The Sails of Tau Ceti (30 page)

“I’ll have to ask Faslorn.”

“Of course.”

“Anything else?”

“There are a few more points we should discuss…”

#

Tory returned to the penthouse shortly after midnight. She had expected Ben to invite her to his place to spend the night. He had surprised her by acting the gentleman. Only when they shared a goodnight kiss had even a shadow of the old ardor returned. She found Faslorn waiting for her as she let herself into the living quarters.

“Just like the old days,” she said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“My father used to wait up for me when I returned late from a date. I think he did it to intimidate the boys.”

Faslorn laughed. He had the best laugh of any of the Phelan. “Despite all of my years of study, I have to admit that human sexual mores are still a mystery to me.”

“They are still a mystery to most humans.”

“What did Tallen want?”

She recounted her discussion with Ben concerning the vote and the establishment of the Phelan colony afterward.”

Faslorn ‘frowned.’ “Who do you suppose he was representing in this overture?”

“Praesert Sadibayan, possibly First Minister Hoffenzoller.”

“Why do you suppose they asked for this back channel discussion? Why not discuss all these things at the meeting this morning?”

“Maybe they thought they could learn more if I were alone with Ben in a social setting. He plied me with wine all evening. Maybe he was trying to get me drunk.”

“Did he?”

“No, worse luck! That is what I hate most about this job. I don’t dare let myself get out of control.”

“It will only be a few more months. After that,
Far Horizons
will be safe and we can begin building our colony.” His words were for the benefit of anyone who might be eavesdropping. The truth was that they had another six years of hard work to prepare for the arrival of the Third Fleet. “Did he say anything else?”

“He wanted to know why we picked the colony sites we did. I explained our concern about getting your people acclimated before they mixed with large numbers of humans.” (This too was for the benefit of unseen listeners.)

“Did the two of you patch up your quarrel?”

She smiled. “A little, I suppose.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

“He asked me out next week. I have not decided whether I will go, or not. Depends on my schedule.”

“I think you should,” the Phelan replied. “It will be good for you to spend more time with your own kind.”

“Oh?”

“I think you’ve been working too hard.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Perhaps you can show Maratel something of Earth. She’s expressed a desire to meet people in a purely social setting.”

“I’ll have the embassy travel desk arrange something.”

Later in her apartment, she found that she had difficulty drifting off to sleep. She kept thinking about Ben. Was it possible to rekindle an old flame? She was still asking herself the question as she drifted off into a fitful sleep.

CHAPTER 23

The arch of the solar prominence reached out toward the tiny black dot of the Phelan light sail like the tentacle of some glowing monster. The scene was a striking one, emphasizing how small the planet-size light sail was when silhouetted against the most diminutive of stellar features. It was one of those defining images that stick in the public consciousness for decades, and no less impressive for being an illusion.

In truth,
Far Horizons
was still some three million kilometers from Sol, and would not reach perihelion for another three hours. As for the “tentacle,” it was a fountain of charged particles that had erupted from somewhere behind the sun’s limb, which was being wrenched into the arch shape by the solar magnetic field. The starship would not pass within a million kilometers of the glowing arch. Only the fact that both were in the same line of sight made them appear on a collision course.

The scene originated in Earth’s largest solar telescope perched high in the Andes Mountains at the Cerro Tololo Observatory. To make the corona visible, the astronomers had electronically blanked out the sun’s disk, transforming it into a dark hole encircled by a ghostly halo. The halo was the sun’s corona, normally visible only during a total solar eclipse.

Despite being three million kilometers out, those aboard the starship were already feeling their coming encounter with the sun. The light sail was now a giant parachute stretched taut by the thick soup of gasses through which it flew. The gasses would grow steadily thicker. Just before
Far Horizons
reached its closest point of approach, the ship’s deceleration rate would peak at over three gravities. That is, if nothing went wrong.

