Edges

Chapter 23

The fleet’s array of telescopes engaged in a continuous slow survey of the Near Vicinity, seeking for anomalies near enough to constitute a threat. Only once a year did the Astronomer focus the array on the individual star systems of the Hallowed Vasties, to capture updated images.

Pasha had sought out Vytet as soon as she learned of this schedule, wanting his explanation for it before confronting Urban directly. “It makes no sense,” she’d insisted to him. “We should be monitoring the Vasties more often. Twice a year, at minimum. It’s why we’re here.”

Vytet had given up his archaic beard, revealing a refined face, one that now wore an ambivalent expression. “I don’t disagree, but Urban’s priority is protecting the fleet from near-term threats, so that’s where the telescope time goes. The Astronomer has advised him an annual survey of the Vasties is sufficient to capture evidence of change.”

“Maybe in the past,” Pasha had conceded. “Maybe even now, for the more distant systems. But we’re closing on Tanjiri and Ryo. Both should be monitored on a much more frequent schedule.”

Vytet had advised patience. “The annual survey is coming up,” he’d reminded her. “Let’s wait. See what it reveals. And then make the argument.”

A shiver of excitement touched her as she left her cottage. The annual survey was finally underway. In minutes, the first new images of Tanjiri in a year would begin to come in.

For once, as she hurried along the path, she did not hear the annoying hum of a flying fox. It was late afternoon, the favorite time to play the game, but today there was only birdsong, the buzz of bees, and quiet chatter as people made their way to the amphitheater, where they would watch together as the new images arrived.

She thought she’d left early, but most of the front-row seats were taken by the time she arrived. Fortunately, Tarnya was there at the center of the row, along with Shoran and Mikael. They waved at her, calling out, “Pasha! We’ve saved you a seat.”

She hurried to join them, as walls descended from the perimeter of the sheltering pergola and the canopy shifted to impenetrable black, blocking out the afternoon sunlight. As the walls bonded to one another and to the floor, the temperature dropped—appropriately, Pasha thought, given the sudden fall of night. On the curved projection screen, a starfield blazed in sudden glory.

A rustling and murmuring as those still standing hurried to find seats, guided by tiny points of blue light on the floor.

“What do you think we’ll see?” Shoran asked, starlight reflecting in her eyes, along with an excitement that echoed Pasha’s own.

“I hope we’ll see what’s casting shadows on the star,” she said. “If it’s a planet, or a disc of debris, or a surviving structure.”

“You want it to be a structure,” Tarnya teased.

“Yes! That would be amazing. Our first hint of the kind of habitats that combined to create the cordon.”

The gathering settled, murmurs faded. A shiver ran up Pasha’s spine—from the cold or from anticipation? She couldn’t say.

She looked for Vytet and saw him standing beside the dais, a tall silhouette limned in starlight, his long hair loosely tied. Vytet had organized this gathering. Now he acknowledged the restless silence by gesturing at the projected starfield. “We have the grandest of views,” he said in his gentle, contemplative voice. “But it’s a view that changes only slowly. It’s not as if we can turn a corner and encounter a new vista. All that is, is out there in front of us but at such a distance details are elusive. Only slowly, gradually, as we draw closer to a target star do we have a real chance of discerning what might still exist in orbit around it.”

A doorway peeled open. Light washed in, inciting annoyed murmurs. A man’s handsome silhouette, against the afternoon glare. Pasha recognized Riffan.

“Pardon me,” he said contritely as the doorway sealed shut behind him. “I’m a minute late.”

Good-humored teasing erupted. People liked Riffan. They clapped and whistled and called out, “Find the man a seat!”

Not Pasha. She stayed silent, and under cover of darkness, allowed herself an irritated snarl. Are we friends, Pasha? he’d asked, but she’d skirted the question. Now she bit her lip and conceded, if only to herself, Jealousy is the worst emotion.

It was not his fault he’d been privileged to go on the expedition to the beacon. Urban had picked him out of the archive, ostensibly because Riffan was an anthropologist. Yet an exobiologist would have made sense too. More sense. But Urban had met the two of them aboard Long Watch, and he had chosen Riffan.

She chided herself, You are so petty!

And still, it rankled. She’d worked so hard in her career. She’d had to push at every stage to advance in the sclerotic hierarchy of Deception Well. The quality of her work had always earned praise and yet it did not bring her the reward of new projects. Always, she had to take the initiative, put herself forward, or be forgotten. Over the years she’d often felt invisible.

