“So,” said Matt, “who put it here? Who’d be capable of an engineering operation like that?”

“THERE’S SOMETHING ELSEthat might interest you,” Phyl said later, when they were getting ready to start on the last leg of the voyage. Antonio had been reading. Hutch was absorbed with a checklist. Only Antonio looked up. “Yeah, Phyl,” he said. “What have you got?”

“I’ve been searching for hydrogen-deuterium brown dwarfs.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing in the scientific literature. Nobody’s ever seen one.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s a fictitious character, Kristi Lang, who showed up in some books written during the early twenty-first century. She’s an astrophysicist, and she locates some brown dwarfs exactly like this one. She eventually produces evidence to indicate that somebody is marking solitary black holes, exactly the way this one is marked. They each get a lighthouse. Because they’re the dangerous ones.”

“So who makes the lighthouses?”

“She has no way of knowing. She doesn’t even have a superluminal at her disposal.”

“How about that?” said Antonio. “I guess she called it.”

“Not really.” Hutch pushed away from the display that had absorbed her. “This isn’t the first black hole we’ve looked at. The Academy’s been to three. The Europeans have visited two. Nobody’s ever reported anything like this before.”

“The others,” said Phyl, “all had natural companions. You could see them from far away. This one, though, if you didn’t know in advance it was there, would be an ambush.”

ANTONIO’S NOTES

Hutch told us a story tonight, how, when she was first starting her career, she’d taken a research party to Iapetus to see the statue left there thousands of years ago by the Monument-Makers. How they’d found the tracks of the creature who’d made the statue, and how they matched with the statue so they knew it was a self-portrait. She talked about following the tracks onto a ridge, where she could see the creature had stood and stared at Saturn. And she thought how alone it had been, how big and cold and uncaring the universe was. Melville’s universe. You get in the way of the whale, you’re dead. And she says she thought how intelligent creatures, facing that kind of empty enormity, are in it together. She says she felt the same way today, looking at the brown dwarf. The lighthouse.

—Monday, January 28

PART FOUR

mordecai zone

chapter 32

THE OMEGA CLOUDS seemed to originate from a single source, located approximately fifty-seven light-years from the galactic center and in orbit around it. It was the Mordecai Zone, named for the guy who’d done the math twenty years ago. It also had a numerical designator, RVP66119. The more sensational news media commonly referred to it as the Boiler Room. Whatever one chose to call it, no one had ever seen it. The area was obscured by enormous clouds of dust and hydrogen.

The jump from Tenareif would take them across seven thousand light-years, and require nearly four weeks.

Jon was annoyed. For him, Tenareif was to have been the highlight of the mission. But Rudy’s death had cast a pall over everything, which even the discovery of the mysterious marker, with its implication of cosmic goodwill, had failed to lift. Especially for Matt. In the end, Jon understood, Matt had looked into the black hole and seen a metaphor for the meaning of existence.

CONDITIONS WERE NOT helped by the fact that riding his star drive was something less than exhilarating. Jon had always enjoyed travel. He’d been around the globe several times, had represented Henry Barber at distant forums and conferences whenever he could, had learned to sail when he was a boy, and had always known that one day he would go the Moon.

To the Moon.

But travel should include motion. Movement. The sense of getting from one place to another. Journeys are not about destinations, they are about the route. They are about mountain passages and cruising around the horn and riding the Northwest glide train along the Pacific rim. They are about sailing past Jupiter and drinking toasts as Centaurus grows brighter on the screens. (Okay, that last was strictly his imagination, but that made it no less true.) It was not, most certainly not, sitting for weeks inside a constricted container that passed nothing. That didn’t rock in the wind, or throw on the brakes, or even glide slowly through the eternal mists of Hazeltine space.

It was early February back home. The All-Swiss Regional Bridge Tournament, in which he’d played last year, where he and his partner had almost won, had opened its qualifying round the day they’d left Tenareif. Pitchers would be reporting for spring training. And the streets of Washington would be filled with lovely young women.

There was a time he’d taken all that for granted.

He’d given up all pretense of trying to work. Before coming, he’d thought the atmosphere for finding ways to improve the Locarno, to make it more efficient, to give it more range on less fuel, to make it even more precise, would be ideal. But it hadn’t played out that way. For one thing he’d found it hard to work when there was no break, no chance to wander off and hit a local bistro. For another, as the situation on board deteriorated, he couldn’t simply abandon Matt, leaving him to entertain himself through the endless days and nights. So they watched VR and played bridge and worked out, and the lights dimmed and brightened, marking the hours.

The AI had an extensive translation by then of the Sigma Hotel poems, but neither of them was much into poetry. When Jim announced he could find nothing in the book about automated deep-space missions or about omega clouds, they lost interest. There were, Jim said, occasional references to clouds, as in creating moody skies or bringing rain, but there was nothing about clouds that rolled in from the outer darkness, pouring down the wrath of the gods on baffled city dwellers.

Jon spent a fair amount of time going over the details they’d compiled on Tenareif. He wasn’t an astrophysicist, and black holes were a long way from his field of interest, but nevertheless he spent hours peering down into the funnel, wondering what conditions were really like, what the odds were that the thing actually opened into another universe. Such a possibility was counterintuitive, but everything about black holes was counterintuitive. So much about the structure of the universe at large was counterintuitive.

HE AMUSED HIMSELF by calculating the distance to Earth. Technically, of course, while it was in Barber space, there was no such thing as a range between the McAdams and anything in the Milky Way. Each existed in its own spatial continuum. Nevertheless, he proposed the question to himself in terms of where they would be if they exited now.

At the beginning of the second week, they were twenty-two thousand light-years out. “Pity we don’t have a telescope big enough to look back,” he told Matt. “Imagine what we’d see. They won’t build their first pyramid for another fifteen thousand years or so. Babylon, Sumer, none of that exists. There’s nobody there except guys living in caves.”