If the sail were to rip or any significant number of shroud lines parted under the stress, the alien craft would be hardly slowed at all. It would continue around the sun in a hyperbolic orbit and head back into the infinite black with no way to return.

The opposite would occur if
Far Horizons
passed too close to the sun. If it did not burn up from a combination of solar and frictional heating, it would climb back into space in a high lob, then plummet back into the Great Hydrogen Bomb in the Sky.

Tory, Faslorn, and Maratel were acutely aware of the things that could go wrong as they sat in front of the entertainment holoscreen in their penthouse living quarters. As the three watched, the view expanded until the tiny black dot became a small circle. A moment later, a brilliant violet spark appeared next to the light sail.

“We have acquisition of signal,” the narrator, one of Earth’s most popular actors, announced. Tory had worked long and hard to obtain his services for this telecast. “Stand by for pictures from inboard the Phelan starship!”

The laser that had once swept the interstellar medium to harvest ions now carried information on its modulated beam. The view from Cerro Tololo faded from the screen, to be replaced by a blinding white light. It took a moment for Tory to recognize
Far Horizons
’s anchor sphere with its thousands of converging shroud lines. The sphere was ablaze with light. Behind it, the light sail was a sheet of fire that blanked out the sky with a distorted reflection of the sun. The scene was straight out of
Dante’s Inferno
.

The view changed again. When Tory’s eyes readjusted to the dimmer scene, she recognized the panorama of
Far Horizons
’ habitat volume. The camera mounted high up in the forward end cap looked straight aft along the lighted sun tube. She had a moment of disorientation as she realized that Spiral Falls was gone. So too were the farms, villages, forests, lakes, and streams that had graced the outer walls of the great cylinder. What had once been a patchwork of greens, yellows, and blues, was now a monotonous gray, broken only by a new forest of beams, columns, and braces.

For most of the past year,
Far Horizons
’s crew had been preparing for the coming encounter with the sun. The transformation of the habitat volume was merely the most obvious of their preparations. For more than two centuries, spin gravity had been the major force aboard the starship. “Out” had always been “down” and the spin axis the zenith. Even the light sail’s deployment had meant little to the starship’s inhabitants. The deceleration that came from plowing the interstellar medium had produced too small a force to notice.

That was about to change. Soon the “floor” of the habitat volume would become its “walls,” and the solid ground underfoot would turn into a sheer cliff. Three gravities along the spin axis would cause the volume’s loose contents — plants, animals, Phelan, water, soil, and houses — to slide forward until they lodged against the forward end cap. To prevent this,
Far Horizons
’s crew had dismantled the small artificial world of the habitat volume. Villages were taken down and packed into storerooms, crops harvested and seeds collected, the great waterfalls turned off and all free water pumped into tanks. Even the soil that covered the decks had been scraped up, and replaced with beams and braces to stiffen the starship’s spine.

The narrator droned on, describing the scene for the billions watching. Then the screen changed again, this time to a compartment where thousands of Phelan lay strapped down in regimented rows. Already the temperature in most of the ship was near the boiling point of water. Soon, the outer decks would begin to glow from the heat. Only in a few hundred shielded and refrigerated sanctuaries were conditions suitable for living things. It was in these that
Far Horizons
’s thousands waited their fate with a stoicism few human crowds could have managed.

“It looks as though they’ve prepared well enough,” Tory said, more to relieve the tension than to inform her two companions of anything they did not already know.

She got no response. Both Phelan were totally absorbed in the holo scenes. Their expressions were alien; reminding Tory of the day they had revealed their terrible secret to her. She had gained some facility at reading Phelan body language since then, and knew that Faslorn and Maratel were as frightened as she had ever seen them.

Logically, they had little reason to fear. After all, any craft capable of surviving inside the heart of a nova should be able to dip close to Sol without difficulty. However, those who had ridden the ship outward from their exploding star were long dead. Faslorn’s generation had no experience with stars, except as distant points of cold light. To see one close up was more daunting than anyone born on a planet could possibly imagine.

