We were keeping the blinds down, as a security measure. I went over and looked through them. Alex was standing in the moonlight near the edge of the forest. Just standing there. I knew his security guard couldn’t be happy about it.
Considering the mood Shara’s success had engendered, I was surprised to see him out there. I hung on until he and the guard came back inside. “You okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just going for a walk.”
“Part of your exercise routine?”
“Pretty much.” The guard retired to his station, which was directly across the corridor from my office. Alex looked at the clock. “What are you doing in here at this hour?”
I told him. Checking to see whether anybody goes out to Echo.
He nodded. “Go home.”
“Okay.”
He stood near the foot of the staircase. “Chase,” he said, “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
“It’s okay. Not your fault.”
“I wish we’d never seen the damned thing.”
PART III
Echo
TWENTY-EIGHT
There is nothing that quite captures the spirit as does that which stands alone, a lighthouse on a rocky shore, an observatory on the dark side of a moon, an eagle perched on a rocky shelf at dawn.
—Yashir Kamma,
At the Edge of the World
When you make the jump from hyperspace into the middle of a system that is uncharted, it takes a while to figure out what the system looks like. We had nothing on the star that was recorded in Shara’s catalog as YL69949. The contest submission had shown us an asteroid, a gas giant and a set of rings, and, most spectacularly, a pair of comets. I’d never seen
twin
comets before, and of course they were gone. Maybe they’d be back in a couple of centuries. Fortunately, all these pictures had also given us a starry background.
Other than that, it had been all partygoers, people wearing funny hats and offering toasts to Uncle Albert and somebody who kept saying I told you so.
We were on the edge of the Veiled Lady. The sun was a class-G yellow dwarf, like the suns found in the home systems that had given birth to the two known technological civilizations. What else actually orbited Echo, the number of planets, their parameters, and so on, was of no interest. Save those worlds that were warm enough for life to have evolved.
The sun floated serenely off to starboard. About twenty minutes after emergence, Belle reported it was somewhat more than three hundred million klicks away. We were on the outer edge of the biozone.
“Any planets yet?” I asked.
“Working on it,”
she said.
Alex let me see that he perceived the question as of little consequence. “Are we getting anything that might be an artificial radio signal?”
“Negative,”
she said.
“Let us know if you hear anything.”
“Of course, Alex.”
It was a bad beginning. Had there been a technological civilization anywhere in the system, we would almost certainly have been picking up electronic signals of one kind or another. Belle needed almost five hours before she could report a planet.
“It’s a gas giant. A sun skimmer, barely twenty million klicks out. No rings. It doesn’t seem to have any moons.”
“Probably pretty warm at that range,” I said.
“What else can you see, Belle?”
“That’s all for the moment. Trying to confirm other possibilities. But it’ll take a while.”
We sat quietly in the cockpit. The sky was filled with stars, and the Cricket Nebula floated directly overhead. “Where’s Rimway’s sun?” asked Alex. “Can you tell?”
“It’s not visible from here,” I said.
If we continued to explore the Veiled Lady and its neighborhood for the next million years, I suspected we still wouldn’t have seen half its worlds. And with so much real estate, it was impossible to believe there was no place anywhere that did not provide a haven for
somebody
. Something out there was looking at the same spectacle we were. Had to be.
The hours crept past. We sat listening to the vents and the just-audible flow of power and the bleeps and clicks of the various systems. Alex was reading while I played cards with Belle. I leaned over but couldn’t see the title.
“
Down and Out on Radford III
,” he said.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s about six hundred years old.”
“What’s Radford III?”
“It was an early colonization attempt that went wrong.”
“Oh.”
“At the beginning of the Interstellar Age, more than half of them failed during the first thirty years.”
“Why?”
“Usually bad planning. Lack of foresight. Relying on luck. Don’t worry about it; God will see us through. That sort of thing.”
Then Belle had more news:
“We have one world eighty-five million klicks from the sun, and I suspect another one is in the biozone on the far side.”
“Okay,” said Alex. “How long to confirm the one on the far side?”
“We need to change our angle.”
“We could be talking a few days, Alex,” I said.
Alex nodded. “All right. Let’s take a look at the one we can see.”
It was a terrestrial world, a little bit larger than Rimway, lots of clouds and storms. It appeared to be mostly dry land. No globe-circling oceans. A few big lakes and a lot of small ones.
While we made our approach, a message arrived from Robin. I went back to my cabin and started it. He blinked on, sitting on the sofa in his living room, one leg crossed over the other.
“Wish I’d been able to go along,”
he said. He looked good.
“Life around here just isn’t the same without you. I’ll confess I have a date this evening with a woman I’ve known on and off for years. Her name is Kyra. We’re going to have dinner at Bacari’s, then probably go to a show. I keep thinking it’s really not fair to her, because the whole time I’m with her I’ll be thinking of you.”
The message was six days old. I responded that I was sure he and Kyra had enjoyed themselves, but I hoped not too much. (I tried to turn it into a joke, but in fact I was annoyed. And he knew I would be.) “We’ve arrived at our destination,” I said, “but at the moment we don’t know anything about the place. Right now we’re just afloat, looking around. It might take a couple of days before we really know what our prospects are. And by the way, I miss you, too.”
