She’s on that ship, Naomi Abila thought as she watched the incoming interplanetary shuttle rise slowly in the far north like a supernova kicked loose from the firmament, a brilliant point of light that got higher and brighter every second. As it grew brighter and nearer, it began a majestic sweep eastward and inscribed a thin, glowing trace across Canis Major and then Orion. Gently, its path curved back until it was again headed directly for their base on New Antarctica.
Naomi smiled at her son, Sasha. She worried that he might resent having another person becoming, effectively, lead on New Antarctica’s part of the project to create a mini black hole. That had been pretty much hers up to now. On the other hand, he idolized Dr. Brunhilda Kremer for solving the Quark star minimum mass problem, all the more since the story had arrived of how she helped derail an attempt to sabotage the project back in Sol’s System. And, of course, in a time when age difference no longer mattered, Dr. Kremer was single.
The glow faded from blue-white to dull red to nothing. Flood beams stabbed up past the tiny yellow disk of their local giant planet, Amundsen, into the Milky Way and found their target, a tiny ball so reflective it might have been made of liquid mercury. Rapidly it descended toward them. At first it seemed like a small chromium moon, then, as it dropped lower, Naomi’s perspective changed, and she saw the light scatter off a teardrop hull as big as a hill and shiny as a mirror.
A beam of brilliant green glowing plasma lanced up from the landing area and blossomed into a violet flower just beneath the broad part of the hull where its force spent itself against a silent expanse. Distant ice fields around their “dry island” city glowed in response.
The spacecraft slowed and followed the beam down toward the landing zone with the ponderous stateliness of objects of its scale. A hundred meters up, the plasma flickered out and the two-hundred-meter-long teardrop settled down through wind-whipped snow as if held by some giant hand. The sight of a thousand tons of mass effortlessly floating on magnetic fields never failed to inspire awe in Naomi. At times like this her mind went back to ancient legends; we are heirs of Prometheus, she thought.
The port dome flowed around the ship as it slipped down into the colony docks.
Naomi turned to Sasha. “Let’s go meet the new boss.”
“Us?”
Naomi laughed. “Your Uncle Ted is out at the site and Wotan Kremer’s tied up in a meeting about ice sheet slippage.”
“Dr. Kremer is his daughter, isn’t she? Hard to imagine Grandpa Abila staying away if it were you.”
Indeed it would. Dad was always there to greet her when she came back from the construction site, even if only for a week. But Wotan Kremer was notorious for not letting personal matters interfere with business. “Yes, but melting planets has to be done just right. He’ll probably see her tomorrow.”
“I wonder what they’ll call New Antarctica when they’re done melting the ice.”
Naomi sparkled. “Come on. You’ll want to make a good impression.”
He chuckled and followed her into the elevator.
She’d reserved a table on the upper level, where they could watch the disembarkation. She liked to watch the new arrivals and imagine who they might be and what their personalities would be like. Sasha shared that general interest, but today was a little more special.
They arrived in the great cylindrical cavern just as massive sections of the shuttle’s hull swung aside, exposing its innards to the business of unloading. The hull was covered with frost and there was a sharp nippy smell to the air just mixed with the icy nitrogen above. They could even see their breath. Sasha tried blowing a ring of mist.
They walked to their table, a semicircle that curved away from the low, transparent guard wall. Four pod-chairs rimmed the table; they took the middle two. She settled into the infrared warmth of the chair and savored the sensation of breathing crisp air. They ordered coffee and watched four ramps slide out from the sides of the cylinder into the ship. A host of robot unloaders rolled down three of them to get to the cargo. Above them was a large sign, “Welcome to New Antarctica. Erebus (Groombridge 34A) Star System.” The name they’d given the star was so new that someone had thought to add the old catalog name in parentheses.
A dozen folk emerged on the fourth ramp, hooded against the chill of the still warming air. “Do you know which one she is?” Sasha asked. “Mom?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry. I was just checking with the site on how impactor fabrication was doing. Icestar was reporting a concern about defect frequency.”
“Mom, those pop media gadflies would make a scandal out of someone’s hangnail.”
