Jack McDevitt - Chindi_玖贝云文库

Chindi - [2002]

By: Jack McDevitt

Book 3 of the Engines of God Series

Do not use driftwood to make a fire because it may have been cast on the

waters by a chindi, who will then track you by its light.

-Navajo taboo

In the forests of the night,

At the edge of the world,

The trees run on forever.

-Ivy Haemon. Collected Poems, 2114

We are in a sense still gathered around our campfires, telling each other

stories, wondering what’s out there in the dark. And we still do not know. We

still cannot see beyond the pale cast of the flickering light.

--Spenser Abbott. Bending the Symmetries, 2201

Live from Babylon and Ur,

From Athens and Alexandria and Rome, The voices of a thousand generations,

Press us,

Urge us on-.

--Tia Kosanna, The Long View, 2044

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted to David L. Dawson, M.D., NASA Johnson Space Center, and to

Walter Cuirle, for technical assistance; to Holly McClure, for the chindi; to

Christopher Schelling for his staying power with titles; to Ralph Vicinanza

for always being there when needed. To Sara and Bob Schwager for their work

with the manuscript. To Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan, who kept a candle

burning in the window. And as always to Maureen.

Dedication

For Susan and Harlan

Prologue

June 2220

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have

been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and

then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the

great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-—ISAAC NEWTON, C. 1725

THE BENJAMIN L. Martin, the Benny to its captain and passengers, was at the

extreme limit of its survey territory, orbiting a neutron star, catalog number

VV651107, when it cruised into the history books.

Its captain was Michael Langley, married six times, father of three, reformed

drug addict, onetime theology student, amateur actor, amateur musician,

disbarred lawyer. Langley seemed to have led at least a half dozen separate

lives, but it was of course not too difficult to do that when vitality into a

second century, and even sometimes into a third, was not uncommon.

The onboard survey team consisted of eleven specialists of one kind and

another, physicists, geologists, planetologists, climatologists, and masters

of a few more arcane fields. Like all the Academy people, they treated their

work very seriously, measuring, poking, and taking the temperature of every

available world, satellite, star, and dust cloud. And of course they loved

anomalies, when they could find one. It was a fool’s game, Langley knew, and

if any of them had spent as much time on the frontier as he had, she’d be

aware that everything they thought to be odd, remarkable, or “worth noting,”

was repeated a thousand times within a few dozen light-years. The universe was

endlessly repetitive. There were no anomalies.

Take for example this neutron star. It resembled a gray billiard ball, or

would have if they’d been able to light it up. It was only a few kilometers

across, barely the size of Manhattan, but it was several times more massive

than the sun. An enormous deadweight, so dense that it was twisting time and

space, diverting light from surrounding stars into a halo. Playing havoc with

the Benny’s clocks and systems, even occasionally running them backward. Its

surface gravity was so high that Langley, could he have reached the ground,

would have weighed eight billion tons.

“With or without my shoes?” he’d asked the astrophysicist who’d presented him

with the calculation.

Despite the outrageous characteristics of the object, there were at least a

half dozen in the immediate neighborhood. The reality was that there were

simply a lot of dead stars floating about. Nobody noticed them because they

didn’t make any noise and they were all but invisible.

“What makes it interesting,” Ava explained to him, “is that it’s going to bump

into that star over there.” She tapped her finger on the display, but Langley

wasn’t sure which star she meant. “It has fourteen planets, it’s nine billion

years old, but this monster is going to scatter everything. And probably

disrupt the sun.”

Langley had heard that, a few days before. But he knew it wouldn’t happen

during his lifetime.

Ava Eckart was one of the few on board who seemed to have a life outside her

specialty. She was a black woman, attractive, methodical, congenial. Organized

the shipboard parties. Liked to dance. Enjoyed talking about her work, but had

the rare ability to put it in layman’s terms.

“When?” Langley asked. “When’s all this going to happen?”

“In about seventeen thousand years.”

Well, there you go. You just need a little patience. “And you can’t wait.”

Her dark eyes sparkled. “You got it,” she said. And then her internal lights

faded. “That’s the problem with being out here. Everything interesting happens

on an inconvenient time scale.” She picked up a couple of coffee mugs. Did he

want one?

“No,” he said. “Thanks, but it keeps me awake all day.”

She smiled, poured herself one, and eased into a chair. “But yes,” she said,

“I’d love to be here when it happens. To be able to see something like that.”

“Seventeen thousand years? Better eat right.”

“I guess.” She remained pensive. “Even if you lived long enough to make it,

you’d need a few thousand more years to watch the process. At least.”

