Nemesis (4 page)

“No, I don’t.”

“Then is it possible that we on Rotor are the only ones who know about this Neighbor Star, since we’re the only ones who’ve sent out a Far Probe. This is your field, Dr. Insigna. Do you agree that we’re the only ones who’ve sent out a Far Probe?”

“The Far Probe isn’t entirely a secret project, Mr. Secretary. We’ve accepted experiments from the other Settlements and discussed that part of it with everyone, even Earth, which isn’t too interested in astronomy these days.”

“Yes, they leave it to the Settlements, which is sensible. But have any other Settlements sent out a Far Probe that they
have
kept secret?”

“I doubt that very much, sir. They would need hyper-assistance for that, and we have kept the technique of hyper-assistance
entirely
secret. If they had hyper-assistance, we’d know. They’d have to perform experiments in space that would give the fact away.”

“According to the Open Science Agreement, all data obtained by the Far Probe is to be published generally. Does that mean that you have already informed—”

Insigna interrupted indignantly. “Of course not. I would have to find out a good deal more before I publish. What I have now is only a preliminary result that I’m telling you in confidence.”

“But you are not the only astronomer working on the Far Probe. I presume you’ve shown the results to the others.”

Insigna flushed and looked away. Then she said defensively, “No, I haven’t. I noticed this datum. I followed it up. I worked out its significance.
I
. And I want to make sure I get the credit for it. There is only one star that is nearest to the Sun and I want to be in the annals of science as its discoverer.”

“There might be a still closer one,” and now Pitt permitted himself the first smile of the interview.

“It would have been long known. Even my star would be known but for the very unusual existence of that tiny obscuring cloud. To have another—and closer—star is quite out of the question.”

“Then it boils down to this, Dr. Insigna. You and I are the only ones to know of the Neighbor Star. Am I right? No one else?”

“Yes, sir. Just you and I, so far.”

“Not just so far. It must remain a secret to us until I am prepared to tell certain specific others.”

“But the agreement—the Open Science Agreement—”

“Must be ignored. There are always exceptions to everything. Your discovery involves Settlement security. If Settlement security is involved, we are not required to make the discovery an open one. We don’t make hyper-assistance open, do we?”

“But the existence of the Neighbor Star has nothing to do with Settlement security.”

“On the contrary, Dr. Insigna, it does. Perhaps you don’t realize it, but you have come upon something that can change the destiny of the human species.”

She stood there, frozen, staring at him.

“Sit down. We are conspirators, you and I, and we must be friendly. From now on, you are Eugenia to me when we’re alone, and I am Janus to you.”

Insigna demurred. “I don’t think that’s proper.”

“It will have to be, Eugenia. We can’t conspire on frigid, formal terms.”

“But I don’t want to conspire with anyone about anything, and that’s all there is to it. And I don’t see the point about keeping secret the facts concerning the Neighbor Star.”

“I suppose you are afraid of losing the credit.”

Insigna hesitated the merest moment, then said, “You can bet your last computer chip I am, Janus. I want my credit.”

“For the moment,” he said, “forget that the Neighbor Star exists. You know that I’ve been arguing for quite a while that Rotor ought to leave the Solar System. Where do you stand on that? Would you like to leave the Solar System?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. It would be nice to see some astronomical object close up for the first time—but it’s a little frightening, too, isn’t it?”

“You mean, leaving home?”

“Yes.”

“But you wouldn’t be leaving home. This is home. Rotor.” His arm flipped from side to side. “It would come with you.”

“Even so, Mr. Sec— Janus, Rotor isn’t all there is to home. We have a neighborhood, the other Settlements, the planet Earth, the whole Solar System.”

“It’s a crowded neighborhood. Eventually, some of us will have to go, whether we want to or not. On Earth there was once a time when some people had to cross mountain ranges and oceans. Two centuries ago, people on Earth had to leave their planet for Settlements. This is just another step forward in a very old story.”