She chuckled. “It’s not really important; we’d like the impactor to be a single crystal, but that’s not a requirement. That close to light speed, its mechanical properties on impact are almost irrelevant.” In two New Antarctica years, their billion-ton iron rod would be the first to head toward the implosion site, a little less than eights light years away. Independently, identical impactors would be launched from Lacaille 9352, Epsilon Eridani, and Sol. Each impactor and each launch had to meet exacting specification and schedule constraints to make the implosion as symmetrical as physics would allow, or the biggest fiasco in human history would result. She was really not so unhappy to have someone else take responsibility for that.
A hood fell from one of the passengers, revealing a tall blond with wide-set eyes and a long nose. She didn’t seem to mind the chill, and she was grinning from ear to ear. She glanced around and Sasha’s eyes met hers momentarily.
“Mom?”
“It’s her! Dr. Kremer’s the tall one.” Naomi waved. The woman waved back and headed for the elevator.
“Not bad,” Sasha said. “She’ll melt someone’s icecap.”
Naomi smiled. “She looks really glad to be home.” At twenty, her son was somewhat of a man-child, brilliant enough in his architectural studies but never quite connecting socially. She worried that she was too close to him, that she hadn’t quite lived up to her weaning responsibilities.
Dr. Kremer reappeared on the terrace and headed for their table. She’d shed the hooded cape on the elevator, to reveal a trim figure in a standard gray unisuit. She carried herself with a grace that spoke of diligent exercise.
“Mom, is she an athlete?” Sasha asked. “Thirteen years on a starship and she looks like she could run a marathon!”
Naomi laughed. “About seven years ship time—remember your physics—and people have a lot of time for exercise on interstellar voyages. Sasha, don’t jump into the personal stuff right away, okay?”
“Okay.”
Kremer held out a hand as she reached the table. “Naomi Abila! How good to see you in person. And this must be Sasha!”
“Welcome to New Antarctica,” Sasha said, holding out his hand.
Kremer shook it, smiling broadly, then added, “I just heard everyone voted to change the star name to Erebus when I came out of deep sleep. I love the change—I think.”
Naomi patted her on the arm. “You’ll get used to it!”
“I got to visit its namesake, the volcano in old Antarctica.”
They sat and ordered more coffee, which a robot vendor brought in short order.
Sasha’s eyes glowed. “Earth must be amazing.”
“It’s good to be home,” Kremer said to Sasha. “You’ve just graduated, haven’t you? Architecture?”
Sasha nodded. “First year in grad school now, macroarchitecture.”
“He wants to design space colonies,” Naomi added.
Kremer smiled warmly at her friend’s son. “I’m sure he will. What do you think of the Black Hole Project, Sasha?”
“The BHP’s just mind-boggling, Dr. Kremer,” Sasha said, “trying to get such a precise collision with four-billion-ton impactors eight light years away.”
She laughed easily. “You can call me Hilda. And that’s about all there’s left to do in physics—mind-boggling things. All the easy stuff was done before we were born. We have to be precise, but not perfect. Vertex Station, where the impact point will be, provides the vernier beams and guidance points for the final approach. Then, on December 23, 2284, all four impactors meet the target as planned, and boom! We get a mini black hole.”
Sasha shuddered. “Or, boom! The universe blows up!”
Naomi grimaced and tried to think of something diplomatic to say as Kremer’s jaw dropped.
“Just kidding,” Sasha said quickly. “But we’ve got some ice-heads here, too, who think it’s possible.”
“Well!” Kremer shook her head. “I didn’t think I’d escape them entirely.”
“Anyway, we’ve got an extra six months,” Sasha said.
Naomi stared at him in surprise. “What do you mean by that?” No one had mentioned a delay to her. She looked at Hilda, who shook her head.
“I haven’t heard anything like that. Where did you get that, Sasha?”
“Ginny Wu at Icestar says a message came in delaying the impact time by six months. Says they’re reviewing the calculations and that Wotan asked them to hold it until he gets a chance to talk to you, Dr. Kremer.”
Naomi watched Kremer’s lips tighten for a brief moment.
“Ginny Wu is Sasha’s best friend’s cousin,” Naomi added. “It’s still a small town here.”
Kremer took a breath and smiled. “Well. You should have seen it when I was here. Morris Wu—he started Icestar—and I went to school together half a century ago. A delay doesn’t sound right, though; I should have gotten word directly. Let me double-check . . . nothing.”
