“But we may learn,” she said with some of the earlier excitement in her voice, “what Sofwari was searching for, which had something to do with what she was searching for.”
“Let the Kennel roll over the rocks. Something may crawl out.”
She looked at Hugh’s message again. “What does he mean in the postscript: ‘Fudir, what is the Treasure Fleet?’”
Donovan snorted. “It means he is playing the game, too. He learned something on Bangtop and isn’t telling us what it is.”
“Then there is something to learn! What is the Treasure Fleet?”
Donovan snatched the message back. “How should I know?” But he felt a stir in the back of his mind and thought that the Pedant had some bright ribbon of fact tucked away back in his nest.
Later, Méarana, concerned that the scarred man was sinking back into the glum haze in which she had initially found him, pried him from the comfortable chair in which he preferred to await, drinking soggy, the arrival of a ship inward bound for Alabaster. “Let’s go for a walk, old man,” she insisted. “Let Billy have some time to himself.”
“He doesn’t have a self,” the scarred man retorted. “I have it. Right here.” And he clenched his left hand into a ball, as if crushing some small and inconsequential object.
But she persevered, and eventually Donovan threw on a cloak and placed a skullcap on his head and followed her out of the room. Billy, who sat at the dining table with a portable’ face, looked up from the screen with a question in his eyes.
“The Fudir and I are going to the Starwalk, Billy.” This was a cue to the scarred man that Donovan would not be welcome. “We’ll be back for dinner. We’ll eat in the restaurant, so you don’t need to cook anything.” In truth—though she would never say such a thing to his face—Billy favored Terran foods, which she found peculiar in flavor.
“It lacks the True Coriander,” the Fudir explained when she mentioned this on the esplanade and they had turned their steps toward the Grand Erebata.
“And what is the True Coriander? You told me once, but I’ve forgotten.”
The Fudir’s look became distant. “No man knows. We find it in some ancient recipes, but whether vegetable, meat, herb, or a mineral like salt, who knows? It grew only on Olde Earth and its secret has long been lost.” He shrugged. “What we really mean when we say that, is ‘all that we have lost since we lost Terra, and all that we hope once more to have.’”
The Grand Erebata was an oval atrium that ran end to end through the hotel, and from whose rim jutted diving platforms. Low-g gravity grids at one focus of the ellipse were on the roof; at the other focus on the mezzanine, so that one could leap out into the great open space and fall leaf-gentle in whichever direction one chose. When Méarana hesitated at the brink and looked toward the mezzanine twelve storeys below, the Fudir growled and reminded her that they were in free fall and “down” was an aesthetic choice. “Why do you think they only allow these things in free-falling habitats?”
And so she leapt. And fell upward. Whatever the Fudir had said, it felt like up, since the residential floors she passed all shared a common orientation. Gradually, she gathered speed. The god Newton is not mocked. But she had called out her destination when she leapt and the tracers directed counter-grids that slowed her so that she alighted like a dancer on the Star-walk level.
The Fudir was waiting. Méarana slipped her hand through the crook of his arm and they set off around the galleria that circled the “top” floor of the hotel. Faux-windows enclosed them on all sides but the inboard. These reproduced the vista beyond the hotel’s shielding and served all the purposes of windows without the hazard of placing a thin pane of glass between hotel guests and hard vacuum. And so they walked, it seemed, through a great glass torus.
While nearby stars were individual points of yellow and white and red and blue, they were no more than free particles thrown off by a great slurry: the Spiral Arm. In that great Core-ward swath of light, individual stars were lost, no more than bricks in a great white wall.
“The Orion Arm,” she said, pointing this out. “It’s like there is no Rift between us.”
“Oh, the Rift is real enough. From Ramage, you can see it clearly. But their ‘Orion Arm’ is only a part of our Perseus Arm split off by the Rift. Or so the Pedant tells me. This view… You get a sense of how small the League and the Confederation are. The vast majority of those stars out there have never shone on human folly.”
“‘It’s a big Spiral Arm.’ That’s what they always say. Oh, look! That bright star. The display says it’s Siggy Sun. It looks so far away. Yet, we’re in Siggy System.”
“Those stars,” he said, as if not hearing. “They are not only leagues away; they’re years ago. This is a vista of time, as well as space. Blind Rami, were he visible from this angle, would be Blind Rami two centuries ago. Jehovah, a millennium. They are not even contemporary. There are thriving worlds out there where, had we’ scope enough, we would see barren wastes, because this light, here, today, is from a time before they were even terraformed.”
They had begun their perambulation, slowly clockwise around the torus, as was the custom. Now and then, they stopped to activate a placard identifying this or that distant sight. The Crab Nebula, looking not much like a crab from this direction, hung off in the galactic west, just within the borders of the ULP.
Several large telescopes, called “Hummels,” were mounted to High Kaddo Station, and these fed special images to the faux-windows. By touching a spot, that portion of the skyscape would swell in magnification as the Hummels obediently redirected themselves. The Fudir summoned a close-up of the Crab.
“It’s as if we zoom out into the cosmos,” said the delighted harper. Then, “It’s quite beautiful.”
“It’s much larger than the Crab they once saw on Olde Earth. That was a much younger nebula. In fact, they actually saw it born, though they didn’t know it at the time. You see, there was once a star there—a massive, giant star, ‘so it is said.’ Then, about the dawn of human civilization, the star exploded and collapsed into something the science-wallahs call a pulsing star. It’s deep in the heart of the nebula to this day, spinning like a madman and strewing his dusty remnants all over that sector—the Badlands, it’s called. It tangles up the roads; so no one goes there, except to mine helium. But light takes six millennia to make the Newtonian crawl from the Crab to the Earth so it did not light the sky there until Old Year 1054. Zhõgwó sages made note of it. Later still, when they could measure such things, the Murkan wallahs found it already eleven light-years wide. That’s Earth-years. Today, from Earth, it would appear to be forty light-years wide. But if you actually went over there, you would see that it’s more like seventy light-years wide, and still dispersing. That was one hell of a firecracker.”
Closer by, he picked out the sun of Alabaster for her. “He’s the next star up the Spiral Staircase,” he explained. “Other stars are closer to Siggy across the Newtonian flats, but a ship would take centuries to reach them, so in a paradoxical way they are actually farther away. Some say there are undiscovered turnoffs and byways on Electric Avenue that we will one day find. Others say that there are multiple road networks, mutually interpenetrating, but unconnected, so you cannot slide from one network to another. Those inaccessible stars may harbor scores of leagues and confederacies and commonwealths.”
“But not human. If there’s no connection between their roads and ours, men could never have reached them. ‘All Men are One.’”