But what of the five years since? He believed firmly, because he had to, that she still lived—but suppose she did not? Suppose she had died five minutes after sending that last message? Suppose she was dying now, this moment, while he lay here, safe and warm, and he did not know?
He calmed himself. No. She lived. He knew that. He had always felt that he would know if she died. He would be able to feel it, and never mind the distance and the logical impossibility of the idea. He could feel her being alive, the way he could feel his own heart beating. He would know if she died, the way he would know if his right arm were cut off.
But what of himself? Dear God, how had five years changed him? How much had he aged? Five years cooped up in this oversized tin can—he had gained weight, lost muscle tone. That happened in space, no matter how much one exercised. And what about his soul, his spirit? Had five years of fruitless effort and failure soured him, embittered him? He did not believe so, but there was no way to tell.
He swung his feet around to the floor and sat up in bed. Enough. It was foolish to think that he was so changed that she would no longer love him, no longer be attracted to him. He had more faith in her—and confidence in himself—than that. But, still, he did not want to be a disappointment to her.
And she would be disappointed indeed to see him moping around in his quarters. There was work to be done. Even if the launch had been delayed for the time being, the second stealthship, the Highwayman, still needed to be prepared for its flight, prepared for the next attempt on a CORE. He got up, left his cabin, and made his way down toward the flight deck. There were stores to check, systems to test, hardware to inspect.
Gerald, of course, took a special interest in preparing the Highwayman.
He was going to command her. No matter how much Dianne Steiger protested, he was going to be aboard the little ship.
Gerald MacDougal had had his fill of sending others out to die. He would go himself, next time.
And would hope that Marcia would understand, and forgive him.
Sianna made her way back to the Main Ops building and her cubicle, sat down in her chair, leaned back and sighed. What a bloody disaster of a morning! The news from Bernhardt was bad by itself, but that was only part of it. She had wasted the morning and made a fool of herself in front of the big boss. The fate of the planet, the idea of universal doom, was a bit too much to deal with. The excellent odds that she would get fired seemed a little closer to home, a bit more tangible, plenty all by itself to bring on the storm clouds.
She might as well give up on the day before depression, guilt, and frustration had their chance to feed on each other.
With a supreme effort of will, she stood up, shoved her chair in behind her desk, and left.
Sianna made her way aboveground without even being aware of the elevator’s terrors. She stepped out into the bright June sunshine, blinking miserably at the perfect robin’s-egg blue sky. She trudged home, unaware of the fresh, clean smell in the air and the playful little breezes that chased each other around the city streets. She dragged herself home to her apartment building, aware of little more than being miserable.
How much worse a morning could it possibly have been? she asked herself as she waited for the elevator. The elevator arrived. She got in and rode to her floor. She stepped out of it to clomp down the hallway to her apartment.
Incredible that she had started the day with her subconscious hinting that she was on the verge of a discovery, a breakthrough! She had actually thought that Wally—Wally—was going to inspire her. So much for the subconscious. Wally telling her something that would unlock the doors to the knowledge hidden inside her? The only real piece of new, solid, information he offered up was that a silly little worldlet orbited the Sphere all by itself. She might as well wait for her toaster to reveal the secrets of the Universe.
To hell with it. She reached the door to her apartment, and waited the infuriating ten seconds it took for the door to recognize her, unbolt, and open up. Damned-fool old-fashioned door. When was the landlord going to install something that didn’t take all day to let her in?
At last the door came open, and she flounced her way into the apartment. She marched straight to her room, hurled her handbag down onto the floor, and flung herself at the bed, landing with a satisfyingly loud if muffled thud.
If only she could learn to grow up. Or maybe the trouble was that she already had grown up, and was forever doomed to retain all the foolishness of childhood. Sometimes it seemed to her that the foolishness was all that remained of her—as if she were the Cheshire Cat, and her foolish smile was lasting quite a while after the rest of her—career hopes, academic standing, maturity—had faded away.
She frowned, shook her head, and hugged her arms around her pillow, burying her face in it.
Suddenly, two other images popped into her head, quite unbidden. Epicycles, as she herself has described them—like a satellite going around the Moon while the Moon goes around the Earth—except the Earth and Moon aren’t there. And the Sphere, the Sphere as she had first seen it in Wally’s simulation, glowing red, a huge thing with stars and worlds in orbit about it; the Sphere’s circumference bigger around than Earth’s old orbit—
Sianna spun around until she was lying on her back, staring at the pulsequake cracks in the ceiling. Her lips moved silently. Her heart started to pound. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed.
She had it. She had it. She knew. In half a minute she was out the door, headed back toward the lab. She had to find Wally and get to work on this.
Sianna paced eagerly up and down the sim room, rubbing her hands together. She had it. She knew she had it. If there were ever a moment in her life where she knew the right answer, this was it.
Wally fed the last of Sianna’s instructions into the simulator system and stared at his setup screens. “Well, it’s all in there,” he said. “Now what?”
Sianna stopped in her pacing at the far side of the room from Wally, then turned and faced him. “Throw it up on the main display system,” she said. “Show it to me. Give me a minute-a-year time rate, starting ten years ago.”
The room darkened, and the Solar System appeared. Not the Multisystem, but Earth’s own home system, the way it had been before the Charonians. Sianna stepped out into the midst of the worlds, marveling at their tiny perfection. Wally had set the system to run in enhanced imagery mode, the planets and other bodies scaled up, made larger and brighter so they were easy to see. Even so, the worlds were little things, delicate jewels set in a vast, velvet darkness.
All was as it should be, all was as it had been and was no longer. The nine worlds orbited the gleaming Sun, the dust motes of the asteroids moved in their myriad paths in the emptiness between Mars and Jupiter. Comets hovered in the outer depths of the Oort Cloud. Pluto hung in the outer reaches of the system, with his moon Charon still in attendance.
The Ring of Charon, the only human-made object large enough to be visible in this scale, was there, a wheel in space wrapped around the circumference of Charon. It looked like an oversized wedding band with a black ball floating at its center. There was Jupiter with all his moons, and his Red Spot, and his modest rings. There was Saturn, with that grand and gaudy ring system, and Mars with both moons.