“That’s why we have simulations.”

“Not the same,” she said. “It’s not like being there.” She shook her head.

“Even when you are, you’re pretty much locked out. Take the star, for

example.” She meant 1107, the neutron star they were orbiting. “We’re out

here, but we can’t get close enough to see it.”

Langley pointed to its image on the displays.

“I mean really see it,” she continued. “Cruise over its surface. Bounce some

lights off it.”

“Go for a walk on it.”

“Yes!” Ava’s enthusiasm bubbled to the surface. She was wearing green shorts

and a white pullover that read University of Ohio. “We’ve got antigravity. All

we need’s a better generator.”

“A lot better.”

The Ahab image customarily used by the ship’s artificial intelligence appeared

on-screen. Like all AI’s in Academy vessels, he answered to Bill.

The grim steely eyes and the muttonchop whiskers and the windblown black

corduroy pullover were too familiar to elicit notice from Langley. But his

passengers always went to alert when he appeared. Had Bill been a self-aware

entity, which his creators claimed he was not, Langley would have thought he

was enjoying himself at their expense.

“Captain,” he said. “We are encountering a curious phenomenon.”

That was an unusual comment. Usually Bill just dumped information without

editorializing. “What is it, Bill?”

“It’s gone now. But there was an artificial radio transmission.”

“A transmission?”

“Yes. At 8.4 gigahertz.”

“What did it say? Who’s it from?”

The sea-swept eyes drew together. “I can’t answer either question, Captain.

It’s not any language or system with which I am familiar.”

Langley and Ava exchanged glances. They were a long way from home. Nobody else

was out here.

“The signal was directed,” Bill added.

“Not broadcast?”

“No. We passed through it several moments ago.”

“Were you able to make out anything at all, Bill?”

“No. The pattern is clearly artificial. Any assertion beyond that is

speculation.”

Ava had been peering at the starfield images on the screens as if something

might show itself. “What’s your level of confidence, Bill?” she asked.

“Ninety-nine eight, at a conservative estimate.” Lines of characters began

rolling down one of the status screens. “This is what it looks like. I’ve

substituted symbols for pulse patterns.”

The captain did not see a pattern, but he accepted Bill’s judgment without

question. “You’re saying there’s another ship out here, Bill?”

“I’m saying only that there’s a signal.”

“Where’d it come from?” asked Ava. “Which way?”

“I can’t be sure. But it seemed to originate in the general direction of 1107.

The neutron star. Something in orbit, I assume. We passed through the signal

too quickly to get a lock on it.”

Langley frowned at the symbols scrolling down the display. He watched until

they stopped.

“That’s it,” said Bill. “Do you want me to repeat the record?”

He looked at Ava. She shook her head no.

Langley glanced up at the AI’s image. The face was thin and worn. The gray

eminence persona, which Bill usually adopted when things were happening.

“Bill, can we find it again?”

The AI hesitated. “A directed signal? If we assume it’s coming from a tighter

orbit than ours, we would have to wait until it caught up with us again.”

“How long would that take?”

“Insufficient data.”

“Guess.”

“Probably several months.”

Langley simply didn’t believe it had happened. Not out here. It was more

likely to be a glitch somewhere. “Can you make any kind of estimate on the

location of the source, Bill?”

“No, Captain. I would need to find it a second time to do that.”

He gazed at Ava. “It’s just a screwup somewhere. Stuff like this happens

sometimes. It’s a glitch in the system.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Bill, run a diagnostic. See if you can find any kind of internal problem that

might account for the intercept.”

“I’ve already done that, Captain. Everything seems to be in order.”

Ava’s lids had gone to half-staff. She was peering inside somewhere. “Let’s

run it by Pete.” That was Pete Damon, the project director. Pete was the

best-known physicist in the world, largely because of his tenure as host of

Universe, an extraordinarily popular science series that had done much to win

public support for organizations like the Academy, but which had also spurred

the jealousy of many of his colleagues.

Langley could hear voices in back, where his passengers were conducting

temporal experiments. Although 1107 was only two hundred million years old, it

had actually been here well over two billion years. When Ava had tried to

explain how that happened, how time moved at a far slower rate at the bottom

of the object’s gravity well than it did out here in a less constrained part

of the universe, his mind had refused to close around the idea. He knew it was

correct, of course, but it gave him a headache to think about it.

Ava brought Pete up on one of the auxiliary screens and conducted a hurried

conversation. Pete frowned and shook his head and looked at his own displays.

“Can’t be,” he said.

“You want to ignore it?” asked Ava.

