“Why’s that?”

“First time off-world. It’s kind of scary.” He flashed a nervous smile. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mac: I haven’t been sleeping well the last few nights.”

This was not a guy you’d want on board if things went wrong. “I’d never have known.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you here under orders, Eric?”

“No.”

“Then why —?”

He looked past MacAllister as if he could see something in the distance. “You’re not going to believe this, but I haven’t done much with my life.”

MacAllister fought hard not to smile. Oh, yes. It was hard to believe.

Eric walked over to the viewport and looked out. The navigation lights were off. There was no point running them in hyperspace. But the illumination from the bridge reflected against the mists. “I have a brother and a sister who envy me. They see me live doing the press conferences. So in their eyes, I’m famous. And they think I make big money. And I suppose, in a way they’re right. I’m doing a lot better than most of the people I grew up with. Better than I ever expected. But the truth is I haven’t really ever accomplished anything.”

“You seem to be doing pretty well. You’re the face of the Academy.”

“Mac, you’re a famous man. Everybody knows you. Everybody knows Hutch. She’s the big hero at the Academy. People are always asking me about her. What’s she like in person? Has it all gone to her head? They want to know whether they can meet her. I have a nephew who was heartbroken when Hutch got married.” His eyes came back to MacAllister. “You know what it’s like to work with somebody like that?”

“It can’t be that bad. She seems okay.”

“It’s bad, believe me. I mean, nothing against her. It isn’t her fault. But I’d like to be able to say I’ve done something, too. To know I’ve done something.”

“You’re not married, Eric, are you?”

“No. How’d you know?”

“Just a feeling.”

He looked momentarily wistful. “It shows, huh?”

“Not really.” MacAllister smiled. “And that’s why you’re coming? To try to do something more with your life?”

“That’s why. You know, you’re lucky. You were part of the Deepsix rescue — ”

“I was one of the people who needed rescuing — ”

“It doesn’t matter. You were there.” He sighed. “I wish I’d been there.”

“You wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”

“Maybe not. But it would have been nice to be able to tell that story. Anyhow, now at least I’ll have something.”

MACALLISTER HAD PROMISED himself he would actually convert the flight into a vacation. Catch up on his reading, relax, watch some shows. And, of course, take in the sights. But by noon on the second day he was already thinking about future stories for The National. A new challenge to institutional marriage had risen: Men and women were getting involved in virtual affairs with avatars who represented their spouses at a younger age. Was it infidelity to spend a romantic evening with your wife as she had looked and behaved at twenty-two?

Then there was the Origins Project. Major breakthroughs coming. “Mac,” said Valya, “did you know it’s not fully operational yet?”

“It won’t be for years, apparently,” he said.

“I don’t know whether you actually want to stop at Origins or not. They’re not expecting us. We should probably just put our monitor over the side and keep going.”

“That might not be a bad idea. It’s nothing more than a giant physics lab.” He shook his head. “Never could stand physics.”

They’d caught Amy’s ear. “Valya,” she said, “Origins is the most exciting place on the flight. Let’s stop and take a look. Please.”

The space agencies have done what they can to sweep moonrider reports under the table. Various astrophysical phenomena have been advanced to explain the sightings. But lights moving in formation and throwing sharp turns do not lend themselves to credible natural explanations. Last week’s reports from the Serenity orbiter are especially startling, because the observers were not only ordinary travelers but also included a group of physicists.

If in fact there is even a reasonable possibility that we are being observed by alien intelligences, then the current notion that we should disband the interstellar program is both shortsighted and dangerous.

— The London Observer, Thursday, April 2

61 Cygni is a binary system located approximately eleven light-years from Earth. It is in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Both stars are visible in the terrestrial sky, but they are quite dim. They orbit each other at a range between 50 and 120 AUs. (The distance to Pluto is about 40 AUs.)

— The Star Register

As soon as the jump was complete, they all crowded onto the bridge to look out through the viewport. Nobody was happier than MacAllister to see the mists go away. The transdimensional fogscape reminded him that the real world was far stranger than anything humans had dreamed up, with its quantum effects, time running at different rates depending on whether you’re standing on the roof or in the basement, objects that aren’t there unless someone looks at them. Hamlet had been right.

It was good to see the stars again. And there was an orange-red sun. It looked far away. Or very small. It was difficult to know which. “That’s Cygni A,” said Valya. “It’s a main sequence dwarf. Weighs in at about seven-tenths solar mass, but it’s only about ten percent as bright as the sun.”

