Nemesis (28 page)

“By which time, of course, it will be too late.”

“No. Not necessarily. You mustn’t look upon the Plague as an all-or-nothing matter. There have been light cases, even very light cases, and people who are lightly affected can live reasonably normal lives. Nothing will happen to her. I’m sure of it.”

Insigna sat in her chair, silent, seeming somehow small and defenseless.

Genarr impulsively placed his arm around her. “Come, Eugenia, forget this for a week. I promise she’ll not go out for at least a week—longer than that if I can weaken her resolve by showing her Erythro from the air. And during the flight she will be enclosed in the aircraft and will be as safe there as she is here. As for right now, I’ll tell you what—you’re an astronomer, aren’t you?”

She looked at him and said, wanly, “You know I am.”

“Then that means that you never look at the stars. Astronomers never do. They only look at their instruments. It’s night over the Dome now, so let’s go up to the observation deck and observe. The night is absolutely clear, and there is nothing like just looking at the stars to make one feel quiet and at peace. Trust me.”

It was true. Astronomers did not look at the stars. There was no need. One gave instructions to the telescopes, the
cameras, and the spectroscope by way of the computer, which received instructions in the way of programming.

The instruments did the work, the analyses, the graphic simulations. The astronomer merely asked the questions, then studied the answers. For that, one didn’t have to look at the stars.

But then, she thought, how does one look at stars idly? Can one when one is an astronomer? The mere sight should make one uneasy. There was work to be done, questions to be asked, mysteries to be solved, and, after a while, surely one would return to one’s workshop and set some instruments in motion while one distracted one’s mind by reading a novel or watching a holovision spectacle.

She muttered this to Siever Genarr, as he went about his office, checking loose ends before leaving. (He was a confirmed loose-end checker, Insigna remembered from the ancient days when they were all young. It had irritated her then, but perhaps she ought to have admired it. Siever had so many virtues, she thought, and Crile, on the other hand—)

She dragged at her thoughts mercilessly and pointed them another way.

Genarr was saying, “Actually, I don’t use the observation deck myself very often. There always seems to be something else to do. And when I do go, I almost always find myself alone up there. It will be pleasant to have company. Come!”

He led the way to a small elevator. It was the first time Insigna had been in an elevator in the Dome, and, for a fleeting moment, it was as though she were back on Rotor—except that she felt no change in pseudo-gravitation pull and did not feel herself pressed gently against one of the walls through a Coriolis effect, as she would have been on Rotor.

“Here we are,” said Genarr, and motioned to Insigna to step out. She did so, curiously, into the empty chamber, and, almost at once, shrank back. She said, “Are we exposed?”

“Exposed?” Genarr asked, bewildered. “Oh, you mean, are we open to Erythro’s atmosphere? No no. Have no fears about that. We are enclosed in a hemisphere of diamond-coated glass which nothing scratches.
A meteorite would smash it, of course, but the skies of Erythro are virtually meteor-free. We have such glass on Rotor, you know, but”—and his voice took on a tone of pride—“not quite this quality, and not quite this size.”

“They treat you well down here,” said Insigna, reaching out gently to touch the glass again and assure herself of its existence.

“They must, to get people to come here.” Then, reverting to the bubble, “It rains, of course, on occasion, but it’s cloudy then anyway. And once the skies clear, it dries up quickly. A residue is left behind, and during the day, a special detergent mixture cleans the bubble. Sit down, Eugenia.”

Insigna sat in a chair that was soft and comfortable and that reclined almost of its own accord, so that she found herself looking upward. She could hear another chair sigh softly as Genarr’s weight pushed it backward. And then, the small night-lights, which had cast a glow sufficient to point out the presence and location of chairs and small tables in the room, went out. In the darkness of an uninhabited world, the sky, cloudless, and as dark as black velvet, burned with sparks.

Insigna gasped. She knew what the sky was like in theory. She had seen it on charts and maps, in simulations and photographs—in every shape and way except reality. She found herself
not
picking out the interesting objects, the puzzling items, the mysteries that demanded she get to work. She didn’t look at any one object, but at the patterns they made.

