“An aphelion of .845 AU and a perihelion of .811 AU,” she said. “Orbital period is two hundred and ninety-six standard days.”
“Anything?” Orisa tapped my shoulder and I glanced back at her. Qory had trimmed Orisa’s hair for her and she’d been wearing it unbound. It smelled of frangipani flowers.
I liked the new look.
“Another runaway greenhouse,” I said. “Grace puts the surface temperature at 462°C.”
She whistled. “That’s one hot chili pepper.”
“Mean radius 5,959 kilometers,” Grace reported. “Surface area is 4.953 x 10^8 km^2.”
“Express that in Earth equivalents,” said Orisa. “And round up.” I didn’t know why she bothered asking for amplification. It wasn’t like we actually cared.
“Surface area is .9 that of Earth. I’m seeing smooth volcanic plains.”
Grace’s voice perked up.
“Also three continent-like highlands,” she continued. “And I count just one thousand one hundred and sixty-two impact craters ranging in diameter from three kilometers to two hundred and eighty. The atmosphere is so thick that it slows incoming projectiles with less kinetic energy down so that they don’t leave craters.”
She did sound more cheerful. I mouthed the question to Orisa. What the hell?
“It’s a trick I learned on Curiosity,” she said, making no attempt to keep her reply a secret. “Starships like to know we’re paying attention. The infosphere needs an audience. We’re how the universe knows itself.”
Impressed, I stepped away from the console and waved her into my place.
“The atmosphere,” said Grace, “is ninety percent carbon dioxide, eight percent nitrogen, one percent sulfur dioxide, traces of argon, water vapor, carbon monoxide, helium, and neon.”
“Could there be life in those clouds?” Orisa called up the panel for the biosignature scanners. “Lots of greenhouse planets have extremophile life at the cooler atmosphere levels.”
“Doubtful,” said Grace. “The clouds are between thirty degrees and eighty degrees Celsius, but they’re mostly sulfuric acid droplets.”
“Will you deploy any probes, then? Collect samples?”
“I’m sorry, but that is not indicated.”
Sorry? We were back to the sad Grace voice. She sounded like she’d let us down somehow.
“So, a course change for the mangle then?”
“Agreed. I should begin developing a nullspace geometry to convey us to the next survey site. Would you like to choose a new destination now?”
Orisa put an arm around my shoulder to guide me back to the console. “Captain’s decision.”
“Umm…” I’d known this was coming but I hadn’t expected it so soon. If we’d deployed probes we might have lingered for days in orbit around Kenstraw, maybe weeks. “Not sure how this works.” Dad had picked the Kenstraw mission when I was thirteen, and back then I hadn’t much cared where we went next. That had been toward the end of the Mars trilogy of stories and I’d been engrossed with dragon jousting in the Valles Marineris. “What are my choices?”
The screen lit up with a grid of nearby stars, with estimated subjective travel times highlighted. The closest was Omplu, three years and two months away, but it had just a pair of gas giant planets in orbit. Three others with a single Goldilocks planet were less than five years away. Eshalet was a K dwarf with four rocky planets in the zone; it was six years distant and the most likely to support life. But just then six years felt like an eternity.
“Your call, Captain.” Orisa’s grin had a menace to it.
“I… but… Grace, why don’t you pick.”
I heard Qory enter behind me but didn’t look back to see what she was doing.
“It’s always a crew decision.” Grace said. “Human privilege. You know that.”
“The last two times, Dad just chose the closest,” said Qory, “but that’s because he’d stopped caring. I think he gave up on the infosphere.”
“And Grace let him get away with that?” This conversation was making me nervous. “Isn’t there some kind of plan?”
Orisa shook her head. “No plan except to keep going. Random choice perfectly acceptable.”
“Random? That would be…”
“Crazy?” said Orisa. “Are you saying that the infosphere is insane?”
I swallowed hard.
Orisa wiped all the panels off the screen, plunging the command center into near darkness. “How many solar systems are there in the infosphere, Grace?”
“The starship project has made eight hundred forty-three thousand two hundred and eighteen supervised surveys of star systems, including Kenstraw.” The screens lit up with a plot of all the stars in the infosphere. “In addition, unsupervised starship intelligences operating drones have accomplished surveys of approximately eighty-two million star systems.”
“But drone surveys don’t exactly count,” said Orisa. “Do they?”
“Data isn’t information. Information isn’t knowledge.”
“And how many stars are there in our galaxy?”
Grace sounded almost gleeful. “According to current estimates, approximately four hundred billion.”
“And how many galaxies in the universe?”
Of course, everybody knew these numbers were huge. So huge that it hurt to think about them, so I never did.
“According to current estimates, there are approximately a trillion galaxies in the observable universe.”
I felt dizzy and Qory put a hand on my arm. Only it wasn’t Qory, or rather it wasn’t the bot little sister I’d lived with for the past decade. Standing beside me was a grown woman, wearing what I realized must be a pantsuit that was nothing like the one in Orisa’s novel. The silky jacket and slacks were the black of space, the blouse was a fiery and voluptuous red. As I goggled at her, I felt the familiar thickness between my ears that came at the beginning of a sex story. She chuckled and put a hand to the side of my face to turn my gaze back to the screens.
Orisa nodded once she had my attention and continued her interrogation. “And how long will it take the starship project to grow the infosphere to include the entire universe?”
“You’re trying to get me to say the word forever, Orisa.”
I’d never heard Grace laugh, but when I’d heard her make a forever joke that one time, she’d used the same happy-scary tone of voice.
“But saying that what we are trying to do can’t be done,” the starship continued, “does not make us insane.”
“That’s your story, is it?” said Orisa. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’”
“Is that not true?” asked Grace.
Orisa took Qory’s hand, tying the three of us in a knot. “The captain and Qory and I are going off watch,” she said. “We have an urgent need to discuss our itinerary.”
I expected Grace to argue and was relieved that she didn’t.
I hadn’t been back to Dad’s old quarters since Orisa had moved in. Her workroom was filled with a contraption that consisted of an upright metal framework hung with colored strings; she said it was called a loom and that she was using it to weave a blanket. For what, I’m not sure. There was a rug on the floor in her bedroom. No, it wasn’t Peruvian; she said it was from the old planet Mars, where her great-great-great-grandmother was from. But she’d been born in a crèche like me, so how could she have known this? The woven cloth satchel I’d seen when she arrived slouched on the table beside her bed; a keyboard right out of a historical peeked out. I was shocked and embarrassed to see a painting that Qory had done of me—who knew when?—leading my army down a passageway. It hung alongside half a dozen photos of men and women—some solo, some in groups. She introduced them all to me, friends and lovers from her other crews. I knew that she had been on two other starships before Grace but I’d never learned how old she was. Sixty-six. We didn’t have to sit on her bed because she’d printed an elegant bench about two meters long, which she’d placed against the opposite wall.