Existence

“No way. I was one of the ‘key’ wielders!”

The four who spoke in unison to open the box and begin transforming their ship into a telescope. That meant he was important, even indispensable! But how?

There must be a talent. A skill he brought along. Something he did supremely well.

And, of course, it was obvious.

98.

DETECTION

Your Mission as a Big Telescope

Thirty-five years before your probe was launched, along with ten million others in Operation Outlook, a much smaller experiment dispatched sixty-four primitive capsules to a zone between Uranus and Neptune. Their purpose? To test an exceptional idea and exploit a quirk of nature.

Way back in the early twentieth century, Einstein showed that heavy objects, like stars and clusters, warp space around them, bending waves that pass nearby. This gravitational lensing effect has let astronomers peer past a few massive galaxies and observe objects so distant, their light departed at the dawn of time.

Till now, these rare viewing opportunities were flukes of astronomical position. We could never choose what to look at.

Then an Italian astronomer, Claudio Maccone, began pushing a strange insight. That we might have a gravitational lens of our very own, nearby and available.

Our sun. Calculations showed that Sol’s mass ought to bend space, refracting any radiation that skims near its surface, so that distant objects would come into focus in a few special places.

The nearest and most accessible of these regions lay between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, a shell completely surrounding our star, twenty-two through thirty astronomical units out. Only certain kinds of radiation would converge in this zone. Just gravitons and neutrinos. Still, a mission was sent, and sixty probes returned valuable data, including breakthrough knowledge about the origins of the solar system.

That experiment told us nothing about far civilizations, nor did it answer our most urgent questions. Still, the concept was proved.

And we confirmed there is another zone, much farther out. A shell where our sun brings into focus a different kind of radiation.

One called light.

99.

APPRECIATION

The Great Telescope’s design grew gorgeously clear to Lacey. Ten million crystal probes, each aiming a hundred kilometer lightsail-mirror back at the sun, peering at the warped glow of distant stars and planets, magnified by Sol’s gravity. A faint, slender ring, surrounding a raging ball of fire.

Those occulting discs will take turns blocking the sun’s glare, allowing lensed light from distant objects to skirt by for our big mirror to collect. A delicate feat of countless adjustments.

Instead of classic images, a gravitational lens made globby, jumbled overlaps of distant points, “focusing” over a vast zone from five hundred out to several thousand astrons.

We’ll stare at the sun-skimming ring in a hundred ways, while cruising through region after region, scanning for rare treasures. Some images may flash for a millisecond as we hurtle through each narrow g-spot! Others could require collection and integration for years, massaging and beaming home more data than all of humanity’s prior instruments put together. And we’re just one component out of ten million, each staring past the sun from a different angle. Together composing the mightiest telescope of all.

Lacey envied the probes speeding away from galactic center. They’d sift a maelstrom of fascinating objects, like Milky Way’s central black hole. Courier, too, was disappointed that this ship could never glimpse Turbulence Planet. But Earth promised to share results. Sooner or later, some probe would bring Courier’s home into clear view, almost like next door. Lacey hoped for good news, and not just on her friend’s account.

It would be nice to have allies in this cold cosmos.

She should be resting. AUPs need sleep, as it turned out. So Lacey came down to her cottage on the One Millimeter Level, summoning a globe of night to surround it. But nervous energy from a momentous day kept her puttering around. Creating fresh flowers for a window box. Adjusting a picture of Hacker and his beloved dolphins, exploring their own amazing frontier. A different story.

One bonus for staying in the solar system. I’ll get news of my sons, their children, and grandchildren. I can’t bug them directly-how horrid to be nagged by ten million ghosts of long-dead granny! Still, I expect they’ll transmit photos, now and then.

Granny. Her last living memories were of lined, leathery skin. Of fragility and pain and irritability with everyone who complimented her “spunkiness.” She had expected to wake up here as the old woman they recorded for uploading.

Now? Lacey felt less grannylike than ever! Even as a young woman, she had stooped under the burden of other peoples’ expectations. Her family’s aristocratic pretensions. The harpy-chivvyings of partygirl-papparazzi- fashionistas who kept flattering her away from better longings. The somewhat more rewarding life of bride, wife, and mother. The secret guilt of knowing that-but for all of those distractions-she might have focused on great things. Beautiful things.

Only now I’m a keystone member of the most important of all scientific endeavors! And my mind feels…

It might be a programmed illusion. But this virtual version felt young, vigorous, ready for challenges.

And then some. It hadn’t escaped Lacey’s attention how the tall, craggy Hamish Brookeman kept intermittently staring at her, then struggling to hide it. Jeepers. And I deliberately chose to appear age forty-two. Anyway, the man was hardly my favorite person, back in reality.

Of course, in this world Brookeman couldn’t hinder science, only help it. In fact, his talents might prove more valuable here than they ever were on Earth. We’ll need a storyteller and not just for distraction. When the data floods in, with glimpses of far-off worlds and alien beings, we tech-types will often seize the first theory or explanation that fits.

Brookeman would keep posing alternatives, just to be ornery! The overlooked but barely plausible “what-ifs.” Those irritating 1 percent improbabilities. Across this endless voyage, many 1 percenters would prove true.

Also, I admit, he seems likely to be… entertaining. Perhaps inexhaustibly. That could prove handy. For immortals.

Having wandered into the bedroom, Lacey found herself standing before a full length mirror, half aware of turning left and right. Till a curiosity caption popped up.

Body image: 85 percent accurate re-creation of former self at age thirty-seven.

Uh-oh. Preening.

She blinked. So this new life included sex and vanity?

With an unladylike snort, Lacey made a hand motion and the mirror vanished. Then she laughed.

* * *

The Great Telescope would complement other projects. Like archaeology in the asteroid belt, studying all types