“Lucinda!” one figure cried out, waving.
Max saw Linda ten Eyck. Jake was with her. They rushed up and embraced their daughter. Both seemed thinner, and Jake had not shaved for some time.
“Where’s Emil?” Linda demanded, looking around.
“Max!” his mother’s voice cried. Joe and Rosalie rushed up from his left and hugged him wildly. He felt a moment of relief as his mother kissed him, but it died away when he heard Lucinda struggling, on the verge of tears, to tell Linda and Jake the bad news.
“Max, where have you been all week?” Joe demanded.
His mother gave him a suspicious look, then glanced at Lucinda.
“When we couldn’t read your wrist IDs inside the habitat,” Joe went on, “we started to search out here.”
“You just started?” Max asked, noticing two older boys in front of the airlock. One of them was Muhammad Bekhter; the dark-haired boy lifted a hand in greeting.
“We’ve been coming out here for two days,” Joe said. “It seemed impossible that anyone would have come out here, but the alarm sensor insisted that the manual locks were open. I almost fell over when I went to check and saw they were open, and realized that you had come out here.”
“We hoped that the three of you were together, hiding somewhere in the hollow,” Rosalie added.
“Why would we be hiding?” Lucinda asked softly, turning away from her mother’s gaze.
“Have you seen the column!” Max asked nervously.
His father nodded. Lucinda turned to him and asked, “Has anyone else gone through it?”
“No, we’ve kept people away, and someone’s always on guard by the airlock.”
“Good,” Lucinda said with relief.
“What happened, Max?” Jake demanded, holding Linda’s hand. She stood rigidly at his side.
“You couldn’t pick up our IDs,” Max explained, “because we were light-years away. The portals in the column lead to stations in other star systems. One of them goes to Alpha Centauri A-4.”
“Emil’s still there, at the colony,” Lucinda said.
“He was poisoned by some briars on A-4,” Max continued, “but the colony found us. He’s in the hospital on the habitat. They gave him antitoxin.”
Max saw Linda ten Eyck stiffen, staring at her daughter in disbelief, her hands trembling. She had lost a brother, and now her son was in danger, or already dead.
Jake put his arm around her. “What are his chances?”
“We don’t know,” Lucinda said in a shaking voice, still avoiding her mother’s gaze.
“Can you take us to him?” Linda asked.
“The portal closed up behind us,” Max answered. “We don’t know when it will open.”
“Can you show us?” Jake asked.
Max nodded. “Sure, but—”
“Rosalie and I will come with you,” Joe said.
“But what’s happened here?” Max asked, looking at his parents, then at the guards by the airlock.
“We’re in a station of some kind,” his father said, “probably somewhere in a close orbit around the Sun.”
“Some people wander out,” Jake explained, “so we’ve posted guards, in case anyone gets the urge to go exploring.”
“That’s what happened to us,” Max said, looking at Lucinda, “but the feeling wore off after we’d gone through the column.”
“It seems to affect people by degrees,” Linda managed to say, looking dazed as she stepped away from Jake.
Max looked at his father. “Lucky Russell rescued us from A-4. The colony’s excited about the possibility of having a direct link with us.”
“Sure,” Joe said, “if we can figure out where we are.”
“But you said we’re near the Sun,” Lucinda said.
“That’s only a guess,” Joe replied. “We could be halfway across the known universe, from what you two have told us.”
Linda said, “A link with Centauri, or with anywhere else, won’t mean much if the habitat remains trapped here.”
Max felt uneasy before the two sets of parents. Rosalie was looking at him strangely, as if he had become someone else.
“We’ll get extra packs,” Jake said, looking at his wife with concern. “Are you kids up to showing us the way right now?”
“Sure,” Max said, hoping that the barrier would be down.
“Could you make a sketch of the portal connections?” Linda asked, her voice trembling.
“Yes,” Max said, “but there’d be no way to tell distances. We can describe the places, but not where they are. We saw different suns in the sky, so we had to be light-years away. Centauri is the only known place we visited.”
Something rumbled in the distance, as if a storm were approaching. They all looked up, but the blue brightness was unchanged.
“We haven’t heard that before,” Linda said.
There was a flash high over the habitat. It came again, brighter. Suddenly it was flashing every second, brighter each time.
“Everyone, back inside!” the navigator shouted over the rumble.
As they retreated toward the airlock, Joe glanced at Max. “Do you know what this is, son?”