Naomi shook her head. “Dr. Kremer, uh, Hilda, it could be a rumor or a complete invention on someone’s part. Ginny can get a little in front of things at times.”
Sasha laughed. “Like when she said the Maluks were New Reformationists and they were just Baptists! It was weeks before all our Martian refugees started talking to them again, just for a rumor.”
“Well, I hope that’s all there is to this,” Hilda said. “You’ll let me know before doing anything about it?”
Naomi grinned. “Absolutely! When are you going to meet your father?”
Hilda shook her head. “He’s still in a meeting about tidal waves and the planned Maud Plateau ice sheet collapse. Said he’d be here tomorrow. Naomi, I haven’t heard anything about a delay, which is surpassingly strange. It’s a major change. Brad Adams and Sarah Levine back at Sol’s BHP would have sent messages to me. All the traffic I’ve gotten is completely normal.”
“Including the impact date?” Naomi asked.
“That was set seventeen years ago,” Hilda said. “The impactor state vector targets are cast in concrete; they’re the fixed star about which everything else in the project revolves. The only reason to send a new one would be some major change.”
Naomi shivered. “Hilda, we do have some Consolidationists here, including three of the ten planetary councilors. Hans Bluth, the security minister, is one of them. Wotan figured that was a good place for a conservative.”
Hilda shook her head. “Some of those people think they’re so right, that anything they do is justified.”
Sasha’s head was turning between them like a spectator watching a tennis match. “What happens if we launch late?” he asked.
Naomi looked at Hilda and both women shook their heads.
“Complete disaster,” Hilda said finally, “of varying flavors, depending on how late and what is done about it, but as far as the project is concerned, complete disaster.”
Hilda found quarters in Hadley’s Hotel, overlooking the large lake in the center of Dome 2, east of the spaceport. The hotel was a re-creation of the hotel in Hobart where Amundsen had stayed after his return from the South Pole. It was staffed by pleasant android robots with cockney accents. After brunch with Naomi and Sasha, she’d spent the day getting her things in storage and connecting with Shira Hassan, an old schoolgirl friend and BHP team member who promised to call on her.
Shira laughed. “I’ll be the one in the head scarf and long dress.”
“You always had the most beautiful long silk scarves.” Hilda remembered them fondly.
Storage chores done, she took a break and walked around the lakeshore where she and Mom had played. Still there was the fountain where Mom had told her of her decision to head the first expedition to Ross 128. . . .
“I have to do this, Hildy. Kyle Perot got himself killed in a skiing accident and they need another starship captain. It will be the first ever discovery voyage not mounted from the Solar System; and after sixteen years on my butt, it’s an opportunity I can’t pass up. You can come too, if you want.”
“Will Dad come?” she’d asked.
Mom had been silent for a while. “Your father and I . . . well, sometimes two strong people need to get away from each other for a while.”
“Mom,” she had said, “I love Dad. All my friends are here. School—I’m playing clarinet in the band. Song-Do Chun wants me to go to the Waltz Festival with him.”
“I understand, dear,” she’d said with a smile. “‘Feathered and flown with projects of your own.’”
“Huh?”
“Look up Millay. Don’t worry, dear, we’ll have more time together some day.”
“When are you going?”
“Tomorrow,” Kate Avonford had said. “Tomorrow.”
Hilda remembered the moment as clearly as if it had been yesterday. It had been the end of her childhood. She finished the walk with moist eyes and headed up to her room, to bury herself in the details of expanding the solar power and beam projector array that would push Erebus’ impactor to its rendezvous some twelve years hence. She worked through dinner but made it down to the Lakeside Grill for supper with Sasha. The starship had been on New Antarctica’s thirty-eight-hour, four-meal day since deceleration, but she still felt a bit of a disconnect after all the years on Earth.
She watched a show until the wee hours, and fell asleep easily enough.
A crash of cutlery woke her the next morning. Her room overlooked a large courtyard full of diners busy with their breakfasts; someone must have knocked over a cup. She opened her eyes and decided it was well past time to get up. Dad would be coming by at noon.
The knock on the door came at 19.6 hours, precisely. Heart in her throat, she opened it.
“Dad!”
