Markham rose. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Huh?” asked Saxtorph, amiably enough. “You want to go now when this is really getting interesting?”
“I do not expect I can make a contribution.” Markham hesitated. “I am a little indisposed. Best I lie down for a while. Do not worry. I will soon be well. Carry on.” He sketched a bow and departed.
“What do you know, he is human,” Carita said.
“We ought to be kinder to him than we have been, poor man,” Laurinda murmured.
“He hasn’t given us much of a chance, has he?” replied Yoshii.
“Stow that,” Saxtorph ordered. “No backbiting.”
“Yes,” added Dorcas, “let’s proceed with the libretto.”
Eagerness made Tregennis tremble as he obliged.
In his galley, Ryan frowned. Something didn’t feel quite right. While be followed the session he continued slicing the mahi mahi he had brought frozen from Earth, but his mind was no longer entirely on either.
Time passed. It became clear that the Quarta approach was going to be an intellectual orgy, the more so because Quinta happened to be near inferior conjunction and thus a lot of information about that planet would be arriving, too. Ryan wiped hands on apron, left his preparations, and stumped up toward the flight deck.
He met Markham coming back. They halted and regarded each other. The companionway thrummed around them. “Hello, there,” the quartermaster said slowly. “I thought you were in your cabin.”
Markham stiffened. “I am on my way, if it is any of your business.”
“Long way ’round.”
“It… occurred to me to check certain stations. This is an old ship, refitted. Frankly, Captain Saxtorph relies too much on his machinery.”
“What sort of thing did you want to check on?”
“Who are you to ask?” Markham flung. “You are the quartermaster.”
“And you are the passenger.” Ryan’s bulk blocked the stairs. “I wouldn’t be in this crew if I didn’t have a pretty fair idea of how all the equipment works. I’m responsible for maintaining a lot of it.”
“I have commanded spacecraft.”
“Then you know each system keeps its own record.” Ryan’s smile approximated a leer, or a snarl. “Save the skipper a bunch of data retrievals. Where were you and what were you doing?”
Markham stood silent while the ship drove onward. At length: “I should, I shall report directly to the captain. But to avoid rumors, I tell you first. Listen well and do not distort what I say if you are able not to. I beamed a radio signal on a standard band at Secunda. It is against the possibility—the very remote possibility, Mme. Brozik assured us that sentient beings are present. Natives, Outsiders, who knows? In the interest of peaceful contact, we must provide evidence that we did not try to sneak in on them. Not that it is likely they exist, but—this is the sort of contingency I am here for. Saxtorph and I can dispute it later if he wishes. I have presented him with a fait accompli. Now let me by.” Ryan stood aside. Markham passed downward. Ryan stared after him till he was gone from sight, then went back to his galley.
Quarta fell astern as Rover moved on sunward. In the boat called Fido, Juan Yoshii swung around the giant planet and accelerated to overtake his ship. Vectors programmed, he could relax, look out the ports, seek to sort the jumbled marvels in his mind. Most had gone directly from instruments to the astronomers; he was carrying back certain observations taken farside. A couple of times there had been opportunity for Laurinda Brozik to tell him briefly about the latest interpretation, but he had been too busy on his flit to think much beyond the piloting.
Stars thronged, the Milky Way torrented, a sky little different from the skies he remembered. Less than 30 light-years’ travel—a mite’s leap in the galaxy. Clearly alien was the sun ahead. Tiny but perceptible, its ember of a disc was slow to dazzle his eyes, yet already cast sufficient light for him to see things by.