In dim prehistory, she thought, it was the study of the patterns, and not of the stars themselves, that gave the ancients the constellations and the beginning of astronomy.

Genarr was right. Peace, like a fine, unfelt cobweb, settled down over her.

After a while, she said, almost sleepily, “Thank you, Genarr.”

“For what?”

“For offering to go out with Marlene. For risking your mind for my daughter.”

“I’m not risking my mind. Nothing will happen to either of us. Besides, I have a—a fatherly feeling toward her. After all, Eugenia, we go a long way back together,
you and I, and I think—have always thought—highly of you.”

“I know,” said Insigna, feeling the stirrings of guilt. She had always known how Genarr had felt—he could never obscure it. It had inspired her with resignation before she met Crile, and with annoyance afterward.

She said, “If I’ve ever hurt your feelings, Siever, I am truly sorry.”

“No need,” said Genarr softly, and there was a long silence while peace deepened, and Insigna found herself earnestly hoping that no one would enter and break the strange spell of serenity that held her fast.

And then Genarr said, “I have a theory as to why people don’t come up to the observation deck here. Or on Rotor. Did you ever notice that the observation deck isn’t used much on Rotor either?”

“Marlene liked to go there on occasion,” said Insigna. “She told me she was usually alone up there. In the last year or so, she would tell me that she liked to watch Erythro. I should have listened more closely—paid attention—”

“Marlene is unusual. I think what gets most people and keeps them from coming up here is that.”

“What?” asked Insigna.

“That,” said Genarr. He was pointing to some spot in the sky, but in the darkness she could not see his arm. “That very bright star; the brightest in the sky.”

“You mean the Sun—our Sun—the Sun of the Solar System.”

“Yes, I do. It’s an interloper. Except for that bright star, the sky would be just about the same as the one we see from Earth. Alpha Centauri is rather out of place and Sirius is shifted slightly, but we wouldn’t notice that. Barring such things, the sky you see is what the Sumerians saw five thousand years ago. All except for the Sun.”

“And you think the Sun keeps people away from the observation deck?”

“Yes, perhaps not consciously, but I think the sight of it makes them uneasy. The tendency is to think of the Sun as far, far away, unreachable, part of an altogether different Universe. Yet there it is in the sky, bright, demanding our attention, stirring up our guilt for having run away from it.”

“But then why don’t the teenagers and children go to the observation deck? They know little or nothing of the Sun and the Solar System.”

“The rest of us set a negative example. When we’re all gone, when there’s no one on Rotor to whom the Solar System is anything but a phrase, I think the sky will seem to belong to Rotor again, and this place will be crowded—if it still exists.”

“Do you think it won’t still exist?”

“We can’t foresee the future, Eugenia.”

“We seem to be flourishing and growing so far.”

“Yes, we are, but it’s that bright star—the interloper—that I’m worried about.”

“Our old Sun. What can it do? It can’t reach us.”

“Sure it can.” Genarr was staring at the bright star in the western sky. “The people we’ve left behind on Earth and on the Settlements are bound to discover Nemesis eventually. Maybe they already have. And maybe they’ve worked out hyper-assistance. I’m of the opinion they must have developed hyper-assistance soon after we left. Our disappearance must have stimulated them greatly.”

“We left fourteen years ago. Why aren’t they already here?”

“Perhaps they quail at the thought of a two-year flight. They know that Rotor attempted it, but they don’t know that we succeeded at it. They may think that our wreckage is strewn through space all the way from the Sun to Nemesis.”

“
We
didn’t lack the courage to attempt it.”

“Sure we did. Do you think that Rotor would have made the attempt if we hadn’t had Pitt? It was
Pitt
who drove the rest of us, and I doubt that there’s another Pitt anywhere in the Settlements, or on Earth for that matter. You know I don’t like Pitt. I disapprove of his methods, of his morals, or the lack of them, of his deviousness, of his cold-blooded ability to send a girl like Marlene to what he clearly hopes will be her destruction, and yet if we go by results, he may go down in history as a great man.”

