FOREIGNER: a novel of first contact

Caroline J. Cherryh

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE FOREIGNER SEQUENCE

Contents

·                                 BOOK ONE

·                                 |I| II| III| IV|

·                                 BOOK TWO

·                                 |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

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Copyright © 1994 by CJ. Cherryh.

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Michael Whelan

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All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

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First Printing, November 1994

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BOOK ONE

I

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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 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 Phoenixlistened intently during her hundred hours traverse of realspace.

She heard nothing at any range—which pleased her captains and the staff aboard. Phoenixwanted 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 Phoenixcarried 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 Phoenixcarried 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 Phoenixran 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 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 Phoenixinto 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.

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. Phoenixwas saving herself. She blew off vwith no consideration of fragile human bodies inside her.