His smile warmed. “You have an overactive conscience, my dear.”
She smiled back and teased, “Have you none?”
He went serious again. “Oh, I feel my occasional qualms. But I don’t have your — tenderness, beneath the tough competence. I am too detached.”
“Nonsense. You are the kindest man I have ever known.”
“And you —” He leaned forward in his chair. They clasped hands.
Less than two shipboard hours after she had gone zero-zero, Envoy arrived at the pulsar.
CHAPTER 28
Year Four
Nine-tenths of a light-year distant, the sun of Tahir stood lord among the stars. But it was another point of light that vision sought, nearly as bright as Sirius in the skies of Earth. Enhancing every other stellar image, the screen mildened this one, for it would have burned a hole in the retina of a naked eye.
“One millionth Solar luminosity,” Dayan said like a prayer to a pitiless god, “shining from a body ten kilometers in diameter. Therefore nineteen thousand times the intensity; and that’s just in the visible spectrum.”
Her companions could well-nigh hear the thoughts prowling through her. The core of an exploded giant sun, a mass almost half again Sol’s, jammed down by its own gravity till it’s that small, that dense, no longer atoms but sheer neutrons, except that at the center the density may go so high that neutrons themselves fuse into something else, hyperons, about which we know little and I lust to know more. An atmosphere a few centimeters deep — incandescent gaseous iron? What storms go rampant through it, what quakes rack the ultimate hardness beneath, and why, why, why? A spin of hundreds per second, a magnetic field that seizes the interstellar matter and whips it outward till it nears the speed of light, kindles a radio beacon with it that detectors can find across the breadth of the galaxy. O might and mystery! Out of the whirlwind, God speaks to Job.
Cleland’s voice trembled. “How close dare we come?”
“The ship will decide,” Dayan answered, her tone flat, her mind still at the star. “Not very, I think. It’s blazing X-rays, spitting plasma and neutrinos — lethal.”
“Besides,” Brent put in dryly, “we’re at about two hundred AU now. Another jump in that direction, and we’d certainly fry.”
“But we’re no so far frae the planet we ken, are we?” Kilbirnie cried. “We’ll tak’ our station ’round it, no?” And explore it, said the glance she exchanged with Cleland.
Of the three Tahirians, Colin and Fernando stared as raptly at the object of the quest — and beyond it, into the cold cataract of the Milky Way? Leo stood aside, ens mane held stiff. The powers on Tahir, whoever they were and whatever their power meant, had required that a person whom they would pick come along to observe.
The spaceboat was not intended for humans. There was no way Envoy could have carried it or any of its kind on her expedition. Not only the hull docks but the entire control system would have had to be rebuilt, which would have caused dangerous instabilities elsewhere in the robotic complex that she was. Improvised facilities — for security, sanitation, nourishment, sleep — enabled humans to go as passengers in the boat. Lately Yu and the Tahirian physicist Esther had jerry-rigged circuits that allowed a skillful human to act as pilot — temporarily, under free-space conditions with plenty of safety margin.
“Hoo-ah!”
Ruszek tickled the board before him. The craft leaped. Nonetheless, weight inside held steady. The moon loomed enormous in sight, a sweep of smooth-fused stone studded with structures, curving sharply to a near horizon. Ruszek cut the drive. Zero gravity felt like an abrupt fall off a cliff. The three aboard had learned to take it as a bird does. The boat swung low around the globe on a hyperbolic hairpin and lined out for the great blue crescent of Tahir.
“That will do,” said Yu from aft. “Let us return.”
“Jarvany,” grumbled Ruszek. “I hoped for more of this.” His tone was genial, though, and a smile bent his mustache toward his brows.
Harnessed beside Yu, Esther asked, “(Did you record the data you need?)” En quivered and fluted; sweet odors wafted from the skin.