At first the Interrogator didn't speak, and Sarnac began to struggle to awareness of things other than the sickening headache, the oppressive gravity, and the air that was only marginally breathable in its thickness and foulness.
He noticed that his arms and legs were strapped to some kind of frame, extending not quite upright from the deck. Then he heard a low moan. He turned his head—at least
it
wasn't secured—and saw Tiraena stretched on another frame beside his.
"I see that you both have recovered consciousness," came the murmur of the Interrogator's translator pendant. "You need not look around for your three fellow inferior beings. They are in cryogenic suspension, where you will join them as soon as I have satisfied myself that you are, indeed, two of those I captured on the planet's surface."
You know damned well we are
, Sarnac thought. Humans were more individually variable than Korvaasha, and an intelligence specialist like this could surely have no trouble distinguishing one human from another. But he must go through the motions of seeming to have difficulty doing so, for inferior beings were beneath notice. It was a quintessentially Korvaash form of stupidity, and Sarnac was heartened by this evidence of weakness.
He swallowed to moisten his mouth. "Why cryogenic suspension?" he croaked. "Why not just kill us? Come to think of it, why did you bother to take our ship? You've already got the frigate down there"—he jerked his chin toward the screen monitoring the hold—"with all its technological goodies."
"You may still be useful sources of information when we reach the Realm. You will be frozen because we anticipate a long voyage and cannot spare the food to keep you alive." The Interrogator's silence about the frigate provided confirmation.
"How do you even expect to find the Realm? You don't even know where you are."
"But we do," the mechanical hum said remorselessly. "We have learned from your ship's log that we are approaching the capital system of the Solar Union. Its location is an interesting datum in itself. We knew your destination was the Solar Union because you departed via the displacement point through which you had entered the Lugh system." He must, Sarnac reflected, have added the name to his translator program's Standard English repertoire after learning it from their log. "As for how we will find our way home, our computer has inferred our realspace location from the positions of various identifiable giant stars. By comparing this sky with its records of the skies of our various worlds, it has pinpointed a system of the Realm, close enough to be reachable by continuous-displacement drive."
"But," Tiraena asked unsteadily, "how could you be sure that you'd be able to locate such a system when you started to follow us?"
"We could not. But it was our only hope of escaping from the Lugh system. The displacement point leading directly to the Realm was heavily guarded. Besides, returning home was only one of our objectives. The other was stopping you."
"Why?" Sarnac asked through the haze of pain in his head, even though he thought that he already knew the answer.
"When your ship departed toward the Solar Union, its objective was obvious: to make contact, and to reunite the two separate branches of your noxious species. Such an alliance, with Raehaniv technology, could . . . possibly cause the Realm serious inconvenience."
Sarnac looked him straight in the eye. "Yeah, that's one way to put it," he said softly. "But you haven't prevented it, you know. Another ship has departed for Raehan, carrying officers of the Solar Union. They'll try again to reach Sol, and they'll succeed. You can't stop it from happening." He was fully aware of his recklessness, but didn't care, for he knew that he was already dead—and had accepted it.
Being dead has its advantages
, he thought.
Liberating, somehow.
An instant passed before the Interrogator made a surprising reply. "You are correct," came the expressionless cybernetic vocalization. "The alliance is inevitable, but your voyage to Sol was clearly intended to expedite it. By stopping you, we have delayed it, giving the Realm more time to prepare by copying the Raehaniv technology we will bring back. More importantly, we will know about that technology's capabilities, and not be caught by surprise. Also, knowing that the alliance
is
an alliance, we can take measures to break it by offering a separate peace to one party or the other."
"That will never work with the Raehaniv," Tiraena said, her voice cold and hard. "We know from experience what the Korvaasha are."
"Then we will target the Solar Union. One of the defining characteristics of humans is their willingness to betray their own kind for the merest hope, however unrealistic, of personal gain."
All at once, Sarnac's headache worsened.
He may actually be right
, he thought sickly.
