Infinity Beach (16 page)

Kane got on a channel that was probably private and told Kile Tripley that
Hunter
should be scheduled for a general overhaul on her return. Kim fast-forwarded the record until a bank of green lamps lit up the console.
“Going hyper,”
Kane said.

Lights blinked, dimmed, brightened, blinked again.

Kane looked at his instruments and, apparently satisfied,
told his passengers that the jump was completed. He asked each of them to check in, and informed them they were free to walk about as they liked. He got up, stretched, and left the room. The imager shut down.

The clock ran off seven minutes and he was back in with Tripley. The mission leader had been rethinking the destinations, and was considering going
here
instead of
there
. A larger number of old class Gs in one area, too much radiation thrown off by nearby young supergiants in another. Here was a new order of places he’d like to visit. They’d still go to their initial series of targets. But after that he wanted to make the adjustment. Could Kane manage it without undue difficulty?

The captain suggested he leave the list.
“I don’t see any problem, Kile,”
he said.
“We’ll need to work out what it’ll do to the duration of the flight. Otherwise—”
He held out his hands to indicate he’d go along with whatever Kile preferred.

During the balance of that first day, and for much of the time following, the pilot’s room was empty. The clock leaped forward over durations of several hours at a time. The calendar began to click off numbers. At precisely 8:00
A.M.
daily, Kane entered, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or another of the crew, and studied the control panel. He talked to the AI, in effect asking it whether there were any anomalies, whether it foresaw any difficulties, whether there were anything it wished to call to his attention. The interactions acquired a ceremonial quality.

“It’s a precaution,” Solly said. “Required by the regs. They’ve built in a lot of redundancy, so it’s hard to imagine any sequence of events that could lead to trouble without alarms going off in plenty of time. Still, we all go through the same routine. Truth is, I think it’s intended to make the pilot feel as if he’s got something to do.”

Here for the first time Kim saw the living Yoshi Amara. She was vibrant and alive and full of enthusiasm for the mission, absolutely convinced that they would not come home without success. She was, Kim thought, a gorgeous young woman. Dark hair, dark eyes, offset by a gold chain and a gold bracelet.

“She must have had money,” said Solly.

Kile Tripley seemed to enjoy the pilot’s room. Other than the pilot, he spent more time there than anyone, often slumped back in the right-hand chair, his long legs crossed, usually reading, sometimes making notes. When Kane was present, or one of his colleagues, he tended to talk about what it would be like to round the curve of a new world, gliding into the night, and see patches of light across its continents. Kim understood that he’d made that run countless times, and that the night had always remained unbroken. As it had through the whole of human history.

“Can you imagine what it would mean,”
Tripley said over and over,
“if we can find them?”
Not
whether they’re there
, but
if we can find them
.

Kim saw what Tripley apparently did not, that Kane did not believe there was anything to find; or if there was, that it was so thoroughly lost among the stars that there could be no realistic hope for success. We could continue crossing the terminators without result, his dark eyes implied, until we get tired of it and find a more useful outlet for the Foundation’s resources.

But he must have seen no point in actively discouraging his employer. Yes, he said, the Golden Pitcher’s rich with class Gs, yellow suns like Sol and Helios. Travel time among them would be relatively short. They could cover a lot of ground in a year.

We
will
cover a lot of ground, Tripley would say. And:
“We’re going to do it this time, Markis. I know it.”

Kane inevitably responded with a nod and an abstract gaze, agreeing with Tripley but informing Kim that this was the conversation they always had. And nobody had ever found anything.

She was looking for an indication of tension between the two, but there was nothing to imply they did not get along, even though the personalities of the two men were vastly different: Kane was cool, deliberative, skeptical, methodical. Tripley was a believer, inclined to follow his emotions. But his instincts were good, and he was generally rational,
other than his fixation on celestials. He had his own vision of the world and did not allow reality to intrude. Had he been devoted to religion, he would have been among those who argued that there
was
a God and a heaven, because otherwise what would be the point of life? Kim’s overall impression was that he was a man who had never quite grown up. But it was clear he was utterly devoid of malice. She discarded the possibility that he might have killed Yoshi. Or anyone.

She glanced at his record. He had completed twenty-nine missions in search of his grail, totaling almost twenty-five years off-world. That qualified him as a fanatic, an
Ahab
. No wonder
Hunter
’s motto was
Persistence
.

Later, to Emily, Kane delivered a more realistic assessment:
“We’d need a hundred of these boats,”
he said.
“A thousand. Headed every which way. Then there might be a chance.”

Emily too had understood the odds.

This was the first time Kim had seen her sister in private interactions. They were three days into the flight before she came into the pilot’s room and Kim was finally able to observe her. Kane was already there, doing his morning routine. She strolled up behind him and
squeezed
his shoulder. Kane looked back at her and Kim understood that the presence of the imager, recording everything, was an impediment to them.

Solly glanced over at her but said nothing.

Emily slipped gracefully into the right-hand seat. She wore the mission jumpsuit, open at the neck just enough to reveal the curve of her breasts.

Kane commented that everything was going well. It was a nondescript remark, small talk, but his voice had dropped an octave. “They’re lovers,” Kim said, more to herself than to Solly.

There was nothing overt, of course. Kane and Emily gazed at each other with the kind of forced indifference that can only be displayed by people in love who are trying to hide the fact.

Yoshi was just out of her teens. Her grades had suggested promise, but she too was caught up in chasing the
Dream
. Kane took time whenever the opportunity offered to caution her that the missions had gone out many times. That it looked easy when there were hundreds of class Gs within a narrow field. That, despite the assumption that it was just a matter of finding the right one, there was no guarantee that there
was
a right one. No assurance that
any
star anywhere, other than Sol, had produced life. Accept the possibility, he told her.
“We may be alone.”