Wotan Kremer had not changed physically since Hilda had last seen him, but he gave the appearance of a somewhat more youthful person than she’d remembered. His shoulders were more square, his posture better, his face more ruddy and self-assured.
Of course, the man who had sent her away to Earth at the age of sixteen had been a very sad person trying to put a failed marriage behind him. That had been six decades ago, with a reunion, two more children and another split. Those who are larger than life live by their own rules, Hilda thought. One looks up in wonder and tries to stay out from under their feet.
“Hildy!” He opened his arms and Hilda rushed into them. Sixty years of heartache were suddenly set aside and she was ten years old again, back in the time of birthdays, Christmas trees, and trips out to see the stars. Her eyes filled with tears as she laid her head on his broad shoulders. At length they parted. She rubbed her eyes. Should she mention Mom? What wounds would that open in both of them? Yet to say nothing was like trying to ignore an elephant in the room.
“Katherine sends her greetings from Luyten something or other, wherever she is now”
“I’m . . . I’m glad you’re speaking to each other.”
“Hmmpf. Well, there are times when I think that the one year between messages is about right. But, ja, we communicate. I should have been more realistic; the only way one can keep a butterfly forever is to put a pin through it. Hildy,” he paused, “she’s very proud of what you’ve accomplished, as I am. The Ried clan and their allies were formidable adversaries, trying to sabotage your project! But you won’t have such worries now. Here, I am in charge!” He grinned at her.
They had Mittagessen of vegetable cake and salad, then talked into the afternoon about family, about Liz going to Lacaille 9352 to manage the final effort there, and Konrad, the brother she’d never met, leading the Colony at Ross 128. They wended their way back to Hilda’s room. Finally it was time to talk about the business here.
“Dad, there’s a rumor that Earth’s directed a delay.”
Wotan nodded gravely. “We received it five days ago. I wanted to talk to you about it before I released it.”
“I’m glad you did,” Hilda said. “Things don’t seem right—I would have gotten a message, too. From Zhau Tse Wen, from Brad, or from Sarah—from all of them.”
Wotan shrugged. “Our people had some reservations as well. But the orders came right from the BHP transmitter location—our interferometers pinned it down to within a couple of kilometers in the Sol System. The multi-channel signal was continuous, with all the right synchronization codes. There are occasional dropouts, but that happens going through an asteroid belt. I’ve released it to your access. Go ahead and take a look.”
She touched the local net and scanned the numbers. It was basically their standard state vector update, of which there had been several early on, but none in the last ten years. Standard except that the launch epoch was almost six earth months later. The comments field said the change was due to a recalculation of the ten sigma coupling to the probability field for fluctuation inflation.
Hilda’s stomach suddenly knotted up. “Dad, there’s no such thing as ‘coupling to the probability field for fluctuation inflation,’ and the BHP certainly hasn’t done any tests to look for anything like that.”
“Hmmm. Well, that’s not really my area, but I understand that many physicists think that the big bang couldn’t have happened by itself, that something external, some first cause, had to trigger the initial period of inflation.”
Hilda was about to say she’d never heard of such nonsense when she remembered that she had, and where. “Dad, there was a Dr. Hiram Kokos working with the Consolidationists . . . I think he was making those kinds of noises. He’s a planetary astronomer, not a theoretical physicist, and no real physicist takes his stuff seriously. Ask your local physics community.”
Wotan shook his head. “Hildy, that would be Brian Lobov, who runs the physics department at our university, and maybe a couple of others who make it a hobby. He’s pretty good; I rely on him.” He smiled and shrugged. “But there is just not much of a physics community on New Antarctica, even now. We only have about half a million people in the whole system! Why do you think I sent you to Earth?”
Hilda’s eyes opened wide.
“Mom left. I thought I was, well, in the way. A reminder.”
“Oh, no, Hildy, never that! It was for your physics. You didn’t want to do anything else—no boys, no dances, just your equations and your experiments. Hildy, do you remember the argument you had with Alex Leparc about relativity? I thought you two would come to blows! You were, what, eight years old?”
Hilda winced. They had come to blows, later, and nobody had ever heard about it because young men don’t like losing fights with girls.
“For physics, Hildy, you had to go to Earth. All these years, you never said . . .”
