C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 1 - Foreigner

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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
FOREIGNER: a
novel of first contact
Caroline J. Cherryh
the first book of the foreigner
sequence
EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1
HTML
April 6, 2003
This file is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict
Contents
● BOOK ONE
●
|I| II| III| IV|
● BOOK TWO
●
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
|I| II| III| IV| V| VI|
● BOOK THREE
●
|I| II| III| IV| V| VI| VII| VIII| IX| X| XI| XII| XIII|
XIV| XV| XVI|
● Pronunciation
● Glossary
DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER
375 Hudson Street. New York. NY 10014
ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM
SHEILA E. GILBERT
PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 1994 by CJ. Cherryh.
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Michael Whelan
For color prints of Michael Whelan paintings, please contact: Glass
Onion Graphics
P.O. Box 88
Brookfield, CT 06804
DAW Book Collectors No. 941.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin U.S.A.
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and
destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
First Printing, November 1994
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA.
HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
BOOK ONE
I
^ »
It was the deep dark, unexplored except for robotic visitors. The
mass that existed here was Earth’s second stepping-stone toward a
strand of promising stars; and, for the first manned ship to drop into
its influence, the mass point was a lonely place, void of the
electromagnetic chaff that filled human space, the gossip and chatter
of trade, the instructions of human control to ships and crews, the
fast, sporadic communication of machine talking to machine. Here,
only the radiation of the mass, the distant stars, and the background
whisper of existence itself rubbed up against the sensors with force
enough to attract attention.
Here, human beings had to remember that the universe was far wider
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
than their little nest of stars—that, in the universe at large, silence
was always more than the noisiest shout of life. Humans explored
and intruded against it, and built their stations and lived their lives, a
biological contamination of the infinite, a local and temporary
condition.
And not the sole inhabitants of the universe: that was no longer
possible for humans to doubt. So wherever the probes said life might
exist, wherever stars looked friendly to living creatures, humans
ventured with some caution, and unfolded their mechanical ears and
listened into the dark—as Phoenix listened intently during her
hundred hours traverse of realspace.
She heard nothing at any range—which pleased her captains and the
staff aboard. Phoenix wanted to find no prior claims to what she
wanted, which was a bridge to a new, resources-rich territory, most
particularly and immediately a G5 star designated T-230 in the
Defense codebooks, 89020 on the charts, and mission objective, in
the plans Phoenix carried in her data banks.
Reach the star, unlimber the heavy equipment… create a station that
would welcome traders and expand human presence into a new and
profitable area of space.
So Phoenix carried the bootstrap components for that construction,
the algaes and the cultures for a station’s life-sustaining tanks, the
plans and the circuit maps, the diagrams and the processes and the
programs, the data and the detail; she carried as well the miner-pilots
and the mechanics and the builders and processors and the technical
staff that would be, for their principal reward, earliest shareholders in
the first-built trading station to develop down this chain of
stars—Earth’s latest and most confident colonial commitment, with
all the expertise of past successes.
Optics told Mother Earth where the rich stars were. Robots probed
the way without any risk of human life… probed and returned with
their navigational data and their first-hand observations: T-230 was a
system so rich Phoenix ran mass-loaded to the limit, streaking along
at a rate a ship dared carry when she expected no other traffic, and
when she had no doubt of refuel capabilities at her destination. She
shoved the gas and dust around her into a brief, bright disturbance,
while her crew ran its hundred-hour routine of maintenance,
recalibrations, and navigational checks. The captains shared coffee on
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
the last watch before re-entry, took the general reports, and approved
the schedule the way the navigator, McDonough, keyed it.
But what the pilot received of that discussion was a blinking green
dot on the edge of his display and a vague sense that things were
proceeding comfortably on schedule, aboard a ship in good order.
Taylor was On, which meant Taylor had input coming at him at rates
it took a computer interface to sort, and, insulated from the
tendencies of an unassisted human mind to process laterally and
distract itself from the rush of data, Taylor had his ears devoted to
computer signals and his eyes and his perceptions chemically
adjusted to the computer-filtered velocity of the ship’s passage.
The green dot had to be there before he hyped out. The dot had
showed up, and what other human beings did about it was not in any
sense Taylor’s business or realization. When that exit point came at
him, and time folded up in his face, he reached confidently ahead and
through space, toward T-230.
He was a master pilot. The drugs in his blood made him highly
specific in his concentration, and highly abstract in his
understandings of the data that flashed in front of his eyes and
screamed into his ears. He would have targeted Phoenix into the heart
of hell if those had been the coordinates the computer handed him.
