As she followed the work of the advanced teams that were working on the signal and the transmitter, Lissa began to understand how minor a part of the expedition were the students. She could witness what was going on, learning what she could as a supplement to her basic studies, but her own work lay in the future. Charles Darwin had voyaged on the
Beagle
, studying the life of Earth; but his real work had come much later. No great honor would have been attached to his presence on the ship if he had not organized his experience after his return to England. By giving them this experience, Dr. Shastri was betting on the future work of his students. But breaking through to a vision of her own individual work seemed as elusive as deciphering the full meaning of the dancing signal.
Occasionally, she saw Alek from a distance, walking with a crew on its way to a job somewhere on the inner surface. Once she saw him in the hallway of her barracks, checking an electrical line, but he didn’t see her as she ducked into Susan’s room. She woke up one night saying his name aloud, thinking that he was beside her.
The spinning asteroid moved outward, ever outward, a rock hurled away from the Sun. The matter-antimatter reactor worked efficiently, providing the immense flow of power needed for the negative-g pusher. Lissa found herself looking outward mentally, to the darkness of outer Sunspace.
“You don’t ever mention him,” Susan said to her one day as they ate lunch in the cafeteria on the engineering level.
“There’s nothing to say,” Lissa answered, sipping a glass of milk.
Susan smiled. “Well, you may not know it, but you’re making up your mind about him all over again, way down deep, where you can’t just decide anything you want.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” Lissa said vaguely. “I don’t think I care anymore. I fell hard on Earth, but I’ve recovered. I see things clearly now.”
“Don’t take too long,” Susan said, looking more serious. “I liked him a lot myself.”
“Thanks, but it won’t work,” Lissa replied. “I know you’re too busy right now.
“Don’t be so sure.”
They were silent for a moment.
“What’s your problem?” Susan asked finally. “You seem to object to Alek’s being here.”
“It’s not that,” Lissa replied. “It’s just that it all seemed settled in my mind. Alek would be on Earth, and I might or might not ever see him again. But now I have to come to terms with my feelings about him all over again.”
“And you don’t want to decide?”
“Not now.”
“Don’t you think you’re being self-centered about it? People aren’t toys that will wait for you on a shelf. And you can’t always have ideal conditions in which to make important decisions.”
Susan was right, Lissa realized. “Then what should I do?”
Susan smiled. “Nothing. Let it happen as it will. Alek is here because he wants to do the work, and so are you. Don’t feel you have to decide anything.”
“You don’t think that would be cowardly?” Lissa asked.
“No. You’ll both have time to really think about your feelings. It might be a very good thing.”
“Thanks, Susan. You’re a good friend.”
Lissa woke up. The night glow of the sun plate was faint in her window. For a moment she imagined that she could feel the asteroid’s ever-increasing velocity. Something was waiting in the outer solar system …
She got out of bed, opened her window, and looked out into the stillness of the hollow. A faint breeze stirred the grassy interior. She sat down in the window and gazed toward the moon plate, wondering about herself.
Dr. Shastri wanted something from her, and so did Alek. What did she want from herself? A moment of uncaring passed through her, and she realized with a chill that others might do whatever work could be her own. Alek probably wasn’t interested in her anymore. She hadn’t seen him in weeks.
She should never have let him invade her mind. How had it happened? He had simply become part of her before she knew it. How could she have known? Being a human being meant not being able to know everything about one’s inner self or that of another. It was hard to accept that her mind was not all-powerful over her feelings and desires.
She closed her eyes. The breeze made her shiver, and she knew that she would have to face what lay within her, as well as what waited for humankind in the dark beyond Pluto.
But not right now
, a part of her whispered,
not right now, later
…
From where she sat in the window, the small world was motionless in a night of its own making; but viewed from outside, she was pressed to the inner surface of a spinning world, which turned on an axis of light. Nothing ever seemed to be what it was.
