and had been the driving force behind many of the safety features now incorporated in FTL deployment.
Her partner was Terry Drafts, a young African physicist not half her age. He was soft-spoken, introspective, intense. He made no secret of his view that riding with Angela was equivalent to getting his ticket punched for greater things.
'If you've really got something, Carson,' Angela said, 'we'd be happy to help. Wouldn't we, Terry? But don't waste our time, okay?'
Since all starships maintain onboard clocks in correlation with Greenwich, the new passengers suffered no temporal dislocation. It was mid-morning on all the vessels of the various fleets when Angela showed her new passengers to their quarters.
She joined them for lunch, and listened while they talked about their experiences in the system. Eventually, she asked pointedly whether they were certain this was the home world of the Monument-Makers. (They were.) How had the team members been lost? (No one got into graphic details, but they told her enough to elicit both her disapproval and her respect.)
'I see why they wanted me to put the ship at your disposal,' she said. 'We can stay here. We can take you to Point Zebra. Or we can go all the way back to Earth. Your call.' The Point was the staging site for local survey vessels.
'Angela,' said Carson, 'what we'd like is to take a look at one of the moons in this system. Then we're going to do some serious traveling.'
Angela trained the ship's telescopes on the harbor city. It looked serene: white ruins embedded in soft green hills, thick forest spilling into the sea. The broken bridge that led nowhere.
They spent two days at the Oz-like artifact. They marveled anew at its perpendicularity. It was, announced Drafts, the mecca of right angles. And, unlike the construct on Quraqua's moon, this one had no exception, no round tower.
But it too was damaged. Charred. Cratered.
'I've seen the other one,' said Angela. 'Why would they make something like this?'
'That's what we hope to find out,' said Carson.
That evening, Monday, April 18, 2203, at slightly before 1100 hours, they rolled out of lunar orbit.
Two nights later, Carson ceremonially stored his wheel-chair. And Janet added another piece of speculation. She first mentioned it to Hutch. 'I was thinking,' she said, 'about the phrase in that Quraquat prayer—'
' 'The engines of God'?»
'Yes. The engines of God—'
'What of it?'
'We might not be far off. // there's an A wave, the one that touched Beta Pac in 21,000 B.C.: if it kept going, it would have reached Earth.'
Hutch nodded. 'Before the rise of civilization, right? Before anybody was there to record it.'
'Not exactly. It would have passed through the solar system somewhere around 5000 B.C.'
Hutch waited. The date meant nothing to her.
Janet shrugged. 'It fits the most recent estimates for Sodom and Gomorrah.'
ARCHIVE
(Transmitted via Laserbuoy)
TO: NCA GARY KNAPP ATT: DAVID EMORY
FROM: FRANK CARSON, BETA PAC MISSION
NCA ASHLEY TEE
SUBJECT: OPERATIONAL MOVEMENT DAVID. SORRY TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HERE, BUT BUSINESS PRESSES. WE MAY BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AT ORIKON. NEXT STOP IS LCO4418. JOIN US THERE IF YOU CAN. CARSON.
27
On board NCA Ashley Tee, en route to LCO4418. Wednesday, April 27; 1930 hours
'I can't believe,' said Drafts, frowning at his pair of deuces, 'we're really doing this.'
'Doing what?' asked Angela, looking up from a book.
'Chasing a dragon,' said Hutch. She wasn't holding anything either.
'It's worth the trip,' said Angela. 'I don't believe a word of it. But I've been wrong before.' She literally radiated vitality. Hutch had no trouble imagining her flying into a volcano.
'By me,' said Drafts. He had been winning, and was in an ebullient mood. 'The problem I have,' he said, 'is that I can't imagine what this thing might look like. I mean, are we expecting hordes of destructive nanomachines belched into the galaxy from somewhere in the Void every eight thousand years?' He placed his cards face down on the table. 'Or fleets filled with psychopaths?'
'Maybe,' said Janet, 'it's not from the Void, but something out of the center of the galaxy.' She was trying not to look pleased with her cards. 'I'll open,' she said. She pushed a coin into the pot. 'It would come from the same direction.'
Drafts glanced at Carson. 'Forty-four eighteen's already been looked at. If there had been anything going on out there, we'd know about it.'
'Maybe not,' said Angela. 'If this thing exists, it might not be easy to find unless you know what you're looking for.'
'Well,' said Drafts, still talking to Carson, 'I don't want to offend anybody, but I doubt this dragon is likely to stand up to the light of day.'
'Ah, Terry, will you never learn?' Angela delivered a sigh they could have heard in the shuttle bay. 'You're right. But it's the wrongheaded types who make the big finds.'
Carson smiled at her appreciatively.
Drafts shrugged. 'Okay,' he said.
Hutch folded, and watched Janet scare everyone out of the pot. Carson picked up the cards and began to shuffle. 'The Monument-Maker as Death,' he said. 'Could they have built something that got away from them?'
Hutch tried to wave it away. 'Why don't we wait until we get there? Meantime, we can't do anything except guess.'
Angela was sitting with her feet doubled under her. She was reading Matama, the hundred-year-old Japanese tragedy. 'If there is a wave,' she said without looking up, 'it would have to be pretty deep, on an order of a couple of light-years, for us to have a reasonable chance to locate it. What kind of mechanism could be that big?'
'If it exists,' said Janet, 'it stretches from Quraqua to Nok. That's a hundred light-years. At a minimum.' She looked toward Carson. 'That would have to be an effect beyond anybody's capability to manufacture.'
'I just can't see that the evidence amounts to anything,' said Drafts. 'Look, these people, whoever they were, had a passion for leaving their signature everywhere they've been. They liked monuments. The Oz-structures and the cube moons were early efforts. They were getting their sea legs. No hidden meanings; just practice.'
'Come on, Terry,' said Carson.
'Why not? Why does there have to be some deep-seated significance? Maybe they're just what most other monuments are: somebody's idea of high art. And the eight-thousand-year cycle is hardly established as fact. Half of it's pure guess-work, and I bet the rest of it is going to turn out to be wishful thinking.'
Carson and Janet looked at Hutch. Hell, she thought, I made no guarantees. But she felt forced to defend her speculations. 'The dating wasn't mine,' she said. 'It was done by Henry Jacobi and David Emory and the data technicians on the Perth. I just put it together. If the numbers are a coincidence, they're a coincidence. But it's not wishful thinking. I have no interest in meeting a dragon out here.'
The tension broke, and they all laughed.
If a cosmic hand were to move the red giant LCO4418 to the center of the solar system, Mercury and Venus
