“No need,” she answered. “I do wish, though, you’d take me at my word. I’ve told everybody what a good childhood I had, and then splendid times in Solar space before I got this berth, everything I could ask for. If I am a bit cross today, it’s because I recall how the things I loved, moors, woods, old towns full of kindness, old lifeways, I’ve seen them crumbling and by now they may be gone.” She shook her head. Gladness flowed back. “But the stars!”
She got to her feet. He stood up likewise, awkward and abashed. She caught his hands in hers. “Why this blethers about me? Oh, Tim, poor dear, I know how you feel, I’ve known for this past year or longer, and I am sorry.”
She kissed him. His response was shy. She laid her arms around his neck. His arms went around her waist. The kiss gathered strength.
She disengaged lithely. “Come,” she said, “we’d better get back to camp before sunset.”
CHAPTER 3
While they waited, Yu Wenji fell to remembering and hoping. She could not but say it aloud. “. . . and this time I’ll show you much more than my home village. We’ll go around the valley. Where the Hwang Ho winds among springtime blossoms — the loveliest land on Earth.”
“You may be prejudiced, my dear.” Wang Xi spoke absently, most of his attention on instruments and controls.
Yu, seated beside him, smiled. “City boy.”
“Well, I’m willing to be convinced.”
The screen they faced did not show the heavens as the naked eye would have seen them. At the center of the view, an image stood steady athwart darkness. Its blinding brilliance stopped down, Sirius A shone a hard blue-white; prominences like red tongues licked from the disk. The corona, its own light enhanced, was an opal mane. That amplification also brought background stars into vision. Sol happened to be in their direction, one spark amidst a throng.
The screen was not for scenery. It monitored an optical system that Yu had lately had to overhaul. Perhaps a lingering uneasiness about it — he was such a worrier, she often thought, such an overconscientious darling — struck through when Wang added, “Of course, you assume those things we knew will be there still.”
Yu stiffened. “They will be. They must. We won’t have been gone too long.” A year here, observing, probing, establishing robotic instruments which would remain to transmit further revelations. Seventeen years to and fro — aboard ship, less than a month.
“We’ll see.” They had been over this ground too often.
Happily, at that moment a hell tone sounded. “Hold!” Wang said. “It’s begun!”
Readings and displays came alive. He lost himself, concentrating on them. Yu’s attention ranged more widely, watchful for any possible malfunction. He was a researcher, she an engineer. But her work required a deeper knowledge of physics than many physicists possessed. Husband and wife had become a scientific team.
The data pouring in were more than an hour old. No living creature dared come near that huge sun, nor to its companion. They radiated too fiercely. This newly activated station was the first to take orbit around Sirius B.
A visual showed the latter star white-hot. It flickered at the edges. Ghostly whirls raced across it, flung in and out of view by a frantic rotation: storms in an atmosphere compressed to a thickness of a few kilometers. The image drifted over the screen and out of sight, out of detection range, borne by the thirty-odd million kilometers per hour at which the white dwarf whipped around A.
But a probe had sprung from the station and hurtled inward. Heavily shielded, its instruments had beamed their findings with lasers that plasma clouds could not block. Rage ramped —
The screen went blank. The probe’s defenses had been quickly overwhelmed. Yet its kamikaze dive had given far more than a brief spectacle. Knowledge of mass distributions, vectors, fields, fluxes, a thousand different aspects of reality had been gained. More was still arriving from the station, a tumble of terabytes.
“All seems well,” Yu said, not quite steadily.
Wang leaped from his seat and danced across the deck. This near the spin axis of the ship, weight was only about a fourth of Earthside; he bounced around like a ball. “Wonderful, wonderful!” he caroled. “Now we’ll learn something!”