On impulse, Tory reached out and laid a comforting hand on Faslorn’s shoulder. Black eyes turned to lock with green.

“Take heart. It will all be over in another six hours.”

“That is what worries me,” he said. He reached up to pat her arm, showing that her attempt at comfort was appreciated.

On the screen,
Far Horizons
continued its long fall toward the sun that would soon capture it.

#

Two hours, 27 minutes later, the violet spark of the comm laser winked out as
Far Horizons
slipped from view behind the sun. Though Mars was on that side just then, there was no solarscope or other equipment on the red planet able to read the laser. Indeed, not even Cerro Tololo could pick the comm laser out against the backdrop of the sun’s disk. There would be no communication with the starship until it reappeared above the eastern limb of the sun 124 minutes hence. Only then would they learn its fate.

Maratel shivered in the Phelan gesture that equates to a human sigh. “Now we wait. How long to perihelion?”

“Sixteen minutes,” Tory replied.

“We should have arranged some method for maintaining contact throughout the encounter.”

“We’ve been over this argument a hundred times,” Faslorn said, his voice empty of human inflection. “There just wasn’t time to build the necessary equipment, nor to get it into position. We will just have to wait.”

“It will be hard,” Maratel murmured. She, too, made no effort to maintain her human personality. “Someone should make an appearance in the pressroom.”

“I’ll go,” Tory said.

“Perhaps I should,” Faslorn replied.

“You have too much on your mind. Let me.”

“Very well.”

The pressroom was equipped with a large holoscreen, two dozen folding chairs, and a coffeepot kept full always. Those assigned to the embassy during the close encounter were not media stars, but working journalists. Mostly they watched the same video as everyone else. Their assignment involved background stories for the afternoon faxes with which their services would fill out the major news of the encounter. The only holo reporter present hovered near a pocket size stereo camera that looked like a pair of binoculars mounted on a spindly tripod.

Only about one-quarter of the chairs were occupied as Tory stepped into the room. Four news people clustered around the refreshment table. There was a sudden reaching for recorders as she entered the converted conference room and moved to stand behind the lectern flanked by terrestrial and Phelan flags. (The Phelan flag had been designed by a public relations firm.)

Tory scanned the faces of the assembled reporters as she waited for the rattling of chairs to die away. “I have a brief statement to make before taking your questions.

“‘At 11:20 hours, 27 June 2245, Standard Calendar, the Phelan starship
Far Horizons
passed behind the sun. Ambassador Faslorn has asked me to pass on his overall satisfaction with the way things are going. He requests all people of good will to pray for the safety of the starship and those who sail aboard her. The ship is now approaching perihelion and maximum dynamic stress on the light sail and its shroud lines. Analysis indicates that the sail has sufficient strength to withstand the stresses, but the degree of turbulence during the encounter is unknown. If all goes well, ship and light sail will reappear at 13:23 hours.’“ Tory looked up from her notes and said, “I will now take your questions.”

“How are the Phelan ambassadors taking this?” a reporter in the third row asked.

“How would you take it if your family, neighbors, and everyone you ever knew was in imminent danger of being broiled alive?”

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

“Sorry. Faslorn and Maratel are naturally anxious about the fate of their shipmates.”

“What about the other two?”

“They are traveling, so I can’t tell you their moods from personal observation. However, I imagine they are equally anxious about the safety of their people.”

Another reporter held up his hand. “Tad Matthews, Interplanetary Newsfax. How long after the ship reappears will you know whether this worked?”

“Immediately. The very fact that it reappears when we predict will tell us the capture maneuver has been successful. If the ship slows too little while behind the sun, it will reappear early; if it slows too much, then it will reappear late.”

Another hand went up, this time from a reporter Tory had met at a few embassy parties. “Yes, Joy-Anne?”