Seeker

THIRTY-ONE

There are worlds enough out there for all. Go, and you will see canyons to make your head spin, and solitary beaches, and rings of light, and iron rivers. But wear a topcoat.

- Tavron Hamm,

There and Back, sixth millennium Once the survey started, Conversations with Caesar stopped. Alex never left the ops center except from necessity. He watched relentlessly as the images shifted every few minutes, showing a new patch of sky. If one of the points of light seemed a trifle blurred, he leaned forward expectantly, hoping Shara would react, or that Kalu would declare a hit.

Occasionally, he talked with Brankov, who said he was fascinated by what we were trying to do. “I wish you all success,” he said. “Let us hope you find it. And that your speculations prove correct.”

Shara stuck it out with Alex the first day. Until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Alex was simply too intense. On the second morning, she told him to let her know if they found something and retreated to the common room. I stuck my head in once in a while to see how she was doing, but for the most part I stayed with Alex. Out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, I suppose.

“Why does he care so much?” Shara asked. “He’s already made the big finds. So what if a few of them retreated to a base somewhere else? Right? Or am I missing something here?”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I’ve never seen him like this before. I think it has to do with the Seeker. Full of kids. That really shook him up. I don’t think he buys the idea that they would have known what was going to happen to one world but not to the other. Of the two, they must have known Margolia was safer. He wants to know why they jumped into the lion’s mouth. He thinks he owes it to them to find out.”

“If in fact that’s what they did,” said Shara. “I’m not convinced.”

“Neither am I. But his instincts for things like this are pretty good.”

“Chase,” she said, “instincts are for things like food and sex. They don’t have much to do with logic.” She shook her head. “If they actually landed people on Balfour, the explanation will turn out to be that they screwed up the calculations.”

“But they should have been able to figure it out, right?”

“Sure.” She sighed. “But it’s not my call.”

We needed a change of subject. “Shara,” I said, “I was surprised to find out how common these things are. Brown dwarfs. Do we have the local ones mapped?”

“Surely you joke.” She smiled again. That mischievous, let’s-not-be-naive grin.

“There’s no reputation to be made looking for local brown dwarfs, so it doesn’t happen.”

“Maybe the Council should get on the stick.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s at the top of their agenda. I mentioned it to one of their reps one time, and he asked how much warning we’d have if one blundered into the system.”

“How much warning would we have?”

“Probably twenty or thirty years.”

“And what did he say?”

“Told me twenty or thirty years would be plenty of time to deal with it.”

“Is he serious? What would we do if it happened?”

“Wouldn’t be much you could do. Except evacuate the planet.”

“Evacuate the planet? We don’t have the facilities, do we? For that kind of effort?”

“Billions of people? I doubt it.” She was sitting with a book in her lap. “I don’t think math was his strong suit.”

I was asleep the second night when Alex knocked on my door. “We got a hit,” he said.

I woke Shara. She came out in a robe and sat down to look at the images on the screen.

There appeared to be two dim stars, side by side.

“That it?” I asked.

“There’s a decent chance. Kalu, what’s the range?”

“Point six-four,” he said. Fraction of a light-year.

“Recessional velocity?”

“Twenty-two kilometers per second.”

She scribbled numbers on a pad. “It’s a pretty good match. That’s probably it.”

“Probably?” said Alex.

“No way to be positive yet. We should reconfigure the telescopes’ optical trains to a higher magnification.”

“Why?”

“That’ll give us the transverse velocity. Allow us to get a 3-D picture, and pin it down for certain.”

“How long will it take?”

“About fourteen hours.”

“Okay.” Alex rubbed his hands. “Then you can figure out where the planet is, right?”

“If the sighting is confirmed.”

“That’s good. Shara, you’re a treasure.”

She smiled modestly. “I do what I can.”

I was standing around, pretty much irrelevant. “Anything I can do to help?”

