The Sails of Tau Ceti (24 page)

In the abstract, the aliens might well win over enough of Earth’s influential class that they could ride out the public furor after Third Fleet’s discovery. As the Phelan were forever pointing out to her, it was only logical.

Except Tory knew that people follow their own brand of logic. In practice it would matter little how many Captains-of-Industry the Phelan bought, politicians they bribed, or scholars they convinced as to the rightness of their cause. The average man or woman can be pushed only so far before rebelling. Once the magnitude of their deception became known, no one would dare speak well of them. Those foolish enough to do so would be swept away by a hurricane of public outrage. Like Tory, the Phelan ambassadors probably would be lynched, as would anyone who had helped them.

Therefore, while pretending to play tourist, Tory also pretended to play along with the Phelan while she searched for a way out of her dilemma. In this, she was aided by her implant, which (unknown to Garth and the others) she used almost continuously.

“When do we tell my shipmates that I’m to be your advocate?” Tory asked Maratel one day while they were touring a food synthesis plant. Kit had accompanied them, but was being distracted by her guide while Tory and Maratel talked.

“Best not to reveal our arrangement until we reach Earth. To bring it up sooner will pique curiosities and might get the wrong people to thinking.”

Tory agreed, but not for Maratel’s reasons. The Phelan was concerned about awkward questions while Tory worried that her friends would think her traitor. She was human enough that she did not want to face ostracism any sooner than she had to.

#

The farewell banquet was held in the same hall as the welcoming banquet with the same important functionaries in attendance. Again, the four humans shared the raised dias with Faslorn and their Phelan guides. The two Phelan who would accompany Faslorn and Maratel to Earth were also present. Neirton was a specialist in human psychology while Raalwin, an ortho-sibling of Rosswin’s, was a political specialist. They would design the public relations and lobbying campaign that the Phelan hoped would breach the indifference of human public opinion.

All four Phelan would be placed in cold sleep in
Austria
’s hold in the morning. After that, the four humans would board, check out the ship’s systems, and if all went well, depart the hangar bay. They would stop to mate up with the
Starhopper
booster and spend several more hours making sure that nothing had gone bad during their long absence. Then they would line up their bow on the bright yellow star in the constellation of Virgo, and boost for home.

Where the initial banquet had been stiff and formal, the farewell included a great deal of humor. The Phelan grasp of human humor had improved since they had first come aboard. Several Phelan, their lower arms strapped to their bodies, put on a comedy sketch for their guests. They presented a parody of each human explorer so perfect that Garth, Eli, and Kit clutched their aching ribs as they laughed. Even Tory laughed as one of the Phelan pranced about in a recognizable version of her own walk. For a while, at least, it was easy to forget what underlay the entertainment.

At the end of the meal, Faslorn rose at his place and regarded the human beings on either side of him. It seemed to Tory that his gaze lingered on her a fraction of a second longer than the others.

“Friends, I stand before you as host one last time. Tomorrow I will become your cargo, and then your guest. During these months we have tried to give you some understanding of who and what we are…” Tory, who had just begun to sip the excellent ersatz wine, sputtered momentarily as liquid went down the wrong way. She felt Faslorn’s stare as she quickly moved her napkin to her lips, both to clean the liquid and to hide her expression. The Phelan leader went on without seeming to miss a beat.

“We who have crossed the great gulf came here to find peace around your beautiful yellow sun. We have found much more. Separately, our two species have overcome much to reach this point in our individual histories. Together, there is no limit to what we will do.”

Faslorn lifted his glass, as did everyone in the room. Tory was slow, but managed to retrieve her glass without a noticeable delay. “To the descendants of Mother Earth, from the children of lost Phela. May our association be long and fruitful!”

There were shouts of agreement from around the crowd. As Tory drank, she had to admit that she shared the sentiment. Of all the humans on the dais, she alone knew the alternative.

#

“They’re coming home!” Dardan Pierce said to Bernardo Lucci as the Italian astronomer strode into his office.

