Starhawk

Chapter 46

JAKE BOARDED THE Venture a half hour before the scheduled departure time and got a surprise. Samantha Campbell, the Academy Project director, was seated in the passenger cabin. “Dr. Campbell,” he said, “it’s good of you to come see us off.”

“Not at all, Jake. I’m going with you.”

“You are? Well, welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.” She looked genuinely pleased to see him. “Since we’re going to be together for a while, you probably should call me Samantha.” She started to drift off the chair, grabbed a restraint, laughed, and hauled herself back. “No way I’d miss this one.”

“I’m not sure I’d get my hopes up.”

“We’ll see how it plays out.”

Jake smiled. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He went onto the bridge, said hello to Lily, and began his routine check. It included ensuring they had a pallet to retrieve Otto’s body.

The rest of the team trooped in a few minutes later. He could hear them talking, laughing, saying how this was the mission they’d all waited for. Mission of a lifetime. When he’d finished, Jake went back into the cabin, and Samantha introduced them. Tony and Mary Carpenter, she explained, had been with several high-stakes Academy expeditions before. They’d penetrated a library on Nok and made off with as much reading material as they could carry. “One of them—one of the Noks—saw us as we were heading for the lander,” said Tony, smiling at his blond wife. “I guess we scared the devil out of it.”

“He’s not kidding,” said Mary. “It screeched and ran into a wall.”

“They don’t look so good themselves,” said Tony, who realized halfway through what he was saying. “Not that you don’t look good, hon.”

Mary had nothing to worry about. But the Noks, of course, were long, spindly creatures, all eyes and husk and clutching jaws, and the color of dried grass. Not exactly showstoppers. At least not in a positive sense.

Brandon Eliot was the Academy’s hi-tech guy. He’d be responsible for getting the shelter put together when they decided on a site for it. Brandon was chunky, a little less than average height, about fifty years old. Usually, when Jake saw him in the Cockpit or the Pilots’ Club, he had a looker on his arm. And it seemed never to be the same one twice.

Denise Peifer was a specialist in extraterrestrial biology. Denise was gorgeous, with light brown hair, a captivating smile, and penetrating brown eyes. She sat down beside Jake. “Drake asked me to say hello,” she said.

“Drake?” He had to think about it. Oh, Drake Peifer. “You’re his wife?”

“His sister.” Denise was momentarily amused. Then it was on to the serious stuff: “I hope you got everything right, Jake. It sounds as if there’s something really weird going on out there. But I’ll tell you”—she was talking to Samantha now—“if we find something alive on a world that hasn’t had sunlight for millions of years, I will be shocked. In fact—”

“I get your point,” said Samantha. “But you’ve seen the report. And if you have any questions, the guy who wrote it is right here.”

They all looked at him, and Jake avoided their eyes. He didn’t want to be responsible for taking anybody on a long wild-goose chase. If that was the way it turned out. “It was strange,” he said. “But the report is as accurate as we could make it.”

* * *

WITHIN A FEW minutes after clearing the station, Samantha joined him on the bridge. “Jake,” she said, “I was looking at the pictures you got of the landscape.”

“You mean the artwork?”

“Yes. That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. “It’s hard to see how those curving hills and domed peaks and the rest of it could have happened naturally.”

“You have any theories?”

“None.”

“Tell me about the rain. Was it falling everywhere across the area?”

“No. It only extended a few meters out from Priscilla and me.”

“Your own private shower?”

“Something like that.”

* * *

PRISCILLA HAD BEEN good company during that long qualification flight. But as amiable and easygoing as she was, Jake knew that having several people on board constituted a vast improvement in social atmosphere. Given a group, you almost always got a conversational flow, and the content was much less predictable. In addition, Tony was an accomplished violinist.

Within an hour after they’d submerged and were on their way to Orfano, they’d gotten into several debates. Samantha thought that some of the more radical physicists might well be right in claiming that the universe was an illusion. Tony, a mathematician with a conservative taste in politics, found himself in a duel with Denise, who had a liberal mind-set. Mary, at one point, asked him to shut up. Tony commented that he was only upset that he was being cut off from the presidential campaign as it was heating up. “I’m just saying the timing for all this could have been better.”

“We could have gotten someone else to come,” Samantha told him.

“No, no,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. But the economy’s been losing ground for years. I’ll be surprised if McGruder doesn’t walk away with the election.”

“McGruder doesn’t have a prayer,” said Mary. Once a reporter for The New York Times, she was now a freelance writer, the author of several books on popular science, including the bestseller Clockwork.

Denise looked around at her colleagues. “I wonder if there’s any possibility we could discover something out there that would impact the presidential race.”

And so it went.

* * *

MARY SPENT A lot of time taking notes, and Jake got the impression that, if they were successful, everything they said would show up in an autobiography, or a bestseller.

