Em had been optimistic for a happy outcome to the rescue mission. She had never witnessed a fatal off-Earth incident, and could not bring herself to believe one had happened there. A rationale was hard to find, though. The most likely seemed to be that a power failure had occurred, leaving the ship adrift, without its long-range communication functions. Sky knew it was possible, but only remotely so.
When they’d arrived near the cloud and heard no distress signal, no radio call, they had both realized that the chance of rescue had become vanishingly small. Superluminals were designed so that the radio transmitter would be pretty much the last thing that went down.
There just weren’t many things that could account for the silence other than catastrophe. Nevertheless they looked, but Bill reported no sign of the ship. “It is not in the search area,” he said.
Em and Sky didn’t know either of the people on the Quagmire, but that didn’t soften things any. There was a brotherhood among those who traveled the great deeps. A tradition had developed much like that among mariners in the dangerous early days on the seas: They were a band, they looked out for each other, and they grieved when anyone was lost.
The Quagmire was lost. The mission had become salvage rather than rescue.
“Must have been an explosion,” Emma said.
Sky looked off to starboard, where the omega drifted, dark and quiet. But it was too far away to be the culprit.
Emma folded herself into his arms. “Damn,” she said.
“We knew all along it might be like this,” said Sky.
“I suppose.” She snuffled, wiped her eyes, pulled away from him, and cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “there’s probably no point hanging around here. What we should do is try to get a look at what happened.”
That got his attention. “How do you suggest we do that?”
THEY SLIPPED INTO hyperspace, rode the quiet mists, and jumped out again before Sky could finish his coffee. “Right on target,” Bill announced. They had traveled 104 billion kilometers, had gotten in front of the light wave from the search area, and could now look back at the place where the hedgehog and the Quagmire had been. Bill unfolded the array of dishes that served as the ship’s telescope and aimed it at the region.
They were seeing the area as it had been four days earlier. Had the telescope been more efficient, they could have watched the Quagmire approach the hedgehog, could have watched Terry Drafts and Jane Collins leave their ship and descend into the spines.
Emma posted the time at the Quagmire site, late evening on the twenty-third, exactly twenty-five minutes before communications had stopped.
It was after midnight on the Heffernan. He felt weary, tired, numb, but not sleepy. While they waited he sent off a preliminary report to Serenity. No sign of the Quagmor. Continuing investigation.
They talked about the incident. Odd that they’d just vanish. You don’t think they might have just taken off? Or been grabbed by something? Sounded wild, but no stranger than simply dropping out of sight. Sky laughed at the idea, but asked Bill whether anything unusual was moving in the area.
“Negative,” said Bill.
Watching too many horror sims.
Emma gently pressed his arm. “Coming up,” she said. He was watching the time. Just a minute or so.
The cloud was, of course, invisible at that range. (He couldn’t help connecting the event with the cloud. Knew it would somehow turn out to be responsible.) But they were well away from it now. The distance between their present position and the site of the incident was seven times as great as the diameter of the solar system. “I can’t imagine what we’d expect to see at this range,” he said.
“We won’t see anything, Sky. But there’s a chance—”
“Photons,” Bill reported. “Just a sprinkle. But they were right on schedule.”
“So what’s it tell us?” asked Sky.
“Explosion,” said Em. “Big one.”
“Big enough to obliterate the ship? And the rock?”
“If we can pick up traces of it out here. Oh, yes, I’d say so.”
LIBRARY ENTRY
. Few of us now alive can remember when we looked at the stars and wondered whether we were alone. We have had faster-than-light transport for almost a half century, and if we have not yet encountered anyone with whom we can have a conversation, we know nevertheless they are out there, or have been there in the past.
More than a hundred people have given their lives to this effort. And we are now informed that, during the last fiscal year, roughly 2 percent of the world’s financial resources have gone into this exploration of the outer habitat in which we live.
Two percent.
It does not sound like much. But it could feed 90 million people for a year. Or provide housing for 120 million. It could pay all the medical costs in the NAU for sixteen months. It could provide a year’s schooling for every child on the planet.
So what do we have for our investment?
Sadly, we have nothing to put into the account books. It’s true we have improved our plumbing methods and created lighter, stronger materials. We can now pack more nourishment into a convenience meal than we ever could before. Our electronics are better. We have lightbenders, which have proved of some use in crime prevention, and also of some use to criminals. We have better clothing. Our engines are more fuel-efficient. We have learned to husband energy. But surely all of this could have been had, at far less cost, by direct investment.
Why then do we continue this quest?
It is too easy to think that we go because of the primal urge, as Tennyson said, to sail beyond the sunset.
We pretend that we are interested in taking the temperatures of distant suns, of measuring the velocity of the winds of Altair, of presiding over the birth of stars. Indeed, we have done these things.
But in the end, we are driven by a need to find someone with whom we can have a conversation. To demonstrate that we are not alone. We have already learned that there have been others before us. But they seem to have gone somewhere else. Or passed into oblivion. So the long hunt continues. And in the end, if we are successful, if we actually find somebody out there, I suspect it will be our own face that looks back at us. And they will probably be as startled as we.
— Conan Magruder
Time and Tide, 2228
chapter 6
University of Chicago.
Thursday, March 6.
IT HAD BEEN almost four years, but David Collingdale had neither forgotten nor forgiven the outrage at Moonlight. The sheer mindlessness of it all still ate at him, came on him sometimes in the depths of the night.
Had it been a war, or a rebellion, or anything at all with the most remote kind of purpose, he might have been able to make peace with it. There were times when he stood before his classes and someone would ask about the experience and he’d try to explain, how it had looked, how he had felt. But he still filled up, and sometimes his voice broke and he fell into a desperate silence. He was not among those who thought the omegas a force of nature. They had been designed and launched by somebody. Had he been able to gain access to that somebody, he would have gladly killed and never looked back.
A blanket of snow covered the University of Chicago campus. The walkways and the landing pads had been scooped out; otherwise, everything was buried. He sat at his desk, his class notes open before him, Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons drifting incongruously through the office. He’d spent the night there not because he knew the storm was coming, although he did, but simply because he sometimes enjoyed the spartan ambience of his office. Because it restored reason and purpose to the world.