Jack McDevitt: Infinity Beach

On the last night before arrival, they celebrated Kim’s thirty-sixth birthday. They broke out a few bottles and toasted her. Gil provided a cake, they put up ribbon, and enjoyed a celebration whose level of festivity, it seemed to her, far exceeded the significance of the event.

Kim was sitting with Ali in the pilot’s room when they made the jump back into realspace, into the Alnitak region. She heard the oooohs and aaaahs downstairs as everyone got a look at the view.

The captain’s manner throughout the flight had been detached, unemotional, under control. The sort of perspective you’d want in an emergency. She was consequently pleased to see him catch his breath when the great illuminated star-clouds appeared in the windows. He turned the lamp down and got up from his chair.

“It’s why the Hunter stopped here, Ali.”

“The hand of the Almighty,” he said. “Still at work.” Kim had grown familiar with the instruments on the Hammersmith , and she’d made it her business to acquaint herself with those of the Mac . Especially with the long-range sensors, which were set to sound off at the first indication of an object moving contrary to orbital requirements. Her eyes went to them now, looking for telltales but finding none. Ali stood for several minutes in the crystalline light, and then directed the AI to adjust course for the gas giant. He turned toward Kim. “Good luck,” he said.

“I hope so.”

She summoned the team to the mission center, where they briefly reviewed the plan. Matt asked whether there’d been an incoming transmission yet.

Yet. Now that they were here it did seem inevitable. “No,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything.”

They began broadcasting a visual program. It consisted of a portion of the numerical interchange between the Hunter and the Valiant , and the recorded Mona Vasquez, in her most inviting manner: “ Hello. We are happy to have the opportunity to greet you and to say hello. ”

They’d deliberately repeated the “hello” in an effort to imply its use. “It would be,” Maurie said in his somewhat pretentious manner, “an appropriate beginning.”

“ We hope, ” Mona continued, “ to establish a long and fruitful collaboration for both of us. We look forward to exchanging ideas and information with you at the earliest opportunity. ”

Mona added that she and her friends were a long way from home, and that they had made the voyage specifically in the desire to meet the entities who had been seen in the area of Alnitak a long time ago. She emphasized the star’s name. Its spelling and its picture appeared beside her.

She got some mocking applause when the broadcast finished. There was a sixty-second delay and it started again.

No one expected an immediate response, but Kim remained hopeful at the beginning. Although after the first few hours, when it became apparent that contact would not come quickly, she grumbled inwardly, fought off discouragement, and went to lunch.

The team members drifted idly through the ship, anxiously awaiting whatever might happen. Most congregated around windows, and Kim found Mona in one such location holding forth to Terri and Maurie.

“What happens here,” she was saying, “is that you get a better sense of the sky’s depth . It’s not like Greenway or Earth, where all you see at night are stars and moons, and it could all be just a shell with holes poked in it. Here you look out and you see those clouds and you know they go on forever. It would have to have a radically different impact on a developing civilization.”

“If there were one,” said Maurie.

“That’s right,” said Terri. “And there isn’t. You wouldn’t get any local lifeforms out here. Too much UV.”

“It wouldn’t have to be orbiting Alnitak,” said Mona. “It could be parked up there anywhere. Just give it a little distance, and it loses the radiation and keeps the view.”

They were seated in a circle. Kim sank into a chair.

“I wonder,” Maurie said, “what kinds of societies would have developed if Earth had had skies like this?”

“Religious fanatics,” said Kim.

Terri chuckled. “They got that anyhow.”

Mona shook her head. “I’m not sure you’d get religious zealotry under these kinds of conditions. I think it would be easier to see the mechanical aspects of the environment, which aren’t so obvious at home.”

“ Kim. ” Ali’s voice, from the pilot’s room. “ Message for you. ”

“On my way,” she said.

When she got there, the heading was onscreen:

TO: GR 717 Karen McCollum

FROM: SOA

SUBJECT: Artifact Personal for Dr. Brandywine

SOA was the Secretariat for Off-World Affairs. “Run the text, Ali.”

“You can read it in your quarters if you like, Kim.” He looked worried. “Is this their reaction to your dealings with Woodbridge?”

“Probably.” She smiled. “It’s too late for them to do much now. Run it.”

Dr. Brandywine:

If you have the object with you, be aware that failure to deliver it immediately into official hands will result in prosecution. No further warning will be sent. Talbott Edward

Edward was Woodbridge’s boss. The man who’d given her the Brays Stilwell Award.

“How does he expect us to do that ?” asked Ali. “He knows where we are.”

“C.Y.A.”

“I’m not so sure.” His dark eyes were hidden in the half light.

“What else?”

“I think we’ll be having company.” He swung around to face her. “Do you really intend to give the microship back to its owners? Its original owners?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Easy. Once we find them.”

“Tell me how.”

“Just lean out the door and hand it to them.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? These are the same creatures who tried to kill you in the Severin Valley.”

“I think that was an anomaly. I think the thing that got stranded became deranged.”

“I hope they’re not all deranged.”

“They have to be rational, Ali. Or they wouldn’t be out here.”

She heard a sound deep in his throat. “Maybe,” he said. “But that sounds like an epitaph to me.”

They settled into a routine during the first few days, working on individual projects, watching the sensor screens. Maurie and Terri never tired of standing by the windows and looking out at the view. To Kim it seemed as if the emptiness looked back. Gradually the assumptions that had held sway throughout the flight—that contact was virtually inevitable, that the celestials would be waiting anxiously for the appearance of another giant ship—came to seem first unduly optimistic, then doubtful, and finally hopelessly naive. They began to speculate that the opportunity had been lost. Fumbled away by the clumsiness of the first expedition. Kim even overheard some comments that suggested she and Solly might have done better if they’d thought things out a bit.

The current situation, the silence that roared at them from the empty sky, was perceived as somehow her fault. If she had gone to them in January with what she knew instead of coming out here alone, they might have salvaged everything.