Denise was so excited by the mission, she had trouble sleeping. She was full of theories about the prospects on Orfano. “It’s possible,” she said, “that the world was home to a hypercivilization when it was ripped out of orbit. If you have enough technology, you can survive pretty much anything. They’d have had to go underground, though.”

Mary was skeptical. “If they were a hyper, couldn’t they have prevented it? Kept their world in orbit?”

“How,” asked Tony, “would an underground civilization have stepped in to prevent the lander from going down?”

“I didn’t say they’d have been limited to being underground. That’s just where they’d live. But for all we know, they’re wandering around out here themselves.”

“If they could do that, wouldn’t they have moved to a sunnier world?” asked Mary. “Someplace warm?”

“Maybe,” said Denise, “some wanted to stay home. Like people who won’t leave town when a hurricane’s coming.” She looked at Jake. “You were there. What do you think?”

Jake had no clue. “It looked to me like nothing but ice and rock. I couldn’t imagine anything living there. Still, we did see lights.”

“None of it makes any sense,” said Tony. “A hypercivilization would have moved the world elsewhere, or encased it, or done something that we’d be able to see.”

“Well,” said Samantha, “there is the artwork.”

“You think that’s really what it is?” asked Tony.

“I’ve talked to a number of specialists. Nobody can account for it as a natural occurrence.”

“Whatever they might be,” said Mary, “they didn’t attack Priscilla and Jake. That suggests they might be pretty advanced.”

Denise smiled. “Maybe they saw no need to attack anybody. Maybe they concluded we’re not very bright and pose no threat.” She realized what she’d said and looked at Jake. “I guess I didn’t phrase that very well, Jake. That’s not quite what I meant.”

He laughed. “It’s all right, Denise. I’ve been called worse.”

Her smile widened. “I guess we can all see who’s the dummy around here. But seriously, there are other possibilities. They’ve had millions of years. At least. They may have been initially underground, but eventually they could have transformed into something else entirely. They may have adapted to the cold. They may have gotten control of the climate. We tend to assume you have to have sunlight and water to have life. That’s not necessarily true.”

“Can you offer any examples, Denise?” asked Samantha.

“We have life-forms in the oceans that have never seen the sun. Though I’ll confess you probably have to have it, along with water, to get started. But life is tenacious. Once it gets rolling, it’s very good at adapting.”

“Maybe,” said Tony, “intelligent life is there, but on a very small scale. So small we wouldn’t be able to see their cities.”

Denise’s eyes sparkled. “Tony, that may be pushing it a bit.”

* * *

THE OFFICIAL PURPOSE of the mission was to recover Otto’s body. That was a relatively prosaic, if requisite, matter, but Samantha explained they didn’t want to get everyone excited about aliens, then look foolish if they came home with no answers. But the actual intention was to determine what precisely had happened to the Vincenti lander. How had it gotten almost intact to the ground? “What we’ll do,” she said, “is just try to get some indication whether the business with the lander could have been, in any way, the result of natural causes. Or whether something else is happening.”

* * *

DENISE WAS A fitness nut. The interstellars all had a workout room, and it was usually cramped and boring. This one was no exception. Priscilla had ignored the one on the Copperhead. Jake was inclined not to bother either when he didn’t have company. So he’d gained a few pounds on that certification flight.

The Venture had a treadmill and a stationary bike. And Denise produced an elastic cord two feet long. “It functions as a bungee.”

“In what way?” asked Jake.

“Come on. I’ll show you.” She demonstrated, using it to stretch arms and legs. Jake tried it.

“The best way to do it,” she said, “is for us to play tug-of-war.”

“In zero gravity?” asked Jake.

“Try it.”

Each took one end of the bungee and grabbed hold of a handrail. Then they began to pull. The cable tightened, and Jake got surprised when Denise, who wasn’t much more than half his size, yanked him off his feet. He quickly discovered that hanging on to both the cord and the handrail was tricky. It didn’t help that he began to laugh. Finally, he released his hold on the rail and, as he was dragged through the air, lapsed into hysterics.

Odd things happen in zero gee.

Tony and Mary came in to see what the commotion was. “Don’t worry about it, Jake,” Tony said. “She does that to everybody.”

* * *

AT THE BEGINNING of his career, Jake had thought of the pleasures of starflight as being contained in the arrival at whatever far-flung destination, with its alien sunlight and its family of planets, with the vast oceans sometimes found on Goldilocks worlds, with rings and moons and comets, with the potential for other life-forms and always, especially, the possibility of a new civilization. That was what it had been about.

But he’d quickly discovered that there was an interior pleasure to be had as well, derived from sharing the experience with others driven by similar passions. Even to the extent of simply taking advantage of the sense of being together in a place so distant from the rest of humanity. It reminded him of how fortunate he was. And that he had no way to explain any of this to Alicia. He realized that he’d blundered. He should have found a way weeks ago to take her on a flight. When he got home, he’d do it. No way she could decline.

* * *

LIBRARY ENTRY

The more we study art, the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished erudition.

—Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1889