At three hundred AUs, the world was eight times farther out than Endgame was from Helios, or six times Pluto’s distance from Sol. It had seventeen satellites and a ring system divided into three sections. A permanent storm of the kind often associated with gas giants floated in its southern latitudes. It required roughly twenty-three centuries to complete an orbit around the central luminary, which even at this extreme distance, was fully a third as bright as Greenway’s noontime sun.
Solly set course toward the planet.
“The system,” said Kim, “has been surveyed once. That was a hit and run, in-and-out. They spent two days here. There are no really unusual features, unless you’re talking about the atmospherics.” She meant the vast interstellar clouds, cradles for new stars, turbulent and explosive, illuminated from within and also by Alnitak. The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light-years across that restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and interior fires. Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in place.
“Slow lightning,” said Solly. “Like the mission.”
Kim looked at the nebula. “How do you mean?”
“We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.”
On the other side of the sky, a long luminous bar, IC434, stretched away into a glorious haze. Presiding over it was the great dark mass of the Horsehead Nebula.
“It’s a place for artists.” She stood by a window looking out at the vast display. The brilliant rings of the gas giant angled past her field of vision, a glowing bridge to its family of moons, all in their first quarter. She looked again at the blowup of Kane’s mural. It was impossible to know whether this world was the one in Emily’s hand. But she’d have bet on it.
There were two other suns in the system, one too remote to pick out, the other bright enough to provide reading light. The nearer was approximately 1300 AUs from Alnitak. It too was superluminous, though not in the same league with its companion. “People used to think a binary star couldn’t have a planetary system,” she told Solly. “We know better now, but the planets tend to get tossed around a lot, and often thrown out altogether. Especially when both components are massive and there isn’t a lot of space between them.” She eased herself into a chair and gazed steadily at the rings and moons. “It won’t stay in orbit long. It’s just a matter of time before something jerks it loose.”
The planetary disk had an autumnal coloration. The storm was a darker splotch, a circular piece of night. “About one and a half Jupiters,” he said, using the standard measurement for gas giant mass. “I’m beginning to understand why they decided this was the place to stop while Kane did his patchwork.”
“It is spectacular. I looked over the records of Tripley’s previous voyages,” said Kim. “He was here before. Wanted to see the Horsehead.”
Solly stared at the clouds and the world for long minutes, and then turned to her. “What do we do first?”
Good question. “We go into orbit. And then we wait.”
“Kim,” he said, “we were a little critical of Tripley for being unprepared to run a contact scenario. Are we ready? If something happens?”
She drew herself up in her professorial mode. “Be assured,” she said, “nothing will happen.” They both laughed. In fact, Kim had prepared a visual program to transmit in the event there was an encounter. It included pictures of the Valiant and the Hunter, of herself and Solly, of interiors of the Hammersmith. There were pictures of Greenway’s forests and oceans, of people lounging on beaches. There were anatomical charts of humans and several dozen animals and plants. And finally there was an image of three Valiants and three Hammersmiths silhouetted against the rings of the Jovian; and the Jovian itself followed by four hundred lines divided into tens. She showed it to Solly.
“We meet back here when the planet has turned on its axis four hundred times.”
“Good,” he said. A day on the gas giant lasted between seventeen and eighteen hours. So they were talking roughly one year. Enough time to outfit an expedition, work out their strategy, and return. “Kim,” he asked, “how do you want me to program, the sensors? What exactly are we looking for?”
“Set for maximum sweep and range. And we should look for anything that wouldn’t normally be out there. Processed metal. Plastic. Anything that isn’t gas, rock, or ice. Or anything that moves on its own.”
The original survey gave few details for the gas giant. Kim knew it had an equatorial diameter of 187,000 kilometers, and a polar diameter of 173,000 kilometers. Average density was only 1.2 times that of water, indicating a high proportion of the lighter elements, hydrogen and helium. Its axial tilt was 11.1 degrees.
Its most striking feature was the rings, which were coplanar with the equator. They had an overall diameter of 750,000 kilometers, and were divided into three distinct sets. The innermost reached down almost to the cloudtops. They were barely one kilometer thick, so when the Hammersmith passed them edge-on they all but vanished.
Two of the satellites were larger than Greenway; one minuscule worldlet at the outermost extremes of the system was only a half-dozen kilometers across. It orbited almost at right angles to the equator.
“It would help,” said Kim, “if we knew precisely where the incident took place.”
“How do you mean?”
“Altitude. Orbit, if possible.”
“Don’t see how we can determine that,” said Solly. “We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet’s not visible at all.”
“But we know when everything happened,” said Kim. “We know now right to the minute.” Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42 A.M. shipboard time. “We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background.”
“The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system,” he objected.
“The stars would,” she agreed.
But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.
There were two.
They ran the sequence again. Hunter floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights coming on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi’s smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.
They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they’d accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12 P.M., February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.
“Okay.” Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. “In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the Hunter would have had to be here.” He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. “But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it’s not enough to track a complete orbit.”
“We’ve got a second picture,” Kim reminded him. The Emily image, which had been taken two hours later.