He was completely right, she realized. She could never have done what she did at New Antarctica. But she had not felt that way at the time. Emotions held back for years raced through her. She didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I just . . . Should I order some drinks?”
Wotan sighed and smiled. “Dry sherry. Our vines have done well.”
She placed the order on her bionet. Wotan kept talking.
“Have you noticed that the glaciers are starting to retreat? Air pressure went over 0.6 bars a couple of months ago, and our mean surface temperature is up to 254, and up to 274 within fifteen degrees of the equator. Things should proceed quite rapidly now.”
Hilda’s mind shifted gears. “274? Above freezing? Open water? Do you have open water?” New Antarctica had started with a surface temperature of 233 K at the equator, with spots below 173 K at the poles.
Wotan laughed—the deep-throated, powerful, thunderous laugh she remembered from the good times of her childhood. “Not yet, but they’ve created a betting pool. The bets will peak for a time a few months from now. People keep asking me; I tell them I’m not saying because I don’t want to bias the pool. Can you imagine that? It is far too complicated to predict precisely, but they think I know and am not saying!”
Hilda shook her head.
“This is the most Earthlike planet humanity has ever found! Mass, gravity, tectonics, everything. All we had to do was give it a little push, ja!”
Their drinks arrived. Wotan swished the dark fluid around his mouth, then abruptly swallowed.
“You must come on an air trip with me and I will show you this world I am building for you.”
“For me?”
“Of course for you, if you want it. Why do parents do anything?”
Hilda laughed. No person could own a planet, but as a first-generation founder’s daughter, and having made a small mark in human history, she would occupy a unique position here for as long as she wanted. “Okay, but it will have to be tomorrow; I’ll be leaving for the site the next day.”
Wotan drained what remained of his sherry.
“Done. We’ll leave about eight, from West Dome Airport.”
After Wotan left, Hilda remembered that they’d left the conversation about the delay unfinished. She touched the net to find Dr. Brian Lobov.
Somewhere, the fates were having fun with her. Dr. Lobov had been a student of none other than Hiram Kokos. Whoever had sent that message had sent it to fertile ground.
The next day, they left early and flew over the ice pack and emerging islands of New Antarctica’s Great Equatorial Sea. Their aircraft was a high-wing delta design with a mostly transparent fuselage. Wotan flew with manual controls. He was born before genetically engineered bioradio and had an irritable distaste for prostheses. As long as Hilda could remember, he preferred to do things with his hands.
Wotan pointed out to her where the first open-air settlements would be. “It’s a volcanic island chain, with the hot spot migrating southeast, somewhat like the Hawaiian Islands, but a bit larger. You see, the big caldera, Novetna, is now free of ice!”
At his touch the aircraft banked left over the gigantic sharp-edged depression on the top of the mountain. They were cruising at fifteen kilometers above sea level, but the mountain was almost twelve kilometers, and a red-orange glow from a spot in the huge caldera was easily visible.
“It has a lava lake!” Hilda exclaimed.
“Ja, more than one. We will not build too permanently near that one! The next island west is not so active. The government and the university, they will go there. I call it Avonford Island, after your mother.”
“You miss her sometimes?”
“I miss the good times. But, Hildy, you must remember she and I are two stubborn people who found we could not make always the compromises two people must make to live together. We both had to be in charge, and that was impossible. Impossible. The fights, those I do not miss.”
Together, they watched the icefields flow by below in silence. Hilda brought up the subject again.
“Dad, the university . . .”
“There will be a place for you there, Hildy, if you want it. Dr. Lobov will be glad to have you; he has many new ideas he would like to discuss with you.”
“Uh, Dad. I’ve looked at a couple of his papers. You don’t have much in the way of peer review out here, and . . .”
Wotan held up a hand, with a laugh. “Hildy, I cannot get into any physics discussions—not my area—but I am sure that is something you physicists will work out! Perhaps the experiments done with this black hole we are making will clarify things, no?”
Hilda nodded, with the unspoken reservation that some people find it very hard to give up cherished ideas, even with contrary data staring them in the face.
“Dad, I’m convinced there’s something wrong with the delay message. The physics justifying it is wrong, but it’s wrong in such a way that may not be clear to Dr. Lobov.”