“It could not be,”
she said.
“It’s a basic scientific principle that nothing is unique.”

Kim noticed that the crew of the
Hunter
never talked about finding an
amoeba
. Judging from all the conversation about how to handle a first encounter, what kind of technology to look for, what dangers might be posed by an immensely advanced celestial, she saw that the discovery of a blade of grass, everybody else’s ambition, would have been a distinct disappointment to this outfit. At the very least, they hoped to unearth ruins somewhere, evidence that another intelligence had existed.

“Until we show that it can happen somewhere else,”
said Kane,
“we have to accept the possibility that the human race was divinely created.”

She laughed at the idea, but Kane smiled back.
“How else would you explain it?”
he asked. “The universal silence?”

She had no answer.

Kim listened as they discussed their strategy. First step was to calculate the area of a given sun’s biozone, and then to find the elusive blade of grass. Once they had done that, had found a living world, then they would proceed to hunt for evidence of intelligence, past or present.

It was all very optimistic. But after all, Tripley said at one point, that’s what makes it worth doing.
“It wouldn’t really be very sporting, would it, if there were life in every other system?”

By four
A.M.
Kim and Solly had reviewed the first six days of the mission, looking for hostility among the members of the research team, for indications of anything that might lead eventually to murder. It might have seemed a handicap that they were barred from overhearing conversations anywhere other than the pilot’s room, that in fact those who spoke for the record knew they were doing so, yet it was evident that the crew members got along well. Kane was almost always present during these dialogues, and there was never more than one other person with him, except on one occasion when Yoshi and Tripley arrived with sandwiches and beer.

There were some differences of opinion, minor and unavoidable among a group of people who talked politics and history, science and philosophy, apparently ran a book discussion group, and engaged in virtual gaming. Kim and Solly were never privy to the games, but they judged by what they heard afterward that they included a fair amount of sexual byplay. There was, however, no evidence of tension between Kane and Tripley, or between the women. Apparently there was an arrangement, but Kim couldn’t sort out its precise nature.

Solly had fallen asleep. Kim was weary but she wanted to hang on until she found out what would happen. If indeed
anything
would happen. She’d begun to fast-forward through the conversations, planning to come back later and listen more closely. Sometimes Kane was alone in the pilot’s room, reading, writing in a notebook, occasionally doing sketches on a pad which he kept on a side table. She thought she detected an early version of the
Autumn
.

She was moving quickly through the record when she saw, for the first time, an
empty
pilot’s room. A klaxon was sounding and lights were blinking. She noted the time: 11:17
P.M.
, February 17, the fifth day of the mission.

The picture went to a split screen, adding a shadowy area that she recognized as the engine room.

She woke Solly.

“Problem with the jump engines, looks like,” he said.

“But they’re in flight, right? Coasting. The jump engines aren’t actually doing anything at this point, are they?”

“They’re still online,” Solly explained, “and any of a number of things can go wrong.” He brought up the data stream and examined it for a few minutes. “Auxiliary feed system,” he said. “It’s a redundant safety feature. Monitors the antimatter flow controls during the jump. If there’s a problem, it takes over.”

“You mean the engines would still work okay without the system in place?”

“Oh, sure. But you don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because antimatter is a cranky fuel. It has a tendency to blow out controls. If the secondary system isn’t there, and you get any kind of overload at all, you can kiss your baby blues goodbye.”

Solly switched back to the visual record in time to see Kane come down the stairs into the engine room. Emily, wrapped in a robe, was right behind him. He paused before a console, touched it, and the alarms died.
“It’s okay,”
he told her.
“We’re not in danger.”

He sat down at a monitor and was paging through schematics when the others arrived.
“It’s the auxiliary feed system,”
he said.
“We’re going to have to abort the mission.”

“Abort?”
Emily looked stricken.
“Is it really that serious? Can’t we fix it?”

Kim knew
she
would have asked whether they were in trouble.

“I can jury-rig it temporarily. But we don’t want to be running around the Golden Pitcher with a busted AFS.”

“Why not?”
asked Tripley.
“What exactly is the risk?”

“Hard to put a number on it. It’s a safety device that we won’t need unless we need it. If you follow me. But my opinion doesn’t matter. The regs require us to head back.”

“Who’d ever know?”

“
I
would. We die out here, it’d be
my
responsibility.”
He took a deep breath.
“It’s not the end of the world, Kile. There’ll be another day.”

“Yeah.”
Tripley glared at the engine as if it had deliberately betrayed him.
“Okay, what do we do now?”

“I need a few hours to work on it. Make some temporary repairs. We’ll get out of hyper and do the job. When I’m finished, we’ll jump back in and head for home.”

“They have to get out of hyperspace,” Solly explained, answering the question he saw in her face, “in case something goes wrong. It’s a precaution against getting stranded.”

“Bingo,” said Kim. “This is where the encounter happens.”

“Home?”
Tripley said.
“Why not St. Johns? Why go all the way back home?”

“It’s a major job. Not the kind of thing they do out there. They’d do what I’m about to, put together a patchwork solution. But to get recertified for flight, we need Sky Harbor.”

Emily gazed up at Tripley.
“I’m sorry, Kile.”
She made a sympathetic face.

“Okay,”
he said.
“Do it. Goddammit.”

Kane opened a channel to the AI.
“
Hunter
, abort TDI. Take us out.”

“Wait a minute,” said Kim. “Are they near a star?”