The Cuddlies here certainly had no premonition of what was about to happen to their faraway cousins. Attracted by the festive atmosphere, they hung around the people, popping in and out of crevices and sometimes pulling at space-suit legs to be picked up.
“You could see it now if you were hanging in a bosun’s chair over the outside rim,” Jun Davd’s voice sounded in his ear. “It’s cutting upward from below a chord drawn between you and its point of intersection. It will rise above your sunward horizon after transit.”
“How soon?” Bram asked.
“Four minutes. If you sight along the outer edge, you ought to be able to see some lightening of the limb.”
Bram strained his eyes. Beside him, Jao, fussing with the tripod of a theodolite, straightened for a look.
Yes, the precipice edge that faced the interstellar night had gained a silvery hairline illumination. It projected a short distance as a faint straight scratch against the darkness. Where the scratch ended would be the theoretical horizon.
“Got it?” he asked Jao.
Jao struggled with the theodolite. “Just a second. Yah. Here we go.”
“One minute.”
All across the pebbled plain, space-suited figures showed that they were listening in on the circuit by ceasing their activities and becoming still. The Cuddlies, sensing the humans’ absorption, froze.
“Now,” Jun Davd said.
Where the threadlike horizon narrowed to invisibility, there was a great flare. Garish light spilled over the plain, casting long black shadows. Human figures, their reflexes slower than their helmet filters, raised arms in a delayed reaction to ward off the light.
Bram saw streaks of movement through the awful glare: startled Cuddlies popping back into their holes. When his eyes adjusted, not a Cuddly was to be seen anywhere.
The light dwindled to a point and disappeared. Moments later, a bright star rose against the inward horizon.
Except that it couldn’t be a star, because it was in front of one of the great, dully visible faces of a disk.
Jun Davd’s voice in Bram’s ear was tinged with sorrow. “The exhaust swept across one of the regions we never had a chance to send a survey team to. The one with the great elliptical bowl and the pyramidal objects rising tens of miles high on stilts. Radar echoes appeared to show a small city in the vicinity to service it, whatever it was. We thought it might be a research center of some sort.”
“I remember,” Bram said.
“There’s nothing there now but thousands of square miles of melted slag.”
Bram thought of all the Cuddly warrens that must have lain under the complex and about all the Cuddlies outside the zone of direct destruction that would be dying of radiation sickness in the days and Tendays ahead.
Beside him, Jao swore. “I was going to come back. Maybe in a couple of hundred years when we got ourselves established and could afford to lay off a little. The pyramid installation was the first place I wanted to look at.”
In the disk-filled inner sky, the artificial star seemed to slow as if it were on a rubber band. Slowly, slowly, the rim of the diskworld pulled it back.
“They’re not going to bother to go into an orbit,” Jun Davd’s voice said. “They’re just going to hang there.”
“Disposable ship,” Jao said. “Or disposable colonists.”
“A life form that just sets blindly out and goes anywhere,” Jun Davd mused, “and takes root if it can. And now, I’m afraid, they’re making their second pass to bring them to a halt over the rim. They don’t bother to think things out in advance. They’re empirical.”
The star hung over the point of the horizon and winked out. Across the narrow plain, space-suited people eddied about, and groups began to break up. A few cautious Cuddlies popped up out of their holes.
“Show’s over,” Bram said.
Back inside a sports arena that buzzed and echoed with excited conversation, Bram and Jao conferred with Jun Davd and watched on their portable screen the images from Yggdrasil’s remote sensors.
“We were lucky,” Jun Davd’s distant voice said. “One of our orbiting cameras happened to be no more than a quarter million miles from where our visitor decided to park. We’ve moved it closer in the last hour, and we’re still closing.”
People kept poking their heads into the alcove where Bram and Jao had installed themselves. It would have been hard to jam more people into the area where people were crowding around for a look at the screen. Outside, on the rocky floor of the arena, a number of people had been foresighted enough to fetch their own personal viewscreens from their quarters and slave them to Bram’s circuit, and each of these had growing knots of watchers around it.
“They’re continuing to ignore us,” Jun Davd said. “Not a peep on any wavelength.”
Bram studied the fuzzy image. The lack of definition took away the regularities that would have labeled the ship an artificial shape and made it look like a life form. A life form with a long lumpy stem whose segments swelled where they fit into each other and a living jelly of bubbles to cap it. The nodules along the shaft fostered the notion.
For a moment Bram toyed with the idea. Yggdrasil was a living spaceship, after all. Why not this? What kind of life form would look like a budding stick, and what function would be served by the gob of bubbles at one end?
Then he dismissed the thought. The thing was a machine, after all—a relatively primitive machine that generated a howling storm of hydrogen-helium fusion and probably poisoned’ its inhabitants.
“We make it at approximately twenty miles long,” Jun Davd said. “It could alight in Yggdrasil’s branches and never be noticed, but it’s still an impressive achievement for a manufactured article.”
“What are they doing?” Bram said.
“Nothing, as far as we can tell. No extravehicle activity, no electromagnetic emissions. No attempt to reorient the axis of the ship as a preliminary to achieving some sort of rational orbit. They just appear to be waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Jao rumbled. “They sit there like that, and eventually they’re going to drift off the rim and get sucked down the side. Then they’re going to have to turn on that torch of theirs and burn some more landscape.”
“Perhaps they don’t care,” Jun Davd said.
Bram was staring at the glob of bubbles. Overmagnification had blended them into an undifferentiated mass, but despite the bleared focus there was enough mottled shadowing for the eye to appreciate them as a clump of hundreds of separate spherules.
They were hollow, according to Jun Davd’s radar echoes. Empty fuel tanks, each a couple of thousand feet in diameter—big enough to hold millions of tons of frozen hydrogen in its different isotopic forms. And there would be a complex maze of piping to skim off the helium three as it became available and store that separately, too.
Tritium was biologically hazardous. It was hard to believe that the empty bubbles had been converted into environmental pods. Jun Davd’s imagination must have run away with him. Surely no people would be that reckless with their generations.
The vague mottling seemed to shift, showing one of the globules more distinctly.
“Do I see movement?” Bram said. “Or is that just image shimmer?”
Jao grabbed Bram’s arm. “No, it’s movement.”
As they watched, one of the bubbles detached itself from the foamlike cluster and drifted free. A fine mist spouted from it.
“Chemical jets,” Jun Davd said. “They’re matching velocity with the rim.”
A hum of voices rose in the surrounding bay. “Hold it down,” Jao thundered.
“You were right,” Bram told Jun Davd. “They moved into their empty fuel tanks. If that one held tritium, there must still be residual radiation. They’d have to be desperate for expansion room.”