But it was to T-230 he was looking.
For that reason, he was the only one aboard aware when the ship kept
going, and time stayed folded.
And stayed.
His heart began to pound in realtime, his eyes were fixed on screens
flashing red, lines, and then dots, as those lines became hypothetical,
and last of all a black screen, where POINT ERROR glowed in red
letters like the irretrievable judgment of God.
Heartbeat kept accelerating. He reached for the ABORT and felt the
cap under his fingers. He had no vision now. It was all POINT
ERROR. He scarcely felt the latch: and time was still folding as he
uncapped the ABORT, for a reason he no longer remembered. Unlike
the computer, he had no object but that single, difficult necessity.
Program termination.
Blank screen.
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
POINT ERROR.
God had no more data.
II
« ^ »
The ship dropped and the alarm sounded: This is not a drill.
Computer failure. This is not a drill…
McDonough’s heart was thumping and the sweat was running from
exertion as he pressed the button to query Taylor. Every screen was
blank.
This is not a drill…
The hard-wired Abort was in action. Phoenix was saving herself. She
blew off v with no consideration of fragile human bodies inside her.
Phoenix then attempted to re-boot her computers from inflowing
information. She queried her captain, her navigator, and her pilot and
co-pilot, with painful shocks to the Q-patch. Two more such jolts,
before McDonough found data taking shape on his screens at the
navigation station.
Video displayed the star.
No, two stars, one glaring blue-white, one faint red. McDonough sat
frozen at his post, seeing in Phoenix’ future-line a coasting drift to
white, nuclear hell.
“Where are we?” someone asked. “Where are we?”
It was a question the navigator took for accusation. McDonough felt
it like a blow to his already abused gut, and looked toward the pilot
for an answer. But Taylor was just staring at his screens, doing
nothing, not moving.
“Inoki,” McDonough said. But the co-pilot was slumped unconscious
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
or worse.
“Get Greene up here. Greene and Goldberg, to the bridge.” That was
LaFarge on the staff channel, senior captain, hard-nosed and
uncompromising, calling up the two back-up pilots.
McDonough felt the shakes set in, wondered if LaFarge was going to
call up all the backups, and oh, one part of him wanted that, wanted
to go to his bunk and lie there inert and not have to deal with reality,
but he had to learn what that binary star was and where they were and
what mistake he might conceivably have committed to put them here.
The nutrients the med-plug was shooting into him were making him
sick. The sight in front of him was insane. Optics couldn’t be wrong.
The robots couldn’t be wrong. Their instruments couldn’t be wrong.
“Sir?” Karly McEwan was sitting beside him, as stunned as he
was—his own immediate number two: she was shaken, but she was
punching buttons, trying, clamp-jawed as she was, to get sense out of
chaos. “Sir? Go to default? Sir?”
“Default for now,” he muttered, or some higher brain function did,
while his conscious intelligence was operating on some lower floor.
The ‘for now’ that had bubbled up as a caution hit his faltering
intelligence like a pronouncement of doom, because he didn’t see any
quick way to get a baseline for this system. “Spectrum analysis,
station two and three. Chart comparison, station four. Station five,
rerun the initiation and target coordinates.” The forebrain was still
giving orders. The rest was functioning like Taylor, which was not at
all. “We need a medic up here. Is Kiyoshi on the bridge? Taylor and
Inoki are in trouble.”
“Are we stable?” Kiyoshi Tanaka’s voice, asking if it was safe to
unbelt and go after the pilots, but every question seemed to echo with
double meanings, every question trailed off into unknowns and
unknowables. “Stable as we can be,” LaFarge said, and meanwhile
the spectral analysis program was turning up a flood of data and
running comparisons on every star system on file, a steady crawl of
non-matches on McDonough’s number one screen, while the bottom
of it reported NOT A MATCH, 3298 ITEMS EXAMINED.
“We’re getting questions from channel B,” came from
Communications. “Specials are requesting to leave quarters.
Requesting screen output.”
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Cherryh, C J - [Foreigner 01] Foreigner
Taylor’s routine. Taylor had always given the passengers a view,
leaving Earth system, entering the mass points, and leaving them…
“No,” LaFarge said harshly. “No image.” A blind man could see it
was trouble. “Say it’s a medical on the bridge. Say we’re busy.”
Tanaka had reached Taylor and Inoki, and was injecting something
into Taylor, McDonough was aware of that. The passengers were
feeling the variance in routine, and the NOT A MATCH hadn’t
changed.
SEARCH FURTHER?
