Charles Sheffield: Summertide

Instead of replying, Pereira went to the window and beckoned Darya Lang to her side. She pointed into the slowly darkening sky. The Sentinel gleamed close to the horizon, a shining and striated sphere two hundred million kilometers away and a million kilometers across.

“Suppose I told you that I knew a way to break in through the Sentinel’s protective shield and to explore the Pyramid at the center. Would you go with me?”

“Of course. I’ve studied the Sentinel since I was a child. If I’m right, the Pyramid could contain a library for the Builder sciences — maybe their history, too. But no one knows how to break the shield. We have been trying for a thousand years.”

“But suppose we could crack it.”

“Then I would want to go.”

“And suppose it involved danger and discomfort?”

“I would still want to go.”

The legate nodded and sat in silence for a few seconds as the darkness deepened. “Very well,” she said at last. “Professor Lang, you are said to be a logical person, and I like to think that I am, too. If you are willing to run the risks of the Sentinel’s shield, and those are unknown risks, then you have a right to endure the lesser risks of Quake. As for travel to the Dobelle system, we humans built the Bose Drive, and we understand exactly how it works. We know how to employ the Bose Network. The experience is frightening at first, but the danger is small. And perhaps if you can use that Network to explore the statistical anomaly that you alone discovered, it will finally provide the tool you need to crack the secret of the Sentinel. I cannot deny that chain of logic. You have the right to make the journey. I will approve your travel request.”

“Thank you, Legate Pereira.” With the victory, Darya felt a chill that was not caused by the night air. She was passing from pleasant theory to commitment.

“But there is one other thing,” Pereira’s voice sharpened. “I trust that you have not told anyone outside the Alliance about your discovery of the anomaly?”

“No. Not a person. I sent it only through regular reporting channels. There is no one else here who would care to hear about it, and I wanted—”

“Good. Be sure you keep it that way. For your information, the anomaly is now to be treated as an official secret of the Fourth Alliance.”

“Secret! But anyone could perform the same analysis that I did. Why…” Lang subsided. If she said that anyone could do the work, she might lose her claim to the anomaly — and the trip to Quake.

The legate stared at her soberly and finally nodded. “Remember, you are about to embark on a journey of more than seven hundred light-years, beyond the borders of the Alliance. In some ways I envy you. It is a journey more than I have ever made. I have nothing more to say, except to give you my good wishes for a safe trip and a successful mission.”

Darya could hardly believe that she had won, after weeks of red tape and dithering from the authorities of the Fourth Alliance. And the perils of the Bose Drive had indeed faded, once she was on her way and made her initial step through the Network. The first Transistion was disconcerting, not for the feelings that it introduced but for their absence . The Transition was instantaneous and imperceptible, and that did not seem right. The human brain required some notice that it and the ship that carried it had been transported across a hundred light-years or more. Perhaps a slight shock, Darya thought; a little nausea, maybe, or some feeling of disorientation.

Then at the second and third Transitions that concern vanished, just as Legate Pereira had promised. Darya could take the mysteries of the Bose Drive for granted.

But what did not decrease was her own feeling of inadequacy. She was a bad liar; she always had been. The Dobelle system contained just one structure that dated back to the Builders: the Umbilical. And that was a minor artifact, one whose operations were self-evident even if the controls that governed it remained mysterious. She would never have made so long a journey merely to look at the Umbilical. No one would. And yet that was the Alliance’s official rationale for her visit.

Someone was going to ask her why she had done so odd a thing; she just knew it. And nothing in half a lifetime of research work had taught her how to fake things. Her face would give her away.

The sight of Dobelle eased her uneasiness a little. In a universe that she saw as populated by the miracles of the Builders, here was a natural wonder to rival them. Forty or fifty million years earlier the planetary doublet of Quake and Opal had orbited the star Mandel in a near-circular path. That orbit had been stable for billions of years, resisting the gravitational tugs of Mandel’s small and remote binary-system partner, Amaranth, and of its two great gas-giant planets, moving in their eccentric orbits five and seven hundred million kilometers farther out. The environment had been tranquil on both members of the Dobelle planetary pair, until a close encounter of the two gas-giants had thrown one of them into a grazing swing-by of Mandel. That unnamed stranger had emerged from its sun-skimming trajectory with a modified path that took it clear out of the stellar system and into the void.

That would have been the end of the story — except that Dobelle lay in the stranger’s exit route. The gas-giant had done a complex dance about the doublet planet, moving Quake and Opal closer together while changing their combined orbit to one with a periastron that skimmed much closer to Mandel. Then the stranger had vanished into history. Only Dobelle and the gas-giant called Gargantua remained, their still-changing orbital elements allowing an accurate reconstruction of past events.

Summertide, Dobelle’s time of closest approach to Mandel, was just a couple of weeks away. It would be a time, if Darya Lang’s analysis was correct, of great significance in the spiral arm. And also in her own life. Her theories would at last be proved true.

Or false.

She went to the port and watched as the ship approached Dobelle. Opal and Quake whirled dizzily around each other in a mad dance, spinning three full turns in a standard day. She could actually see their motion. However, speed was all relative. The ship’s rendezvous with the landing field on Opal’s Starside sounded difficult, but it was a trivial problem for the navigation computers that would make the rendezvous.

The problems would come not from there, but from the humans who wanted to greet her. The tone of the message permitting her entry to Opal sounded ominous. “Provide the full identification of your sponsor. State in full the proposed length of stay. Give details of expected findings. Explain why the time of your requested visit is critical. Say just why you wish to visit Quake. Provide credit information or nonrefundable advance payment. Signed, Maxwell Perry, Commander.”

Were the immigration officials on Opal so hostile to every offworld visitor? Or was her paranoia not paranoia at all, but a well-merited uneasiness?

She was still standing by the port as the ship began its final approach. They were coming in from the direction of Mandel, and she had a fine sunlit view of the doublet. She knew that Opal was only slightly larger than Quake — 5,600 kilometers mean radius, compared with Quake’s 5,100 — but the human eye insisted otherwise. The cloud-covered iridescent ball of Opal, slightly egg-shaped and with its long axis pointing always to its sister world, loomed large. The darker, smaller ovoid of Quake brooded next to it, a smooth-polished heliotrope against the brighter gemstone of its partner. Opal was featureless, but the surface of Quake was full of texture, stippled with patches of deep purple and darkest green. She tried to make out the thread of the Umbilical, but from that distance it was invisible.