“And… if we should find them, if we should… I will be ready to speak with them.”
Only later, having left a pledge behind her not to limit Joelle as long as no danger signals appeared, did Caitlin think of the last sentence, the unspoken one. I will be ready to join them.
Chinook flew.
The common room was asparkle with newly made decorations. Organ tones pealed from a data retrieval, through whose hologrammic screen glimpses of Earth and Demeter slowly paraded, a flower garden, an ocean sunset, a mountain peak, a tree in a meadow. Elsewhere, the stars and the galactic heart shone. Clad in their best, Dozsa, Weisenberg, Leino, Frieda, and Caitlin flanked a table behind which Brodersen stood. In front of him, Rueda and Susanne were hand in hand. At the rear of the chamber waited a feast which had been days in the preparing.
Joelle alone was absent, but aware in her ascendancy of what went on.
She had given the party her awkward benediction. A permanent watch must be maintained against the chance of an alien vessel emerging, to set instantly in action everything programmed, and she could replace the two who ordinarily were posted.
Brodersen lifted the papers he needed. He being neither priest nor magistrate and the couple not sharing the same faith, it wouldn’t have felt right to look up and use a traditional service. Caitlin had written this, and inscribed it with calligraphic flourishes as an extra gift for her friends.
She should’ve presided, too, he thought. She’d put on a better show. I’m a slouch of a parson. I… damnation, my eyes are stinging and blurring, I’m not about to cry, am I? Lis, Lis, the sunbeams through the chapel window when we-
“Dearly beloved,” he began, “upon this day of our exile we are gathered to create a home. Lost, but lost among splendors; imperilled, but charged with hope: we ask the blessing of God, or we ask the blessing of life, on these two of us, Carlos and Susanne. We thank them for the courage they have renewed, the spirit they have brightened. Shipmates, may joy be always yours! Now let us witness your vows, the while that we pledge anew to each other-”
A siren screamed.
Chinook was not far from the T machine, moving outward, to make a whole four hours available for ceremony and festivities before turnover interrupted.
At electronic speed, Joelle switched the proper viewscreen to full magnification. The querning cylinder and a pair of its beacons seemed to leap into the room. But nobody glimpsed more than a blur, that whipped past sight and was gone.
After a moment wherein music was obscene against the silence, Joelle’s voice came, flat: “A ship. She completed transit in thirtyseven seconds.”
“Nombre de Dios,” Rueda whispered, and caught his bride to him.
Before she could lose a tear, Caitlin was holding them both. Across their shaken shoulders, she called to Brodersen, “Dan, we’ve a larger matter to finish, aye, and celebrate, before we think about that unlucky business. Will you begin over?”
The captain sat alone in his office. Its private line was connected to the holothete. His jaws clamped hard on a pipe, which had turned the air around him acrid and was scorching his tongue. A bottle of whisky stood on his desk beside the printouts of highspeed photographs.
Those pictured a three-dimensional latticework, its widest dimension perhaps a kilometer, of no simple configuration, though graceful and fragile-seeming as a spiderweb at dawn, it also aglitter with dewdrop light. A pearly luminance cloaked the whole. That, and distance, left barest hints of any further details. The precise track it had taken had likewise escaped identification.
Joelle said: “I suspect the vessel is almost massless, almost entirely a construct of force-fields. Those could cushion passengers and cargo against the fantastic accelerations that took her through her guidepath. If there is a Side 167
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The cargo; if there are passengers. She may well be robotic – no, doubtless too crude a concept – and she may carry nothing but patterns, imposed on a few molecules, which are information. Why send your body anywhere? Why not a recording of your personality, that can be activated when it arrives – in an identical, manufactured body, or in one made for the particular purpose? It can do and experience whatever you want. Then it can return as a pattern and be…