Further: Beyond the Threshold (29 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I grinned sheepishly. “Old habit.” I pointed to his white stones remaining on the board, which I’d been gradually encircling with black. “Those stones have only one liberty, and a single move could capture the whole group. That condition used to be known as being in ‘atari.’”

“Ah,” Maruti said, thoughtfully puffing on his cigar. “My uncle Cornelius had a name for it, too. He called it ‘about to get screwed.’”

I goggled.

“I’m sorry,” the chimpanzee quickly added, “that’s an idiomatic expression that might not translate too well from Cercopean to Information Age English. It means to—”

“No, no,” I said, laughing. “I got it just fine.”

Maruti sipped his glass of port. “But why, Captain, did you opt to alert me to the fact?”

“Well, that’s the old habit part. The man who taught me the game insisted on observing an antique custom, abandoned even in my time, in which the instigator says the word out loud to call their opponent’s attention to the potential danger. It’s a courtesy, really, nothing more.”

“Mmm.” Maruti nodded thoughtfully and then plopped a white stone down on the empty juncture, my advantage lost. “Thanks for that, then, Captain. Your move, I think.”

As the ship prepared to drop back into normal space, rather than watching from the bridge with just the command crew and department heads, I asked everyone who was interested to join me in the Atrium. The
Further
avatar perched on my shoulder as more than a thousand crewmembers crowded into the park, lining the walkway, spilling over the bandstand and theater shell. Some lay on the grass, propped up on their elbows, watching the domed ceiling high overhead. I’d asked the
Further
to configure the ceiling to display a real-time, true-color image of the hull’s exterior view.

We were approaching our destination head-on so that the north pole of the
Further
’s main sphere was pointed directly at the binary pulsar. Only moments remained before the bubble of distorted space collapsed, but we’d already been slowing for hours. The stars, which had been crowded only a short while before into a red dot directly overhead, were gradually shifting down the scale, spreading apart, barely pinked by our accelerations.

With the crowd around me, the only light that of the pinkish stars overhead, I was reminded of my grandfather’s stories of his childhood in America and Independence Day celebrations. The illusion was strengthened when Maruti ambled over, wearing a top hat and tails, drinking some sort of a frozen cocktail.

“I thought I’d dress for the occasion,” the chimpanzee said, smiling. “Not all of us opt to wander around stark naked at all hours like Xerxes.” He glanced around. “Where is that dour robot, anyway? It’s his bloody pulsar we’ve come to see, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t realize it was in your purview to deed ownership of stars, exobiologist,” said a voice from behind him, “but if that power is yours, I’ll happily accept.”

Maruti sighed dramatically. “Good ship’s evening, Xerxes.”

Ey joined us, and the robot, the chimp, and I looked overhead as one, all of us eagerly anticipating our arrival in our own way.

“Just another moment, Captain Stone, and we’ll be arriving,” said the silver eagle on my shoulder.

“Did I miss it?” chimed the voice of Amelia, projecting onto my other shoulder. “I got caught up in learning to navigate a sailship and lost track of time.”

“No, little ghost,” Xerxes said, “but we’ll be there momentarily.”

A short distance off, the cetacean Arluq lounged in the bowl of the fountain, luxuriating in the cool water. The brothers Grimnismal were perched on a nearby bench, in some sort of disagreement with the cat Ailuros.

“Shouldn’t those two be down in drive engineering?” I said, pointing toward the corvids, asking no one in particular. “Shouldn’t someone be looking after the operations?”

“I have things well in hand,” the
Further
said, “but if anything should arise, I assure you I’ll alert the drive engineers immediately.”

“They’re busy arguing about Ailuros’s proposal to reconfigure the power routing system when we arrive,” said Chief Executive Zel, walking over to where we stood. “Ultimately, I think it’ll be a question for the principals to decide, since it doesn’t look as though they’re going to reach an accord anytime soon.”

“Captain,” said the voice of three Jida bodies in unison, approaching from the other side, “this is probably the best idea you’ve had yet. We need to have these sorts of gatherings more often. I’m having the
best
time.” A pair of escorts walked with them, each flanked by Jida on either side—one a space-adapted anthropoid male who stood almost as tall as Arluq, the other a whip-thin artificial being of some sort who looked to be made of flowing quicksilver and whose laughter was like tinkling bells—and from the gentle caresses the Jidas bestowed on arms of muscle and quicksilver alike, it wasn’t terribly hard to imagine what sort of time Jida was having.

“We’re almost there,” the
Further
said.

“Xerxes,” Zel said, “what can we expect to see when we arrive?”

“The display above us is coded to the visual spectrum, blocking out any harmful X-ray radiation or the like coming from the rotating neutron star.”

“Yes, but it’ll just be two small stars, yes?”

“Essentially,” the robot said with a sigh.

“Captain?” the
Further
said. “We are there.”