None of it was Riffan’s fault, but she could not help a stab of jealousy every time she saw him, so she did her best not to see him. It was that simple.

Shuffling sounds from the back indicated Riffan was still making his way to an open seat, but Pasha raised her chin and fixed her attention forward as Vytet resumed his introductory remarks.

“The ingredients of life are all still present at Tanjiri,” he said. “Past surveys have detected water, oxygen, and abundant organic molecules. Whether those are associated with biological life we can’t know, but the situation is intriguing.

“Throughout our journey, we’ve tracked irregular but easily measurable variations in Tanjiri’s luminosity. And yet historically, the star is known to be stable. We have data from centuries of observations, predating the expansion, that prove this.”

Shoran interrupted with a half-raised hand. “You’re assuming the people of the Hallowed Vasties did not manipulate and destabilize the star itself,” she said.

“We can’t be sure,” Vytet admitted. “We know they possessed engineering skills far beyond anything we’re capable of—but did they build their cordons from matter harvested from cometary clouds? Or did they break up planets to do it? To overcome the attractive force of gravity… that is a physics we know almost nothing about, even now, when we’ve had the use of the propulsion reef for centuries.

“We don’t know how the cordons were made, but in just a few minutes we may gain some insight on where the matter was obtained.

“We have records of Tanjiri’s major planets. We know where they should be now, in their orbits, and we know the percentage each would contribute to the variation in luminosity as they cross the face of the star—”

“If they still transit the face of the star,” someone in the second row interjected. Pasha recognized the precise diction of the physicist, Naresh. “If they are no longer intact, we have no basis for our calculations.”

“Yes, Naresh. Exactly.” Vytet again spoke to the full gathering. “What we do know is that the variation we’re seeing is much greater than could be caused by the known planets if they do all still exist. Our hypothesis—mine, along with those Apparatchiks we call the Scholar and the Astronomer—is that some megastructures from the original cordon, or perhaps just fragments of them, still exist.”

Pasha’s mind was running ahead. “But this is not a new theory, correct?” she asked. “It’s been less than two thousand years since the Hallowed Vasties broke up. Not much time on an astronomical scale. And if the structures had been broken down to dust, we would have seen a nebula.”

Naresh answered this, saying, “I’ve looked over the historical data.” Pasha turned to see him in the row behind her, a shadowy figure in the faint light, his posture as precise as his words. He continued, “There may be a nebula, but it’s too thin to account for a majority of the matter that went into the construction of the cordon.”

“I agree,” Vytet said.

“So where did all that matter go?” Shoran wanted to know. “Is it still tied up in these fragments of… what was the term you used?”

“Megastructures,” Pasha said. “Is there even another possibility? Surely there’s not been enough time for debris to re-gather into a planetary body or even into an accretion disc.”

“We hope to find out today,” Vytet answered.

The first image to be displayed came from Dragon’s telescope alone. A Dull Intelligence swiftly combined it with a digital image from Griffin, producing a sharper picture of Tanjiri. Pasha squinted, instinctively trying to bring into focus several tiny blurs of what looked like reflected light, scattered at a uniform distance around the pale yellow star. A tag popped up:

Average estimated distance of orbital bodies from the central star: 0.78 astronomical units.

An astronomical unit, an AU, was the distance that had once separated Earth from Sun… and maybe it still did. No one knew for sure.

Murmurs erupted, whispered questions. Pasha gripped an armrest to stop herself from rising to her feet. “What are we looking at?” she asked herself aloud.

“The shape of these objects suggests a crescent,” someone in back said. “Could they be planetary objects in partial light?”

“Or could they be surviving structures?” another voice asked.

A discussion ensued, the planetary hypothesis gaining support when an analysis of the spectra revealed strong indications of water and an oxygen-bearing atmosphere.

After forty minutes, image data began to stream in from Khonsu’s telescope. The DI cross-matched time and angle, working to integrate it with the existing image to reveal even more detail.

Pasha leaned forward, anxious for the update, hoping it would allow a clearer view of the ruins if that’s what they were, or, far better, reveal an indication of surviving life.

She hoped for proof of life with a child’s eager hope, even as she reminded herself not to let hope influence her judgment. No matter what the refined image showed, she had to view it with an impartial mind. She had to see what was actually there and not just what she wished to see.

The existing image on the projection screen blurred—a dramatic touch, a clear demarcation—before snapping back into focus. Across the watching audience, a collective gasp. Pasha’s hand rose to cover her open mouth.