The computer had run out of local stars.
“Karly, you prioritized search from default one?”
“From default,” Navigation Two answered. The search for matching
stars had started with Sol and the near neighborhood. “Our vector,
plus and minus ten lights.”
The sick feeling in McDonough’s gut increased.
Nothing made sense. The backup pilots showed up, asking distracting
questions nobody could answer, the same questions every navigator
was asking the instruments and the records. The captain told the
medic to get Taylor and Inoki off the bridge—the captain swore
when he said it, and McDonough distractedly started running checks
of his own while Tanaka got the two pilots on their feet—Taylor
could walk, but Taylor looked blind to what was going on. Inoki was
moving, but just scarcely: one of the com techs had to haul him up
and carry him, once Tanaka unbuckled him and unplugged the tube
from his implant. Neither of them looked at Greene or Goldberg as
they passed. Taylor’s eyes were set on infinity. Inoki’s were shut.
SEARCH FURTHER? the computer asked, having searched all the
stars within thirty lights of Earth.
“We stand at 5% on fuel,” the captain reported calmly—a potential
death sentence. “Any com pickup at all?”
At this star? McDonough asked himself, and: “Dead silent,”
Communications said. “The star’s noisy enough to mask God-knows-
what.”
“Go long range, back up our vector. Assume we overshot the star.”
“Aye, sir.”
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A moment later, hydraulics whined up on the hull. The big dish was
unpacking and unfolding, preparing to listen. V was down to a crawl
safe for its deployment—safe, if it was Earth’s own Sun, but it
wasn’t. There was no data on this system. They were gathering it,
drinking it in every sensor, but nothing gave them even minimal
certainty there wasn’t a rock in their path. Nobody had ever come in
at a close binary, or a mass as large. God only knew what had
happened to the field.
McDonough’s hands were shaking as he punched up the scope of
both search sequences, approaching a hundred lights distant in all
directions, search negative, past their objective. They still didn’t
know where they were, but with 5% fuel in reserve, they weren’t
leaving soon, either. They had the miner-craft: thank God they had
the miner-craft and the station components. They might gather
system ice and refuel…
Except that was a radiation hell out there, except the solar wind that
blue-white sun threw out was a killing wind. This was not a star
where flesh and blood could live, and if the miners did go out to work
in that, they had to limit their time outside.
Or if the ship was, as it might well be, infalling, on a massive star’s
gravity slope… they’d meet that radiation close-up before they went
down.
“We’ve rerun the initiation sequence,” Greene said, from Taylor’s
seat. “We don’t find any flaw in the commands.”
Meaning Taylor had keyed in on what navigation had given him. A
cold apprehension gnawed at McDonough’s stomach.
“Any answer, Mr. McDonough?”
“Not yet, sir.” He kept his voice calm. He didn’t feel that way. He
hadn’t made a mistake. But he couldn’t prove it by anything they had
from the instruments.
A ship couldn’t come out of hyperspace aimed differently than it had
on entry. It didn’t. It couldn’t.
But if some hyperspace particle had screwed the redundant storage, if
the computer had lost its destination point and POINT ERROR was
the answer, they couldn’t run far enough on their fuel mass to be out
of sight of stars they knew.
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Two stars, in any degree near each other, both with spectra matching
the charts, were all they needed. Any two-star match against their
charts could start to locate them, and they couldn’t be more than five
lights off their second mass point, if they’d run out all the fuel they
were carrying—couldn’t be. Not farther than twenty lights from
Earth total at most.
But there wasn’t a massive blue-white within twenty lights of the
Sun, except Sirius, and this wasn’t Sirius. Spectra of those paired
suns were a no-match. It wasn’t making sense. Nothing was.
He started looking for pulsars. When you were out of short yardsticks
you looked for the long ones, the ones that wouldn’t lie, and you
started thinking about half-baked theories, like cosmic
macrostructures, folded interfaces, or any straw of reason that might
give a mind something to work on or suggest a direction they’d gone
or offer a hint which of a hundred improbables was the truth.
III
« ^ »
Something’s wrong, was the word running the outer corridors from
the minute that the station staff and construction workers had
permission to move about. The rumor moved into the lounges, where
staffers and pusher pilots and mechanics all stood shoulder to
shoulder in front of video displays that said, on every damned
channel, STAND BY.
“Why don’t they tell us something?” someone asked, a breach of the
peace. “They ought to tell us something.”
Another tech said, “Why don’t we get the vid? We always got the vid
before.”
“We can go to hell,” a pusher pilot said. “We can all go to hell.
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