The larger of the clouds was a rose of pink light. Its heart was speckled by bright splashes of light — stars? — and it was bordered by a band of deeper darkness, velvet blackness, where no stars shone. It was beautiful, strange.
“That is a star birth nebula,” he said. “It’s probably much more extensive. All we can see is a blister, illuminated by a clutch of young stars at the center — see the way that glow is roughly spherical? The stars’ radiation makes the gases shine, out as far as it can reach, before it gets absorbed. But you can see more stars, younger stars, emerging from the fringes of the blister. That darker area all around the glow, eclipsing the stars behind, is a glimpse of the true nebula, dense clouds of dust and hydrogen, probably containing protostars that have yet to shine… Madeleine, I did a little amateur astronomy as a kid. I recognize that thing; it’s visible from Earth. We call it the Lagoon Nebula. And its companion over there is the Trifid. The Lagoon contains stars so young and bright you can see them with the naked eye, from Earth.”
In all her travels around the Saddle Point network, Madeleine had seen nothing like this.
“Ah,” Malenfant said, when she expressed this. “But we’ve come far beyond that, of course.”
She shivered, suddenly longing for daylight. “Malenfant, in those trees over there. I thought I saw—”
“There are Neandertals here,” he said quickly. “You needn’t fear them. I think they’re from Io. Maybe some of them are from Earth, too. I think they were brought here when they were close to death. I haven’t recognized any of them yet. There is one old guy I got to know a little, who died. I called him Esau. He must be here somewhere.”
She tried to follow all that. He didn’t seem concerned, confused by the situation. There was, she realized, a lot he needed to tell her.
“We aren’t on Io anymore, are we?”
“No.” He pointed at the stars with his half-eaten fish. “That’s no sky of Earth. Or even of Io.”
Madeleine felt something inside her crack. “Malenfant—”
“Hey.” He was immediately before her, holding her shoulders, tall in the dark. “Take it easy.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“We’re a long way from home. I know.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you.” She started to blurt out all that she’d seen since she, Malenfant, and Dorothy Chaum had returned to the Solar System from the Gaijin’s Cannonball home world: the interstellar war, the hail of comets into the Sun’s hearth, the Crackers.
He listened carefully. He showed regret at the damage done to Earth, the end of so many stories. He smiled when she spoke of Nemoto. But after a time, as detail after detail spilled out of her, he held her shoulders again.
“Madeleine.”
She looked up at him; his eyes were wells of shadow in the starlight.
“None of it matters. Look around, Madeleine. We’re a long way away from all that. There’s nothing we can do to affect any of it now…”
“How far?”
“Questions later,” he said gently. “The first thing I did when I woke up was go behind those bushes over there and take a good solid dump.”
Despite herself, that made her laugh out loud.
By the time they’d eaten more fish, and some yamlike fruit Malenfant had found, it was still dark, with no sign of a dawn. So Madeleine pulled together a pallet of leaves and dry grass, tucked her arms inside her coverall, and quickly fell asleep.
When she woke it was still dark.
Malenfant was hunkered down close to a stand of trees. He seemed to be drawing in the dirt with a stick, peering at the sky. Beyond him there was a group of figures, shadowy in the starlight. Neandertals?
There really was no sign of dawn, no sign of a moon: not a glimmer of light, other than starlight, on any horizon. And yet something was different, she thought. Were the stars a little brighter? Certainly that Milky Way glow close to the horizon seemed stronger. And, it seemed to her, the stars had shifted a little, in the sky. She looked for the star patterns she had noted last time she was awake — the box overhead, the ellipse. Were they a little distorted, a little more squashed together?
She joined Malenfant. He handed her a piece of fruit, and she sat beside him.
The Neandertals seemed to be a family group: five, six adults, about as many children. They seemed oblivious to Malenfant’s scrutiny. They were hairy, squat, naked: cartoon ape-men. And two of the children were wrestling, hard, tumbling over and over, as if they were more gorilla than human.
“Why did you come here, Madeleine?” Malenfant asked slowly, avoiding her eyes.
He seemed stiff; she felt embarrassed, as if she had been foolish, impulsive. “I volunteered. The Gaijin helped me. I wanted to find you.”
“Why?”
“I got to know you, on the Cannonball, Malenfant. I didn’t like the idea of you being alone when—”
“When what?”
She hesitated. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“Just remember,” he said coolly, “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” He continued his sketching in the dust, angry.
She shrank back, confused, lost; she felt farther from home than ever.
She studied his sketches. They were crude, just scrapings made with the point of his stick. But she recognized the box, the ellipse.
“It’s a star map,” she said.
“Yeah. Kind of basic. Just a few score of the brightest stars. But look here, here, here…”
Some of the points were double.
“The stars have shifted,” she said.
“Here’s where this was yesterday — or before we slept, anyhow. And here’s where it is now.” He shrugged. “The shift is small — hard to be accurate without instruments — but I think it’s real.”
“I noted it too,” she said.
“Not just a shift. Other changes. I think there are more stars than yesterday. They seem brighter. And they are flowing across the sky—” He swept his arms over his head, toward the bright Milky Way band on the horizon. “ — thataway.”
“Why that way?”
He looked up at her. “Because that’s where we’re headed. Come see.” He stood, took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet, and led her past a stand of trees.
Now she saw the galactic band exposed to her full view: It was a river of stars, yes, but they were stars that were varied — yellow and blue and orange — and the river was crammed with exotic features, giant dark clouds and brilliant shining nebulae.
“It looks like the Milky Way,” she said. “But—”
“I know,” he said. “It’s not like this at home… I think we’re looking at the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.”
“Which is not the arm that contains the Sun,” she said slowly.
“Hell, no. That’s just a shingle, a short arc. This mother is the next arm in, toward the center of the Galaxy.” He swept his arm so his hand spanned the star river. “Look at those nebulae — see? The Eagle, the Omega, the Trifid, the Lagoon — a huge region of star birth, one of the largest in the Galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. The Sagittarius Arm is one of the Galaxy’s two main spiral features, a huge whirl of matter that reaches from the hub of the Galaxy all the way out to the rim, winding around for a full turn. This is what you see if you head inward from the Sun, toward the Galaxy center.”
Under the huge, crowded sky, she felt small, humbled. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Malenfant?”