“Some of the effects, though,” he added, “can be eerie. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid. And I’ve seen other odd stuff. I remember a woman who thought she’d regressed to her childhood, and a man who claimed to have seen through to the end of his days. Alternate personalities show up sometimes. One elderly passenger swore she’d become possessed. Another insisted he’d been followed on board by a werewolf.”

“A werewolf?”

Solly’s blue gaze locked on her. “You haven’t been seeing anything out of the ordinary, have you?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” She was quietly proud of herself.

“Tell me about Alnitak.”

Kim pushed back in her chair. “It’s a class O. Pretty hot, about thirty-five thousand times as bright as Helios.”

“Wear your sunglasses.”

“I’d say. It has two companion stars, both a long way out, but close enough to ensure that planets will probably never form. Or if they do, that they’ll be unstable.”

“But you said there is a planet.”

“Captured,” she reminded him.

“Alnitak.” He tasted the word.

“From the Arabic for ‘girdle.’”

They took over the briefing room for their first onboard dinner and put out a few candles. The windows, had they been real windows, could have revealed nothing other than the glow of the ship’s running lights, had Solly chosen to put them on. Instead he programmed a view of the Milky Way as it would have appeared to an approaching intergalactic vehicle.

The meal itself was quiet. Solly usually carried more than his share of the conversation, but he had little to say that evening. The candles and the wine and the galactic disk provided an exquisite atmosphere. The food was good. Yet Kim felt the weight of her decision, and worried that she might be wrong, that she might have overlooked something, that she might have destroyed Solly’s career. And her own. They were probably swearing out warrants at this moment. “I wish,” she said, “that I could come up with any kind of explanation why they would have kept it quiet. I mean, contact would be the story of the age.”

“Don’t know,” said Solly.

She looked up from a piece of corn. “We’ve more or less assumed that everybody feels the same way about celestials that we do. That everybody wants to find them if they’re out there. Except maybe Canon Woodbridge and probably the Council. But there might be a lot of people who’d prefer the status quo. Who’d just as soon we not discover that we have company.”

Solly’s face was framed by the candles. “I’m one of them,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid. Look, Kim, life is pretty good right now. We have everything we could possibly want. Security. Prosperity. You want a career, it’s there. You prefer lying around the beach for a lifetime, you can do that. What can celestials give us that we don’t already have? Except things to worry about?”

“It might be a way to find out who we are.”

“That’s a cliché. I know who I am. And I don’t real’y need philosophy from some thing that may in fact look on me as a potential pork chop. There’s a real downside with this, especially considering your experience in the Severin. And I’m sorry, but I can’t see much upside. For you and me, maybe, if this pays off. But I think the human race, in the long run, would not benefit.”

She pushed back from her food and stared at him. “Considering how you feel, I can’t understand why you came.”

“Kim, if they’re out there, then it’s just a matter of time before we meet them. I don’t like it, and I’d stop it if I could. But it has the feel of inevitability about it. If it happens, it’ll be a big moment. I’d just as soon be there. And we’re probably better off if we know it’s coming.”

“Hunter instinct,” said Kim.

“How do you mean?”

“Hide in the bushes. Kill or be killed. Are those the kind of conditions you really think would exist between interstellar civilizations?”

“Probably not. What I said was, it could happen. And since things are pretty good right now, I can’t see why we’d want to change anything. Why take chances? Leave well enough alone.”

“Solly, why do you think we went to Mars?”

He dipped a roll into his soup, bit off a piece, and chewed it thoughtfully. “We went to Mars,” he said, “because we recognized that exploitation of the solar system would have long-term economic benefits.”

“You really think that was the motivation? Long-term economic benefits?”

“It’s what the history books say.”

“The history books say Columbus headed out because he wanted to establish trade routes to India.”

“Last I heard, that was the explanation.”

“It was a cover story, Solly. It was intended to help Isabella make the right decision. To hock her jewels, have an argument ready for her councilors, and at the same time to follow the call of her DNA.”

“The call of her DNA?” He looked amused. “You always did have a talent for poetry, Kim.”

She waited patiently while he finished his wine.

“So,” he asked at last, patting his lips with his napkin, “what was the call of her DNA?”

“It wasn’t trade routes,” said Kim.

“So what was it?”

“Outward bound,” she said. “Exploration. To set foot, either in person or by proxy, in places that have never been seen before.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” said Solly. “But we’ve done that. We’ve set foot in a lot of places over the last few centuries. What’s that have to do with celestials?”

“We’ve accepted the notion we’re alone.”

“We probably are.” Solly reached for the decanter and refilled their glasses. “Maybe there’s somebody out there somewhere, but they’re probably so far away it’ll never make a difference. Yes: for practical purposes, I think we can proceed as if we’re alone.”

“The problem with that,” she said, “is that we’ve become complacent and selfsatisfied. Bored. We’re shutting down everything that made us worthwhile as a species.”

“Kim, I think you’re overstating things.”

“Maybe. But I think we need something to light a fire under us. The universe has become boring. We go to ten thousand star systems and they’re always the same. Always quiet. Always sterile.”

“Is that why Emily was on the Hunter? Is that the way she felt?”

“Yes,” said Kim. “She tried to explain herself to me when we used to go down to the beach.”

“You remember that!”

“She asked me if I knew why ships always traveled along the coast? Why they never put out to sea?”

“Oh,” said Solly. It was because there was nothing there. Just water for thousands of kilometers, until you’d rounded the planet and arrived at the western side of Equatoria. Back where you started.

“That’s where we are, Solly. On the beach, looking out at an ocean that doesn’t go anywhere. As far as we know.” Her eyes slid shut. “But if there’s really nowhere to go, I don’t think we have much of a future.”

After dinner they watched On the Run, an irreverent chase comedy in which several unlikely characters discover they’re clones of some of history’s arch criminals and find themselves the targets of a desperate manhunt. An interactive version was available, but they were both tired and satisfied just to sit and watch.

She fell asleep toward the end and woke after midnight, alone in the room. The projector had shut itself off, Solly had apparently gone to bed, and she sat for a time staring at the Milky Way.

For meals, they eventually took over the mission control center. It was small and consequently more intimate than the dining area. They spread a tablecloth over one of the consoles and discovered it worked very nicely.

Solly varied the views in the windows. Sometimes she looked out at star fields or at generated worlds, sometimes at waterfalls or a mountainscape or even downtown Seabright.

“What’s it really like outside?” she asked.