Fanion’s head jerked, a nod. “Yes. The oldest left, wasn’t she?” He blinked hard. “Well, I suppose death finally caught up with her, too.”
“Too?” asked Nansen.
“Word reaches us eventually, by laser beam if not by ship. Whether or not a particular vessel has called on us in centuries, she’ll have done so elsewhere. When nobody’s seen or heard of her for a very long time — then nobody ever does again.”
The things that can fatally happen. . . . But what did? There shouldn’t be any hazard in a familiar region like Tau Ceti’s, nothing she hasn’t dealt with over and over in her thousands of star-years.
“That’s my message, Captain Nansen,” the Kithman finished. “I wish it weren’t. I’ll inform you as soon as we learn more.”
“If you do,” Chandor said.
“Yes, if. God keep them yonder.” Fanion ended transmission, maybe afraid he couldn’t have gotten through the usual formalities.
Ghosts of nacre drifted in a wall gone bare. The sky outside shone as it had no right to shine. The city mumbled.
“God keep us all,” Chandor said, “and the hopes we had.”
“What do you mean?” Nansen demanded.
“You should know, Captain. How few and far between the Kith ships are. Now we probably won’t see any for more than a hundred years. When you and I are dead.”
“Unless another one happens to be bound here, too.”
“Hardly.” Chandor’s tone flattened. “It could chance to, I suppose, as thin as the trade is and as loosely organized as it always was. But in general, the ships settled long ago on a cycle of routes. It’s complicated and variable, no doubt — I don’t know the details — but roughly speaking, if this was Fleetwing’s turn to call on us, nobody else will for at least a century.”
“Oh, yes. Pardon me. I’ve heard that, but forgotten.”
Chandor smiled sadly. “Understandable, sir, as much as you’ve had to learn in four short years, and as much as you’ve been doing.”
Staving off grief as best he could, Nansen forced some resonance back into his voice. “This doesn’t have to be a disaster for the League.”
“I’m afraid it is, sir. Our opponents will be quick to take advantage. The psychological effects —”
“Well, you know your society better than I do.” A free society with an ideal of enterprise, where the story of the great pioneering era has the power of myth. Would its young really surrender their newborn dreams so soon?
Maybe. Those dreams are so very new.
“And, you know,” Chandor trudged on, “we were counting on a shipful of starfarers, their experience and example, their help.”
“Yes. We were.” He’s right, this could be the blow from which we can’t recover. “They may not be lost.” Don’t let it sound forlorn. “They may start up again — have started up again — and arrive in another seven or eight years.”
Chandor shook his head. His shoulders sagged. “I can’t believe it, sir.” He drew breath. “Once, before Envoy returned, I got to wondering about the mysterious disappearances. I’ve been interested in the Kith my whole life, you recall. I retrieved everything about them that’s in their database on Weyan. It goes back millennia, and includes many observations made elsewhere. Three times in the past, Shipwatch systems have detected trails — not bound their way, as it happened, but detectable — that suddenly ended. No one knows why.”
“Did no vessel make a search?”
“None were on hand. Except — let me remember — yes. A ship that stopped at Aerie, decades after an observation there, did go look, since the distance was fairly short, a few light-years. But she found nothing. Cumulative effects of uncertainties in the data, during the time that had passed. The search volume was too huge.”
“Wouldn’t survivors have broadcast a signal?”
“None was detected. The searchers gave up. Nobody else ever made such an attempt. They couldn’t afford to.”
A chill coursed through Nansen. He tautened. After a minute he said, gazing past the other man, out at the sky, “Perhaps we can.”
Chandor gaped. “Sir?”
“Let me use your visiphone, please.”
First Nansen called Dayan at their home and spoke briefly with her. Thereafter he told the communications net to find the rest of Envoy’s crew, widely scattered over the planet. It was to bid them get in touch and come to him as soon as possible.