Asquith had asked her why, but Hutch had no idea.
“Whatever she wants,” Asquith had instructed her, “don’t commit the Academy to anything. Tell her we’ll take it under advisement.”
He didn’t offer to sit in.
HUTCH HAD SEEN Dr. Alva numerous times, of course. Everyone had. Who could forget the blood-soaked images of her kneeling over a dying girl during the aftershocks of the Peruvian earthquake of ’21? Or leading the Counselor himself through the wreckage of Bellaconda after the Peacekeepers finally put down the rebels? Or charging out of the flyer in plague-ridden South Africa?
But when she came through the door, Hutch would not have recognized her. She seemed smaller somehow. The windblown hair was under control. There was no sign of the no-nonsense attitude that was such a large part of the legend. She was reserved, polite, almost submissive. A woman, perhaps, headed out shopping.
“Dr. Emerson,” said Hutch, rising to greet her, “it’s a privilege to meet you.” Her voice went a few decibels higher than normal.
“Priscilla?” Alva stretched out her hand. “It’s my pleasure.”
Hutch directed her to a wing chair and sat down beside her. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the office.”
Alva wore a pleated navy skirt and a light blue blouse beneath a frayed velomir jacket. Part of the image. Her hair had gone white, “in the service of the unfortunate,” as Gregory MacAllister had once put it. She was probably the only public figure for whom MacAllister had ever found a kind word.
“None at all, thank you.” She arranged herself, glanced around the office, and smiled approvingly. It was decorated with several of Tor’s sketches, images of the Twins and of the Refuge at Vertical, of the illuminated Memphis gliding through starlight, of Hutch herself in an antique Phillies uniform. She smiled at that one, and her eyes settled on Hutch. They were dark and penetrating. Sensors, peering through the objects in the room. This was not a woman to be jollied along.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” she asked.
“Priscilla, I need your help.”
Hutch wanted to shift her weight. Move it around a bit. Force herself to relax. But she sat quite still. “In what way?”
“We need to do something about the omega.”
At first Hutch thought she’d misunderstood. Alva was of course talking about the one headed toward Earth. When people said the omega, that was always the one they meant. “It won’t become a problem for almost a thousand years,” she said uneasily. “Were you suggesting—?”
“I was suggesting we find a way to stop it.”
That was easy to say. “We’ve been doing some research.”
“It’s been more than twenty years, Priscilla. Or is it Hutch?”
“Hutch is good.”
“Hutch.” Her tone softened. “Somehow, in your case, it is a very feminine name.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Alva.”
Hutch nodded and tried the name. It was a bit like sitting with Washington and calling him George.
Alva leaned forward. “What have we learned so far?”
Hutch shrugged. “It’s loaded with nanos. Some of our people think it can create gravity fields. To help it navigate.”
“And it doesn’t like artificial objects.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s a lot of dust and hydrogen. The clouds vary in size by a factor of about 30 percent. They coast along at a pretty good clip. In the range of 20 million klicks an hour.”
“That’s how fast it’s coming? Our cloud?”
“Yes.” Hutch thought for a minute. “Oh, and they seem to come in waves. We don’t know how wide the waves are because we can’t see the end of them. The local waves are 160 light-years apart, give or take, and one of them rolls through the solar system approximately every eight thousand years.”
“But they’re not always the same distance apart? The waves?”
“No. It’s pretty erratic. At the beginning, we assumed that the local pattern held everywhere, and that there were literally millions of clouds drifting throughout the Orion Arm. But of course that’s not true. Fortunately.”
“Anything else?”
“The waves are arcing outward in the general direction that the galaxy is turning. Joining the flow, I suppose.”
“And that’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
“It strikes me there’s not much we didn’t know twenty years ago. As to the questions that come to my mind, we don’t know where they come from. Or why they behave the way they do. We don’t even know if they’re natural objects.”
“That’s correct.”
“Or how to disable them.”
Hutch got up. She could feel energy radiating out of the woman. “They’re not easy to penetrate,” she said.
Alva smiled. “Like a virgin.”
Hutch didn’t reply.
For a long moment, neither spoke. The commlink blinked a couple of times, then shut off. Incoming traffic. Hyperlight from Broadside, personal for her.
Alva smiled politely and fixed Hutch with those dark eyes. The woman looked simultaneously amused and annoyed. “Are we making a serious effort?”
“Well,” said Hutch. “Of course.”
“But we’ve nothing to show. After twenty years. Thirty years, actually.”
“We’re working on it.” She was floundering.
Alva nodded. “We have to do better.”
“Alva—” She had to struggle to say the word. “There’s no hurry. I mean, the thing’s a thousand years away.”
Alva nodded again. But it wasn’t a concession, an acknowledgment that she had a point. Rather it was a recognition that Hutch was behaving exactly as expected, saying precisely what Alva had known all along she would say. She straightened her collar. “Hutch, you’ve been to Beta Pac.”
Home of the Monument-Makers, the lost race that had left majestic relics of their passing across several thousand light-years. Star-travelers while the Sumerians were learning to bake bricks. Nothing more than savages now, wandering through the ruins of their once-proud cities. “Yes, I’ve been there.”
“I have not.” Her eyes clouded. “I’ve seen quite enough decimation here at home.” Another long silence ensued. Then: “I understand the Monument-Makers knew about the omegas. Well in advance of their appearance at Beta Pac.”
“That’s correct. They even tried to divert the things at Quraqua and at Nok. To save the local inhabitants.”
“With no success.”
Hutch saw where this was going. “They cut cube moons and inserted them in orbit around Nok hoping the cloud would go for them instead of the cities.” She shrugged.
“In the end,” said Alva, “they couldn’t even save themselves.”
“No. They couldn’t. There’s evidence they packed up a substantial chunk of the population and cleared out.”
“Yet they had how long to prepare? Two thousand years?”
“A little longer, we think.”
She was on her feet now, moving to the window, drawn by the sunlight, but still not looking at anything. “How do you think that could have happened? Are the clouds so irresistible that even the Monument-Makers, given two millennia, couldn’t do something?”
“It’s probably not easy. To stop one of the omegas.”
“Hutch, I would suggest to you that two thousand years was too much time to get ready. That they probably put it off. Somebody else’s problem. Get to it next year. Or sometime during the next century. And they continued delaying until it became too late.”