I’m changing into someone else
, she thought,
losing what
I was, and no one can give me back myself …
She opened her eyes and saw that the light plate was beginning to brighten toward dawn.
Dr. Shastri walked into the small auditorium and looked around at the assembly of students and observers. The now-familiar alien signal continued its strange dance on the screen.
“How does he stay so calm-looking?” Susan whispered to Lissa.
Dr. Shastri glanced up at the signal. “We’ve learned so little from it.” He sighed and stuck his hands in his jacket pockets, managing to look boyish despite his age. “However, we’ve now located the exact source of the signal.” He smiled. “We’re crossing the orbit of Pluto right now, and our acceleration is up to ten g’s.” He smiled again. “I still find that remarkable. A conventional acceleration that high could crush us, but with our negative-g drive it’s identical to free-fall, while spin gives us the illusion of slightly less than one g.” He shook his head. “I only wish that our four shuttles were large enough to carry negative-g generators. It will be more cumbersome exploring in them, but we can’t have everything.”
The screen flickered behind him. Starfields appeared, overlaid by a coordinate grid. One small square began to flash red.
“That’s where it is,” Dr. Shastri said, “over seven times the distance of Pluto from the Sun. We can’t see it because it’s a dark body, but we’ll be there in less than a month.”
The starfields drew Lissa, lifting her out of herself, away from the problems caused by people. The fact was brought home to her again that something was speaking to humanity from the darkness, that a small part of humanity was speeding outward to the source at millions of kilometers per hour, and that she was part of the adventure of reaching out …
“I’m still sorry to report,” Dr. Shastri continued, “that the tachyon receiver-transmitter is not yet working, and we can’t say when we’ll have the bugs out of it.” He looked around at the people in the chamber. “I’m hoping that a few more of you will visit our various projects as a supplement to your studies. We could use some extra help, and I think it would be good to poke your noses into the work of our older researchers. You might see something they don’t.” He smiled again. “That is my hope, at least. Too many of you have kept to your routine studies and minor duties. Break free a bit—don’t be afraid.”
Lissa kept very busy during the next month. When she wasn’t alone, she was visiting the tachyon installation, or the negative-g drive control area, or just watching the alien signal doing its endless cosmic dance. She learned a lot of advanced mathematics. It took her into another kind of universe, and into another part of her mind. Math quantified the universe into a system of fine limits, in which the unknown was encircled by known quantities, thus forcing the unknown to reveal itself. There was no unknown that did not leave a trail, somewhere, and could not in principle be unmasked by experiment and reasoning.
She surveyed what was known about the outer solar system, the region beginning at 40 times the distance of Earth from the Sun and ending at some 10,000 times that distance. This volume of space was filled with millions of asteroids and bodies as large as Earth—all moving with great slowness around the Sun. Beyond this region, 30,000 to 50,000 astronomical units from the Sun, lay the cometary halo, the fabulous Opik-Oort Cloud, made up of ice and frozen gas—a great barrier reef before the ocean of interstellar space. From the inner solar system the Cloud was as invisible as a swarm of bees a million kilometers away, but the Centauri starship had confirmed the halo’s existence on its way out of the solar system.
The asteroid wasn’t going out quite that far, but it could, and much more. This run was as much a test for the negative-g drive as it was an investigation of the source of the alien signal.
Lissa also read many of the great works in the humanities from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the novels in which the human heart struggled with itself, with restrictive social systems, and with other hearts. These works tuned her feelings and made her see clearly where thought alone could not. Her two favorites were Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim
and Elizabeth Bowen’s
The Death of the Heart.
There were evenings of music. Many of the scientists and researchers were musicians, and they got together regularly to give concerts and recitals of chamber music. Lissa would sit in her window, listening to great chords sounding through the green hollow. The grand symphonic sound structures of Gustav Mahler and Ralph Vaughan Williams were great favorites, but Dr. Shastri complained that more modern works were being ignored.
