The Second Star, page 4
“They approached us separately,” Rob said, with the same tight smile he had worn before. “We’d been given no chance to talk to one another about it. But we gave them the same answer, individually, even without the opportunity of discussing it. That far… was too far. We both said we would stand ready to go out there, if chosen for the mission. But only together. Or not at all. They agreed.”
“So what is it that draws you there, in the end?”
Rob got that faraway look again, the one that made Stella’s hackles rise. “It’s the stars,” he said, and his voice had dropped again. It was as though he couldn’t speak about this except in hushed tones, as though it was almost too big a miracle to utter out loud at all.
“I wanted to look at the stars, up close—to look the stars in the eye,” he said. “We are all star stuff, you know that, don’t you? The molecules inside you and me were all forged in the heart of a star once. The stars are our brothers. I always knew they were there, waiting for me—and when this chance was offered to me it wasn’t the WSA that I heard calling me. It was their voices, the high sweet voices of those stars. Where I was always meant to be.”
“Yes,” Jerry said. Only that.
It was remarkably easy to hold that depth in a corner of her attention when Stella watched a different show, a late-night chat show which was clearly more entertainment than informational, and the twins responded accordingly.
“So what do you plan on doing up there?” the host asked, grinning broadly.
“The same thing we do down here,” said Jerry.
“Finish…”
“…each other’s sentences. Drive…”
“…everyone mad. Be…”
“…the thing that keeps everyone sane up there. Make…
“…everyone laugh. There’s going to be a need…”
“…for finding things to laugh about, when things go wrong.”
“As they inevitably will.”
“As they always do.”
The host lifted both hands in surrender, laughing. “I almost wish I was going with you,” he said, and sounded almost sincere about it.
“Probably not,” Jerry said.
“And that’s okay,” Rob said.
“Not everyone…”
“…is cut out for this stuff.”
Everyone else was laughing. The two of them weren’t. Not quite. They were smiling, but there was always a part of them that knew exactly where they were and what they were doing and how they were doing it—and they were a tag team in whatever they did.
Drive everyone mad. And here they now were, and the world called them mad instead.
Was the presence of twins a factor in what had happened? Could it have been? Could this rapid disintegration of personality have occurred because there was already a ‘split personality’ up there as a model—these two men who were obviously capable of thinking as a single mind if necessary? Or should it have made them immune to the splittage—already carrying, as it were, parts of each other’s personality? Stella tapped out a note to herself on her phone. The Hillermans might hold at least part of the key to the mystery of what had happened to the crew of the Parada.
Surprised by a bone-cracking yawn some time later, Stella straightened at her workstation. She cast her eyes around the library, finding herself alone—so absorbed had she been in what she was watching that she had completely failed to register it when Ichiro had left. Glancing at her watch, she noted with faint surprise that it was just past three o’clock … in the morning. She was suddenly and very sharply aware that she needed to grab a few hours’ sleep, and only vaguely remembered talk of her “quarters” from before she had dived into the data banks, without the first idea about where these would be or how she would go about finding them. She recalled Martin saying that she should call if she needed anything; rising from the workstation, she eased a stiff body and stretched until she heard her joints pop with it. Then she studied her workstation, looking for the correct controls, wondering if there was anybody in fact on duty at the other end at this hour, and experimentally touched a likely icon on the screen.
To her surprise, the response was instant. A woman with brown hair scraped back into a tight knot at the back of her head looked up and straight into Stella’s eyes, giving a small nod of acknowledgment.
“Yes, Dr. Froud?”
“Yes. Um, I find myself in need of somewhere to take a nap. I was wondering if I could…”
“Yes, ma’am. Someone will be with you at once to escort you to your quarters.”
The contact was terminated. Almost immediately she heard the door open behind her and turned to see a young ensign, in a uniform so crisp and freshly pressed that it might have been taken out of a replicator five minutes before she donned it. The thing seemed a little over the top for three in the morning, but Stella allowed for being exhausted and cranky and decided that she was just being petty and cross.
“Ma’am,” the ensign said politely, and waited.
Stella yawned again. “Bed,” she said, partly to the ensign and partly to herself. “I think.”
“If you’ll follow me.”
Stella was simply too tired, her mind too blown, to keep track of where she was led. She simply meekly thanked the crisp ensign when she was delivered to a blankly featureless rectangle of a door which, she did register, had her name on a sign beside it. She stared at the door owlishly for a moment.
“Just say your name,” the ensign said helpfully.
She did and the door soundlessly slid open and she stumbled inside, murmuring a mushy response to the ensign’s “Good night, ma’am.” She dropped her bag where she stood, crossed to the bed, and fell on it fully dressed, already asleep before her head touched the pillow.
When her eyes fluttered open again, she lifted her head and focused blearily on a dimmed digital clock on a touchscreen built into the wall above the head of the bed. It read 7:45. To the best of her recollection she had collapsed on this bed somewhere close to 3:30 AM. She was still tired, but as she came more awake she also became aware that she was hungry, and also that she could barely remember coming into this room. Grimacing as she sat up and smoothed down her slept-in clothes, she looked around.