“When did you hear that?”

“Just this minute. The communications supervisor switched off as you came through the door. Garth’s message announcing the departure arrived about twenty minutes ago. They are coming home and bringing four Phelan with them. They’ll be here this time next year.”

“When do they leave?”

Pierce glanced up at the chronometer on the wall. “If they kept to their timetable, they’ve already left. We should see their drive flare in a couple of weeks.”

Lucci rubbed his hands together. “Any news as to the data they will be bringing back?

“Unknown,” Pierce said. “I imagine they will have a great deal of science with them as samples to convince us to allow their colony.”

“Any close-up views of the exploding nova?”

“How the hell should I know? Besides, didn’t they already send us that travelogue? It shows the nova exploding.”

“That travelogue isn’t much better than a home holo of some stranger’s little darlings at play,” Lucci sneered. “Where are the calibration curves, the time marks, and all the other data we need to do real science?”

“Seems to me that Tycho Brahe did pretty fair astronomy with just his naked eye and a sextant.”

“It was a quadrant, not a sextant,” Lucci replied. “No, we need real data to work with. About all we can get out of that travelogue is that their star exploded, something we can see with our own eyes.”

“Don’t be so glum. They’ve solved one mystery for us.”

“You mean the light deficiency? I hardly call putting it down to experimental error a solution. If the instruments were bad, why did they track the theoretical curve so precisely for several weeks afterward?”

“I have no idea. Instead of complaining about it to me, why don’t you see for yourself? The Union undoubtedly has the original data locked away in their archives somewhere. Get a copy and see if you can’t find out where our predecessors went wrong.”

Lucci struck Pierce’s desk with his fist. “By damn, I’ll do just that! If our modern techniques can’t resolve the discrepancy, we don’t deserve to be called astronomers.”

CHAPTER 18

Garth Van Zandt lay in his control couch aboard
Austria
and stared pensively at the main viewscreen. The small telescope that had once scanned the skies for a first sight of
Far Horizons
was now focused on two tiny crescent disks. At full magnification, Earth and Luna were twin marbles three-quarters in shadow. Earth’s night hemisphere was ablaze with tiny diamond sparkles, the lights of vast megalopolises. Even three centuries after the race had first won free of the home world; fully ninety five percent of humanity lived beneath blue skies and fleecy white clouds. Most had never been higher than the peak of a suborbital transport’s trajectory. Most never would.

The sight of home triggered a flood of emotions. It was common for travelers long absent to feel acute longing at their first sight of home. Garth felt that and more. Mixed with the longing were exhilaration, and a certain sadness. The exhilaration was natural: They were alive and the mission successful. More than once he had had his doubts on both counts.

The sadness was natural, too. The small family they had become these past several months would soon be sundered. Each expedition member would go his or her separate way. Tory, Kit, and Eli would undoubtedly be assigned to the alien assessment teams, while he would return to the fleet. With this voyage on his record, there was a good chance he would be assigned command of a cruiser.

The emotion he felt was that of an ending. A part of his life was over, never to be regained. It was natural to feel a little bit of a letdown at the end of a long patrol, but this was more than that. This was not just the end of a mission, but of an era. Never again would humankind look to the night sky and think the lights there sterile. Everyone henceforth who tilted their head back to gaze at the stars would wonder if other eyes were gazing back at them. There were more stars in the sky than all the grains of sand and motes of dust on Earth and Mars combined. No matter how wildly improbable life was in the universe, a billion trillion stars must have thousands of space faring cultures sprinkled among them. The Phelan were the first. They would certainly not be the last.

His sense of melancholy had a more personal cause as well. The end of the voyage also meant separation from Tory. He had had more than a few shipboard romances in his career, and they had always ended amicably enough. Come home orbit, the partners packed their bags, kissed each other passionately one last time, then moved on to the next assignment. Lately, Garth had found himself thinking about making his arrangement with Tory permanent. He had been serious enough to suggest a limited marriage contract. To his surprise and hurt, she had turned him down. Her reasons for rejecting him had become increasingly evasive as he pressed her.