Probably not about the separate peace ploy—at least I don't
think
the Solar Union is that naive. And their copied technology will always be one step behind what we'll be able to field. But the unexpectedness of the continuous-displacement drive and the rest is an advantage we've been counting on. Without that element of surprise . . . oh, we'll still win. But how many more humans will die for that victory?
Another jag of pain spiked through his head.
It occurred to him that the Interrogator had been unusually talkative for a Korvaasha. Garrulous, in fact. Then insight came, and he spoke insouciantly.
"Yeah, very clever on your part. So clever that you needed to tell somebody about it. Somebody who could appreciate the cleverness . . . which means somebody besides the members of your own society, who've been overspecialized and cyberneticized into organic robots!" He shook his head slowly. "God, what a hell your life must be! You're probably one of the few genuine individuals you know, because there aren't many others whose jobs require the capability of original thought. And almost all of those must be either above or below you in the caste structure—they might as well be different species!"
"Bob, don't!"
He barely heard Tiraena's frantic whisper, for he was eyeing the Interrogator closely, and he thought he could detect the same signs of emotion that he had once before, on a beach on Danu. And to be even barely perceptible across the chasm of species and worlds, the emotion must be volcanic indeed. But the words from the voder were, of course, as flat and uninflected as ever.
"Enough. I demean myself by talking to inferior beings—an occupational hazard of my work." He turned and addressed a guard, though the translator continued to translate in default of a contrary command. "Take them to Cryogenics and commence the freezing procedure."
The guard pointed an instrument at them, and the clamps securing Sarnac flipped open. Massive hands like mechanical grapples seized both of his arms and hauled him to his feet. Tiraena was also upright, and they sought each other's eyes . . . when Sarnac was distracted by a sudden motion. The Interrogator swung around, incongruously swift for so large a being, to face a Korvaasha at a console.
The console operator's words—his neck-slits were rippling with obvious haste—were of course inaudible. But the voder continued to generate Standard English translations of the Interrogator's replies.
Must be easy for him to forget that the thing is on
, Sarnac reflected,
since he can't hear the sounds it emits.
It was like listening to one end of a phone conversation.
"What do you mean a 'gravitational anomaly, stationary with respect to Sol'? Explain. . . . Very well, order Piloting to secure from free fall and prepare to change course. . . . What? Yes, I am aware that a fusion drive cannot be activated instantly . . . Are you saying that we cannot avoid this thing? How long before we . . . ?"
The Interrogator must have remembered the translator was on, for he suddenly rounded on the guard. "Remove them!" But Sarnac didn't even hear him, for his universe had narrowed to what he was seeing in the viewport.
At first there was a tiny distortion, dead ahead, that made the bright yellow-white star that was Sol flicker and twinkle, rather than shine with the steady, diamond-hard luminescence that stars displayed in the vacuum of space. Then, as the
Gorgon
plunged on in free fall at a velocity built up through two planetary systems' worth of acceleration, it resolved itself into a torus-shaped distortion in the universe, growing at an ever-increasing rate. Then, faster than thought, almost too fast to register on Sarnac's retina, it rushed up, a hoop of insubstantial unreality flung by a playful god. And they were through it. . . .
Sarnac found himself sagging in the grip of the Korvaash guards, fighting a sensation of wrongness akin to that of a displacement transition, but far worse. It was as if his entire being knew that something truly unnatural had been done, some outrage performed upon the proper order of Creation.
He grew aware that Tiraena was also hanging limp, her expression as disoriented as he knew his own must be. But none of the Korvaasha seemed to be experiencing the sensation. The Interrogator gazed at the viewport, where the stars continued serenely in their accustomed array, and resumed his conversation with the console monitor.
"Good . . . no damage or casualties reported from any station. . . . What was that? Slight discrepancies in Astronomy's observations? Well, order . . ." He suddenly remembered the humans' presence and swung around to face the guard. "Why are they still here?"