More glances at displays. Whispered conversations with shadowy figures off to

one side. Fingertips tapping on a console. “No,” he said. “I’m on my way up.”

Hatches opened and closed. Langley heard footsteps and excited voices. “Sounds

as if you stirred up the natives, Ava,” he said.

She looked happy. “I’m not surprised.”

Several of them spilled out onto the bridge. Pete. Rick Stockard, the

Canadian. Hal Packwood, who was on his first long flight and who drove

everybody else crazy talking endlessly about the wonder of it all. Miriam

Kapp, who was running the chrono experiments. And two or three more. Everybody

was breathing hard.

“Where’d it come from?” The question came from every side. “Did we really hear

something?”

“Are we still picking it up?”

“For God’s sake, Mike,” said Tora Cavalla, an astrophysicist with a

substantial appetite for sex, “are we scanning for the source? You realize

somebody might be out there?”

“We are,” said Langley. He didn’t care for Tora very much. Her behavior

disrupted the ship, and she seemed to think everyone around her was an idiot.

It was an attitude that might have passed unnoticed at, say, CalTech. But in

the intimate environment of a superluminal, where people had to live together

for months at a time, she created claustrophobia and jealousy. “Of course

we’re looking. But don’t expect much. We’ve no idea where the source might

have been. And any kind of scan near that pile of iron is suspect. The gravity

well distorts everything.”

“Keep looking,” said Packwood, speaking as if he were in charge.

“Is there any other likely explanation?” Tora asked. Her wide white brow was

furrowed. She was really intrigued by the event.

“There’s always the possibility of an equipment malfunction. But Bill says

no.”

She glanced over at Pete, her gray eyes pleading for him to turn the mission

into a hunt for the signal.

“This isn’t something,” Pete said, “that we want to write off until we have an

idea what caused the transmission.” He was tall, long-legged, solemn. His eyes

were furtive, always suggesting he was hiding something. Langley thought he

looked like a pickpocket who’d made good. But he kept his word. You could

believe what he said. “What have you actually got, Mike?” he asked.

“It was a one-shot intercept. But Bill can’t give us any more than that.”

“Can we hear it?” asked Packwood.

“Bill,” Langley said, “run the record. Audio this time.”

It was about two seconds long, a series of high-pitched blips and squiggles.

“We can’t read any of it?” asked Pete.

“No,” said Langley. “Zero.”

The team members looked at one another solemnly. A couple more pushed in. “It

has to mean there’s another ship here somewhere,” Pete said. “Or an orbiter.”

“Nothing of ours out here,” said a quiet, very young, female technician who

had just come in. Her name was Wanda. “I double-checked.”

Pete nodded.

“What would anybody be doing here?” asked Tora.

“We’re here,” said Langley.

Tora shook her head. “Sensors aren’t picking up anything?”

Langley had already checked the stat board. But he looked again. It was still

quiet.

“If there were something out there,” said Stockard, “I’d think we’d be able to

see it.” He was gruff, aggressive. A man who, in another age, would have been

career military.

“Well,” said Packwood, “conditions tend to be strange in a place like this.

Space folded over on itself, time warps blinking in and out. Still—”

“Why don’t we turn around and go back?” said Pete. “Search the same area?”

“Can’t. We can’t spare the fuel for a U-turn. If you want to get back to the

same spot, you’ll have to wait until we go around again.”

“How long?”

“Several months.”

They all looked at him, but there wasn’t anything he could do. Langley didn’t

think anything out of the ordinary was happening anyhow. He’d been carrying

Academy teams into deep space for almost forty years, and he knew if there was

one thing about neutron stars a man could be sure of, it was that nobody else

was hanging around.

In all the time since the superluminals had left Earth, they’d found only one

other living civilization, if you could call it that. The inhabitants of Nok

went back about fourteen thousand years, but they were just now coming out of

their industrial revolution. They were strong believers in various causes, and

they were constantly at war with one another.

There’d been ruins in a few other places. But that was it. Langley had

personally seen upward of a thousand terrestrial worlds, and there weren’t

thirty that supported any kind of life whatever. And two-thirds of those were

single-celled.

No. Whatever Bill had intercepted, or thought he’d intercepted, the

explanation would not include a vessel crewed by something from another world.

But it was easy enough to understand the excitement of his passengers.

“What do you suggest, Captain?” asked Pete after a long hesitation. “Can you

run a diagnostic to determine whether the intercept is valid?”

“We’ve done that. Bill doesn’t see a problem anywhere.” But of course if Bill

himself were the problem—

“All right. What else can we try?”

