Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

The technicians took Tanuojin off to a long bench against the circular wall. A light switched on above it. He swore at what he saw. Paula went over to his side. The technicians backed away, letting her through. The bench had a light in it, and a screen for viewing: a strip of colors was running across it. The colors ran the brilliant clear range of the spectrum. The technicians pointed to different areas and talked about calcium and hydrogen and compounds of oxygen.

She leaned on the bench, her eyes on the stream of colors, the clear deep violet and snapping yellow, pictures of worlds light years away. She glanced around the spacious, circular room. A man in a long coat came in a far door and sat down at a desk on the opposite wall. Her face was stiff with cold but the pressure suit kept her body warm. She looked up through the ceiling into the stars.

“Very good,” Tanuojin said. “Good, good, good.”

The technicians, all but one, wore white coats; the one wore a green coat, and he turned to the others and dismissed them in an important voice. Bending over the spectra, he pointed to a mass of yellow. “Akellar, let me point out the sodium lines here.” His claws were clipped short. Probably they got in his way. On the wall above the bench compasses hung, in several sizes, clear plastic shapes to measure with, clippers with toothed edges. She still had her gloves in her hand and she stuffed them under the strap on her shoulder.

“Those are rho lines,” Tanuojin said.

The film stopped moving with a sharp double click. “Some malfunction in the pulse source,” the technician said. “We noticed them right away, of course—I thought they’d been removed.” He stooped and pulled down the underside of the bench, which swung outward on curved hinged arms. The film ran along it on sprockets. “The probe fixed itself—the interference is just in this series.” He shouted over his shoulder and another man came quickly toward them. Paula moved out of the way. Brimming with apologies, they brought in another piece of film and replaced the first.

“The computer reconstructed the series awfully well.” The technician pushed the film train back into the bench.

“What’s a rho line?” Paula asked.

Tanuojin’s head turned. He spread the discarded piece of film out on the bench to one side of the screen. Without the lights behind it the film looked dull. He pointed to a band of yellow. “These spectra show which elements make up the Planet—each of the elements absorbed a characteristic wavelength of the light. These—” his claw tapped a broader gray space, “that’s a rho line. Radio interference in the transmission.” He went back to the corrected film. “Have any of the photographs come in?” he asked the technician.

“Not yet.”

“What are these?” Paula asked. A row of dots ran along the edge of the film under the spectrum.

He was bent over the bright rolling film; he did not take his eyes from it. “Pulses. Rate of emission.” He and the technician talked about ferric salts. She looked down at the strip of defective film beside her hand. Those stripes of color bounded her experience. Lalande’s light fell mostly in the infra red; people there would see a world invisible to her. Perhaps inaccessible to her. The Styth astronomer was writing down a formula on a pad of paper, explaining something to Tanuojin. Tanuojin nodded. His interest in this impressed her. He was curious about everything. Her gaze fell again to the ribbons of color on the bench by her hand. The rho lines made thick breaks in the loom of colors. She counted the pulses between them.

“It’s a message,” she said.

The two men swiveled their heads toward her. “What?”

“The spaces between these rho lines,” she said. “Four, nine, forty-one, thirty-six. The number of pulses between them.” She struggled to keep her voice even; she was filled with excitement. “They’re perfect squares, see?”

“Forty-one?” the technician said. He glanced at Tanuojin. “Is she crazy?”

He shook his head. “Sixteen plus twenty-five.” Pushing her away, he stooped over the film and counted dots.

The technician said, surly, “It’s a dysfunction in the transmitting laser.” He scowled down at Paula, a round-faced, smooth-skinned man, who never fought. “What does she know about spectroscopy?”

“Nothing,” Tanuojin said. “That way she doesn’t get confused by facts.” He rolled up the film and shoved it in under the edge of the bench. “You ought to write illusion serials,” he said to her. “You have a full-round imagination.” He went back to the rolling color band.

Paula retrieved the film and spread it out again. He did not want to believe it, but she did. She counted the pulses between the nine rho lines in the spectra: 4, 9, 41, 36, 13, 16, 25, 36. So there were two rho lines missing, mistakes in the mistake. She looked up through the ceiling at the stars, wondering which was Lalande.

“Akellar, I hate to keep mentioning this, but nobody else in the Chamber takes our work seriously—”

“You need money,” Tanuojin said. They crossed the complex of buildings toward the landing field. David went ahead of them and opened the hatch into Ybicket , standing on her tail.

“We’ve had to give up some very important work because we just haven’t got the equipment.”

“I’ll talk to the Prima.”

Paula stood beside the slender ship, put her hands on the lower edge of the hatch, and hoisted herself up to the opening. In the light gravity it was easy. David helped her across the narrow aisle, now vertical, between the hatch and the middle seat. Inside her helmet she could still hear the technician’s pitch. Tanuojin filled the hatchway, blocking out the faint sunlight.

“I’ll fly back,” he said to David. “You take the kick-seat.”

David wheeled around in the drive seat ahead of her. “But—”

“Do as you’re told.”

“But—Uncle—I can’t navigate in the Planet.”

“Then this is a good time for you to learn.” Tanuojin climbed into the seat with him, and David tumbled out, giving way.

“Paula—”

“Leave me out of it,” she said. She leaned forward and groped for the lifeline to attach it to her suit. David climbed down past her to the kick-seat.

When they got back to the House, Saba was sitting in her favorite chair in the front room of the Prima Suite, writing on a workboard. Paula took her coat off. “How was the Akopra?”

“Terrible.”

David came in, still warm under the friction of Tanuojin’s pedagogical sarcasms, and Tanuojin after him. Saba put the workboard down. “What did you find out?”

“The films are perfect.” Tanuojin unslung his coat. “All twenty-six of them came through, the probe worked perfectly.”

“I’ll see them when the laboratory sends them down. Have they gotten any photographs yet?”

Tanuojin shook his head. He picked up the workboard from the floor and wound back the surface to read what Saba had written. “I told them not to send the stuff down here piecemeal, to wait until everything is together. They need more money.”

“They always need more money.”

Paula stood watching them together. She saw what she should have noticed long before. Saba was gray-headed, but Tanuojin’s hair was still jet black. He looked no older than he had when she first met him, at the Nineveh, sixteen years before. He was not aging.

“Tell him about your little pink men,” Tanuojin said to her. He threw down the workboard. “Wait until you hear this,” he told Saba. “You’ll like this one.”

Melly turned and turned at the far end of the room, dancing. She held out her skirts in her hands, her head to one side. Paula stood in the doorway watching the girl play. Abruptly the Styth girl saw her and stopped.