“As a great leader,” said Insigna. “
You
are a great man, Siever. There’s a clear difference.”

There was silence again, till Genarr said softly, “I keep waiting for them to come here after us. That’s my biggest
fear, and it seems to strengthen when the interloper shines down upon me. It’s fourteen years now since we left the Solar System. What have they been doing in these fourteen years? Have you ever wondered about that, Eugenia?”

“Never,” said Insigna, half-asleep. “My worries are more immediate.”

August 22, 2235! It meant something to Crile Fisher, for it was Tessa Wendel’s birthday. To be precise, it was her fifty-third birthday. She made no reference to the day, or to its significance—perhaps because she had been so proud of her youthful appearance on Adelia, or perhaps because she was overconscious of Fisher’s five years’ advantage.

But their relative age difference didn’t matter to Crile.

Even if Fisher had not been attracted to her intelligence and to her sexual vigor, Tessa held the key to Rotor and he knew it.

There were fine wrinkles around her eyes now, and a distinct flabbiness to her upper arms, but her unmentioned birthday was one of triumph for her, and she came swinging into the apartment, which had grown steadily more lavish with the years, and threw herself into her sturdy field-bottomed armchair with a smile of satisfaction on her face.

“It went as smoothly as interstellar space. Absolute perfection.”

“I wish I had been there,” said Crile.

“I wish you had, too, Crile, but we’re on a strictly need-to-know basis, and I get you involved in more things than I should, as it is.”

The goal had been Hypermnestra, an otherwise undistinguished asteroid that was in a convenient position, not too close to other asteroids at the moment, and, what was more important, not too close to Jupiter. It was also unclaimed by any Settlement, and unvisited by any. And, to top it off, there were the first two syllables of the name,
which, however trivial, seemed to represent a proper target for a superluminal flight through hyperspace.

“I take it you got the ship there safely.”

“Within ten thousand kilometers. We could easily have placed it closer, but we didn’t want to risk an intensification of its gravitational field, feeble though it was. And back, of course, to the prearranged spot. It’s being shepherded in by two ordinary vessels.”

“I suppose the Settlements were on the lookout.”

“Of course, but it’s one thing to see that the ship vanishes instantaneously, and quite another to tell where it went; whether it went at or near light speed, or many multiples of it; and, most of all, how it was done. So what they do see means nothing.”

“They had nothing in the neighborhood of Hypermnestra, did they?”

“They had no way of knowing what the destination was, barring a breakdown of security, and that
apparently
didn’t happen. If they had known, or guessed, that alone still would not have helped them. All in all, Crile, very satisfactory.”

“Obviously a giant step.”

“With additional giant steps still facing us. It was the first ship, capable of carrying a human being, to attain superluminal velocity, but, as you know, it was staffed—if that’s the word—by one robot.”

“Did the robot operate successfully?”

“Completely, but that’s not very significant, except that it shows we can transfer a fairly large mass there and back in one piece—at least in one piece on the macro-scale. It will take several weeks of inspection to make sure that no dangerous damage was done on the micro-scale. And, of course, that still leaves us the task of building larger ships, of making sure that life-support systems are incorporated and functioning well, and of multiplying safety provisions. A robot can take stresses that human beings cannot.”

“And is the schedule holding up?”

“So far. So far. Another year or year and a half—if there are no disasters or unexpected accidents—and we ought to be able to surprise the Rotorians, assuming them to exist.”

Fisher winced, and Wendel said, looking hangdog,
“I’m sorry. I keep promising myself not to say things like that, but it does slip out once in a while.”

“Never mind,” said Fisher. “Is it definitely settled that I’ll be going on the first trip to Rotor?”

“If anything can be definitely settled for something that won’t take place for a year or more. There’s no way of guarding against sudden shifts of needs.”

“But so far?”

“Apparently, Tanayama had left behind a note to the effect that you were promised a berth—more decent of him than I would have expected. Koropatsky was kind enough to tell me about the note today, after the successful flight, when it seemed to me that it might be a good time to advance the possibility.”