CHAPTER 45
On the voyage back to Sol, Nansen often sought the command center. There was seldom any need for it. As ever, Envoy mostly conned herself, making leap after zero-zero leap so smoothly that her crew never noticed the transitions. Only when she was about to pause and orbit free, in the normal state, for the taking of observations, did captain and engineer stand by their posts, and that was more from a sense of duty than because they anticipated any problems.
But in between such times, when he wanted to be alone and felt as if his cabin were closing in on him, he would come sit among instruments and quietness, dim the interior lights, activate the great viewscreens, and lose himself in the splendor around.
Late one daywatch, about at midpassage, he heard a light footfall behind him. Turning his head, he saw Dayan enter through the dusk he had made. She wore a gray coverall and he could not make out the red of her hair, but stars and Milky Way touched it with frost. As he rose from his seat, she caught her breath. He wondered why. It did not occur to him that he stood limned against the cosmos.
“Well, welcome,” he said. His pleasure was as genuine as his surprise.
“I’m . . . not sure I will be,” she answered.
“You always are, Hanny.”
Her gaze dropped, lifted anew toward his, and held steady. The change in her mood, from the optimism and exuberance of her projects with Yu, was like a sudden cold wind upon him. She plunged ahead: “I’m sorry to interrupt your thinking.”
“I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t be sorry if you did.”
“But — I suppose you can guess why I’m here.”
He smiled. “Because I happen to be?”
His fragile cheerfulness broke under her words. “I thought you should hear first, privately, and I didn’t want to wait till you were in your cabin. I’d have had to fend off everybody else’s questions.” She glanced away, at a cloudlet glimmering in the crystal blackness, a nebula where suns were coming to birth. “Besides, this place is more right, somehow.”
“It’s about your latest observations, isn’t it?” he asked slowly. They had not been quick or easy, she alone out on the hull. Sundaram, Zeyd, and Mokoena lacked skill to help her; she had declined Nansen’s and Yu’s offers, declaring that, slight though the risk might be, the ship could spare neither of them.
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve finished reducing the data.”
He folded his arms and waited. Ventilation rustled, no louder than bloodbeat in ears. At this point of its cycle the air verged on chilly, with an autumnal smell.
“No further room for doubt,” Dayan said. “Starflight in the region of Sol is — has been — decreasing. Steeply. Toward extinction.”
Twilight shielded faces. “It had begun to seem that way,” Nansen murmured.
“We weren’t sure. Statistical fluctuations — Now, though, the tracks I measured this time —” She swallowed. After a second she had forced dry-ness on her tone. “A total of nineteen. The maximum distance from Sol was fifty-five light-years, plus or minus three. The mean distance was about twenty.”
“Down from sixty-two flights averaging fifty light-years each,” he recalled. “Ten weeks ago.”
“A thousand years ago, star time,” she reminded him, needlessly, desperately.
“And now — no, ‘now’ is meaningless — these wave fronts new to us are twenty-five hundred years old,” he mused. “Human starfaring peaked maybe four thousand years after we left home. Then the ebb set in.”
“Figurative figures,” she said, regaining prosaicism. “I’ll have more exact values in my report.”
Nansen stood mute for a little. The stars gleamed multitudinous in constellations that still were strange to Earth. “Do the numbers make much difference?” he replied. “What matters is what we find when we come . . . home. Or don’t find.”
Defiance stirred. “Or as the Yankees used to say, ‘We ain’t licked yet.’ For all we know, enterprise has been recovering.”
He looked at her. Eyes caught starlight and gave it back out of shadow. “Do you really believe that?”
The liveliness died. “I’d like to. But probably I don’t.”