The Long Sunset

by Jack McDevitt

  “Kilroy.”

  “Whatever.” He got up. “I gotta go lie down.”

  • • •

  Ken, Beth, and Wally were seated in the passenger cabin when she came in off the bridge. They’d turned on one of Hutch’s favorite settings, a country porch surrounded by trees and bushes in the path of a warm southern breeze. Something by Beethoven played softly in the background. Ken was reading while the other two talked. He looked up and raised a hand. Hutch sat down beside him. “Is that a history?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “It’s Andre Sainte-Angelou’s Harbingers.”

  Hutch had read the book two months earlier, immediately after its release. It was an attempt to explain where the omega clouds came from, and how they functioned. Unfortunately, her grasp of physics was too shaky to allow a dependable analysis. “What do you think of it?” she asked.

  “It’s all guesswork. I don’t think there’s any question they were weapons. And somehow they got out of control.”

  “I know. It’s hard to see how they could have evolved naturally. But they were intelligent beings. I’m not sure how that equates to weaponry.” She sat back, closed her eyes, and let the scent of gardenias, sweet lemongrass, and honeysuckle envelop her.

  Ken shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe we discovered what super soldiers really look like. By the way, I should say thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For helping make all this possible. Hutch, I’ve been reading and theorizing about history all my life. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to be part of it.” He closed the notebook. “A thousand years from now, people will still be talking about this mission.”

  “Even if we don’t find anything?”

  “It’s the first mission to track down the origin of a TV signal. When you do something that’s never been done before, it’s automatically historic.” He gazed across the porch at a pair of azalea bushes. “l know this is no big deal for you. I mean, you were on the first flight to the galactic core. That’s about as historic as it gets. But this mission’s not over yet.” He sat back in his chair. “We have a Photoshopped picture at home of me standing between Celeste Larsen and Elliott Paul in front of Paul’s home outside London.” Larsen, of course, was the ultimate physicist of the era, the Einstein of the twenty-third century. And Paul had led the remarkably successful effort to introduce liberal education and a healthy tolerance for conflicting opinions into the darkest areas of the Middle East. He’d put his life at risk constantly, but in the end, his work had inspired a revolution. “The picture’s in our living room on a book shelf. People come in and they tend to say, ‘Hey, I know Ken, but who are those other two guys?’ ”

  “Ken,” she said, “I’m glad you’re with us.”

  “Derek knew what my attitude is toward all this. We’ve known each other a long time. He was upset because of the defunding of the Academy, which of course resulted in what had started out as space exploration getting handed over to the corporates, who’ve simply turned it all into a profiteering operation. Find a few rich people who want to go visit a nearby star. And then do it again. And keep doing it. Meantime, they were happy to buy into the notion that we were virtually alone. That there are so few advanced worlds in the universe at any one time that the chances of locating any of them are virtually nil. And these are the same people who are now claiming we need to be careful because of all those dangerous aliens out there.”

  “Maybe in a billion years,” she said, “conditions will be different.”

  “A universe filled with species talking to one another? Collaborating? Vacationing on one another’s worlds?” His face wrinkled. “Actually, now that I think of it, I’m not sure that taking the mystery out of things wouldn’t leave us all bored.”

  “You have a point, Ken.”

  “I have a question for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “We left the copilot behind. What do we do if something happens to you? If you were to get seriously ill or something?”

  “It wouldn’t be a problem. Barry could get you home.”

  “The AI?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then why on earth do we need a pilot?”

  “I’m here mostly to react to unexpected contingencies. To problems. Especially on a flight like this, where we have no idea what might happen.”

  “All right. I guess that makes sense.”

  Beth smiled at Ken. “You’d love having a couple of aliens on board, wouldn’t you? Like they do in the movies.”

  They obviously had a good marriage. “Tell me about your kids,” Hutch asked.

  “A couple of girls,” said Beth. “Madeleine and Hannah. They’re teens. They’d have enjoyed meeting you.”

  “We can arrange it when we get home.”

  Wally seemed somewhat alone. Hutch wondered if he’d left someone behind. She missed her cop. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t lost him. That last pizza they’d shared hadn’t gone well, and he’d made no effort to get in touch with her and say good-bye before she left.

  She’d have enjoyed having Charlie and Maureen on board. Maybe one day, families would travel routinely across the stars. Why don’t we take a run over to Aldebaran and say hello to Uncle Mike?

  • • •

  “All those silent stars,” Beth said as they left the cluster. “You’d think somebody in there would have a transmitter.”

