Transcendence

So his worry had to be arising from somewhere else. Something unusual that he had noticed, and lost when he was interrupted. Something…

Rebka finally gave up the struggle. Whatever was troubling him refused to show itself. Experience told him that it was more likely to return if he stopped thinking about it for a while, and now there were other things to worry about. The ship had turned again and was crawling along a path that to Rebka’s eyes led only to a white, glowing wall. He tensed as they came closer. They were heading straight for that barrier of light.

Should he override? If only human senses included a direct sensitivity to gravity waves…

He forced himself to trust the ship’s sensors. They reached the wall of light. There was a faint shiver through the seedship’s structure, as though an invisible tide had swept along it, and then they were through.

Right through. The i

Louis Nenda had been crowded into the rear of the seedship, deep in pheromonal conversation with Atvar H’sial. He squeezed quickly forward past the sixteen sprawled legs of J’merlia and Kallik, to stand crouched behind Rebka.

“Planet!”

Rebka shrugged. “We’ll know if there’s one in a few minutes.” Then he would release a tiny drone ship, designed to retrace their path from the Erebus and provide information of their arrival to the others waiting outside. Whatever happened, Julian Graves and Darya should be told that the singularities were navigable. Rebka ordered the onboard sensors to begin their scan of space around the orange-yellow sun, masking out the light of the star itself.

“I wasn’t askin’, I was tellin’.” Nenda jerked his thumb to the display that showed the region behind the ship. “You can see the damn thing, naked eye, outa’ the rear port.”

Rebka twisted in his seat. It was impossible — but it was true. The rear port showed the same blue-white world with its big companion moon that Darya Lang and Kallik had displayed, back on the Erebus. They were both in half-moon phase, no more than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Large landmasses were already visible. Rebka turned on the high-resolution sensors to provide a close-up view.

“Do you know the odds against this?” he asked. “We fly through the whole mess of singularities, we emerge at least a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from a star — and there’s a planet sitting right next to us, close enough to spit on.”

“I know a good bit about odds.” Nenda’s voice was an expressionless growl. “This just don’t happen.”

“You know what it means?”

“It means we found Genizee. An’ it means you oughta get us the hell out of here. Fast. I hate welcomes.”

Rebka was ahead of him. He had taken the controls of the seedship even before Louis Nenda spoke, to send them farther away from the planet. As the ship responded to Rebka’s command, high-resolution images of both planet and moon filled the screen.

“Habitable.” Nenda’s curiosity was competing with his uneasiness. He was flanked by Kallik and J’merlia. Only Atvar H’sial, unable to see any of the displays, remained at the rear of the ship. “Five-thousand-kilometer radius. Spectrometers say plenty of oxygen, classifiers say eighteen percent land cover, forty percent water, forty-two percent swamps, imagers say three main continents, four mountain ranges but nothin’ higher than a kilometer, no polar caps. Wet world, warm world, flat world, plenty of vegetation. Looks like it could be rich.” His acquisitive instincts were awakening. “Wonder what it’s like down there.”

Hans Rebka did not reply. For some reason his attention had been drawn not to the parent planet, but to the images of its captive moon. The view that Darya Lang and Kallik had provided on the Erebus was from a long distance, so that all he had seen then was a small round ball, gleaming like a matte sphere of pitted steel. Now that same ball filled the screen.

His mind flew back to focus on Darya’s accelerated-time display, with the moon whirling around and the planet steady against a fixed background. And he realized what had been puzzling him then, below his threshold of awareness: any two freely-moving bodies — binary stars, or planet and moon, or anything else — revolved around their common center of gravity. For so large a satellite as this, that center of gravity would lie well outside the planet. So both bodies should have been moving against the more distant background, unless the moon had negligible mass, which would have to mean—

He stared at the image filling the screen, and now he could see that the pits and nodules on its surface were regularly spaced, its curvature perfectly uniform.

“Artificial! And negligible mass. Must be hollow!” The words burst out of him, though he knew that they would be meaningless to the others.

No matter. Soon they would learn it for themselves. Part of the moon’s surface was begi

“What the hell’s going on here?” Nenda was pushing forward, grabbing at the controls.

Hans Rebka did not bother to stop him. It would make no difference. The ship’s drive was already at its maximum setting, and still they were going in the wrong direction. He stared out of the rear port. Instead of moving away from the moon and planet, they were being drawn toward it. And soon it was clear that this was more than a simple tractor beam, drawing them in to a rendezvous with the gleaming moon. Instead their trajectory was turning, under the combined force vector of the beam and the drive, taking them to a different direction in space.

Rebka looked and extrapolated, with the unconscious skill of a longtime pilot. There was no doubt about the result.

Wonder what it’s like down there, Louis Nenda had said. They were going to find out, and very soon. Like it or not, the seedship was heading for a rendezvous with Genizee. All they could do was sit tight and pray for the long shot of a soft landing.

Soft landing, or good-bye, life.

He thought of Darya Lang and felt sorrow. If he had known that this was coming, he would have said a decent farewell to her before he left the Erebus.

While Hans Rebka was remembering Darya and imagining their last good-bye, she was thinking of him and Louis Nenda in much less favorable terms.

They were self-centered, overbearing bastards, both of them. She had tried to tell them that she might be on the brink of a major discovery. And what had they done? Brushed her aside as though she were nothing, then at the first chance dashed off in search of Genizee — which she and Kallik had found for them — leaving her behind to fester on the Erebus and endure the babbling of E.C. Tally and the groveling of Dulcimer.

The Chism Polypheme was desperate to have another go at the power kernel. Julian Graves had ordered E.C. Tally not to release another radiation beam, so Darya was Dulcimer’s only hope. He pestered her constantly, ogling and smirking and offering her the unimaginable sexual delights that according to him only a mature Chism Polypheme could provide. If she would just crack open a kernel for him and let him soak in the beam for a few hours — a few minutes…

Darya retreated to the observation bubble and locked herself in. All she sought was solitude, but once that was achieved her old instincts took over. She went back to her interrupted study of the Anfract.

And once started, again she could not stop. With no Kallik to interrupt her work, she entered her own version of Dulcimer’s radiation high.

Call it research addiction.