark among the links that illuminates the breadth of the net—“
“Katin, you’re crazy!”
“No I’m not. I’ve finally seen what I’ve—“
“Hey there, keep your vanes spread taut!”
“Sorry, Captain.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.”
Ruefully the two cyborg studs turned their attention back to the night. The Mouse was pensive. Katin was belligerent.
“There’s a star coming up bright and hot. It’s the only thing in the sky. Remember that. Keep it smack in front of us and don’t let her waver. You can babble about cultural solidity on your own time.”
Without horizon, the star rose.
At twenty times the distance of Earth from the sun (or Ark from its sun) there was not enough light from a medium G-type star to defract daytime through an Earth-type atmosphere. At such distances, the brightest object in the night would still look like a star, not a sun—a very bright star.
They were two billion miles, or a little over twenty solar distances, from it now.
It was the brightest star.
“A beauty, huh?”
“No, Mouse,” Lorq said. “Just a star.”
“How can you tell—“
“—it’s going to go nova?”
“Because of the build-up of heavy materials on the surface,” Lorq explained to the twins. “There’s just the faintest reddening of the absolute color, corresponding to the faintest cooling in the surface temperature. There’s also a slight speed-up of sunspot activity.”
“From the surface of one of her planets, though, there would be no way to tell?”
“That’s right. The reddening is far too faint to be detected with the naked eye. Fortunately this star has no planets. There’s some moon-sized junk floating up a bit closer that may have been a failed attempt at a world.”
“Moons? “Moons!” Katin objected. “You can’t have moons without planets. Planetoids, maybe, but not moons!”
Lorq laughed. “Moon-sized is all I said.”
“Oh.”
All vanes had been used to swing the Roc into its two billion-mile-radius orbit about the star. Katin lay in his projection chamber, hesitant to release the view of the star for the lights of his chamber. “What about the study stations the Alkane has set up?”
“They’re drifting as lonely as we are. We’ll hear from them in due time. But for now we don’t need them and they don’t need us. Cyana has warned them we’re coming. I’ll point them on matrix moveable. There, you can follow their locations and their movements. That’s the major manned station. It’s fifty times as far out as we are.”
“Are we within the danger zone when she goes?”
“When that nova starts, that star is going to eat up the sky and everything in it a long way out.”
“When does it begin?”
“Days, Cyana predicted. But such predictions have been known to be off by two weeks in either direction. We’ll have a few minutes to clear if she goes. We’re about two and a half light-hours from her now.” All their views came not by light, but by ethric disturbance, which gave them a synchronous view of the sun. “We’ll see her start at exactly the instant she goes.”
“And the Illyrion?” Sebastian asked. “How we that get?”
“That’s my worry,” Lorq told him. “We’ll get it when the time comes to get it. You can all cut loose for a while now.”