The best image from last year—the fully integrated image—had shown only glints and shadows that might have been nothing more than tiny flaws in the lenses or random errors in the integration algorithm. This year, with the data newly integrated from Khonsu, those glints were now, undeniably, objects.

In this iteration, the DI had used a screen to block out the direct light of the star, allowing a better look at the surrounding space.

Pasha could now clearly see the lit crescent of a planet or a planetoid, a moon, something… tiny in the overall span of the image but sharply defined and so tantalizingly bright blue in color it commanded the eye to gaze upon it. And paired with it, a smaller crescent, also blue, but not so sharply rendered.

Naresh again, coolly confident: “The larger crescent must be Tanjiri-2. It’s right where the planet should be, but—”

He broke off as another tag popped into existence on the image. Pasha leaned forward to read it. It confirmed Naresh’s evaluation, labeling the larger crescent as the known planet, Tanjiri-2.

“This is quite extraordinary,” Vytet said breathlessly.

“It’s impossible,” Naresh said, anger edging his voice.

This time, Pasha could not resist rising to her feet. She spoke out, defiant, incredulous. “Tanjiri-2 has no moon!”

It never used to have a moon. She’d read the reports. She was certain of this. There was no moon, not even a small rocky body, but in this image the planet appeared to have gained a partner, a smaller world to be sure, but a living world.

“I think we’re looking past the biggest miracle,” Shoran said, projecting her powerful voice over the ongoing murmur of argument. “The living world, the originally inhabited world, still exists! It wasn’t destroyed to create the cordon. It still has atmosphere, an ocean. We might be able to walk there someday, stand on an alien shore.”

Pasha’s heart raced. Shoran was right. There might still be people living on that world and there would surely be life of some kind. And life was precious. Living worlds so very rare.

She flinched at a touch against her hand. Shoran, with a meaningful look toward her empty seat. Sheepishly, Pasha sat down again.

On the dais, Vytet was as awed as anyone. He drew a deep breath, shook his head in wonderment. “All right,” he murmured. A second breath to steady his voice, get his shock under control. “First pass analysis. Both worlds—the old and the new—have atmospheres and—we’ll need to check the spectra of course but I think Shoran is correct—both have oceans. Even that moon, that new, inexplicable moon. Tanjiri-2b, let’s call it! Are they living oceans? We can’t know yet but I want to think so. By the Waking Light! I never imagined we’d find such a thing. A newly created world. A living world.”

“Let’s take a step back,” Naresh said. “No other planetary bodies have been tagged in this image. But historical records assure us there were once additional worlds.”

Vytet cocked his head in an attitude of listening, and then looked out at Naresh. “The DI processing these images has not been able to resolve any other planetary bodies.”

Pasha drew a deep breath. The absence of other planets was eerie but not unexpected. She asked, “If Tanjiri-1 still exists, would it be visible from this angle of view? Or is it possible that it’s passed behind the star? Or behind… one of those other objects?”

Those other objects…

So far, no one had called them out directly. It was as if they were all in tacit agreement to discuss the most familiar objects first.

“Let’s get a projected position for the inner planet,” Vytet said.

A broad, bright crescent appeared, much larger and closer to the star than Tanjiri-2. The inner planet had been a gas giant in close orbit. If it still existed, it would have been clearly visible at the time the image was recorded.

“So it’s not there,” Pasha concluded.

Kona spoke up for the first time. Pasha had not noticed him before, standing in the shadows at the far end of the first row. “How the hell do you take apart a planet?”

Riffan answered from the back of the room. “Honestly, I hope we never figure that part out.”

This earned a low general chuckle.

“Still, it’s a question we have to ask,” Naresh said. “It’s gravity that holds a world together. Even if you could shatter a planet, gravity will pull most of the matter back—”

“But surely they manipulated gravity,” Shoran interrupted.

“Yes,” Vytet said. “There is no other explanation for it. They developed something as unexpected as the reef, only on a massive scale.”

A giddy laugh from Riffan. “Ah, but if we are going to entertain impossibilities then there are other explanations. Perhaps they’ve manipulated time, or opened seams between parallel universes, allowing disruptive forces to bleed through, or maybe they’ve folded the fabric of space to create brief tidal forces strong enough to tear worlds apart.”

Several seconds of silence followed this outburst. “Uh,” Riffan said, sounding deeply embarrassed. “I’m joking, of course.”