Somewhere between the words “are” and “there,” it happened. The stars, now only vaguely pinked, shifted once more in position before freezing in place, once more startling white, and the binary pulsar hung above us.

The
Further
was capable of fairly limited maneuvering in normal space, and so it had brought us in fairly close to the center of the system so as to be in an optimal position. Directly overhead, a pole star to our night sky, hung the pulsar. Somewhere off in the night was a tiny white dwarf companion, only about forty-three thousand times more massive than Earth. Just as had been expected.

What hadn’t been expected, however, was that the pulsar might have an asteroid belt, much less a planet.

But this particular pulsar appeared to have both.

“Didn’t see
that
coming,” Maruti said, doffing his top hat respectfully.

A short while later, as automated subsentient probes shot out from the
Further
toward the planet and the asteroid belt, the command crew gathered in the bridge, where Xerxes shared eir thoughts on the unexpected appearance of a planetary system.

“Planetary formation around pulsars is rare,” ey said, “even exceedingly rare, but not unknown. This pulsar was the result of a core-collapse supernova. Formerly a massive main sequence star, it gradually worked through its available supply of fuel, fusing hydrogen into ever-heavier elements—oxygen and carbon, at first, and then neon, magnesium, silicon, and iron—each time liberating energy released in the form of light and heat. Once the heart of the star began to produce iron, though, fusion gradually slowed, as iron requires more energy to fuse into heavier elements than is released in the process. When the fusion shut off entirely, the enormous outward pressure of heat energy likewise ceased, and the star’s own massive gravity caused its core to collapse in less time than it takes to say, condensing from an object roughly the size of Earth to one less than twenty kilometers across—a neutron star.

“This rapid collapse forced together the subatomic particles of the atoms themselves, fusing electrons and protons into electrically neutral neutrons and neutrinos. In the blink of an eye, the huge numbers of out-rushing neutrinos and neutrons collided with the in-rushing outer layers of the star with such force that it rebounded the outer layers back into space, while at the same time fusing them into still heavier elements—zinc, gold, silver, platinum, cobalt, and uranium. And in the example of this star, with temperatures of over one billion degrees Kelvin and neutron densities in excess of 10^20 cm^-3, r-process nucleosynthesis would even have been possible, the fast neutron capture and beta decay producing a whole range of transuranic elements.

“Typically, this debris is ejected from the star at escape velocities and travels out into space. In some cases, of which this was evidently one, the debris fails to escape the dead star’s gravity and forms a disc around it. Much like the debris discs surrounding young stars at their birth, this matter has the potential of accreting into larger masses, eventually resulting in planetary formation.”

Eir brief lecture ended, Xerxes stood patiently and waited, as everyone sat in silence. I wondered if, like me, they were still parsing out all of the facts ey’d just thrown at us.

“I followed very little of what you just said,” Maruti said, breaking the silence, “so you’ll have to tell me…Did you happen to explain
that
, by any chance?”

Maruti pointed an unlit cigar at the smart display on the control center, and I leaned forward in the command chair to see for myself.

X-ray emissions bleeding from the pulsar had interfered with extraship communication, meaning that only line-of-sight communication was possible, so the signals the
Further
was receiving were the first since the probes had been launched.

“Um, what are we looking at?” I said. Even the suspicion had sent my heart into my throat, and my hands were gripping the armrests of my chair in vice grips.

“That is the surface of the pulsar planet,” the
Further
said.

“No,” Maruti sang, and pointed at neat rows of stone structures, like towers or cairns. “I think the captain means, what are
those
?”

Opinions were sharply divided, but that was hardly surprising.

“And I say that the cairns are undoubtedly the result of alien intelligence!” Maruti shouted.

“Would that it were so,” Xerxes answered in a calm that clearly infuriated the chimpanzee, “as it would earn me a signal honor among the Exode to be the first to discover incontrovertible proof of nonterrestrial intelligence, but it simply isn’t possible. The simplest solution is that these are purely geological formations, nothing more. We should, instead, be focusing our attention on the missing mass I mentioned previously, which is doubtless a more fruitful avenue of investigation.”

“Could life have even evolved in this kind of environment?” I asked.

“Hardly,” Zel said, shaking her head. “Any life in the vicinity of the star would have been incinerated when it went supernova, and the level of X-ray radiation from the neutron star would eliminate the possibility that even unicellular life would arise in the aftermath.”

“So who built cairns?” Hu Grimnismal asked.

“No one built them, brother!” Mu said, exasperated. “Didn’t you hear the robot? They’re geological.”

“Really?” Hu asked.

“I don’t know,” the Jida emissary said, lounging in her chair, “they look like the result of architecture to me, however primitive.”

“Look,” I said, jumping out of the command chair and holding up my hands. “This is getting us nowhere.” I turned to the ship’s avatar, sitting on its perch on the wall above us. “
Further
, how much power remains in the metric engineering drives?”