“We could reconfigure the satellites and launch them to look for it. Then we

go back to our routine mission. And when it’s over we go home.”

Pete didn’t look very happy with the strategy. “What about the satellites?”

“If they find something, they’ll forward the results.”

“You still think it’ll take that long?”

“I’m sorry, Pete. But there’s really no easy way to do it.”

“How many satellites?” There were only seven left. He was going to have to

sacrifice parts of the program.

“The more we put out there, the better the chance.”

“Do it,” said Pete. “Put them all out. Well, maybe save one or two.”

** Chapter 1

June 2224

People tend to believe that good fortune consists of equal parts talent, hard

work, and sheer luck. It’s hard to deny the roles of the latter two. As to

talent, I would only say it consists primarily in finding the right moment to

step in.

—HAROUN AL MONIDES, REFLECTIONS, 2116

PRISCILLA HUTCHINS WAS not a woman to be swept easily off her feet, but she

came very close to developing a terminal passion for Preacher Brawley during

the Proteus fiasco. Not because of his good looks, though God knew he was a

charmer. And not because of his congeniality. She’d always liked him, for both

those reasons. If pressed, though, she would probably have told you it had to

do with his timing.

He wasn’t really a preacher, of course, but was, according to legend,

descended from a long line of Baptist fire breathers. Hutch knew him as an

occasional dinner companion, a person she saw occasionally coming in or going

out of the Academy. And perhaps most significantly, as a voice from the void

on those interminable flights to Serenity and Glory Point and Faraway. He was

one of those rare individuals with whom one could be silent, and still feel in

good company.

The important thing was that he had been there when she desperately needed

him. Not to save her life, mind you. She was never in real danger herself. But

he took a terrible decision out of her hands.

The way it happened was this: Hutch was aboard the Academy ship Wildside en

route to Renaissance Station, which orbited Proteus, a vast hydrogen cloud

that had been contracting for millions of years and would eventually become a

star. Its core was burning furiously under the pressures generated by that

contraction, but nuclear ignition had not yet taken place.

That was why the station was there. To watch, as Lawrence Dimenna liked to

say, the process. But there were those who felt Renaissance was vulnerable,

that the process was unpredictable, and who’d attempted to close it down and

withdraw its personnel. It was not a place Hutch was anxious to visit.

The wind blew all the time inside the cloud. She was about a day away,

listening to it howl and claw at her ship. She was trying to concentrate on a

light breakfast of toast and fruit when she saw the first sign of what was to

come. “It’s thrown off a big flare,” said Bill. “Gigantic,” he added. “Off the

scale.”

Unlike his sibling AI on the Benjamin Martin, Hutch’s Bill adopted a wide

range of appearances, using whatever he felt most likely to please, annoy, or

intimidate, as the mood struck him. Theoretically, he was programmed to do so,

to provide the captain with a true companion on long flights. She was

otherwise alone on the ship.

At the moment, he looked like the uncle that everybody likes but who has a

tendency to drink a bit too much and who has an all-too-obvious eye for women.

“You think we’re actually going to have to do an evacuation?” she asked.

“I don’t have sufficient data to make a decent estimate,” he said. “But I’d

think not. I mean, the place has been here a long time. Surely it won’t blow

up just as we arrive.”

It was an epitaph if she’d ever heard one.

They couldn’t see the eruption without sensors, of course. Couldn’t see

anything without sensors. The glowing mist through which the Wildside moved

prevented any visuals much beyond thirty kilometers.

It was hydrogen, illuminated by the fire at the core. On her screens, Proteus

was not easily distinguishable from a true star, save for the twin jets that

rose out of its poles.

Hutch looked at the display images, at the vast bursts of flame roiling

through the clouds, at the inferno rendered somehow more disquieting than that

of a true star, perhaps because it had not even the illusion of a definable

edge, but rather seemed to fill the universe.

When seen from outside the cloud, the jets formed an elegant vision that would

have been worthy of a Sorbanne, beams composed of charged particles, not

entirely stable, flashed from a cosmic lighthouse that occasionally changed

its position on the rocks. Renaissance Station had been placed in an

equatorial orbit to lessen the possibility that a stray blast would take out

its electronics.

“When do they expect the nuclear engine to cut in?” she asked.

“Probably not for another thousand years,” said Bill.

“These people must be crazy, sitting out here in this soup.”

“Apparently conditions have worsened considerably during the past forty-eight

hours.” Bill gazed down at her in his smugly superior mode and produced a

noteboard. “It says here they have a comfortable arrangement. Pools, tennis

courts, parks. Even a seaside retreat.”