  “I’m sure somebody does,” said Hutch. “But it’s time we go to Calliope.”

  They watched comedies more frequently than anything else. They turned it into a game, using technology that allowed them to insert one of themselves into a role in the film. The chosen person left the porch and the others decided which role he or she would be inserted into. Which role, they claimed, best fitted the reality of the individual. Ken became Jasper Hall, the cheapskate comedian who’d do anything to hang onto a dime. Derek showed up as the host of The Night Show, where he introduced Beth as the whacky journalist of Breaking Now. Wally played Horace Evans in one of the haunted museum films, where he directed a team of archeologists tracking down the supposed truth about various unexplained historical events. And they brought Hutch in as the lead in Cool Clara, a high school teacher given to panic attacks because her students are constantly out of control.

  Mostly, though, they just sat on the porch talking. Hutch got more serious about encouraging everyone to establish a workout program. Derek and Ken, both talented chess players, developed a serious rivalry. Wally spent a lot of time in the workout room, but mostly what he wanted was to watch Beth and Hutch do their stretch exercises. The area could only accommodate three at a time, so Hutch set up a schedule, warned her passengers that the limited level of artificial gravity, well below Earth normal, could create problems if they didn’t stay with the program. Eventually, everyone got in line, after Hutch pointed out that they had to make a choice: do the exercises or pass on dessert.

  Ken lodged a complaint. “You know,” he said, “when we started, I thought we’d have more important things to worry about than the distribution of apple pie.”

  Beth Squires’s Notes

  How much formal education is really little more than indoctrination? People with graduate degrees seem to provide a substantial level of understanding of cosmological physics, of 21st century American literature, of mathematics, while often keeping their minds closed to opposing ideas or even common sense. What we seem to be good at doing is persuading individuals that they are considerably more knowledgeable in general than the rest of the population without actually thinking about the issues. If there really is a judgment of some sort, I wonder if the charges lodged against us will turn out to be considerably different from those we hear from the pulpit on Sundays? “I gave you a brain, Beth, and you never used it.”

  —Saturday, March 22, 2256

  13.

  And that inverted bowl they call the sky,

  Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die,

  Lift n
ot your hands to it for help—for it

  As impotently rolls as you or I.

  —Edward Fitzgerald, translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (c. 1100), 1887

  Finally, at midmorning March 23, Barry informed Hutch that they had arrived. “Transition into normal space is one hour away.” Everybody had known, of course, that this was the day. They also knew of the lack of precision involved in locating the target area. They’d be lucky if they arrived within a hundred light-years of Calliope.

  They sat in the galley, congratulating one another, and enjoying a late breakfast. “Hutch, how fast is the star moving?” said Ken, trying to get the details right for his book.

  “About forty kilometers per second.”

  “Stars routinely move that fast?”

  “A lot of them do, yes. Some of them move considerably faster.”

  He turned to Derek. “So it’s traveled pretty far since the place where it was when you saw it in the Van Entel.”

  “That’s correct.” Derek’s brow wrinkled while he juggled the numbers. “It’s traveled roughly 173 billion kilometers.”

  “That would be a long walk.”

  “It would.”

  “Hutch, since we know its trajectory and everything, we’ll make our exit nearby, right?”

  “We know the trajectory and velocity. It’s the distance from Earth where we had to do some guesswork. But we should be okay. What we need is for someone to invent a scope that penetrates through the dimensions. That would allow us to look outside and see where we are before we jump out.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” said Ken.

  “I’m not sure it’s possible.”

  “It probably is,” said Derek. “We already have a sensor that won’t let us surface inside a planet or a star or even too close to a piece of rock.”

  • • •

  When they got within a few minutes of the transdimensional leap, Hutch returned to the bridge with Derek, while the others took their seats in the passenger cabin, locked the chairs in place, and belted down.

  “Okay, Barry,” she said, “activate the Locarno.”

  The drive came on line. It hummed softly, like a life support unit in the hull.

  “Let’s hope,” said Derek, “we’re within a few light-years.”

  “Seven thousand years is a long time,” she said. “I wonder whether any civilization can last that long. Judging by what we’ve seen so far, most of them seem to collapse pretty quickly.”

  “Five minutes,” said Barry.

  “What’s this star look like?” asked Beth, speaking through the allcomm.

  Wally responded. “Like every other star in the sky.”

  “So how do we tell it from the others?”

  Derek took it from there: “We have its spectrum, Beth. We have a telescope so Barry should have no trouble identifying Calliope.”

