It was just like working around the shuttle, if he focused on his immediate environment. But the light was odd. He missed the huge, comforting presence of the Earth; from low Earth orbit, the daylit planet was a constant, overwhelming presence, as bright as a tropical sky. Here there was only the Sun, a remote point source that cast long, sharp shadows; and all around he could see the stars, the immensity that surrounded him.
Now, suddenly — and for the first time in the whole damn mission — fear flooded him. Adrenaline pumped into his system, making him feel fluttery as a bird, and his poor old heart started to pound.
Time to get with it, Malenfant.
Resolutely, he worked his right hand controller, and he turned to face the Gaijin artifact.
The artifact was a blank circle, mysterious, framing only stars. He could see nothing that he hadn’t seen through the Perry ’s cameras, truthfully; it was just a ring of some shining blue material, its faces polished and barely visible in the wan light of the Sun.
But that interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.
He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?
There was, of course, no reply.
First things first. Let’s do a little science here.
He pulsed his thrusters and drifted toward the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.
He reached out a gloved hand, spacesuit fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop. Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.
No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself with the thrusters, he could get his glove no closer than a millimeter or so from the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.
He tried running his hand up and down, along the hoop. There were… ripples, invisible but tangible.
He drifted back to the center of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging. He cast a shadow on the structure from the distant pinpoint Sun. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.
Malenfant rummaged in a sleeve pocket with stiff, gloved fingers. He held up his hand to see what he had retrieved. It was his Swiss Army knife. He threw the knife, underhand, into the hoop.
The knife sailed away in a straight line.
When it reached the black sheet it dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.
The knife disappeared.
Awkwardly, pulsing his thrusters, he worked his way around the artifact. The MMU was designed to move him in a straight line, not a tight curve; it took some time.
On the far side of the artifact, there was no sign of the knife.
A gateway, then. A gateway, here at the rim of the Solar System. How appropriate, he thought. How iconic.
Time to make a leap of faith, Malenfant. He fired his RCS and began to glide forward.
The gate grew, in his vision, until it was all around him. He was going to pass through it — if he kept going — somewhere near the center.
He looked back at the Perry. Its huge, misty main antenna was pointed back toward Earth, catching the light of the Sun like a spider web. He could see instrument pallets held away from the hab module’s yellowed, cloth-clad bulk, like rear-view mirrors. The pallets were arrays of lenses, their black gazes uniformly fixed on him.
Just one press of his controller and he could stop right here, go back.
He reached the center of the disc. An electric blue light bathed him. He leaned forward inside his stiff HUT unit, so he could look up.
The artifact had come to life. The electric blue light was glowing from the substance of the circle itself. He could see speckles in the light. Coherent, then. And when he looked down at his suit, he saw how the white fabric was crisscrossed by the passage of dozens of points of electric blue glow.
Lasers. Was he being scanned?
“This changes everything,” he said.
The blue light increased in intensity, until it blinded him. There was a single instant of pain—
Chapter 6
Transmission
“We think a Gaijin flower-ship is a variant of the old Bussard ramjet design,” Sally Brind said. She had spread a fold-up softscreen over one time-smoothed wall of Nemoto’s lunar cave. Now — Maura squinted to see — the screen filled up with antique design concepts: line images of gauzy, unlikely craft, obsessively labeled with captions and arrows. “It is a notion that goes back to the 1960s…”
Nemoto’s home — here on the Japanese Moon, deep in Farside — had turned out to be a crude, outmoded subsurface shack close to the infrared observatory where she’d made her first discovery of Gaijin activity in the belt. Here, it seemed, Nemoto had lived for the best part of two decades. Maura thought she couldn’t stand it for more than a couple of hours.
There wasn’t even anywhere to sit, aside from Nemoto’s low pallet, Maura had immediately noticed, and both Sally and Maura had carefully avoided that. Fortunately the Moon’s low gravity made the bare rock floor relatively forgiving, even for the thin flesh that now stretched over Maura’s fragile bones. There were some concessions to humanity — an ancient and worn scrap of tatami, a tokonoma alcove containing a jinja — a small, lightweight Shinto shrine. But most of the floor and wall space, even here in Nemoto’s living area, was taken up with science equipment: anonymous white boxes that might have been power sources or sensors or sample boxes, cables draped over the floor, a couple of small, old-fashioned softscreens.
As Sally spoke, Nemoto — thin, gaunt, eyes invisible within dark hollows — pottered about her own projects. Walking with tiny, cautious steps, she minutely adjusted her equipment — or, bizarrely, watered the small plants that flourished on brackets on the walls, bathed by light from bright halide lamps.
Still, the languid flow of the water from Nemoto’s can — great fat droplets oscillating as they descended toward the tiny green leaves — was oddly soothing.
Sally continued her analysis of the Gaijin’s putative technology. “The ramjet was always seen as one way to meet the challenge of interstellar journeys. The enormous distances even to the nearest stars would require an immense amount of fuel. With a ramjet, you don’t need to carry any fuel at all.
“Space, you see, isn’t empty. Even between the stars there are tenuous clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen. Bussard, the concept originator, proposed drawing in this gas, concentrating it, and pushing it into a fusion reaction — just as hydrogen is burned into helium at the heart of the Sun.
“The trouble is, those gas clouds are so thin your inlet scoop has to be gigantic. So Bussard suggested using magnetic fields to pull in gas from an immense volume, hundreds of thousands of kilometers around.”
She brought up another picture: an imaginary starship startlingly like a marine creature — a squid, perhaps, Maura thought — a cylindrical body with giant outreaching magnetic arms, preceded by darting shafts of light.
“The interstellar gas would first have to be electrically charged, to be deflected by the magnetic scoops. So you would pepper it with laser beams, as you see here, to heat it to a plasma, as hot as the surface of the Sun. It’s an exotic, difficult concept, but it’s still easier than hauling along all your fuel.”