The room was spacious enough not to be claustrophobic, but there were no windows or any other openings other than the door she had entered through. The bed she sat on was smoothly molded into the wall, with the screen that presently displayed the clock sitting just above the head of the bed; Stella noticed a row of symbols arrayed vertically along the side of the screen and surmised the touch screen would yield other useful functions if those were put to use, but put them aside to investigate in more detail later. On the floor by the foot of the bed was the suitcase she had packed for this trip and last seen on the luggage rack in her hotel room. Her coat hung in a closet area revealed by an opening in one of the sleeping section’s walls, obviously left open in order to permit her to see the purpose of the enclosure although she could see that it could be closed so that it presented a smooth seamless wall when not in use. Beyond that was another door that led into a compact bathroom area, in which she could glimpse the necessary facilities—a sink, a toilet, a small square shower. She could see a bath towel draped over a towel bar. The archway to her right opened into a sitting area with a small two-seater couch, shorter and narrower than the bed but otherwise very like it, built in as part of the wall, and a free-standing chair; she couldn’t see it from where she was sitting on the bed but her brain obligingly presented her with a picture of a desk tucked into an alcove on the sitting room side of the wall at the foot of her bed, with a chair tucked into place and a screen that might have been a computer monitor or a video screen hanging on the wall above it. The lights were pleasant, and unobtrusive. It was a disconnect; the room they had described as a library was almost a throwback to early 21st century office utilitarianism, practically an anachronism if you didn’t count the state-of-the-art computers, but this place—Stella almost felt as though she was herself on some sleek new-built starship hurtling into the unknown.
She wasn’t, but there were people waiting who had been exactly there. Stella winced, and slipped off the bed, stepping into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.
“You’ve looked better,” she informed her reflection in a mirrored wall above the sink, inspecting dark circles under her eyes and an expression she couldn’t quite name settling her features into a mask of what she could only describe as the beginnings of a deer-in-the-headlights look. She made another half-hearted attempt to straighten her clothes but she knew that it would take more than that to make herself presentable; a stray thought did swim across her mind about whether these quarters, too, were subject to the same kind of surveillance as the two crews’ quarters—but she frowned at herself in the mirror, shaking her head. No, she wasn’t going to let herself get paranoid about things.
On her way to ascertain if they had brought all her belongings in the suitcase that waited for her, she glanced into the closet again and saw that the coat wasn’t the only thing in it—the closet also contained a couple of what she could only describe as a uniform-lite—it wasn’t the crisp military garb as worn by last night’s ensign but more of a matching set of pants and tunic in a neutral blue shade. A rectangular patch on the right front panel looked like some sort of flexible hi-tech screen woven into the material. Stella reached out to touch it experimentally, and under her fingertips it blinked and resolved itself into an ID badge, with her image and her name coming into quick focus.
She gave in. The clothes were obviously there for a purpose, and she would have to investigate laundry facilities later for the things she was taking off. The provided clothing fit her perfectly and Stella retrieved her bag from where she had dropped it before the door when she had been delivered to this place, drew out a small hairbrush with her left hand in almost the same motion that she tossed the bag onto the bed with her right, and stepped back into the bathroom to drag the brush through her hair. She supposed there would be a toothbrush in there somewhere if she just took a moment to look, but first she needed to find out how—and if—she could actually get out of this comfortable confinement.
When she stepped into the sitting area she saw a transparent rectangle of a tablet, similar to the one she had seen Martin use, lying on a charging mat on the desk. She picked it up and swept a finger across the screen; the thing came to life, offering her a number of icons to choose from. One at least was immediately obvious—a crossed knife and fork—and Stella realized that she was in fact ravenous, something that her stomach punctuated immediately by giving a confirmatory growl. She tapped the icon; it resolved into directions to the cafeteria and a menu of available offerings.
“Breakfast sounds good,” she muttered to herself, mostly just to hear herself speak out loud, and tucked the tablet into a long pocket in the side of her tunic that appeared to have been made to house it.
She turned to the door.
It seemed to be an intelligence test because at first she could see no way to open it directly.
The ensign had said something about saying her name.
“Stella Froud,” Stella said experimentally, staring at the door. And then, just because something more seemed necessary, “Open.”
The door obligingly whooshed open for her.
She stepped into a featureless corridor. The door closed behind her with a vaguely threatening finality.
Stella drew a deep breath and hauled the tablet back out, calling up a map. Probably anything would look better after a good strong cup of coffee.
The first person Stella saw in the cafeteria was Father Philip Carter, sitting with the Lieutenant whom Stella could vaguely remember having been their escort the day before but whose name she could not immediately fish out of her back brain and another man, also in military uniform, whom she did not recognize. She hesitated, and while she did Philip looked up and noticed her. He gave her a smile, waving her over to the table where he was sitting; she mimed coffee, and he nodded. Stella took her time gathering up a cup of coffee and a plateful of breakfast (a pancake that looked passable, two fried eggs, and a piece of toast on the side) and carried her tray over to the table where Philip and the others waited.
