They had lost sight of the apparition as it passed toward the inner system.

Blackie said, “We are crippling ourselves by operating at less than optimal intelligence. Let us warm up the mind core to full self-awareness.”

“It took me ten thousand years to figure out how to destroy Exarchel, your last fully self-aware supermachine, and that was when I had a supermachine of my own occupying the Earth’s core helping me. No thanks. Next idea?”

Blackie said, “Let’s take a year or two and look for occlusions. If a body passes before a star, we can find it.”

Montrose said, “We can also keep an eye on any orbital anomalies. A mass the size of Uranus, if it is still in the system, might not mess up the fallpath of Jupiter too much, but we should be able to see its influence on the motions of the smaller planets, Mercury and Pluto. And let’s deploy the sails a little bit, and gather in some light.”

“Which may expose us to the Virtue, if the body is still in this system. With our sails open, we are visible to anyone with a medium-powered telescope.”

“Let’s risk it. I got two reasons. First, the aliens never approached any object smaller than a planet before. This ship is just a mayfly to them, and we’re just specks.”

“Hm. I seem to recall that even humans occasionally swat flies. What is your second reason?”

“We’re both reckless and bored.”

By unspoken mutual consent, both men lowered their subjective rate of passing time until they could see through the various instruments in the astronomy houses fore and amidships, or brought in through extravehicular remotes, the jeweled dots of the planets moving like waltzing dancers against the star-gemmed velvet of vacuum.

Intently they watched.

2. Visions of Great Worlds Afar

A.D. 11050

They created indentations in portions of the sail to use as convex mirrors and flexed the shrouds to turn them this way or that. These immense light-gathering fields were larger than any Earth-based telescope could be. It was like having a lens the size of the arctic ice cap.

Montrose soon noticed an anomaly in the drain of resources from the ship’s astronomy house: the ship’s brain was spending time poring over data peripheral to star occlusion scans. He was curious what Del Azarchel was seeking, and carefully, slowly, and secretly, he heterodyned a repeater signal on the incoming astronomical data.

The first quarter of the sky toward which Del Azarchel looked was the constellation Canes Venatici, toward the great extragalactic globular cluster at M3. Montrose with some effort beat back his rage at this act of voyeurism, so he did not thaw himself, take up the fire ax from the bulkhead, go to Del Azarchel’s coffin, and chop his frozen face into bits. Yet Montrose was appalled that Del Azarchel would dare to stare, like an adulterous lover sighing and mooning at a married woman’s window, at the stars which so called to Montrose and so recalled his wife to him.

But then Del Azarchel turned elsewhere those instruments more potent than any human eyes. Here in the constellation of Fornax the Furnace was a star called Hipparchos 13044, two thousand lightyears from Earth, whose waltz through the heavens betrayed the presence of a dark body, perhaps twice the size of Jupiter, orbiting it. But the star was one of many in a Helmi stream, originally belonging to a dwarf galaxy that had been devoured by the Milky Way nine billion years ago. The age of the planet was greater than that: it was from outside the galaxy. Montrose could not imagine what interest Del Azarchel could have in this astronomical anomaly.

Closer at hand, the wobble of the failed star HD 42176 in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, three hundred ninety lightyears away, betrayed a fire giant world, larger than Jupiter and closer to its primary than Mercury, orbiting once every thirty hours: a year short as a day.

It seemed Earth-like planets throughout the Local Interstellar Cloud were unusual. Jovian and superjovian worlds were much more common than smaller, rocky worlds. The current theory was that small planets were naturally swept up in the orbits of larger ones. In Sol’s system, for reasons yet unknown, a primordial superplanet had been split into Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and this allowed inner and outer worlds, Mercury and Pluto, to form. Apparently life on Earth-sized worlds was a rare accident.

Montrose was puzzled. What was Del Azarchel’s interest in exosolar planets?

Months passed.

3. Inconstant Earth

A.D. 11051

Both men exclaimed at the same time.

“Eureka!” and “Thar she blows me!”

“What did you find, you disgusting Texan clodpole?”

“I found where the Earth is hiding, though I cannot say how she got there. What’d you find, you dandified Iberian gutterbug?”

“I found out how she got there but not where she is. While looking for occlusions of any stars or background radiations by black bodies, the instruments picked up occlusions of various intervening energy fields. The magnetosphere of the sun is gravely disturbed. This disturbance is enough to grapple the core of the planet magnetically, and impart a lateral vector. I assume the initial acceleration was very mild, because even rocky planets are actually just gooey liquid with a little crust on the surface, and we do not see a trail of asteroids, ejecta, and debris trailing off. And it also shows the Earth was not removed entirely from the Solar System, since the solar magnetosphere does not extend so far, and, at accelerations low enough to keep the planet intact, could not have achieved solar escape velocity.”

“Well, boy howdy, because I done found her. Venus has a slight drift to her orbit, and a wobble to her rotation, and so does Pluto—who did me good service this day, despite the men of old who said he weren’t no planet.”

“So where?”

“Up. The Earth is at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Earth is in a ball-o-twine orbit above the solar North Pole and below the South Pole.”

“At the same distance as before?”

“So I guess. Simple orbital mechanics says it is easier to change your inclination than your speed or distance from the center of gravity. In this case, all they did—whoever they were—was increase the orbital inclination to ninety degrees. Boy, are all the astrologers going to be daffy after that stunt. As seen from Earth, the sun will swing through the same northern and south constellation once a year, but the zodiac of signs the sun passes through will be different each year, because the whole orbit is turning.”

“So you have not actually found the Earth?”

“I know where we should concentrate our telescopes. One AU to the solar north, and one to the solar south. Because the whole orbit is turning like the rim of a spinning penny, we won’t know from what direction Earth’ll be approaching the solar North Pole. Could be up to six months before she passes through that area, and then however long it will take us to match orbits, three years or so. But to us at this speed, it will seem like no time.…”

4. Less Oblate Spheroid

A.D. 11054

“… See? That weren’t long,” Menelaus concluded his sentence.

Now the world loomed large within the images the astronomy houses fore and amidships brought in. The moon looked nothing like the moon of old. Logic diamond had coated her seas and uplands, and now new craters of war damage had smashed and cracked the layers of diamond shell so that she resembled the fantastically shattered surface of Europa, rather than the silver-gray moon of Earth’s past. Unthinkable energies had scalded strange and lurid colors into the blasted glass, green and gold and lines of crimson like bleeding scars, speckles of peacock blue scattered like pepper.