Okay. It’s hard to capture our state of mind while everything was in the air. The world, Belle had decided, was the second one out from the sun. Henceforth it would be known as Echo II.
“There is no indication,”
she said,
“of artificial construction anywhere
yet
. Be aware, though, that we are still a considerable distance away. Even a city, at this range, might not be visible. But, unfortunately, there is no evidence of electronic activity.”
The surface, however, was green.
“It’s a living world,”
she continued, and that news alone sent my pulse up a few beats. We were angling in from the outer planetary system, so we had a good look at the nightside of Echo II. It was unbroken by light anywhere, except occasional flickers that probably represented electrical storms or fires.
Alex sighed. “Not going to be anything here,” he said.
Well, what had we expected? If we’d actually seen something, seen lights come on somewhere, maybe even seen a ship draw alongside and ask who we were, I’d have fallen out of my chair. In thousands of years, and tens of thousands of flights, it’s never happened.
Well, once.
So you don’t expect it. Still, there was the tablet.
Then Belle surprised us.
“There’s an artificial satellite. I’ll have a picture for you in a minute.”
“Yes!” I said.
Alex raised a cautionary hand. “Don’t get too excited.”
“Why not?”
“It was probably left by us. Maybe a long time ago, maybe by World’s End. It could be a promo gimmick.”
“I think that’s stretching things, Alex.”
“Just don’t get your hopes up.”
A picture of the object appeared on the auxiliary screen: It was a rectangular case supporting an array of antennas. There was also a scope. The AI placed the satellite alongside an image of the
Belle-Marie
so we could judge comparative size. It was almost as big as we were.
“Belle,” I said, “put us on an intercept course.”
We needed a couple of hours to turn around and, eventually, to move alongside the object. It was dark gray, inert, and the scope had taken a hit from something.
“It’s in an irregular orbit,”
said Belle.
I rotated the image at Alex’s request, spun it around its axis, turned it over until he saw what he wanted.
“There,”
he said. Two lines of characters were emblazoned on the case.
“Don’t recognize them,”
said Belle.
“They aren’t in the standard directory.”
And they bore no resemblance to the ones on the tablet.
“Belle,” Alex said, “you say the orbit’s irregular.
How
irregular?”
“Not an excessive amount. Apogee is one point four perigee.”
Alex looked at me. “Translate, please?”
“At its farthest point,” I said, “the satellite is almost one and a half times as far from the central body as at its closest approach.”
“If the trend continues unabated,”
said Belle,
“it will eventually begin dipping into the atmosphere. That will, of course, be the end of it.”
“When would that be likely to happen?”
“I would estimate about another hundred years.”
“Can we make an age determination based on that?”
“Negative, Alex. We simply do not have enough information.”
We turned it some more. Magnified everything.
“You can, however,”
said Belle,
“do an analysis.”
“How?”
“It’s actually quite straightforward. But you’ll have to bring a piece of it inside.”
I went out and cut a slice from the leading edge. I also removed part of the scope and brought both pieces back in. Belle examined them and, after a few minutes, announced her conclusion:
“The satellite has been in orbit approximately four thousand years.”
“How can you tell?” Alex asked.
“If you look closely, you will note the pitting in the metal. It’s caused by micrometeoroids. Also, the burnishing along the forward edge is instructive. Very fine particles collide with it over the centuries, and this wear is the result. We also have a telescope lens. If you look at it under sufficient magnification, you will observe a slight hazing.”
“And that happens because—?”
“Accumulated radiation damage from the sun. I don’t have a clear analysis of the background radiation here, or the dust density, but it’s not difficult to provide a reasonable estimate.”
“Thanks, Belle.”
“You’re welcome, Alex. I’m sorry it’s not the result you would have preferred.”
We saw nothing artificial on the ground. But Belle reported large animals.
“Can you show them to us?” asked Alex. He couldn’t hide his disappointment that Echo II wasn’t a world full of cities. Or, at least, a place with some research facilities.
Something.
Belle put a catlike creature on-screen. It was gray, with long fangs, almost a saber-tooth. The thing was virtually invisible against the trees and shrubbery through which it moved. And she showed us a bird that seemed so fat it could not possibly have gotten airborne. But it soared through the sky like an eagle.
And a lizard with a long, muscular, serpentine neck. We couldn’t be sure how big it was, but it measured pretty well against the tree trunks.
There was also something that looked like nothing more than a cluster of weeds. But Belle asked us to watch for a moment.
“Let me do a replay. This happened minutes ago.”
A four-legged creature that might have been a vulpine of some sort wandered by, and a tentacle whipped out of the weeds and made a grab. More tentacles appeared, and, within seconds, the vulpine was hopelessly ensnared, and the animal was dragged into the tangle. The struggle went on for about a minute, devolving finally into a series of lurches. Then it stopped, and we saw movement that suggested the weed cluster had begun feeding.