She listened for two years, all the way to Earth III. She never heard it again.
She said nothing about this to Holle and the others.
94
July 2081
Venus brought Thandie’s old crystal ball out of storage one last time, and set it up at the heart of the hull, mounted on a strut attached to the fireman’s pole. Holle drifted beside her, clinging loosely to the pole, two solid, competent women in their sixties, side by side.
Helen Gray, clinging to a strut that had once supported a deck partition, glanced around as the crew settled into their places, all around the hull. People clung to guide ropes or handrails every which way up, unconscious of their differing orientations after so many years without gravity, and they made a shell of faces all turned toward Venus. Save only for the crew on watch in the shuttle and cupola, everybody was here, all chores suspended for the day, and there was a buzz of conversation.
Helen spotted her mother. Grace had her grandson, two-year-old Hundred, with her today; the little boy seemed fascinated by the whirling of the crystal ball. And there was Jeb, with seven-year-old Mario sitting on his shoulders. Close by was Mario’s best friend Diamond Murphy Baker, a year older than Mario, with his own parents, Magda and Max, and little Sapphire. Helen was struck how many children there were, the final shipborn. But the survivors of the original crew, those few who remembered Earth, were here too, like Venus and Holle, work- hardened sixty-somethings, and Cora Robles, now a contented grandmother. Wilson Argent hovered up near the apex of the hull, within the charred walls of what had once been his palace. Still a big man at sixty-plus, his hair snow white, he was alone; even now people were generally in awe of him.
If only Zane was here, Helen thought suddenly. She’d scarcely thought of Zane since his suicide three years back. For all his problems he had always achieved everything that had been asked of him. When they got around to building the statues on Earth III, Helen promised herself, there would be one for Zane Glemp, alters and all.
Now Venus seemed to be ready. She didn’t call for order but just looked around. She had always had a kind of natural command, Helen thought. Everybody quietened down quickly, save for the piping voices of a couple of the children. Venus touched her crystal ball. The whirling screens spun into invisibility to reveal a glowing pink- white sphere, a star small as a pea, with a single visible planet, one side illuminated by the star, the other in darkness. The hull’s big arc lights dimmed.
The session was suddenly so like Venus’s report on Earth II, when Kelly had challenged Wilson, provoking the Split. It was so long ago, Helen had only been nine years old and now she was a year away from forty, but she remembered its drama distinctly. The hull, a battered, half-burned-out wreck, was all but unrecognizable from the bright, clean ship of those days. Now it was more like a cave, with its charred walls and worn equipment racks and panels covered with the gangs’ graffiti scrawls. And yet the green plants still grew in their hydroponic beds down on the lower deck, and Holle’s pumps and fans still hummed as they cycled air and water through the hull’s levels. Like the worn-out crew, Halivah had done its job.
Venus began: “Well, we got here.”
There was a spontaneous storm of applause. Helen saw little Hundred happily clapping about something he couldn’t possibly understand, his grandmother’s hand on his shoulder to stop him drifting off into space.
Venus turned to her display. “Here is your new sun, the M-sun. These images have been assembled from observations taken from the cupola and the free-floating space telescopes.” The view panned in on the star, so that the pea-sized image swelled up to the size of a basketball. “It’s a red dwarf star, an unremarkable member of the constellation Lepus, not even visible to the naked eye from Earth. We are a hundred and eleven light-years from Earth, yet the star is not unlike the closest star of all to Earth, Proxima Centauri-though it has twice Proxima’s mass, about a fifth of a solar mass. And it’s small, about a quarter the sun’s diameter. It would fit into the Earth- moon system, in fact, with one edge brushing Earth, the other the moon. It’s of the stellar type M6.” She pointed at snakes of yellowish light that crawled across the star’s surface and reached up in spindly arches. “You can see it’s active. We can expect solar storms-lots of auroras. In fact it was a lot more active when it was younger, but it’s pretty quiescent now. There is no significant ultraviolet component in its light, for instance, unlike Sol. It will be a safe and stable sun-and it will outlive Sol a hundred times over.”
“And it’s white!” somebody yelled.
“Yes,” Venus said, and she grinned. “Its spectrum peaks in the infrared, but there’s enough light in the rest of its spectrum that close up it will saturate your eyes’ receptors, and will look white.”
“So much for Gordo and Krypton,” Wilson called down.
“And here is Earth III.”
The viewpoint panned back so that the pinpoint planet swam back into view, and then zoomed in. Everybody had had a chance to glimpse the new world through the cupola windows, to see an unfolding panorama of lakes and mountains and seas passing under the orbiting hull. But this was the first time they had been able to inspect the planet as a whole. There was another burst of applause, but it was muted, Helen thought. For Earth III looked nothing like Earth.
There was an ocean at its subsolar point, where the M-sun would be directly overhead. Further away continents could be made out, fractal shapes against the ocean’s face, wrinkled by mountain ranges and incised by river valleys. But unlike the gray-green of Earth’s continents seen from space the land was eerily black. And there was a kind of banding effect across the planet, concentric circles with different textures as you looked away from that oceanic subsolar point, so the sun-facing hemisphere looked like the targets they used in the kids’ microgravity archery contests. All this was obscured by a thick layer of atmosphere, with banked clouds at the higher latitudes, and haze as you looked toward the horizon. The shadowed side of the planet, the night side, was entirely dark save for lightning crackles. At the antipode to that subsolar point Helen saw the pale gleam of ice, illuminated by the faint light of the distant stars.
Huddling for warmth, Earth III orbited so close to its parent star that tides had long since massaged its rotation so that its day equalled its year, and it kept the same face permanently turned toward its sun. One side was in perpetual light, the other in unending darkness, save for the starlight. But even the side of perpetual day was so cold that glaciers draped equatorial mountaintops.
Maybe it was habitable. It was not like Earth. That was the basic truth that was driven home to Helen even as she first examined these images, even as Venus began to describe the new world.
Venus said, “Earth III is the innermost planet in its system, but there are other planets further out. More Earths and super-Earths. Not as easy to colonize as Earth III, but they’re there for our descendants-new homelands just waiting in the sky for them, off in the future.
“We looked for planets in the habitable zones of stars, that is the orbital radius where liquid water is possible on the surface, and that’s just what we found here. You can see the oceans. But this M-sun is a lot dimmer than Sol, so Earth III has to be closer in to its parent, only about ten million kilometers out-much less than the orbit of Mercury. The year is different, of course. Earth III’s year is just fifteen of our days long. The stars will shift quickly in the sky. But there is no ‘day,’ and there are no seasons. From the ground you will never see the sun move from the same position in the sky. And it’s cool. Even at the subsolar point you’ll only get about sixty percent of the radiant energy as you’d receive from the sun, on Earth. If you’re on the night side you never see the sun at all.” She pointed. “There’s an ice cap at the point of deepest shadow, as you can see. It gets pretty cold back there.
“You might wonder why the air doesn’t all freeze out on the dark side. It doesn’t work like that; the atmosphere is thick, full of greenhouse gases injected by volcanoes, a blanket that transports heat around the world. Also you have the planet’s own inner heat, which is greater than Earth’s. The climate is stable. It’s just different.
“And Earth III is larger than the Earth-that’s the most basic fact about it. It’s an exoplanet of the kind the planet-hunters called a super-Earth. It has around twice Earth’s mass, and maybe twenty-five percent higher gravity. That will feel hard, but you’ll soon muscle up, and your children will grow up stockier than you are and