The guard's reply was inaudible, but the gesture he made to his underlings transcended language. Sarnac and Tiraena were shoved toward a hatch, but before passing through it they heard one mechanical word from behind them: "Wait." Their captors brought them up short with brutal suddenness and spun them around to face the Interrogator.
"One moment. You appeared to experience some distress following our passage through the . . ." Sarnac wasn't sure whether it was the Korvaasha himself or his translator that seemed to be at a loss for words. "I am curious as to this, since the phenomenon, while admittedly unexplained, is manifestly harmless."
Even as Sarnac opened his mouth to reply, he knew something was bothering him about the scene before him.
Probably something childishly simple—what's wrong with this picture?
Then he knew . . . and his mouth remained open.
"Well," the Interrogator prompted.
At first, Sarnac could not reply—it was a thing so small, and yet so overwhelming. When he did speak, all he could manage was, "Look at the view-aft."
The Interrogator did, and so did Tiraena. And for a time beyond time, none of them moved. They could only stare at the center of the screen, where the bright bluish spark of Sirius had been. The star that had replaced it was even brighter. And it was red.
The Interrogator was the first to recover. He turned to the console operator, who had also been staring at the view-aft, and spoke—again forgetting that his translator was operative.
"Inform Astronomy that their instrumentation is at fault; the visual displayed is inaccurate. Have them go to backup systems. . . . They have? Very well, go to tertiary systems. . . ."
"Tiraena!" Sarnac's whisper was charged with urgency. "You remember the data on Sirius A? It's a fairly massive main-sequence star. According to Raehaniv understanding of stellar evolution, could it have gone into the red-giant phase in the last few minutes, while we were distracted by that . . . thing we passed through?"
"No. Impossible. The process is far less gradual than was once thought, even abrupt—but not
that
abrupt! And there's a lengthy buildup, with unmistakable warning signs, none of which Sirius A displayed. Bob, what's happening?"
"Happened," Sarnac corrected. "Whatever it is, it's already happened." He flashed a rueful smile. "I'm just quibbling, of course. The answer to your question is that I haven't a clue. If there hasn't been time for anything to happen to Sirius A . . ."
He stopped as the Interrogator turned to face them. The translator worked both ways. Their conversation had been comprehensible to him.
"Do you have some insight into the cause of the anomalous astronomical observations?"
Sarnac suppressed his natural impulse to play dumb. "No, I'm just speculating."
The Interrogator gestured to a guard, and Sarnac's left arm was jerked upward behind him with a strength that could splinter bone, but Sarnac managed not to cry out.
"We will hear your speculations," came the computer-generated ersatz speech.
"All right, all right! But I tell you, I don't know anything. The nearest thing I had to a theory has been blown away. That star back there is obviously a red giant, and eventually Sirius A will turn into one, and later, a white dwarf. But there hasn't been time. . . ."
He stopped, for the words "white dwarf" seemed to resonate just beneath the level of consciousness, as though there was a connection he should be making.
The Interrogator gestured again, Sarnac's arm was pulled up another notch, and in a blaze of pain the realization ignited in his brain.
Odd, the focusing effect pain can have
, some remote part of him thought dispassionately.
"Wait, wait," he gasped, and the pressure on his arm relaxed a trifle. "Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but . . . you remember that Sirius has a white-dwarf companion? Well, I just remembered reading—God knows where—that that companion must have collapsed into the white-dwarf stage in historical times. You see, our astronomers, as recently as the Classical era—that's two or three thousand of our years ago—described Sirius as a red star. So Sirius B must have been a red giant then, brighter than Sirius A. It must have evolved into a white dwarf during the Dark Ages that followed, when people weren't recording astronomical observations. We've always had trouble with the idea—it seemed like stellar evolution ought to take longer than that. But Tiraena's people have learned that the transitions between the stages of a star's life span go a lot more quickly than we've believed."
He was gasping for breath by the time he had finished, and he became aware that his arm had been released. The Interrogator gazed at him for a moment before speaking.