Foreigner Read online

  Except that was a radiation hell out there, except the solar wind that blue-white sun threw out was a killing wind. This was not a star where flesh and blood could live, and if the miners did go out to work in that, they had to limit their time outside.

  Or if the ship was, as it might well be, infalling, on a massive star’s gravity slope … they’d meet that radiation close-up before they went down.

  “We’ve rerun the initiation sequence,” Greene said, from Taylor’s seat. “We don’t find any flaw in the commands.”

  Meaning Taylor had keyed in on what navigation had given him. A cold apprehension gnawed at McDonough’s stomach.

  “Any answer, Mr. McDonough?”

  “Not yet, sir.” He kept his voice calm. He didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t made a mistake. But he couldn’t prove it by anything they had from the instruments.

  A ship couldn’t come out of hyperspace aimed differently than it had on entry. It didn’t. It couldn’t.

  But if some hyperspace particle had screwed the redundant storage, if the computer had lost its destination point and POINT ERROR was the answer, they couldn’t run far enough on their fuel mass to be out of sight of stars they knew.

  Two stars, in any degree near each other, both with spectra matching the charts, were all they needed. Any two-star match against their charts could start to locate them, and they couldn’t be more than five lights off their second mass point, if they’d run out all the fuel they were carrying—couldn’t be. Not farther than twenty lights from Earth total at most.

  But there wasn’t a massive blue-white within twenty lights of the Sun, except Sirius, and this wasn’t Sirius. Spectra of those paired suns were a no-match. It wasn’t making sense. Nothing was.

  He started looking for pulsars. When you were out of short yardsticks you looked for the long ones, the ones that wouldn’t lie, and you started thinking about half-baked theories, like cosmic macrostructures, folded interfaces, or any straw of reason that might give a mind something to work on or suggest a direction they’d gone or offer a hint which of a hundred improbables was the truth.

  III

  Something’s wrong, was the word running the outer corridors from the minute that the station staff and construction workers had permission to move about. The rumor moved into the lounges, where staffers and pusher pilots and mechanics all stood shoulder to shoulder in front of video displays that said, on every damned channel, STAND BY.

  “Why don’t they tell us something?” someone asked, a breach of the peace. “They ought to tell us something.”

  Another tech said, “Why don’t we get the vid? We always got the vid before.”

  “We can go to hell,” a pusher pilot said. “We can all go to hell. They’re too good to bother.”

  “It’s probably all right,” somebody else said, and there was an uneasy silence—because it didn’t feel like the other times. That had been a hell of a jolt the ship had dealt when she braked, coming in, and the techs who knew anything about deep space were as long-faced and nervous as the Sol-space miners and construction jocks, who had no prior voyages at all to draw on.

  It wasn’t Probably All Right in Neill Cameron’s thinking, either—even a pusher mechanic like him could feel the difference between this system entry and the last. Friends and couples like himself and Miyume Little were generally just standing close and waiting. Miyume’s hand was cold and still. His was sweating.

  Possibly—he’d said it to Miyume—the techs up topside were working up some big show for their arrival in their new home.

  Maybe there was just a routine lot to do because they were shutting down and staying here—the crew might be figuring their insystem course or their local resources, and they’d get a take-hold call any time now, so that Phoenix could do course corrections. He’d heard that speculation offered by someone in the lounge. It was what he sincerely hoped.

  Or Phoenix was in some sort of trouble. That was implicit in all the questions … but it was much too soon to panic. The ship’s crew was up there doing their job and a one-sun spacer brat at least knew better than to borrow trouble or start rumors—either with hopeful lies or the speculations on the worst case that had to be in everybody’s thoughts, like infall, an entry too near the star itself.

  Foolish fear. Robots had been here and fixed T-230’s position with absolute certainty. Phoenix’ crew was an experienced, hand-picked lot—Phoenix herself had run trade for five years before they diverted her to the stations start-up at T-230, and the U.N. didn’t commit billions to any second-rate equipment or any crew that was going to drop a ship into a star.

  God, infall couldn’t be the trouble up there. That was too remote a chance.

  He could take pusher and miner-craft apart and put them together again. Most that went wrong with an insystem miner ship, a mechanic could fix with a good guess and a screwdriver; but what could go wrong with a stardrive—what could go amiss in the massive engines that generated effects into hyperspace—fell entirely outside his competency and his understanding.

  The STAND BY flasher suddenly went off. A star-view came on-screen and a collective breath of relief went up from the room, chilled by a murmur of consternation from a handful of techs, all standing together in the center of the room. Miyume’s hand tightened on his, his on hers, while the tech staff were saying things like, That’s not right and Where in hell are we?

  The white glare looked like a star to him. Maybe it did to Miyume. But techs were shaking their heads. And there was a red glow in the view he didn’t understand.

  “That’s not a G5,” one of them said. “It’s a damn binary.” And when ordinary worker-types started asking what he meant, the tech snapped, “We’re not where we’re supposed to be, you stupid ass!”

  What are they talking about? Neill asked himself. What they were hearing wasn’t making sense, and Miyume was looking scared. The techs were saying calm down and not to start rumors, but the tech who had claimed they were wrong shouted over the other voices,

  “We’re not at any damned G5!”