“No. Thanks. I can take care of it. You might as well go back to bed.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

I started for the door. Shara turned suddenly toward Alex. “But there’s something you can do for me.”

“Name it.”

“I’ve never seen a brown dwarf. From nearby. Instead of just sitting here, waiting for the numbers to come in, why don’t we go take a look?”

“All right,” said Alex. He hid it well, but he wasn’t excited at the prospect of going off on a side trip. Not at this point. But he figured he owed Shara. He looked my way.

“Chase?”

“Consider it done, boss.”

“I mean,” said Shara, “as long as we’ve come this far, it would be nice to see one.”

That surprised me. “You’ve never seen a dwarf star?”

“Actually,” she said, “no. I never really had the opportunity.”

“Well, we’ll rectify that.”

She looked delighted, a kid at a birthday party. “I mean, we pretty much take them for granted. There are a lot of them, and they don’t actually do anything.”

“Except barge around.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Except that.”

Shortly before we made the jump, we got a transmission from Brankov. They’d found what appeared to have been a museum set up to honor the original settlers. Not much was distinguishable. The objects that had been exhibited, as well as the cases in which they’d been placed, had all but dissolved. “We can make out some of the inscriptions.

And that’s about it. Some terrestrial dates. Some names we don’t recognize.”

During the course of the conversation, we told him we might have found the brown dwarf.

“Glad to hear it. So you can figure out where Balfour is? Are you headed there now?”

“We’re going to take a look at the dwarf first. We have a lady on board with a special interest in compact objects.”

“Okay. Good luck. Keep me informed.”

We sent a message to Windy, letting her know what was happening. It seemed like smart policy to keep Survey’s public relations officer in the loop.

We made a good jump and came out within a day’s travel time. The brown dwarf looked like a gas giant, except there was no sun nearby, so the glow it was putting out wasn’t reflected light. It packed about 5 percent of a solar mass beneath allencompassing clouds. “It’s a little bit light,” said Shara. “It needs about eight percent solar mass to ignite.” To become a legitimate star. There was a collection of moons, eleven of them altogether, and a wispy ring that wasn’t immediately visible.

The dwarf itself-a curious term for so monstrous an object-seemed to be simply a sphere of eerily lit mud-colored clouds, with a few reddish streaks and spots. Surface temperature checked in at 800 ?dm;K. “The spots are storms,” Shara said. She was luminous that day. I had never seen her so filled with sheer joy. She was face-to-face with, as she put it, one of the objects that formed the gravitational center of her life.

She stood by a viewport, bathed in its autumn light. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s a class-T,” she said. “Lot of methane. And it’s got water.”

“Water?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

I went over and stood beside her and she embraced me. “Chase,” she said, “I take it all back. I’m glad I came.”

“Good,” I said.

We were still there, exchanging pleasantries, when Kalu’s baritone got our attention.

“We have the transverse velocity,” he said.

Shara nodded and started back for the ops center. “Let’s see what it looks like.”

Kalu gave us a 3-D projection. Here was the brown dwarf. This was its track back to the time of impact, and over there, well toward the monitor bank, was Margolia and its sun. At the point of impact.

“They don’t intersect,” I said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Kalu, run a check, please.” She looked at me and shrugged. These things happen.

“The display is accurate, Shara.”

“Can’t be,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s nowhere near the system.” She checked the ranges. “This is not the one.

Closest it got was a decent fraction of a light-year. A twentieth.”

I became aware of Alex, standing silently at the hatch, listening.

“Does this mean we got things wrong?” I asked. “Are there two brown dwarfs in the area?”

“Could be.” She sat down at one of the ops consoles and the 3-D images vanished.

“Actually, sixty percent of brown dwarfs travel in pairs.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The companion is usually within a tenth of a light-year.” She put the scope images on the monitors. Views forward and aft, and off both beams. “It’s not very likely that this thing missed Margolia just as another, unrelated, dwarf took the system apart. So there’s probably-”

Against the cosmic backdrop off the starboard side, a bloodred star appeared. First magnitude.

