Hie peace with Hanno that each had made on his or her own terms did not strengthen into the former fellowship. If anything, it thinned, stretched by a new guardedness. What might be want next, and how might someone else react? He had promised that eventually they would go on to Phaeacia; but when would that be, would it ever, could he then betray it? Nobody made accusations, or indeed brooded much on the matter. Conversation was generally free and easy, if not intimate, and he joined again in some recreations—but no more in shared dreams, once their training purpose had been served. He remained half the outsider, in whom none but Aliyat confided, and she little except for her body.
He did not attempt to change their attitudes. He knew better; and he knew, as well, how to pass lifetime after mortal lifetime among strangers to his spirit.
Tritos grew in sight.
Pytheas cast signals ahead, radio, laser, neutrino. Surely the Allot had detected the ship from afar, roiling the dust and gas of space, braking with a flame out of the furnace engine. Receivers caught no flicker of response. “Have they gone?” Macandal fretted. “Have we come this whole way for nothing?”
“We’re still many light-hours off,” Wanderer reminded her. Hie hunter’s patience was upon him. “Can’t talk very readily. Not at all by electromagnetic waves, while our drive blazes in front of us. And … I would scan a newcomer first, before leaving my cover.”
She shook her head, half angrily. “Forget the Stone Age, John. Anything like war or piracy between the stars isn’t just obscene, it’s absurd.”
“Can you be absolutely certain? Besides, we could be dangerous to them, or they to us, in ways neither party has managed to imagine.”
Tritos brightened. Without magnification, simply with the fight stopped down, eyes beheld the disc, spots upon it, flares leaping aloft. Offside stood a bluish-white steady spark that was the second planet. Now spectroscopy gave details of land and water surfaces, air mostly nitrogen and oxygen. The travelers changed course to intercept. The name they bestowed was Xenogaia.
The hour came when Pytheas called, “Attention! Attention! Coded signals detected.”
The eight crowded into the command room. That wasn’t physically necessary. They could quite well have perceived and partaken from their separate quarters. It was merely impossible for them not to be side by side, breath mingling with breath.
The message employed the same basic system as had the robots—a dozen years ago ship’s time, three and a half cosmic centuries—minus relativistic adjustments no longer required. It arrived by UHF radio, from somewhat aft, to avoid ionization that was no longer enormously strong but could still interfere. “The source is a comparatively small object about a million kilometers distant,” Pytheas reported. “It has presumably lain in orbit until we came this near. At present it is accelerating to match our vectors. Radiation is weak, indicating high efficiency.”
“A boat?” Hanno wondered. “Has it a mother ship?”
Pytheas assembled the images transmitted. They sprang into vivid existence. First appeared a starscape, then an unmistakable Tritos (you could compare what was in a view-screen), then a dizzying zoom in on … forms, colors, a thing that swept lopsidedly around a larger. “That must be Xenogaia,” Patulcius said into a thick silence. “It must be where they stay.”
“I think they are preparing us for what comes next,” Yukiko said.
The representation vanished. A new form was there.
They could not, at once, properly see it. The contours, the mathematical dimensionality were too exotic, too far beyond any expectation. Thus had it been for Svoboda and Wanderer when first they glimpsed high mountains—snow-clouds, heaven gone wrinkled, or what? “More art?” Tu Shan puzzled. “They do not make pictures like any that humans ever did. I think they do not sense like us.”
“No,” Hanno said, “this is likelier a straightforward hologram.” The hair stood up on his arms. “Maybe they don’t know how we see, either, but die reality is die same for all of us … I hope.”
The image moved, a stow and careful pirouette revealing it from every angle. It reached out of the scene and brought back a lump of something soft, which it proceeded to mold into a series of geometrical solids, sphere, cube, cone, pyramid, interlinked rings. “It’s telling us it’s intelligent,” Aliyat whispered. Blindly, she crossed herself.