  “So where are we?” Miyume asked, the first words she’d said. She was asking him, or anyone, and Neill didn’t know how to answer that—he didn’t see how they could miss T-230 if they had gotten to any star at all … by what he knew, by the education he’d had, ships just kept going in the directions they were going, that was a basic law of physics … wasn’t it? You aimed and you built your field and you went, and if you had fuel enough you got there.

  And meanwhile his hardware-biased brain was thinking, Could we have overshot? How far off could we be, on the fuel we’ve got?

  “This is Capt. LaFarge …”

  That was the general address, and people shouted urgently for quiet.

  “… unfortunate circumstance,” was all that got through, that Neill could hear, and he was desperate to hear what the captain said. Miyume’s nails bit deeply into his hand, people were talking again, and Miyume shouted, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs, at the same time others did.

  “… positional problem,” was the next clear phrase. Then: “which does not pose the ship any imminent danger …”

  “That’s a blue-white star!” a tech shouted. “What’s he think it is?”

  Someone got the fool shut down. Others hushed the ones that wanted to ask questions.

  “… ask everyone to go about business as usual,” LaFarge was saying. “And assist the technical crew while we try to establish position. We’ll be looking into our resources in this system for refueling. We’re very well equipped for dealing with this situation. That’s all. Stand easy.”

  ‘Establish position’ sounded comforting. ‘Refueling’ sounded even more hopeful. ‘Well equipped for dealing with this,’ sounded as if the crew already had a plan. Neill clung to that part of it, while a frantic part of him was thinking: This can’t be happening to us, not to us. … Things can’t go wrong with this ship, there were too many precautions, everything taken care of …
r />   They’d been screened, their skills had been tested, they’d had to have recommendations atop recommendations even to come close to this job. They didn’t send foul-ups on a ship that carried Earth’s whole damned colonial program, and disasters didn’t happen to a mission as important as this one. People had planned too long. People had been too careful. Everything had been going so right.

  “Establish position,” a tech said. “I don’t like that ‘Establish position.’ Are we talking about infall?”

  “No,” a senior tech said. “We’re talking about where we are. Which is clearly not where we’re supposed to be.”

  “Refuel, hell,” another tech said. “That’s a radiation bath out there.”

  The pusher-craft aren’t shielded to work out there, Neill thought, with a sudden sick feeling, as the dynamics came clear to him. Jupiter was a radiation hazard. This thing … this double sun, with light that made the cameras flare and distort …

  The miner-pilots couldn’t survive it. Not for any long operation. The miners couldn’t deploy here, not without an inevitable cost, as the exposure tags went dark, and the hours of running time added up. Pusher-craft were shielded for the environment they had to deal with, and their designated environment had been a mild, friendly G5.

  He didn’t say that. Miyume looked scared. Probably he did. The numbers started adding up, that was what the pilots said when things started going wrong: the company might lie, and the captain the company hired might refuse you answers, but the numbers wouldn’t deceive you, no matter what.

  They added, and the result didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t change from what it was. Wishes didn’t count.

  IV

  McDonough’s shadow arrived, hovered over Taylor’s chair, saying there hadn’t been a mistake. Taylor processed that datum in the informational void. Things came painstakingly slowly or not at all. Other inputs in his surroundings were irrelevant. His mind refused distraction to trivia. But the navigator he paid close attention to … and tried to ask him, although one had to slow the brain down incredibly to frame a single complex sound:

  “What?”

  Babble, then, unauthorized people touching him and talking to him. Taylor tuned the voices out until McDonough’s voice came back, telling him in its infinite slowness that they were fueled up.

  That was something to process: they’d been at this star some months of realtime, then. Major datum.

  The navigator said next that Greene was sick, something about an accident, about miner-pilots and crews dead or dying of radiation, pilots training pilots to do their job once they were dead … something about the star they hoped to go to. The navigator had one for him, and they were fueled and going now, away from this hellish vicinity, this double monster that sang to him constantly in his slow-moving dark. For the first time in a recent, lonely eternity, new data came in.

  “Point,” Taylor managed to say, needing destination, and McDonough fed him coordinates that didn’t make sense off the baseline, or with where they had to be.

  “Wrong,” Taylor said. But McDonough said then that they’d taken a new zero point, at this star, that they’d spotted a possible mass point by optics and targeted a G5 beyond it.

  McDonough reeled off more numbers—Taylor grew drunk with them, the relief he felt was so great, but he didn’t process forward, he was still listening to McDonough with painful, slow attention. McDonough said the crew and the captain wanted him to know they were going to move. Said—McDonough wasn’t precise on the matter—they thought he might have some awareness of the ship’s motion.

  Hell, yes, he did. Things were moving faster and faster. There were actual data-points in sight, more than one at a time. Taylor said, laboriously, at McDonough’s speed, “Bridge. Now.”

  McDonough went away. The data stopped. Taylor waited. And waited. Sometimes it seemed to be years, and there was no sanity but to wait for that next point, that next, authorized contact.

