Jack Campbell - Leviathan

“Neither would the Kicks, and the enigmas only do it when they absolutely have to. But you would think something that humans had built like the dark ships would at least give us a little respect.” Charban paused, looking upward, his eyes distant. “Being left here at Varandal did have the benefit of giving me a lot of time to think, and since I didn’t want to spend my time worrying about what might be happening at Bhavan, I spent it thinking about the Dancers. Specifically, about that trip they took.”

“Going home, you mean?”

“No, before that. The trip the Dancers took to Durnan Star System. I didn’t want to talk to other people about this because I didn’t know how important it could be, and I didn’t know whether you would want to keep it as quiet as possible. Can I see your star display?”

“Sure.” Geary called it up, the stars floating in the air between them like jewels suspended in space.

Charban leaned toward the display and used one hand to adjust its scale and focus. “Here. Let’s see. Ah. Look.” Lines appeared, one branching out from Varandal, connecting some of the stars, then going back to Varandal. “This was the path the Dancers took, jumping from star to star.”

“They were going to Durnan Star System to look at those ruins of an ancient Dancer colony,” Geary said.

“Yes,” General Charban agreed, “but aside from the question of how an ancient Dancer colony got there when it did is the question of why the Dancers took the route they did.” He indicated the lines between stars again. “It wasn’t as straight a path as it could have been going out, and wasn’t straight at all coming back. Look how they looped around on their way back to Varandal.”

Geary studied the display, intrigued. “It’s almost like the fragmentary outline of a rough sphere, isn’t it? Why would the Dancers have taken such a roundabout path?”

“I’m assuming they must have wanted to send us some kind of message,” Charban said. “But what?”

“What message could they send with a rough spherical shape?” Geary asked. “Do the names of the star systems they visited spell out anything?”

“No,” Charban said. “I think forming a coded message in the names humanity gave those stars would be even too subtle and convoluted for the Dancers. But it did occur to me that perhaps the message was not in the sphere but in what it contained.”

“What it contained?” Geary looked again. The region of space inside the rough sphere defined by the path of the Dancers contained a few stars with little or no human presence and no particular reason to visit them. “There’s nothing there.”

“What about that?” Charban asked, pointing. “Our systems can’t tell me much about it.”

Geary looked closely. “You’re pointing at a close binary star. I’m not surprised there is little in our systems about it. It’s not really worth noticing.”

“Why not?” Charban asked. He leaned over the low table between them, his extended finger almost touching the image of the binary. “Do the systems on Dauntless know anything more about it than I could have found elsewhere?”

Geary shook his head, frowning in puzzlement at the question. “Probably not, but since Dauntless is the flagship, it’s possible we might have supplemental files. We know it’s a close binary star system, two stars orbiting each other. Let’s see if there have ever been long-distance observations of that star system.” He called up the data. “Yes. It has been viewed from other star systems. That’s not the most detailed way of surveying a star system, but it does pick up larger objects. That particular binary system contains six planets in eccentric orbits, most of them probably captures of wandering planets that got too close to one of the two stars. That’s all we know.”

“That’s what I learned before.” Charban nodded in agreement, but still looked confused as well. “Why is that all we know? No one has ever gone there? Why wouldn’t the Dancers jump there if they were interested in it?”

“You don’t know?” Geary eyed Charban in astonishment that gradually changed to comprehension. “You’re ground forces. Not a sailor.”

“Or a scientist. I was pondering the last message from the Dancers, you see,” Charban explained. “ ‘Watch the many stars.’ And I realized that there was an alternate meaning. It could have been meant to say ‘Watch the multiple stars.’”

“Multiple stars.” Like binaries and the occasional triple star system. “Why would we watch them?”

“Why don’t we ever go to them?” Charban asked again.

“Because we can’t. Not by using jump drives. Do you know how the jump drives work?”

“Vaguely. Something about thin spots in space that the drives can take ships through into somewhere else where the distances are much shorter.”

“Right,” Geary said. “I’m not a scientist, either, but the basics are that space-time isn’t rigid. It bends. The gravity of objects makes space-time bend or dimple, as if you put a heavy object on a flexible sheet. Big objects create big dimples. Stars are massive enough to bend and stretch space-time sufficiently to create thin spots in it. Those thin spots are jump points, places where our jump drives can push ships through into jump space and back through to get out of jump space at the next star. There’s nothing in jump space except that endless gray haze—”

“And the lights,” Charban added.

“And the lights,” Geary conceded. No one knew what the lights were. They came and went at no discernible intervals for no discernible reasons. Sailors tended to regard them with superstition, but given that their nature remained unexplained, perhaps superstition was too prejudicial a word. The lights could conceivably represent just about anything, or Anyone. “The distances in jump space are far smaller than in our universe, as if jump space is a small fraction of the size. It may be, but since we can’t see any distance in jump space, we don’t know if it has limits and how small or large those limits are. But on average it only takes a week or two to get from one star to an adjacent one using jump space, where it would take ten or twenty years at a minimum on average to make that same voyage in normal space using our best technology. The important thing in answer to your question is that the thin spots, the jump points, are stable around each star, so we can find them and know they will be there when we get where we are going and when we want to come back.”

“I see,” Charban said, nodding and frowning in thought. “What does that have to do with not going to binary stars? With two stars close together, shouldn’t they have lots of jump points?”

“Yes, and no.” Geary moved his hands around each other. “When two or more star masses are orbiting each other, the dimples in space-time they cause are constantly interacting. That makes jump points around them unstable. There might be one that vanishes suddenly, then another appears elsewhere. If you detect a jump point that leads to a binary star, it might vanish before you could even jump toward it. Worse, the jump point at a binary that you are heading toward might vanish before you get there, and if that happens you can’t come out of jump space.”

Charban shuddered. “Like the man the Dancers returned to Old Earth?”

“Like that, maybe, yes. The ship might eventually find another jump point and return to normal space, but you’ve been to jump space. You know humans don’t belong there and can’t manage more than a couple of weeks without developing serious problems.”

“Like that itchy, unnatural feeling that your skin no longer fits?” Charban asked. “Yes. The longest jump I was ever on was about two weeks, and I’m not sure I could have endured three weeks. I can understand why no one would want to risk being stuck there. That’s why we’ve never gone to that binary star?”