“He is a good man, Hildy. You are suggesting that someone has deliberately sent a false message to sabotage the project?”
“I think so. There’s been no subsequent confirmation.”
“Hmmm. Hildy, would there be?”
“It’s such a major change, I’m sure I would have gotten a personal message from Tse Wen, Sarah, or Brad. The physics is such a departure from the standard model that it would be the most important thing happening in physics. But we have no news.”
Wotan was silent for a while, then said, “If we send our impactor at the wrong time, it would be bad.”
“Very bad.”
“I am looking forward to using mini black holes to make a new kind of world, like a ring world, but one that can use the energy conversion properties of a black hole to provide light and propel itself among the stars, or maybe even to another galaxy.”
“Dad, that would take millions of years.”
Wotan laughed. “When I was growing up, people got old and died in a few decades; everyone was in a hurry. ‘We aren’t getting any younger, are we?’ they would say about delays. Now we say ‘we aren’t getting any older, are we?’ There is time enough.” He reached out and touched her hand. “Hildy, people look up to me here. I have to be responsible and responsive.”
He chuckled as if he did not take it very seriously, but Hilda saw the steel in his eyes and thought otherwise.
“I do very much want the black hole to be created,” Wotan continued, “and it is a unique honor to be chairman of the Erebus System Commonwealth Council when it is happening. But that means I am not free to do exactly as I please, even where you are concerned, my Hildy.”
“Dad, if our impactor is late, and the other impactors aren’t diverted, they will make a beam of relativistic matter and radiation that could squirt out our way, spraying over this planetary system. Everyone will have to take shelter. Some of the larger pieces of debris could hit like nuclear warheads. It would be moving so fast that the first of it would arrive only hours after the flash of the explosion. Very little warning would be possible.”
Wotan thought for a while. “There is time,” he said finally. “The Impactor does not launch for eighteen months yet, even on the old schedule. So no changes need to be made now. We will discuss and evaluate this. Meanwhile, I have something to show you. Ahead, we approach the shadow line.”
Their aircraft had overrun morning, racing into night. As the sky darkened, Hilda saw the Vasili range rise before them, painted blood red by the rising star behind them.
“Oh!”
“Ja, but wait a moment now as we go over.”
Darkness fell and Hilda soon found the next planet out, Wilkes, rising over the peaks. Almost as bright as Venus from Earth, it was easy to spot over the mountaintops in the crystal clear sky.
“That one is near opposition. A pretty sight. But look down.”
The ice below glowed red as far as she could see, as if lit from beneath. A network of brilliant yellow lines could be seen here and there.
“You have heard of the Deccan Traps of India?” Wotan asked.
“The huge lava field?”
He nodded. “Something like that is happening here, beneath the ice. We have removed an immense weight from the local geology. New Antarctica is smaller, denser, and younger than Earth and the demons of its core are less tame.” He chuckled at the metaphor. “We have loosed their chains, and this ice is now melting from both below and above. It will be gone here in a few weeks, I think.”
“And with it the clear skies,” Hilda remarked.
“Ja, for a while, cloudy it will be.”
A meteor streaked through the dark sky, and then another. Soon the sky was full of them.
“More nitrogen,” Wotan said, “that was once ammonia ice in the Krietzerbelt.”
The planet was transforming before her eyes. How many years would she live, Hilda thought, how many star systems might she see, before she saw the likes of this again!
Hilda caught her breath as she approached the nearly completed impactor with staff members Phil Stavros, Shira Hassan, Naomi Abila, and her brother Ted Abila. From ten kilometers out, it looked like an incredibly long, thin beam of light with a spiderweb at one end.
“How did it go with your dad?” Naomi asked Hilda as they approached its dull gray cylindrical surface.
“I was awed by the progress he’s made,” she answered softly, thinking about progress in all its various guises.
“What about the project schedule?” Phil Stavros asked, swiveling his seat around. He was nominally their pilot, but he handled everything through AIs and the net. A youngster of forty, he’d mastered the ability to carry on a verbal conversation while interfacing visually with the net.
“We can keep going for now, but he’s not convinced the message is phony. The physics rationale is apparently credible to Dr. Lobov, whom he trusts.”
“But Lobov doesn’t have . . .” Naomi paused and started again. “He’s a nice avuncular showman and students love him, but I know physics better than he does!”