Sometimes Lissa went to the concerts and sat on the grass with Susan, noticing the couples and hoping vaguely to see Alek. But he was never there, and the moment when she would have been glad to see him always passed. She wondered if she liked him better as someone she had left behind on Earth, a person to dream about but not have to deal with. I must be a very selfish person, she told herself in critical moments.
One day she saw Dr. Shastri outside the tachyon receiver control room, and decided to ask him a question.
“Doctor, I haven’t seen Alek Calder anywhere for some time. Do you know where he’s working now?” She took a deep breath as she waited for his reply.
Dr. Shastri smiled. “Of course. He’s moved to the engineering level. He’s training with the shuttle pilots. I’m told he’s quite good at it.”
“What?” Lissa asked, surprised by the information and by her sudden twinge of jealousy.
“Yes, it’s what he wanted from the start. He’ll probably be going out to chart the source of the alien signal if he checks out in time. I’m told he’s one of the best. He flew airplanes back home. We’re lucky to have him.”
“Thank you,” she said turning away, feeling confused as she headed toward the elevator that would take her up into the hollow.
Alek would get to go outside. He would explore, with only a suit and shuttle between him and the unknown. So this was what he had been planning all along!
She turned suddenly and ran back down the hall after Dr. Shastri.
“Oh, Doctor,” she said breathlessly as she caught up with him.
“Yes?” he asked as he turned to face her again.
“Will any of the rest of us get to go out and examine the source of the alien signal?”
“You wish to go?” he said impatiently, cocking one eyebrow.
She nodded. “Very much. Do you think it will be possible?”
He smiled. “I don’t see why not, assuming we don’t find it inaccessible or dangerous.” He was looking at her intently, as if he’d lived her life and countless others, and knew the motives behind all requests.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Lissa said, feeling much better.
“You will excuse me,” he said abruptly, “but I have an appointment.”
She nodded and turned away. As she walked down the long passageway, it seemed to her that she had become another person.
What are you worried about,
she asked her stranger self,
that Alek Calder will beat you out of something? You’re only a minor member of this expedition, a student,
she told herself,
and you’re not likely to awe anyone with a major breakthrough. So what are you afraid of?
The stranger within did not reply. Lissa stopped, knowing that her feelings were irrational. None of this was real. Alek couldn’t be a threat; he was only doing what interested him. She should be proud of him. He might even be the pilot who would take her to the site of the alien transmitter.
Endless possibilities still waited for her. Nothing was decided.
Beyond Pluto, nearly 300 astronomical units from Earth, the Sun was only a bright star. Here bodies moved in stately orbits, strolling members of a whirlpool trillions of kilometers wide; dark, airless worlds by the thousands, asteroids, clumps of ice and frozen gas. The combined mass was probably greater than a dozen Jupiters.
Lissa watched as the asteroid slipped into a wide orbit around a black shape twice the size of Earth. Data runs at the bottom of the screen reported that the dark world had a large moon and a ring of debris. The alien signal was coming from somewhere on the moon’s equator.
An inset of the signal appeared in the lower left hand corner of the screen. The dancing line seemed unchanged. Lissa had discussed with Dr. Shastri the possibility that the signal was emanating from an alien probe that had landed on the moon of the dark planet. She was hoping that the device possessed a level of cybernetic intelligence that would enable it to communicate when approached.
She watched nervously now, hoping that the source would respond to their presence and reveal itself to be something more than an automatic program. She wanted very badly to be right in her prediction, even though she knew it was a long shot.
But as the asteroid swung around the black world, the signal remained unchanged, despite the greetings that were being beamed at it.
Dr. Shastri smiled at her and shrugged gently. The room quieted as he got up and turned to address the gathering. “There may be a lot to learn when we examine the design of whatever is down there, but there doesn’t seem to be an alien delegation waiting to meet us here.”
“When will some of us get to go?” Lissa asked.
“The landing coordinates are being established right now by a reconnaissance shuttle. As soon as the area is checked out, we’ll put in a team of initial observers. Some of you may go with them, or with later groups.”