I’m indebted to David L. Dawson, M.D., NASA Johnson Space Center, and to Walter Cuirle, for technical assistance; to Holly McClure, for the chindi; to Christopher Schelling for his staying power with titles; to Ralph Vicinanza for always being there when needed. To Sara and Bob Schwager for their work with the manuscript. To Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan, who kept a candle burning in the window. And as always to Maureen.

Dedication

For Susan and Harlan

THE BENJAMIN L. Martin, the Benny to its captain and passengers, was at the extreme limit of its survey territory, orbiting a neutron star, catalog number VV651107, when it cruised into the history books.

Its captain was Michael Langley, married six times, father of three, reformed drug addict, onetime theology student, amateur actor, amateur musician, disbarred lawyer. Langley seemed to have led at least a half dozen separate lives, but it was of course not too difficult to do that when vitality into a second century, and even sometimes into a third, was not uncommon.

The onboard survey team consisted of eleven specialists of one kind and another, physicists, geologists, planetologists, climatologists, and masters of a few more arcane fields. Like all the Academy people, they treated their work very seriously, measuring, poking, and taking the temperature of every available world, satellite, star, and dust cloud. And of course they loved anomalies, when they could find one. It was a fool’s game, Langley knew, and if any of them had spent as much time on the frontier as he had, she’d be aware that everything they thought to be odd, remarkable, or “worth noting,” was repeated a thousand times within a few dozen light-years. The universe was endlessly repetitive. There were no anomalies.

Take for example this neutron star. It resembled a gray billiard ball, or would have if they’d been able to light it up. It was only a few kilometers across, barely the size of Manhattan, but it was several times more massive than the sun. An enormous deadweight, so dense that it was twisting time and space, diverting light from surrounding stars into a halo. Playing havoc with the Benny’s clocks and systems, even occasionally running them backward. Its surface gravity was so high that Langley, could he have reached the ground, would have weighed eight billion tons.

“With or without my shoes?” he’d asked the astrophysicist who’d presented him with the calculation.

Despite the outrageous characteristics of the object, there were at least a half dozen in the immediate neighborhood. The reality was that there were simply a lot of dead stars floating about. Nobody noticed them because they didn’t make any noise and they were all but invisible.

“What makes it interesting,” Ava explained to him, “is that it’s going to bump into that star over there.” She tapped her finger on the display, but Langley wasn’t sure which star she meant. “It has fourteen planets, it’s nine billion years old, but this monster is going to scatter everything. And probably disrupt the sun.”

Langley had heard that, a few days before. But he knew it wouldn’t happen during his lifetime.

Ava Eckart was one of the few on board who seemed to have a life outside her specialty. She was a black woman, attractive, methodical, congenial. Organized the shipboard parties. Liked to dance. Enjoyed talking about her work, but had the rare ability to put it in layman’s terms.

“When?” Langley asked. “When’s all this going to happen?”

“In about seventeen thousand years.”

Well, there you go. You just need a little patience. “And you can’t wait.”

Her dark eyes sparkled. “You got it,” she said. And then her internal lights faded. “That’s the problem with being out here. Everything interesting happens on an inconvenient time scale.” She picked up a couple of coffee mugs. Did he want one?

“No,” he said. “Thanks, but it keeps me awake all day.”

She smiled, poured herself one, and eased into a chair. “But yes,” she said, “I’d love to be here when it happens. To be able to see something like that.”

“Seventeen thousand years? Better eat right.”

“I guess.” She remained pensive. “Even if you lived long enough to make it, you’d need a few thousand more years to watch the process. At least.”

“That’s why we have simulations.”

“Not the same,” she said. “It’s not like being there.” She shook her head. “Even when you are, you’re pretty much locked out. Take the star, for example.” She meant 1107, the neutron star they were orbiting. “We’re out here, but we can’t get close enough to see it.”

Langley pointed to its image on the displays.

“I mean really see it,” she continued. “Cruise over its surface. Bounce some lights off it.”

“Go for a walk on it.”

“Yes!” Ava’s enthusiasm bubbled to the surface. She was wearing green shorts and a white pullover that read University of Ohio. “We’ve got antigravity. All we need’s a better generator.”

“A lot better.”

The Ahab image customarily used by the ship’s artificial intelligence appeared on-screen. Like all AI’s in Academy vessels, he answered to Bill.

The grim steely eyes and the muttonchop whiskers and the windblown black corduroy pullover were too familiar to elicit notice from Langley. But his passengers always went to alert when he appeared. Had Bill been a self-aware entity, which his creators claimed he was not, Langley would have thought he was enjoying himself at their expense.

“Captain,” he said. “We are encountering a curious phenomenon.”

That was an unusual comment. Usually Bill just dumped information without editorializing. “What is it, Bill?”

“It’s gone now. But there was an artificial radio transmission.”

“A transmission?”

“Yes. At 8.4 gigahertz.”

“What did it say? Who’s it from?”

The sea-swept eyes drew together. “I can’t answer either question, Captain. It’s not any language or system with which I am familiar.”

Langley and Ava exchanged glances. They were a long way from home. Nobody else was out here.

“The signal was directed,” Bill added.

“Not broadcast?”

“No. We passed through it several moments ago.”