A scattering of laughter, but not from Pasha. She clenched an armrest, pondering the terrible possibility that some aspect of Riffan’s joking explanation was true. What had been done in Tanjiri System was so far beyond their own science it might as well be magic.

“We are resolved to trespass among the ruins of gods,” she said, not caring if anyone heard. Then she lifted her chin and spoke again, this time at good volume, determined to push the conversation forward. “Can we discuss the other objects?”

This request silenced the gathering for two full seconds. Then everyone started talking at once.

Aside from the occulted star and the now-double planet, the image showed a generous sprinkling of faint, widely scattered points of light that together defined a flattened ring like a halo encircling the star. Nearly all the points were outside the orbit of Tanjiri-2.

A few structures, shadowy but limned in light, could be seen among the points.

The structures were large. Immensely large. So large, they made Tanjiri-2 look small.

Pasha counted thirteen megastructures visible in the image, each with a unique shape and none with a neat design. They looked like wreckage, ruined fragments fused together in the kinetic chaos that had followed calamity. Some lay horizontal to the plane of the ecliptic, others towered above it, their silhouettes suggesting long, drawn-out conglomerations of curved panels, partial spheres, rods, stair-step beams, and broken discs. The glittering points of the halo sparkled around them.

One megastructure appeared to be crowned in a wisp of white mist. Pasha imagined atmosphere still bleeding out of a broken habitat… but centuries had passed since cataclysm. More likely, the gravity of the megastructure allowed it to hold on to a fog of fine dust or frozen molecules of air.

“Aren’t we still missing matter?” someone asked.

Another: “My thought too. Surely there is not sufficient matter in that halo to account for all the matter that must have been used in the cordon at its peak.”

Naresh said, “We’ll do the calculations, but I suspect you’re right.”

Hours later, Pasha emerged from the night-dark pavilion into real night. She felt giddy with excitement. Lifting her face to an artificial sky bright with projected stars, she twirled like a child, laughing.

Tarnya laughed with her. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she said. “To know it’s not all dust, that something is out there.”

“I’m a horrible person,” Pasha confessed in a stage whisper. “What we saw in there was the shattered tomb of millions, billions, maybe more… but it’s amazing all the same.”

“The ruins of gods,” Tarnya teased. “Who knows what we’ll find there?”

Pasha pulled up abruptly, her ardor cooling. “If we go there.”

Tarnya frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The last time I checked, our course was set for a close pass of Tanjiri System, like the close pass Urban made at Deception Well.”

Both queried the library, confirming this. The fleet was not on course to enter the system.

“I think we were only waiting for confirmation that something is there,” Tarnya said, waving at someone. She looked at Pasha in apology. “I need to speak to Bituin.”

“Go ahead. We’ll meet later.”

People were leaving the pavilion in small groups, chattering and debating with each other. Pasha looked for Urban, but did not see him. Maybe he had left early.

She checked the personnel map. It showed him at the cottage he shared with Clemantine. She arrived there to find the gel door open, the living room glowing with soft light. Urban was inside, half-reclined on the sofa, watching her with an unnerving fixed stare as she crossed the patio. This annoyed her. She wondered what game he was playing.

But when she reached the threshold, she saw his eyes weren’t tracking her. His face looked vacant, giving her the unsettling impression that although his avatar was present, he was somewhere else.

But even if that was so, surely some part of his mind, or a submind, monitored what passed around him?

She called to him from the threshold. “Hello, Urban? Can we talk?”

To her relief, his eyes shifted at the sound of her voice. He sat up. His gaze focused on her, and a slight, cynical, lopsided smile appeared on his face.

He said, “You want to talk about Tanjiri, don’t you? Come on in.”

She straightened her shoulders and stepped inside, striving to present a strong, confident front. “You’ve seen the new imagery. We have to go there. This is why we came.”

His smile widened. “Is that what the ship’s company wants? Is there consensus on that?”

He was teasing her, payback for her criticism of him that first day. She answered in a neutral voice. “I think we were all too excited to discuss it.”

“Well, you’ve got time.”

That was true! There was so much time left to endure before they got there.

“It’ll take even longer than you’re expecting,” he said. “We’ll have to dump velocity as we get close. Go in slowly.”

“Understood. And we’ll need to take the time to carefully map every object. But it’s worth it, isn’t it? We’ll never know the truth if we limit ourselves to a fly-by, standing off at a distance that keeps us safe.”

“We’re not safe,” he reminded her.

She shrugged, unwilling to play word games. “I think we should spend time in this system. It’s why we came.”