The flashes came faster, and the rumbling deepened. Max stopped and turned around. Lucinda did the same, and as he looked at her he knew what they both expected.
“What is it?” Linda demanded.
“I think the aliens are about to show themselves,” Max said.
“Look at that!” Muhammad shouted.
Max saw a dark outline in the center of the flashing area.
“A ship!” Lucinda cried.
An alien ship, Max thought, as the black egg-shape descended slowly toward the station floor.
“It’s being brought in the way we were,” Joe said as the flashing and rumbling stopped.
The vessel touched the floor and settled slightly on its shocks. Max saw markings on the ship’s side, but the glare made them illegible.
They waited in silence. Finally, two shapes emerged from the black hull and moved across the bright floor. They were of human height, but in the distorting glare they seemed to lack arms and heads. Max tensed as the black masses drew near, moving as if they were machines.
Jake and Linda stepped forward. The black figures halted, and one came forward. It acquired arms and a clearly human face, then raised one arm in greeting—and Max saw a woman about five and a half feet tall. She seemed slim under her black jumpsuit. Her face was pale, with some freckles, her hair reddish brown. She was an adult, but Max couldn’t be sure of her age. Her light green eyes seemed to be searching for someone she knew.
“My name is Lissa Quintana-Green-Wolfe,” she said in a slightly raspy voice. “I’m science officer on the ship behind me. We’ve been worried about you on Earth. I’m glad to see you all safe here.”
There was a long silence.
The woman from Earth smiled. “You will find an entry for my parents in your scientific records, under my last name. But to save identification time, let me ask about Joe Sorby. He went to college with my father on Bernal One.”
“That’s me,” Max’s father said.
She came up to him and held out her hand. “Joe? I’m your old friend Morey’s daughter, Lissa,” she said as they shook hands. Joe was smiling, but Max saw that his father was puzzled. “And you must be Rosalie,” Lissa said. “I grew up hearing about you two—the big miners’ strike on Mercury, the quakes, the building of the habitat there. My father kept up with all of it.”
“This is our son, Maxwell,” Rosalie said.
“Hello, Maxwell. They call you Max?”
“Sure,” Max said.
“Will you please tell us what’s going on?” the navigator cut in. “I’m Linda ten Eyck. This is Jake LeStrange. Our son is very ill .…”
“What’s wrong with him?” Lissa asked with concern.
Lucinda glanced at Max, and he knew that pieces of the mystery were coming together—the habitat’s capture by the alien station, their wanderings through the alien web, and the arrival of Lissa’s ship were all part of it. Max was sure that Lissa was carrying information that would complete the picture.
“My son is at the Centauri habitat,” Linda said.
As she spoke, the figure behind Lissa came forward. Max saw a sandy-haired man with pale blue eyes, slightly taller than Lissa. He seemed stocky in his jumpsuit.
“This is Captain Alek Calder,” Lissa said, showing no surprise at what Linda had just told her.
Captain Calder nodded in greeting. “I want you all to know that we’ve detected no danger in the docking procedure by which your habitat and our ship were drawn into this station.”
“And where is this station?” Linda demanded.
“Inside the Sun itself,” Lissa replied.
“The Sun?” Jake asked.
“All of this,” Lissa continued, “may be described as a suncore station, designed to sit inside a star and draw power from the star. Obviously, the station could not be placed directly inside a sun’s fusion furnace without vaporizing, so this station exists in what may be described as
otherspace
, outside our space but congruent with it. This station sits in that space, where there is no sun as we know it, but which shares its location with our Sun’s interior. Somewhere in this station is a device whose core blinks back and forth from normal to otherspace, and uses that infinitesimal interval of time to draw power from the Sun’s fusion process. At least that’s what we think happens, even if the details are very different. In effect, two kinds of space are superimposed on each other, making it possible to harness the energy of a star. To put it in very quaint terms, this station is a kind of waterwheel, turned by the controlled amounts of energy released from the Sun, much in the same way a stream or waterfall would turn a generator wheel or millstone.”
“How do you know any of this?” Jake demanded.
“After your habitat disappeared during its approach to Titan,” Lissa continued, “we went out to the point in space where you were last seen. We found no evidence along your course that you had disintegrated. I felt that there was
something
at the point in space where you vanished. We passed through the same window you did and arrived here, although for a few moments it seemed as if we were being pulled into the Sun. There may be two windows, one in the outer Solar System near Saturn’s orbit, where you entered, and one nearer the Sun. The second one may be there to orient incoming vessels, or just as a spare. When you entered the distant window and came out closer to the Sun, you had in effect stitched through space like a needle through a folded fabric. You probably saw that the Sun was closer. You were being given a clue, terrifying as it was.”