“Why?” asked Amy.

Valya passed the question to Bill who, surprisingly, didn’t know. “It just says here,” he said, “that it’s dimmer.”

“Where’s our sun?” asked Eric, who could barely restrain himself.

Valya glanced around the sky. “Can’t see it from this angle,” she said. She told Bill to put it on the display. “This is zero mag, and there’s Sol.” One of the stars momentarily brightened.

“That doesn’t look very bright either,” said Eric.

Amy was more interested in Cygni A. “It has six planets,” she said.

“Where’s the other star?” asked MacAllister, recalling that 61 Cygni was a binary.

Valya referred that question also to Bill, who did better this time. He highlighted Cygni B off to one side. It might have been nothing more than a bright star.

Amy obviously had been doing her homework. “They orbit around each other every 720 years.”

MacAllister simply stared. “The last time they were in their current positions respective to each other,” he said, “Columbus was poking around in the Americas.”

“That is correct,” said Bill, who seemed delighted to have passengers who cared about such things. “Cygni A, by the way,” he continued, “is a fairly old star. Considerably older than the sun.”

“Is there a green world in the system?” asked Eric. “In either system? I assume both suns have planets.”

“B has four,” said Amy. “But there’s no life anywhere.”

“Not in either system,” said Bill. “A is so cool that a planet would have to be right on top of it to have liquid water.”

“How close would that be?” asked MacAllister.

“Closer than Mercury is to the sun,” said Amy.

MacAllister loved listening to a know-it-all kid trying to outdo a know-it-all AI. He resisted saying anything, contenting himself with looking out at Cygni A. And at the firmament of stars surrounding it. “Where’s the monument?” he asked.

SITTING ON THEIR front porch in Baltimore, he and Jenny had contemplated how exhilarating it would be to do an interstellar tour. Jenny had talked of seeing the four stars at Capella. (Was that right, she’d asked? Was it four? Or five?) And she’d wanted to see a living world. The nearest was at 36 Ophiuchi. But she’d had something more dramatic in mind. She wanted Quraqua, where a civilization had once thrived. She’d talked about visiting the ruins. But there was no easy way to get there. The tour services didn’t exist then. Even now nobody went out that far.

Most of all she’d wanted to see the monuments, those magnificent works of art scattered through the Orion Arm ten thousand years ago by a race that had since gone out of existence, leaving only a few savage descendants who possessed no technology and had no memory of their great days.

The first monument had been found in the solar system, on Iapetus. It was a statue, a self-portrait of its creator. A lone female standing on that bleak moonscape, its eyes turned toward Saturn, which remained permanently fixed above a nearby ridge. It was, in fact, the discovery of the Iapetus statue at a time much like the present one, during which the space effort was losing momentum, that had led to the suspicion that somebody had FTL, that it was possible to build an interstellar drive.

He’d promised Jenny they would go to Iapetus. And they’d eventually visit two or three of the other monuments. (That was a time when there seemed no limit to what they could do together.) But the illness had struck shortly after, and they never got beyond Baltimore.

“The Cygni monument,” said Amy, apparently in answer to a question, “was discovered in 2195 by Shia Kanana.”

“It was a follow-up mission,” said Bill.

“The first mission missed it?” asked Eric.

“Passed right by it and never noticed.” Amy seemed delighted that adults could be such buffoons.

“Of course,” said Eric, “there was no Academy then.” MacAllister’s eyelids sagged. The guy was breathtakingly loyal. “The way they were operating in those days,” he continued, “everything was hit-or-miss. And the truth is, despite what they said, they were really only looking for two things: habitable worlds and aliens.”

“There’s something I never really understood,” said MacAllister.

“What? Habitable worlds? For settlement.”

“Right. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why? You know the damned places won’t be comfortable. What sort of idiot wants to live on a frontier? Would you, Amy?”

“Not really,” she said. “I just want to ride around out here.”

Eric smiled benignly. “There are a lot of people who’d like to get away from the cities,” he said. “Away from all the fuss at home.”

“Well, my God, Eric, move to the country.”

“You’re so narrow-minded, Mac. You know, eventually we’ll terraform a lot of these places, turn them into garden worlds.”

“That’s something else that could cost an arm and a leg. And it’s typical. We tried to terraform Quraqua, and all we did was destroy an archeological treasure house.”