“That it?”

“I’ll get back to you,” said Shara.

It was just under a half light-year from our position, and its radial and transverse velocities were almost identical to the brown dwarf.

“It’s one of your bloodred jobs,” I said.

“Looks like.” She was tapping keys and watching numbers roll down the screen.

Finally, she froze them. We were looking at a set of coordinates. Shara ran the dwarf backward until it intersected with Tinicum. At the point of impact. “That’s your intruder,” she said. “No question.”

“Okay.” Alex took the chair beside her. “Now we can figure out what happened to Balfour.”

“Give me a little time,” she said.

I sent off a report to Windy, then went back to my cabin and tried to read. I was tired, but I just lay there listening to the assorted sounds of the ship. The Spirit was noisier than the Belle Marie. The quarters were more cramped. And it felt more impersonal. I can’t explain that, exactly. Maybe it was the AI. Kalu wasn’t exactly charismatic.

Eventually I gave up, got a shower, and put on a clean set of clothes. Outside, Shara was in the middle of an explanation. And she looked solemn. Alex was pale. Shara waved in my direction. “-Doesn’t mean it necessarily got swallowed,” she said.

Alex took a deep breath. “Shara thinks,” he said, “there might have been a collision.”

“Might,” she said.

“A direct hit?” I asked. “Balfour?”

“It’s possible.”

Nobody said anything.

“Look.” Shara leveled her voice. Let’s all keep calm. “We need to check this out more carefully. I need time to put the numbers together. Then we can get a better idea what actually happened.”

Alex looked at me. “Chase,” he said, “bring Emil up to date. And get us over there.”

“Over where?”

“To the intruder.”

We swung to starboard. The intruder was a distant red glow. We lined up on it, fed the range into Kalu, and belted down.

“Don’t jump in too close,” Shara cautioned. “We want to give ourselves plenty of space with that thing.”

I’ve always been a safety-first kind of person. Because of that, and the inaccuracy of the quantum drive, we came out almost three days away. Close enough.

Again, I was struck by the dwarf’s resemblance to a gas giant. Except that this one was red, with no visible moons and no ring. Its surface churned with tornadoes and cyclones. “That’ll be iron,” Shara said.

“What will?”

“The clouds. And silicates and corundum.” Occasionally, when the clouds parted, hot spots that were even brighter became visible. Shara spent time on the instruments while Alex watched anxiously.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Maybe a surprise. Good news: It did not swallow Balfour. But it did have lunch recently.”

“How do you mean?” asked Alex.

“Probably Balfour’s moon. This thing passed within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Balfour. And I’d bet it took the moon. Do we know whether Balfour had one?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’d bet it did.”

“How do you know?”

She pointed at lines on the central screen. “Its atmosphere is saturated with silicates.”

“Which tells us what?”

“It swallowed a moon. And it happened at about the time of the intersection.”

Alex took a deep breath. “How can you be sure it wasn’t Balfour?”

“It wasn’t a planet.” She spun around to face him. “Terrestrial moons are made of the surface scum skimmed off terrestrial worlds by major impacts. Think of Rimway’s structure. An iron core and a silicate mantle. The moon at home is pretty much nothing but iron-poor mantle material.” She indicated the screen. “Take a look at the lines. You can see there’s no iron.”

I couldn’t see that, and I had no doubt Alex couldn’t. But that was irrelevant. Shara could, and that was all that mattered.

“So where’s Balfour?”

She was smiling broadly. “It got close enough to lose its satellite. So at the very least, it’s trailing behind the dwarf.”

“Can we get pictures?”

“I’ve been trying to. I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Okay. It’s still early.”

“Right. And there’s another possibility.”

“Which is what?”

Bare minutes later, the second possibility materialized when a blue star appeared from behind the dwarf. “Chase,” Shara said, “Alex. Enjoy the moment. Unless I’ve completely blown it, you’re looking at Balfour.”