  But McDonough’s voice came back, after a long, long time, saying the captain wanted him to sit as pilot on the bridge. Goldberg would back him up. Greene, McDonough reminded him, was sick. Inoki was dead. Three years ago. Earth time.

  Datum. He had to factor in Goldberg as backup. His mind wanted to race. He held it down. There would be numbers. At long last there would be data at speed, mission resumed.

  He sat down. He felt the chair around him. Somebody said—it was an authorized voice, Tanaka, he thought—that he didn’t need the drug. That his brain manufactured it on its own now.

  Interesting datum. It accounted for things. Goldberg talked, then, saying how they were clear to hell and gone from Earth and Sol, that they still didn’t know how they’d gotten there, but they’d gone through something they hoped wasn’t attached permanently to this star.

  Watch it, Goldberg said. Are you hearing me?

  “Yes,” Taylor said, with slow patience. But numbers had begun to proliferate.

  He saw the destination mass. He had it. He couldn’t lose it this time.

  Goldberg was with him. And the universe was talking to him again, at a rate he could understand. He skipped into the mass well and out again with a blithe disregard of gravity. He had a G5 in sight. Goldberg stopped talking to him, or had just gotten too slow to hear. He had the star and he reached for it, calm and sure now that those numbers were true.

  He brought his ship in.

  He shut down, system by system, in the light of a yellow sun.

  Then he knew he could sleep.

  I

  The foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream-bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the o’o’o’click of a small creature somewhere in the brush.

  There were more unfixed stars now, tiny specks of light in irregular motion about the first. Sometimes the very sharp-eyed could count them, two and three motes at a time, shining before dawn or before the dusk, in proximity to the foreign star.

  Their numbers changed. They combined and uncombined. Should one count the foreign star in their number or reckon only the attendant stars, and from what date? How could one reckon whether such activities were auspicious or not?

  Neither had the astronomers been able to say, when, a hundred and twenty-two years ago, the foreign star had first begun to grow in the heavens, a star so faint at first that only the strongest eyes could see it, so the story was—a star that rose and set with the moon, in its ancient dance with the sun.

  Then the astronomers had been embarrassed, because with their lenses and their orreries they still could not define that apparition as a moon or a star, since in appearance and behavior it was both, and they could not swear to its influence. Some thought it good, some thought it bad and, as many events as proponents could bring up on one side to prove it good, opponents could prove as many of bad issue. Only nand’ Jadishesi had been unequivocal, insisting, cleverly, that it portended change.

  But so, also and finally, most astronomers swore, while the star grew in magnitude year by year, and gathered companions to itself: continual instability.

  Now dared one call it fortunate?

  The tracks yonder, the marks of the machines, were, beyond dispute, real, and bore out the story of repeated excursions from the landing-site—even at dusk, even to the eyes of a city-dweller. The Tachi, who herded in these hills and knew them as well as a city-dweller knew his own street, said that the machines had fallen from the sky, suspended from flowers, and drifted down and down and down by this means until they landed.

  So was it indeed from the clouds that the visitations had come, and with those descending flowers, came machines that ran about the land ripping up trees and frightening Tachi children.

  Manadgi had doubted that origin in the clouds the
same way he doubted that autumn moon-shadow was curative of rheumatism. People nowadays knew that the earth circled the sun, that in the axial tilt they had their seasons confirmed. All such things they had come to understand in this age of reason, and understood them better once the astronomers of the aiji’s court had taken to the problem of the misbehaving star and commissioned better and better lenses.

  The moon, as all educated people knew now, was a sphere of planetary nature, traveling through the ether, the same as the earth—their smaller cousin, as it were, measuring its year by the earth as the earth measured its time by the sun.

  So the falling of machines out of the heavens was astounding, but not incredible. In considering this awesome track which no farmer’s cart had ever made in the clay, one could easily suppose people lived on the moon. One could imagine them falling down to earth on great white petals, or on canvas sails, which Manadgi hoped to witness for himself tomorrow, that being the full of the moon, the likeliest source of visitors.

  Or, for an alternative source of flower-sails, there was the unfixed star, the persistent oddness of which argued at least that it had something to do with this manifestation of machines, since it was a newcomer to the skies, and since it had been, in the last forty years, acquiring a plethora of what might be unfixed moonlets, mere sparks, yet.

  But again, Manadgi thought,—the sparks themselves might grow—or come nearer to the earth and deal with men.

  Perhaps moon-folk had drawn the foreign star to the position it presently occupied, sailing their created world across the winds of the ether, in the way that ocean-faring ships used the worldly winds.

  There had thus far seemed no correspondence between the appearance of the star or the stage of the moon phases when the flower-sails came down.

  But one could wonder about the Tachi’s records-keeping as well as their grasp of the situation, when, simple herders that they were, they insisted on flowers instead of ordinary canvas and, in the clear evidence of people falling from the clouds, had endured this event for a quarter of a year debating what to do—until now, now that the machines were well-established and ravaging the land as they pleased, the Tachi aiji demanded immediate and severe action from the aiji of the Mospheiran Association to halt this destruction of their western range and the frightening of their children.