Of all of them, Tory seemed the most changed by contact with the aliens. She had been pensive, withdrawn, and preoccupied ever since leaving the starship. He had tried to cajole her out of her mood, with only limited success. Even on those few nights when she made her way to his cabin, she had seemed a stranger.

Nor had Garth been the only one to notice the change. Kit ascribed the personality change to the lasting effects of the loss-of-synchronization accident. Eli had no cause to offer, but had tried to be a sympathetic listener, a role for which he lacked talent. Nothing seemed to help. Whatever was wrong, Garth hoped a return to human society would snap her out of it.

As he stared vacantly at the blue-white world on the viewscreen, he heard a quiet sound behind him. They were under boost with half a standard gravity of deceleration on the ship. He recognized the quiet thud of bare feet mounting the rungs of the ladder leading up from the deck below. Tory’s head and shoulders appeared out of the access tunnel a moment later.

She was clad in her usual costume of singlet and shorts. The outfit showed off her long legs to good advantage. Her hair had been trimmed short just prior to departure, and had not grown much during their year in cold sleep.

“Won’t be long now, will it?”

“Not long,” he agreed. “We take up parking orbit in another seventy-two hours. Where’s Eli?”

“Oh, he was complaining about getting behind in his studies. I told him I’d take his watch for him.”

“What about your own watch?”

She shrugged. “So I’ll do two in a row. I can do my correlation here as well as anywhere.”

“All right, but don’t overdo it.”

“Yes, sir.”

She lounged against an instrument console and stared at the viewscreen while he made some end-of-watch notations in the log. A long sigh brought his attention back to her.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I never really expected to get to Earth.”

He smiled. “Just a hick from the sticks, eh?”

“A what?”

“Sorry. Antique slang. Just a digger from the darly, I should have said.”

“That’s me.” She flexed her arms in a way that hiked her bosom up in the low gravity. “I wonder if I still have my high gravity muscles.”

“From where I’m sitting, you do.”

“Lecher!”

“Can I help it if I appreciate the human form?”

“Well, on that note, I relieve you, sir.”

“I stand relieved,” he replied formally. In a more conversational tone, he asked, “Who was that showering about half an hour ago?”

“Kit.”

“Did she leave me any water?”

“Don’t know.”

“She better have! I feel like I haven’t washed in a week.”

Tory made a show of sniffing the air and screwed up her face. In truth, the smells aboard a spaceship were such that it was often difficult to tell where the ship’s odor left off and that of the crew began.

Garth turned to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Tory’s expression. The impish look was already beginning to fade, to be replaced by the long face she had worn habitually since leaving the starship. Whatever her private demon, he thought, it seemed to be getting the best of her.

#

Tory gazed for long minutes at the Earth and Moon. As more than one poet had noted, there are few sights more beautiful than the Earth from space. To a Martian, one raised amid the driest desert in the Solar System, the water encrusted home planet held a certain intellectual beauty. Still, Tory would have preferred to be back in Dome 3 on Phobos, gazing up at the ocher plains and walking walls of red dust. The little girl within her wanted to slink back to the womb, to return to the familiar sights of childhood where she could forget her terrible secret.

She had to admit that there was something restful about watching the home world grow slowly larger day by day. She drew peace from the evidence that humankind still lived beneath a well-behaved star. Or maybe her newfound tranquility was the result of fatalism. Like the heroine in a Greek tragedy, she was resolved to play her part in the Phelan drama though she knew it to be hopeless. Any other action on her part would only accelerate the inevitable.

Having resigned herself to her fate, Tory had turned her intellect to the problem of pushing the inevitable as far into the future as it would go. To do that required her to take some actions she did not want to take. Still, she faced her choices squarely. Her synergist training helped her in that respect. As a professor had once said, “A synergist faces facts. To do otherwise is dishonest. Besides, it doesn’t work.”