“I understand, but there are some people who never went. There are people who are still on Earth. There are people who’ve lived in one small region of Earth for countless generations.”

“And you want to be one of these nonmovers.”

“I think my husband Crile does. He’s quite outspoken about your views, Janus.”

“Well, we have freedom of speech and thought on Rotor, so he can disagree with me if he pleases. Now here’s something else I’d like to ask you. When people generally, on Rotor or elsewhere, think of moving away from the Solar System, where do they think of going?”

“Alpha Centauri, of course. It’s the star everyone believes is closest. Even with hyper-assistance, we can’t end up going faster than the speed of light on the average, so it would take us four years. Anywhere else, it would take much longer, and four years is long enough to travel.”

“Suppose it were possible to travel even faster, and suppose you could reach much farther than Alpha Centauri, where would you go then?”

Insigna paused in thought awhile, then said, “I suppose—still Alpha Centauri. It would still be in the old neighborhood. The stars at night would still seem quite the same. That would give us a comfortable feeling. We would be closer to home, if we wanted to return. Besides, Alpha Centauri A, which is the largest of the three-star Alpha Centauri system, is practically a twin of the Sun. Alpha Centauri B is smaller, but not too small. Even if you ignore Alpha Centauri C, a red dwarf, you would still have two stars for the price of one, so to speak, two sets of planets.”

“Suppose a Settlement has left for Alpha Centauri and found decent habitability there and settled down to build a new world, and back in the Solar System, it was known that this had happened. Where would the next Settlements go, once
they
decided to leave the Solar System?”

“To Alpha Centauri, of course,” said Insigna without hesitation.

“So the human species would tend to go to the obvious place, and if one Settlement succeeds, others would follow quickly, until the new world was as crowded as the old, until there were many people with many cultures, and eventually many Settlements with many ecologies.”

“Then it will be time to move on to other stars.”

“But always, Eugenia, success in one place will draw other Settlements. A salubrious star, a good planet, will bring others flocking.”

“I suppose so.”

“But if we go to a star that is only a little over two light-years away, only half the distance of Alpha Centauri, and no one knows about it except us, who will follow us?”

“No one, until they find out about the Neighbor Star.”

“But that might take a long time. For that long time, they would all flock to Alpha Centauri, or to any of a few other obvious choices. They would never notice a red dwarf star at their doorstep, or if they did notice it, they would dismiss it as unfit for human life—if they didn’t know that human beings had already made it a going concern.”

Insigna stared at Pitt uncertainly. “But what does all this mean? Suppose we go to the Neighbor Star and no one knows about it. What is the advantage?”

“The advantage is that we can fill the world. If there is a habitable planet—”

“There won’t be. Not around a red dwarf star.”

“Then we can use whatever raw material that exists there to build any number of Settlements.”

“You mean there would be more room for us.”

“Yes. Much more room than if they came flocking in after us.”

“So we would have a little more time, Janus. Eventually we would fill the room available for us at the Neighbor Star, even if we were alone. So it would take us five
hundred years instead of two hundred. What difference would that make?”

“All the difference you can imagine, Eugenia. Let the Settlements crowd in as they wish and we will have a thousand different cultures, bringing with them all the hatreds and misfittings of Earth’s dismal history. Give us time to be here alone and we can build a system of Settlements that will be uniform in culture and ecology. It will be a far better situation—less chaotic, less anarchic.”

“Less interesting. Less variegated. Less alive.”

“Not at all. We’ll diversify, I’m sure. The different Settlements will have their differences, but there will, at least, be a common base from which those differences will spring. It will be a far better group of Settlements for that. And even if I am wrong, surely you see that it’s an experiment that must be tried. Why not devote one star to such a reasoned development and see if it works? We can take one star, a red dwarf throwaway that no one would be ordinarily interested in, and use it to see if we can build a new kind of society and possibly a better one.

“Let us see what we can do,” he went on, “if we don’t have our energies worn out and broken by useless cultural differences, and our overall biology constantly perverted by alien ecological inroads.”