“I know, Naomi. But Lobov has a Ph.D. from Earth. That makes him a god as far as Dad is concerned.”
Ted shook his head. “A rather imperfect god, if you ask me. I have an idea.”
“Yes?”
“We can add another deflector ring to the design. It will let us push 50 percent harder and give the control system 50 percent more drag to use when it reaches the vertex. We may need some added flexibility—in case there are schedule problems.”
Hilda thought long and hard. There was only one thing more important than not getting into a contest of wills with her father, and that was the BHP itself. She closed her eyes. If Wotan were held responsible for the failure of the BHP, his reputation would be ruined forever. Humanity had not yet gotten used to the implications of that word “forever.” The ancient words came to her mind: Cattle die, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die, but one thing lasts forever, the doom on each man’s life. Nowadays, one could not even count on death for escape from one’s critics. It would be up to her to keep her father from becoming the laughingstock and fool of history.
But even fighting for his own doom, Wotan Kremer could be a formidable opponent. And he was the law, here. Hilda touched Naomi’s hand. “We need more of a contingency, and one that is less obviously a challenge to his authority.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Hilda shook her head. She tried to remember what she could about leadership. An American general, Patton, had once said something like, Don’t tell people how to do something, tell them what you want done and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. That seemed to fit the circumstance.
“It’s probably best that I don’t know,” Hilda went on. “Dad can be very clever, and I don’t think I could lie if he asked me a direct question. Meanwhile, Ted, I need a favor. You’re more attuned to AIs and what they can and can’t be made to do.”
He nodded, looking at her with dark shiny eyes from beneath a mop of short, wavy black hair. He was, she thought, very handsome.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“I’ve sent you a link to the postponement message. I’d like you to analyze it front and back. See if you can find anything suspicious at all that might indicate a fake—besides the content, of course.”
“You mean like using a different version of the spread-spectrum encoding protocol?”
“The what?” Hilda touched the net and was greeted by a two-line definition, half the words of which she didn’t know, and a menu of menus, the titles of which would require a trip to a dictionary. She shivered. Just as soon as you think you’re hell on wheels in this universe, something comes along to humble you.
“Uh, a spread spectrum protocol is something that determines which bits go where on which frequency,” Ted said. “Different protocols work better than others, depending on what part of the solar system the beam is going through and what the solar activity is—separate AIs might differ on what protocol to use, so an abrupt change in protocol could indicate a different choice, or just a change in conditions. But it could be an indicator of a different source.”
“Yeah, that kind of thing,” Hilda said. “Indicators. Lots of good, solid indicators.”
A slight tug on their seat harnesses told them the runabout had reached the end of the impactor. The lines holding the superconducting loops that would pull the impactor up to a gamma of ten looked exceedingly thin, but up close, Hilda could see they were more complex.
“The stays are like lace tubes.”
“Yup,” said Ted, “almost two meters across. The lacy pattern is due to cross-connections—you could cut any of these stays in a thousand different places, and still tow the impactor. The carbon nanotubes that bear the weight are even thinner. Most of what you see is matrix and shielding. The Groombridge 34 system is fairly young still, 2.734 gigayears by the last measurements, and there’s a fair amount of debris around. So we have to design for more contingencies. By the way, have you looked at Bee?”
“Bee?”
“Our other red dwarf. Out that way.” Ted waved toward the rear of the impactor.
Hilda followed the motion of his arm and soon spotted a very brilliant orange-ish star.
“Pull up a visual from astroview and zoom in,” he told her.
Hilda did so.
“It’s only about a tenth the brightness of A,” Ted said. “Not much more than a brown dwarf, and the biggest thing in its planetary system is a micro-giant with a Mars-sized core, about three Earth masses of ice on top of that, and two Earth masses of hydrogen, etcetera, on top of that. But it’s got a huge asteroid belt—almost a ring system, really—about two tenths of an AU out.”
Hilda noticed a dark curved line across the southern hemisphere. “That thick dark band?”
“Yup. The first planet out is a bit off the equatorial plane—probably an escaped moon, an interloper. Anyway, it makes the ring thicker than it would be otherwise.”
“Anyone out there now?”
