Hakim presented the facts for Martin with his wand; they appeared to float before him, or he among them, words and images and icons and charts, a visual language created by the moms. Martin had become used to this method of teaching on the Ark; now he took it in stride.
At the center of the displays hung diagrams of three stellar systems. Figures surrounding the diagrams told him that these stars were no more than a trillion kilometers from each other.
The moms used stellar classifications based on mass, diameter, luminosity, age, and percentages of “metals,” elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Martin was more used to this scale than the one that would have been familiar to his father. The children had converted some of the moms’ technical terms to more informal language: Thus, the closest star was a Buttercup Seven, about nine tenths the mass and diameter of Sol, bright yellow, relatively high in metals. The second closest was a Cornflower Two, one and a half times Sol’s mass, with a lower percentage of metals. The third star in the group was an aging Firestorm Three, a brilliant bloated red giant. The Buttercup Seven had four planets, two of them peculiar, diminished gas giants.
Hakim noticed his interest in these worlds. “They are substantially smaller than might be expected—evidence of gas mining, perhaps,” he said.
Martin frowned. Tough to refuel the Ship of the Law in a system that had already been tapped out by an old civilization.
Two rocky planets hugged close to the Buttercup Seven. In addition, there were several—perhaps as many as five—invisible bodies close to the star. Together, they might have added up to the mass of Earth’s moon.
The Cornflower Two, a pale yellow giant, had ten planets, two of them apparent gas giants. The Firestorm Three was surrounded only by small rubble; at some ninety million kilometers in diameter, it could have swallowed several planets when it ballooned.
Numbers flickered in and out of his awareness; his eyes shifted around the display, picking out what he needed to know.
Martin examined the intrinsic spectra of the stars. There were intriguing diffraction patterns, unnatural ratios of infra-red versus other frequencies. A technological civilization had been at work around at least two of the stars, the Buttercup and the Cornflower.
“How long ago did the Firestorm balloon?” he asked.
“We estimate five thousand years,” Hakim said.
“Did they armor?”
“The civilization around the Buttercup apparently armored. We have no direct evidence yet for the Cornflower.”
“But they haven’t built an all-absorbing envelope…”
“No,” Hakim agreed. An envelope around each star—a Dyson construct of multiple orbiting structures surrounding the star in many layers—would have reduced the stellar images to heat-waste, dull infra-red only. Martin checked the information available on the interstellar particle fluxes surrounding the stars—the stellar winds —and felt a tickle of apprehension.
The Ship of the Law was one point eight trillion kilometers from the nearest, the Buttercup. Martin reached out to touch a glowing geometric shape pulsing slowly next to the star images. The shape unfolded like a flower into a series of pentagonal petals. He touched the petals in sequence until he had the information he desired. “The Buttercup may have large structures in orbit, besides these five dark masses. You think that’s sign of armoring?”
Hakim nodded. Martin summoned and inspected occultations, spectrum variability, brightness fluctuations. He called up absorption spectra for the stellar atmosphere, outer stellar envelope and “wind” of particles, and planetary atmospheres.
The Ship of the Law had not sent out its remotes, and the information he received obviously came from angles and distances not their own.
“I have obtained this additional information from the moms, three months ago,” Hakim said, as if reading his thoughts. “They’ve kept watch on this group for a long time. Perhaps thousands of years.”
The Benefactor machines that had destroyed the Killers around Sol had collected a fragment of a killer probe and analyzed its composition, checking for minute traces of radioactive elements and proportions of other elements. Martin thought it likely the Benefactor machines knew the characteristics of populations of stars for thousands of light years around Sol, and had sent the
Martin suddenly didn’t like being alone with Hakim in the schoolroom, talking about such things. He wanted the others to share his responsibility and back his conclusions. He wanted a mom present. “How about the assay?” he asked, swallowing too noisily.
“You can refer to it.”
He flushed, touched another shape marked with a spinning atom symbol, and it blossomed. The comparison between the probe’s composition and the Buttercup’s stellar spectra and estimated planetary makeup was close. The killer machines
Additional information came up beneath his questing fingers. Four other inhabited worlds within two hundred and ninety light years of the group had been attacked and transformed by killer probes, all within the past thousand years. There were one million three hundred thousand stars within this radius, or roughly one star for every seventy-eight and a half cubic light years. Four civilizations had been murdered, five including the Earth; only two besides the Earth had left any survivors.
The four victim stars lay within a hypothetical sphere determined by the density of stars within the possible paths of killer probes, and complex analyses of how often those probes would reproduce, and how quickly they would saturate such a sphere. The center of the sphere was within two light years of this group of three, Buttercup, Cornflower, Firestorm.
Hakim had been through this material already, and with growing excitement, embellished details he thought might not be obvious.
“All right,” Martin said. His hand shook. He controlled it. “It seems… interesting.”
Hakim smiled and nodded once, then watched intently while Martin perused the data again.
On Earth, Martin’s father had compared the attempt to destroy killer probes to the murder of Captain Cook by distrustful Hawaiians. To the islanders, Cook had been the powerful representative of a more technologically advanced civilization.
If Earth’s Killers lived around one or more of these stars, the Ship of the Law would be up against a civilization so advanced that it controlled two or perhaps even three star systems, commanding the flux of an entire star, perhaps even capable of armoring that star against the expansion of a red giant.
If this was the home of Earth’s Killers, the children’s task would be much more difficult than just killing Captain Cook.
Such adversaries could be as far beyond human intellect as Martin had been beyond his dog Gauge, long dead, powder and ashes around distant Sol.
“The assay match is… I won’t say unique,” Hakim said softly as Martin’s thoughtful silence lengthened. “Other stars in this portion of the spiral arm might share it, having come from the same segment of old supernova cloud. But it’s very close. Did you see the potassium-argon ratios? The indium concentrations?”
Martin nodded, then lifted his head and said, “It does look good, Hakim. Fine work.”
“Tough decision, first time,” Hakim said, awaiting his reaction.
“I know,” Martin said. “We’ll take it to the children first, then to the moms.”
Hakim sighed and smiled. “So it is.”
The call went out to all the wands, and the children gathered in clusters, a full meeting, the first in Martin’s six months as Pan.
A few glued on to Martin’s trail as he laddered forward to the first homeball. Three cats and four parrots joined as well, using the children’s ladders to scramble after them into the schoolroom.
George Dempsey, a plump boy of nineteen from the Athletes family, came close to Martin and beamed a smile. Dempsey read muscles and expressions better than most of his fellows. “Good news?”
“We may have a candidate,” Martin said.
