binoculars, and, like so many myopic opera buffs, we studied the apparitions which floated into existence above the polished mahogany surface.
Stars: incalculable numbers of them — hard white and blood-red gems, strewn in lacy patterns against deep velvet blue.
Childe narrated:
‘The better part of two and a half centuries ago, my uncle Giles — whose somewhat pessimistic handiwork you have already seen — made a momentous decision. He embarked on what we in the family referred to as the Program, and then only in terms of extreme secrecy.’
Childe told us that the Program was an attempt at covert deep space exploration.
Giles had conceived the work, funding it directly from the family’s finances. He had done this with such ingenuity that the apparent wealth of House Childe had never faltered, even as the Program entered its most expensive phase. Only a few select members of the Childe dynasty had even known of the Program’s existence, and that number had dwindled as time passed.
The bulk of the money had been paid to the Ultras, who had already emerged as a powerful faction by that time.
They had built the autonomous robot space probes according to this uncle’s desires, and then launched them towards a variety of target systems. The Ultras could have delivered his probes to any system within range of their lighthugger ships, but the whole point of the exercise was to restrict the knowledge of any possible discoveries to the family alone. So the envoys crossed space by themselves, at only a fraction of the speed of light, and the targets they were sent to were all poorly explored systems on the ragged edge of human space.
The probes decelerated by use of solar sails, picked the most interesting worlds to explore, and then fell into orbit around them.
Robots were sent down, equipped to survive on the surface for many decades.
Childe waved his hand across the table. Lines radiated out from one of the redder suns in the display, which I assumed was Yellowstone’s star. The lines reached out towards other stars, forming a three-dimensional scarlet dandelion several dozen light-years wide.
‘These machines must have been reasonably intelligent,’ Celestine said. ‘Especially by the standards of the time.’
Childe nodded keenly. ‘Oh, they were. Cunning little blighters. Subtle and stealthy and diligent. They had to be, to operate so far from human supervision.’
‘And I presume they found something?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Childe said testily, like a conjurer whose carefully scripted patter was being ruined by a persistent heckler. ‘But not immediately. Giles didn’t expect it to be immediate, of course — the envoys would take decades to reach the closest systems they’d been assigned to, and there’d still be the communicational time-lag to take into consideration. So my uncle resigned himself to forty or fifty years of waiting, and that was erring on the optimistic side.’ He paused and sipped from his wine. ‘Too bloody optimistic, as it happened. Fifty years passed… then sixty… but nothing of any consequence was ever reported back to Yellowstone, at least not in his lifetime. The envoys did, on occasion, find something interesting — but by then other human explorers had usually stumbled on the same find. And as the decades wore on, and the envoys failed to justify their invention, my uncle grew steadily more maudlin and bitter.’
‘I’d never have guessed,’ Celestine said.
‘He died, eventually — bitter and resentful; feeling that the universe had played some sick cosmic trick on him. He could have lived for another fifty or sixty years with the right treatments, but I think by then he knew it would be a waste of time.’
‘You faked your death a century and a half ago,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you tell me it had something to do with the family business?’
He nodded in my direction. ‘That was when my uncle told me about the Program. I didn’t know anything about it until then — hadn’t heard even the tiniest hint of a rumour. No one in the family had. By then, of course, the project was costing us almost nothing, so there wasn’t even a financial drain to be concealed. ’
‘And since then?’
‘I vowed not to make my uncle’s mistake. I resolved to sleep until the machines sent back a report, and then sleep again if the report turned out to be a false alarm.’
‘Sleep?’ I said.
He clicked his fingers and one entire wall of the room whisked back to reveal a sterile, machine-filled chamber.
I studied its contents.
There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep was not without its risks.
‘I spent a century and a half in that contraption,’ he said, ‘waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you’re made of glass; as if the next movement you make — the next breath you take — will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces. It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it’s never easier the next time.’ He shuddered visibly. ‘In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.’
‘Then your equipment needs servicing,’ Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolised every occasion on which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.
They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.
‘How long did you spend awake each time?’ I asked.
‘No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not. I’d allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I had to be disciplined. If I’d stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?’
‘You’ve obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There’s no consciousness when you’re frozen, granted — but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange dreams.’
‘But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?’
Childe nodded. ‘And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I’ve not returned to the chamber since. Instead, I’ve spent that time gathering together the resources and the people for a highly unusual expedition.’
Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.
‘I won’t bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this table — with the possible exception of Forqueray — is likely to have heard of. There’ve never been any human colonies there, and no crewed vessel has ever passed within three light-years of it. At least, not until recently.’
The view zoomed in again, enlarging with dizzying speed.
A planet swelled up to the size of a skull, suspended above the table.
It was hued entirely in shades of grey and pale rust, cratered and gouged here and there by impacts and what must have been very ancient weathering processes. Though there was a suggestion of a wisp of atmosphere — a smoky blue halo encircling the planet — and though there were icecaps at either pole, the world looked neither habitable nor inviting.
‘Cheerful-looking place, isn’t it?’ Childe said. ‘I call it Golgotha.’
‘Nice name,’ Celestine said.
‘But not, unfortunately, a very nice planet.’ Childe made the view enlarge again, so that we were skimming the world’s bleak, apparently lifeless surface. ‘Pretty dismal, to be honest. It’s about the same size as Yellowstone, receiving about the same amount of sunlight from its star. Doesn’t have a moon. Surface gravity’s close enough to one gee that you won’t know the difference once you’re suited up. A thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, and no sign that anything’s ever evolved there. Plenty of radiation hitting the surface, but that’s about your only hazard, and one