“Are you sure of this?” Jake asked.
“I’ve been working at uncovering something like this all my life,” Lissa said. “We’ve been suspicious of the Sun ever since the discovery of tachyon transmissions from the stars twenty years ago. At that time we learned that our Sun is a tachyon crossroads, a focus of some kind—probably quite routine—for faster-than-light communications. The existence of this station fits in with that early observation. I’m certain that what you have to tell me will confirm and extend what I’ve described.”
Linda asked, “What can Earth do to free us?”
“Very little, at the moment.” Lissa smiled. “I suspect that someone wanted you to stay a while.”
“Who are they?” Jake asked.
“We don’t know anything about them,” Lissa replied, “except that they exist. I suspect my ship is not under restraint, and that they wanted us to find you. I think that if we activate our g-pusher drive, it will trigger this station’s departure systems, and we will be ejected through one of the existing windows.”
“Are you sure?” Linda asked.
“I’m guessing that this suncore station,” Lissa continued, “is part of a communications and travel net, a component of a grid for powering interstellar vessels. It probably contains repair facilities, judging by its size. Stations of this kind may be common throughout our Galaxy.”
Max saw his chance. “Better than that,” he said. “Over in that direction there is a column with twelve portals. There’s a tunnel in each that leads to another star system. Lucinda and I, and Emil, explored a number of them. One passage took us back to Centauri. Emil’s there now, in the habitat’s hospital.”
“He’s recovering from an alien poison,” Lucinda said in a shaking voice.
“We saw living things on the worlds we visited,” Max continued. “I saw what might have been intelligent beings inside one of the passages, when I was looking through a barrier that went up there.”
As the habitat’s assembly came to order, the navigator introduced the woman from Earth, then sat down in the first row with her daughter, Jake, Max and his parents.
The spherical chamber was silent as Lissa stood up and repeated what she had told the group outside, including what she had learned from Max and Lucinda. “Now I want to tell you what we believe may be true,” she continued, “about the civilization, or civilizations, out in the Galaxy. Many of us at the Interstellar Institute believe that the attitude of galactic civilizations toward us may be divided into two factions—nurturers and weeders. We think they’ve been debating about us, in a general way, for maybe a million years, or from just before humanoid life appeared on Earth. The actions flowing from this debate explain, I believe, why the habitat is here in the suncore station, and what happened to Max Sorby and Lucinda ten Eyck.”
And to Emil
, Max thought sadly.
“Our previous discovery of their tachyon communications, together with what you’ve learned here, may give us a clue to what the attitude toward us might be, or is about to become.”
Max felt a rush of excitement tainted with fear, as if he was waiting for his grades, or was about to be judged in a school project. What right did an alien species have to make decisions about humankind? They were not humanity’s parents or teachers.
“We’ve thought about this in several ways at the Institute,” Lissa continued. “To some of us it seemed that if life were plentiful in the universe, then even a single technical civilization might overrun our Galaxy in less than thirty million years. That’s a very short time in the life of a galaxy. It would mean that younger cultures, when they attained the means to leave their sunspaces, would encounter the galactic culture and stop developing. They would adopt the dominant culture’s ideas and technologies, and lose the unique road they might have taken in ignorance of the galactic culture’s existence. Some of us have argued that the first culture to sweep the galaxy might have learned this when it found itself surrounded by echoes of itself, in the form of cultures it had influenced earlier. Not wishing to have this happen again, it began to nurture worlds where life might still develop, but it also set up limits to prevent developing civilizations from bursting the bounds of their solar systems too easily and losing their individuality. They could have done this by slowing down evolutionary processes with periodic catastrophes. One example would be an inward rain of asteroids from the cometary shells that surround most solar systems. Ice ages caused by such collisions would slow intelligent life’s emergence but not stop it, thus saving the galaxy from being choked with intelligent life. Cultures would emerge spaced across great stretches of time, much in the same way as parents often space their children. Individual cultures would have a chance to shine, to be themselves before meeting others. Their emergence onto the galactic stage of history would be slow, based on careful prior exchanges of technical and ecological information, of the kind that would help species control their more rampant, darker natures. Cultures engaged in purely informational exchange would be stimulated by each other’s unique outlooks and experiences of nature without being swamped.”