An outer moon drifted across vision. This was his last close passage, and instruments worked greedily. Clicks and whirrs awoke beneath the susurrus of air through the hull. Yoshii pointed his personal camera; photography was an enthusiasm of his. The globe glimmered wan red under its sun. It was mainly ice, and smooth; any cracks and craters had slumped in the course of gigayears. The surface was lighter than it might have been and mottled with yellow spots. Ore deposits? The same material that tinted most airless bodies here? Tregennis was puzzled. You got dark spots in Solar-type systems. They were due to photolysis of frozen methane. Of course, this sun was so feeble…
It nonetheless illuminated the planet aft. Quarta’s hue was pale rose, overlaid with silvery streaks that were ice clouds: crystals of carbon dioxide, ammonia, in the upper levels methane. No twists, no vortices, no sign of any jovian storminess marred the serenity. Though the disc was visibly flattened, it rotated slowly, taking more than 40 hours. Tidal forces through eons had worn down even the spin of this huge mass. They had likewise dispersed whatever rings it once had, and surely drawn away moons. The core possessed a magnetic field, slight, noticeable only because it extended so far into space that it snatched radio waves out of incoming cosmic radiation-remnant magnetism, locked into iron as that core froze. For gravitational energy release had long since reached its end point; and long, long before then, K-40 and whatever other few radionuclei were once on hand had guttered away beyond measurement. The ice sheath went upward in tranquil allotropic layers to a virtually featureless surface and an enormous, quietly circulating atmosphere of starlike composition. Quarta had reached Nirvana.
It fell ever farther behind. Fido closed in on Rover.
The ship swelled until she might have been a planet herself. Instructions swept back and forth, electronic, occasionally verbal. A boat bay opened its canopy. Yoshii maneuvered through and docked. The canopy closed, shutting off heaven. Air hissed back in from the recovery tanks. A bulb flashed green. Yoshii unharnessed, operated the lock, crawled forth, and walked under the steady weight granted him by the ship’s polarizer, into her starboard reception room.
Laurinda waited.
Yoshii stopped. She was alone. White hair tumbled past delicate features to brush the dress, new to him, that hugged her slenderness. She reached out. Her eyes glowed. “W-welcome back, Juan,” she whispered.
“Why, uh, thanks, thank you. You’re the… committee?”
She smiled, dropped her glance, became briefly the color of the world he had rounded. “Kam met Carita. As for you, Dorcas—Mate Saxtorph suggested—”
He took her hands. They felt reed-thin and silksoft. “How nice of her. And the rest. I’ve data discs for you.”
“They’ll keep. We have more work than we can handle. Observations of Quinta were, have been incredibly fruitful.” Ardor pulsed in her voice. The outermost planet was a safe subject. “We think we can guess its nature, but of course there’s no end of details we don’t understand, and we could be entirely wrong—”
“Good for you,” he said, delighted by her delight. “I missed out on that, of course.” Transmissions to him, including hers, had dealt with the Quartan system exclusively; any bit of information about it might perhaps save his life. “Tell me.”
“Oh, it’s violent, multi-colored, with spots like Jupiter’s—one bigger than the Red—and the surface is liquid water. It’s Arctic-like; we imagine continent-sized ice floes clashing together.”
“But warmer than Quarta! Why?”
“We suppose a large satellite crashed, a fraction of a million years ago. Debris formed the rings. The main mass released enough heat to melt the upper part of the planetary shell, and, and we’ll need years, science will, to learn what else has happened.”
He stood for an instant in awe, less of the event than of the time-scale. That moon must have been close to start with, but still it had taken the casual orbital erosion of… almost a universe’s lifespan so far—how many passages through nebulae, galaxies, the near-ultimate vacuum of intergalactic space?—to bring it down. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? What is man, that he should waste the little span which is his?
“That’s wonderful,” he said, “but we—” Impulsively, he embraced her. Astoundingly, she responded.
Between laughter and tears she said in his ear, “Come, let’s go, Kam’s spread a feast for the two of us in my cabin.”
Set beside that, the cosmos was trivial.
Saxtorph’s voice crackled from the intercom: “Now hear this. Now hear this. We’ve just received a message from what claims to be a kzin warship. They’re demanding we make rendezvous with them. Keep calm but think
