“I’m happy I could help.” You’re almost where I want you, Dana. Now take the final step.
“World enough, or time,” Dana mused aloud.
“So it goes,” Li said.
“What if…?”
“If what, Dana?”
“Suppose we all begin discussing candidate names. Planets and moons. Continents and oceans. Mountains and rivers and reefs. Everything will need a place name once we find our new home. Suppose we let those names remind us, and instruct us, about our past accomplishments. Maybe, great thinkers. Maybe, philosophers. Or poets. Or scientists.”
Li grinned. “I like it. If your proposal doesn’t get everyone thinking about humanity’s great accomplishments, and whom from our history we should honor, and whom we should strive to emulate, I can’t imagine what will.”
“Thanks again, Li. Net me that reading list.” And then Dana was gone.
No, thank you, Captain.
Because you are about to set off a tidal wave of independent thinking.
18
Carlos had avoided cargo hold three since the day he’d been carried out strapped to a stretcher. The other two holds were crammed; apart from the central corridor, no place else aboard would have accommodated all of them.
He would rather have stood on the ladder.
Instead, grinding his teeth, making himself stand tall, he followed the others into the hold. He took a spot beside Li, between two cold-sleep pods.
“Is everyone comfortable?” Dana began.
Yeah, right. He’d gengineered a virus to mod the software in his nanites, but it remained mere theory that addled med bots had all but killed him in cold sleep.
Li said, “I believe I can speak for everyone in answering, ‘No.’”
“Fair enough,” Dana said amid chuckles. “We have something important to talk about. Just maybe, Antonio and Rikki have found our new home.”
That brought a smile to Carlos’s face.
Antonio said, “Marvin. Image…one.”
Someone had magneted a datasheet to the hold’s forward bulkhead. At Antonio’s halting request, the display came to life.
The parallel black lines, irregularly spaced, reminded Carlos of something he had once seen in a museum. Some kind of ancient product identifier.
“Absorption lines,” Antonio explained. “A glimpse of atmospheric composition. The constituent gases…gases…”
“Would you like me to explain?” Rikki asked.
“No thanks.” Antonio added something under his breath.
Carlos thought the mumble might have been, “Short words.” And could there have been something about twelve?
Antonio went on, “We’ve been surveying nearby stars. The lines are spectrographic data about a planet we observed crossing in front…of its star. The planet’s atmosphere absorbs…some of the starlight. Each gas absorbs at its own characteristic…wavelengths.”
“And these gases are?” Li asked.
Rikki beamed. “Oxygen, nitrogen, and hints of water vapor.”
Like Earth’s atmosphere, then. Only Dana had started off this session with a just maybe. What was the bad news? Carlos asked, “What does the planet look like?”
Antonio choked on at least three answers, or justifications, or excuses, before sputtering to a halt. After a deep breath, he got out, “We can’t see it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rikki said. “This does: the planet has an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Without replenishment, an atmosphere doesn’t retain oh-two. As happened on Mars, the oxygen gets trapped as oxide in the rocks. So we know this world has oxygen-producing life. The water vapor suggests oceans, too.”
Carlos reserved judgment on whether distant gases mattered. “Where is this world?”
Antonio said, “About fourteen light-years…from here. Toward the Coalsack.”
Li shivered.
Dana said, “I remember as well as anyone that we set out to go four light-years. But consider the experience we’ve gained. We know Endeavour is good for the distance. We know that the cold-sleep pods are good for the distance. And we—”
Opinions differ about how well the pods work, Carlos thought. “How long do you anticipate it would take to get there?”
“Twenty to thirty years,” Dana said, “which allows for decelerating on the other side. Without a cosmic string to follow, we’ll experience relativistic effects. We don’t know how the DED performs in those circumstances. I’m not inclined to stress the drive.”
Blake said, “In my opinion, we should get moving sooner rather than later.”
“Not so fast,” Carlos said. “We’ve only been surveying for a few days. Might there be something better, closer?” Someplace we could reach without the cold-sleep pods?
“A fair question.” Dana said. “Antonio?”
“The nearest star is five light-years from us. That star is a red dwarf. It could be a flare star, as many…red dwarfs are. Regardless, very cool. Its liquid-water zone will be very narrow. Almost surely it has no habitable planets.”
“Does it have planets?” Carlos asked.
Antonio shrugged.
“Do any nearby stars have planets?” Li asked. She laughed uncertainly, as if at the absurdity of applying nearby to objects light-years-distant.
“Statistically, several…should,” Antonio said. “That’s based on what we know about solar systems. With our instruments, the challenge is…spotting them.”
Because we need more challenge, Carlos thought. The universe has taken it so easy on us thus far. “Maybe you could explain that.”
Antonio looked pleadingly at Rikki. She nodded.
“We can’t see planets,” Rikki said. “Not with this telescope. Not at anything near these distances. That brings us to an indirect method, the way astronomers found the first extrasolar worlds. We look for stars that wobble back and forth from the tug of their orbiting planets.
“We won’t know what we have, though, until we see the full cycle of a wobble. If a planet takes, as an example, a standard year to orbit its star, we’d need half that time to deduce its orbit. And till we understand a planet’s orbit, until we compare that orbit to the luminance of the star, we can’t begin to guess whether the planet is in the habitable zone.”
“Six months cooped up in this tin can?” Blake said. “We don’t have the supplies for that.”
“You’re right, we don’t,” Dana said.
“Then how did you two spot the oxygen planet?” Carlos asked.
“There’s another method for spotting planets.” Rikki tipped her head, furrowed her forehead, choosing her words. “Imagine a planet that’s crossing between its star and our ship. We can’t see the planet—it’s too small and it’s lost in the glare—but from our vantage point it covers a bit of the star. The starlight we see