Had Proteus been at the heart of the solar system, the thin haze of its outer

extremities would have engulfed Venus. Well, maybe engulfed wasn’t quite the

right word. Enshrouded, maybe. Eventually, when the pressure reached critical

mass, nuclear ignition would occur, the outer veil of hydrogen would be blown

away, and Proteus would become a class-G, possibly a bit more massive than the

sun.

“Doesn’t really matter how many parks they have if that thing has gone

unstable.”

The AI let her see that he disapproved. “There is no known case of a class-G

protostar going unstable. It is subject to occasional storms, and that is what

we are seeing now. I think you are unduly worried.”

“Maybe. But if this is normal weather, I wouldn’t want to be here when things

get rough.”

“Nor would I. But if a problem develops while we’re there, we should be able

to outrun it easily enough.”

Let’s hope.

It was unlikely, the dispatching officer had assured her, that an Event would

occur. (He had clearly capitalized the word.) Proteus was just going through a

hiccup period. Happens all the time. No reason to worry, Hutchins. You’re

there simply as a safety factor.

She’d been at Serenity, getting refitted, when the call had come. Lawrence

Dimenna, the director of Renaissance Station, the same Dimenna who’d insisted

just two months ago that Proteus was perfectly safe, as dependable as the sun,

who’d argued to keep the place going against the advice of some of the top

people at the Academy, was now asking for insurance. So let’s send old

Hutchins over to sit on the volcano.

And here she was. With instructions to stand by and hold Dimenna’s hand and if

there’s a problem, see that everyone gets off. But there shouldn’t be a

problem. I mean, they’re the experts on protostars and they say everything’s

fine. Just taking a precaution.

She’d checked the roster. There were thirty-three crew, staff, and working

researchers, including three graduate students.

Accommodations on the Wildside would be a bit tight if they had to run. The

ship was designed for thirty-one plus the pilot, but they could double up in a

couple of the compartments and there were extra couches around that could be

pressed into service during acceleration and jump phases.

It was a temporary assignment, until the Academy could get the Lochran out

from Earth. The Lochran was being—armored, really—to better withstand

conditions here and would replace her as the permanent escape vessel within a

few weeks.

“Hutch,” said Bill. “We have incoming. From Renaissance.”

She was on the bridge, which was where she spent most of her time when riding

an otherwise empty ship. “Patch them through,” she said. “About time we got

acquainted.”

It was a pleasant surprise. She found herself looking at a gorgeous young

technician with chestnut hair, luminous eyes, and a smile that lit up when

there’d been time for the signal to pass back and forth and he got a look at

her. He wore a white form-fitting shirt and Hutch had to smother a sigh. Damn.

She’d been alone too long.

“Hello, Wildside,” he said, “welcome to Proteus.”

“Hello, Renaissance.” She restrained a smile. The exchange of signals required

slightly more than a minute.

“Dr. Harper wants to talk to you.” He gave way to a tall, dark woman who

looked accustomed to giving people directions. Hutch recognized Mary Harper

from the media reports. She owned a clipped voice and looked at Hutch the way

Hutch might have glanced at a kid bringing the lunch in late. Harper had stood

shoulder to shoulder with Dimenna during the long battle to prevent the

closing of the station.

“Captain Hutchins? We’re glad you’re here. It’ll make everyone feel a bit more

secure to know there’s a ship standing by. Just in case.”

“Glad to be of service,” Hutch said.

She softened a bit. “I understand you were headed home before this came up,

and I just wanted you to know that we appreciate your coming out here on short

notice. There’s probably no need, but we thought it best to be cautious.”

“Of course.”

Harper started to say something else but the transmission was blown away by

the storm. Bill tried a few alternate channels and found one that worked.

“When can we expect you?” she asked.

“Tomorrow morning at about six looks good.”

Harper was worried, but she tried to hide it behind that cool smile while she

waited for Hutch’s response to reach her. When it did she nodded, and Hutch

got the distinct impression that back behind her eyes the woman was counting.

“Good,” she said with bureaucratic cheerfulness. “We’ll see you then.”

We don’t get many visitors out this way, Hutch thought.

THE STATION MADE periodic reports to Serenity, recording temperature readings

at various levels of the atmosphere, gravity fluctuations, contraction rate

estimates, cloud density, and a myriad other details.

The Wildside had drifted into the hypercomm data stream between Renaissance

and Serenity and was consequently able, for a few minutes, to pick up the

transmissions. Hutch watched the numbers rippling across a half dozen screens,

mixed with occasional analysis by the Renaissance AI. None of it was

Jack McDevitt - Chindi

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