“Did you get some sleep?” Philip asked, rising to his feet to pull a chair out for her.
“You might say I passed out, finally,” Stella said, grimacing. “Still trying to process all this.”
Philip nodded. “We all are. By the way, this is Lieutenant Barriéres. Louis. Lydia you will remember from yesterday.”
The two people he named nodded at Stella, and she acknowledged the nods over the rim of her coffee cup. “Stella Froud,” she said, for Louis’s benefit. “Will you guys excuse me while I eat?”
“Of course,” Philip said. “Does anyone else want any more coffee?”
“I could use a cup. I’ll get it,” Louis Barriéres said, pushing his chair back.
Philip, who was dressed in the same kind of outfit that Stella wore except for an obstinate addition of a shiny black pectoral cross made from something that looked like obsidian, indicated the clothing with a wave of his hand. “They sure seemed ready for us, weren’t they?”
“They’re always ready for anything,” Lydia said. “The ID badge is programmable. The rest—it’s a matter of replicating the uniforms in the correct size which is trivial.”
“So these are actual uniforms?” Stella said, through a mouthful of toast.
“It’s what we wear when off duty,” Lydia said. “Congratulations, you’ve joined the military. I’m sure you’ll get an honorable discharge when your tour is up…”
“What about the other lot? Philip asked. “I mean, we get the wetware, so to speak, I understand that—between us, Ichiro Amari and Stella and I are supposed to cover the bases—body and mind and, I suppose, when it comes to me, soul. But the ones we left upstairs—the hardware crowd and the IT contingent—are they somewhere here or is it just the three of us who got conscripted?”
“At least you’re still on terra firma,” Lydia said. “As far as I know, everyone other than the historian, that professor—what’s her name, Vivien Collins?…— everyone else was bundled up and packed off upstairs, to the Parada.” She indicated the ceiling with a thumb. “Up there. Floating above the clouds and looking down on us all, trying to dig around that ship’s innards and find out just what the fuck went wrong there. They’ve got a crew fine-tooth-combing the Juno, too. I mean, that ship didn’t exactly get the bit between her teeth and go careening off into the galaxy. So that worked. But we lived for two hundred years under the Parada’s loss and the martyrdom of the Six for the Stars. They finally tossed another crew out there and they seem to have come back okay but that first lot… they don’t know what happened. And until they figure that out they are completely stalled out. Nothing can ever be done again until something concrete is learned from the situation.”
“The problem,” said Louis, returning with the coffee and catching the tail end of that conversation, “is that we have precisely two data points, and they are a hundred and eighty degrees apart. Either we have a working star drive, or we don’t. Either we can send humanity out there, or we can’t. And until we find out which is the right answer—and they don’t really want to send another ship and crew out there just to weigh the scales one way or another—they simply don’t know if this is actually something we have accomplished, or something that has come down on us like a hammer of God warning us away from the stars altogether.”
“God,” Philip said equably, “would seem to be my department.”
Stella swallowed another piece of her toast. “It took them two hundred years to get over the Parada and try again,” she said.
“Exactly,” Louis said. “They don’t want to wait another two hundred until Juno is given a clean bill of health and they can start thinking interstellar again. I mean, it’s all very well playing around in our back yard and all—but we’ve bitten into the interstellar travel now and had a good taste of it and that doesn’t just disappear.”
“Even if the taste was pretty bitter?” Philip asked. “I mean, look what happened when we tried…”
“It’s a craving now, one we are going to have to feed,” Louis said. “If there’s something to be discovered up in the bowels of those ships, they’ll try and find it. But even though my brain would fry if anyone asked me to attempt such a thing, I think they have the easy part. I mean, inanimate things are supposed to work a certain way, non? That is how they are made—how we made them. We know how they were made, know what they were supposed to accomplish, know what we did. If something unexpected happened we know that it was unexpected, and why. They literally have blueprints to follow, and lines of code to debug. It’s going to take time but it’s drudge work. You have to have a certain kind of knowledge to be able to do the drudgery but it’s just that—a slog.”
“And in some ways, it’s easier to enforce the gag orders,” Lydia said. “I mean, even if they ran out and started blabbing about things they shouldn’t to anyone they met I suspect people’s eyes would just glaze over in short order. They could talk forever but nobody would be listening any more. But the crews…”
“For the record, they probably won’t be very happy today,” Louis said. “Your Dr. Amari has put in a request for new bloodwork, and for a new set of all scans. He says he wishes to start fresh with the work ups, to start using data he can know the chain of custody of, and the timeline of, and can trust. The Juno crew are first up, and they are going to be marched off for more poking and prodding today. I talked to an orderly who works in that compound, and he says he heard Tyrone Kidman say he was starting to feel like a colander, he’d had so many holes poked in him by needles. And it’s starting over today. There could be riots.”
“And that’s just the bodies,” Lydia said, glancing at Stella, who was keeping her head down and mopping up her eggs with the last of the toast. “The rest…”