Insigna felt herself moved. Even if it didn’t work, humanity would have learned something—that this wouldn’t work. And if it
did
work?

But then she shook her head. “It’s a useless dream. The Neighbor Star will be independently discovered, no matter how we try to keep it secret.”

“But how much of your own discovery, Eugenia, was accidental? Be truthful now. You just happened to notice the star. You just happened to compare it with what you could see on another map. Might you not have missed it altogether? And might not others have missed it under similar circumstances?”

Insigna did not answer, but the expression on her face was satisfactory to Pitt.

His voice had grown softer, almost hypnotic. “And if there is a delay of only a hundred years. If we are given only a hundred years to ourselves to build our new society, we would be large enough and strong enough to protect ourselves and make the others pass by and go on
to other worlds. We won’t have to hide any longer than that.”

Again Insigna did not answer.

Pitt said, “Have I convinced you?”

She seemed to shake herself. “Not entirely.”

“Then think about it, and I’ll ask you just one favor. While you think about it, don’t say a word to anyone about the Neighbor Star and let me have all the data in connection with it for safekeeping. I won’t destroy it. My promise. We will need it if we are going to go to the Neighbor Star. Will you go that far at least, Eugenia?”

“Yes,” she said at last in a small voice. Then she fired up. “One thing, though. I must be able to name the star. If I give it a name, then it’s my star.”

Pitt smiled briefly. “What do you want to call it? Insigna’s Star? Eugenia’s Star?”

“No. I’m not
that
foolish. I want to call it Nemesis.”

“Nemesis? N-E-M-E-S-I-S?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“There was a brief period of speculation back in the late twentieth century about the possibility of a Neighbor Star for the Sun. It came to nothing at that time. No Neighbor Star was found, but it had been referred to as ‘Nemesis’ in the papers devoted to it. I would like to honor those daring thinkers.”

“Nemesis? Wasn’t there a Greek goddess of that name? An unpleasant one?”

“The Goddess of Retribution, of Justified Revenge, of Punishment. It entered the language as a rather flowery word. The computer called it ‘archaic’ when I checked.”

“And why would those old-timers have called it Nemesis?”

“Something to do with the cometary cloud. Apparently, Nemesis, in its revolution about the Sun, passed through the cloud and induced cosmic strikes that killed off large portions of Earth life every twenty-six million years.”

Pitt looked astonished. “Really?”

“No, not really. The suggestion didn’t survive, but I want Nemesis to be the name just the same. And I want it to go on record that I named it.”

“I promise you that, Eugenia. It’s your discovery and
that will enter our records. Eventually, when the rest of humanity discovers the Nemesian region—would that be the right way of putting it?—they will then learn who made the discovery and how it came about. Your star,
your
Nemesis, will be the first star, other than the Sun itself, to shine over a human civilization; and the first, without exception, to shine over a human civilization that originated elsewhere.”

Pitt watched her leave and felt, on the whole, confident. She would fall in line. His letting her name the star was the perfect touch. Surely she would want to go to her own star. Surely she would feel the attraction of building a logical and orderly civilization about
her
star, one from which civilizations all over the Galaxy might descend.

And then, just as he might have relaxed in the glow of a golden future, he was shaken by a faint touch of horror that was utterly alien to him.

Why Nemesis? Why should it have occurred to her to name it for the Goddess of Retribution?

He was almost weak enough to think of it as an evil omen.

It was dinnertime, and Insigna was in one of those moods when she was just a little afraid of her own daughter.

Those moods had become more pronounced lately, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps it was Marlene’s increasing tendency to silence, to being withdrawn, to be always seeming to commune with thoughts too deep for speech.

And sometimes the uneasy fear in Insigna was mixed with guilt: guilt because of her lack of motherly patience with the girl; guilt because of her too-great awareness of the girl’s physical shortcomings. Marlene certainly didn’t have her mother’s conventional prettiness or her father’s wildly unconventional good looks.