“Less than a hundred researchers and the usual infrastructure,” Naomi said. “The main habitat is a toroid—only three hundred meters across.” She grinned. “It contains the smallest population of any inhabited star system that we know of. My other brother’s out there and says they’re lost in it. It’s a good place for independent minds that want to get away from it all.”
Hilda thought about the opportunity such seclusion would give her. Time to think. Time to wrestle with the universe without having to worry about projects, schedules, and politics.
“You look wistful,” Ted said, laughing. “Are we already such a pain?”
She shook her head. “No, no. It’s just that, well, not everyone is made for what they have to do in life.” She sighed.
Their craft rounded the impactor in silence.
“I may have to oppose Dad to make the project happen,” Hilda finally said. “I’ll need your support and it won’t be without risk. Tolerating disobedience isn’t one of Dad’s virtues; he can be gentle, but only when his control isn’t threatened.”
“Wotan’s our elected leader,” Naomi said. “You can’t just say no, Hilda. You have to think about the rest of the colony and your responsibility to them!”
“Oh, God, Naomi! I’ve thought of nothing else. But that’s the point, isn’t it? That message is bogus. If we follow it, we’ll have had a role in sabotaging the most important project humanity has ever attempted. It passes all the authentication tests; but Tse Wen and all would never send out something like that without a viable explanation.”
“I can’t remember any group, never mind an individual, openly defying the Council president before,” Ted said in a hushed voice.
Shira Hassan spoke up. “We made him give in on allowing traditional clothing.”
Hilda nodded. If it had been up to Wotan, there would probably have been a dress code. As it was, the colony colorfully reflected the varied national origins of its people. Her father was stubborn and autocratic, but not impossible when others were clearly in the right.
“He may not feel free to do what he suspects should be done,” Hilda said. “You would be saving his name and his reputation as well, though don’t expect to be thanked for it.”
“Well,” Ted said, “it hasn’t come to all that yet, and we’ll proceed as if this delay order is going to go away. I’ve got a feast programmed back at the construction shack. Strap in!”
Hilda laughed and had barely gotten her belt around herself when the runabout leapt forward at what must have been a full gee. The construction shack, a golden ring spinning on top of what looked for all the world like a beehive of robots, grew before them. Now that she thought about it, she was hungry.
Most of the crew were there to meet her, and over coffee after lunch, she laid it out for them. A younger woman laughed nervously. “We’re just going to buy some time, right, Dr. Kremer? Until something from project HQ clears this up. That’s not defiance; I mean we wouldn’t really be doing anything irreversible. It’s not any worse than, say, pretending you’re out of touch when someone rings you. Once it gets cleared up, we say, ‘Oh, sorry, there must have been some miscommunication,’ and because shutting down would have been a disaster, they wouldn’t look any deeper than that.”
Hilda shook her head. “That impactor has to be on its proper vector come whatever, or the project may be dead for a long, long time. The Consolidationists are within a razor’s edge of a majority back in the Solar System. We may never get another chance.”
One of the older researchers raised a hand. Hilda nodded.
“Jake Jabowsky, Dr. Kremer. What if we’re all wrong? What if we send our impactor into that asteroid against legitimate orders? What then? Our collective butts will all be persona non grata here from now to kingdom come!”
“Cool it, Jabowsky,” Phil Stavros said. “That would be nothing compared to what would happen if we’re not wrong and don’t send an impactor!”
Hilda shook her head. “We’re not wrong, and I’ll be available here for the next ten days to walk anyone interested through the physics. But that’s a good point about the consequences. I know we all believe in this project. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe in it. But those of you who don’t think you can survive the consequences should leave now before you are further involved. I hope I can trust you enough to not talk about our intent prematurely.” Hilda looked at each of her team members in turn. And then she looked at them again. “Who’s with me?”
Jake grabbed his jacket and headed for the exit. He might be a useful witness when this is all over, she thought ruefully. No one else left.
Ted raised his coffee cup. “To launching on time, come honor or chaos.”
“To launch!” a dozen voices cried, and they all clinked their coffee cups together.
“Looks like we’re in with you, Hilda,” Ted declared.
Hilda allowed a few nanoseconds for relief to drain tension from her shoulders. Then she smiled at her team. “Let’s get back to work then, and be thinking about how we’ll do this.” n