  Wally asked whether each star’s spectrum was unique, and that led to a discussion that quickly faded from Hutch’s attention. Barry came in on her personal channel to inform her they were at one minute. She broke into the conversation. “Get ready, guys. Let’s finish this on the other side.”

  The AI counted down the last twenty seconds, Derek thanked Hutch for a smooth ride, and then they were out under the stars again. The near-blinding effect of the Wasserman Cluster was of course gone, although it was still visible behind them, a relatively dim cloud now.

  “Everybody okay?”

  “It makes me want to throw up,” said Ken.

  “You all right?” Beth’s voice.

  “Yeah. I’m okay. I think I need a cinnamon bun.”

  “Anybody else with a problem?”

  “I’m good,” said Barry.

  She laughed. “All right, people. We’re hunting for Calliope. That might take a while. In the meantime, you can unbelt and wander around.” Hutch switched over to the AI. “Glad you’re okay, Barry. Do you know where we are?”

  He would be comparing the sky with what the star patterns would look like had they emerged close to Calliope. “Give me a minute, Captain.”

  Derek got up, opened the door, and paused. “Priscilla, let me know as soon as you have something.” He disappeared into the passenger cabin. She sat quietly for several minutes, staring out at the sky, looking maybe for moving lights, for something that would give them what they were hoping for. But she saw nothing unusual.

  Finally, Barry was back. “We did extremely well, Captain. We are within thirty light-years of Calliope.”

  “Great. Have you found it yet? The star?”

  “No. I don’t see it. But despite our enthusiasm, thirty light-years is a considerable distance. Let’s just stay on course and get closer.”

  • • •

  Hutch went back and ordered a sandwich while she waited. Beth joined her. “How does Barry know we’re thirty light-years away if he can’t see Calliope yet?”

  “The first thing he did when we surfaced was to take a look at the sky. He has a chart of twenty-four marker stars. He knows what their positions should look like if we’re close to Calliope. There’s no way to be precise when you’re dealing with these kinds of distances. We never really knew how far Calliope was. The range was an estimate. Nothing more.”

  “So how long will the next jump be?”

  “About three hours.”

  “Well, that’s not bad.”

  “You look tired, Beth.”

  “I’d just like to get out of here for a while. I hope we find a place where we can land and walk around a little.”

  “I know. I think everybody’d like to get outside and watch a sunset.”

  They were finishing the sandwiches when Beth asked how many more jumps they would have to make. “Maybe one more after this next one,” said Hutch. “When we surface this time, we’ll probably be inside the system. Assuming it has planets.”

  Wally leaned in. “I told you guys we should have brought some rum. How are we supposed to celebrate with iced tea?”

  • • •

  Derek rejoined Hutch on the bridge. “Good luck to us,” he said.

  Barry reported that they were ready to go. Hutch told everyone to belt down and took them under. Derek sat quietly in his chair. They’d run out of conversation. There was nothing left to talk about that they hadn’t worn down. “I don’t think,” he said finally, “that monkey brains were designed for this kind of activity.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “I don’t much like flying. When I travel at home, I prefer a place we can drive to. I like to watch the countryside go by.”

  Derek grinned. “Odd comment coming from a lady who pilots interstellars.”

  “It’s true.” She got up. “I’m going back to crash for a couple of hours.”

  • • •

  She never really did get to sleep. After lying for an hour on her bunk, she tried reading. Eventually, she wandered back out to the front porch and joined her passengers. Derek was with them. They were speculating about what they would find. A culture advanced beyond human imagination? Or the bones of a lost civilization? Or possibly nothing at all. There was, of course, the possibility that the signal had actually come from a place far beyond Calliope, that it had simply passed through the system during the moment that it was lined up with the Van Entel. Or that the source had been simply a ship passing through the Calliope system, aiming its transmission at a target that got in front of the supertelescope.

  With twenty minutes remaining, she returned to the bridge. She sat down and looked at the window. You didn’t actually look through it. There was no sense of peering out into a void. It was just darkness.

  “Sometimes,” Derek said, “I think technological advances are actually a step back.” She hadn’t been aware he had followed her in.

  • • •

  When they surfaced, nothing substantive had changed. They looked out at essentially the same scattered stars that had occupied the sky a few hours earlier. Hutch had hoped to s
ee a sun, which would have been Calliope. It wasn’t there. There was nothing in front of them that stood out. A couple of the stars could have been perceived as first magnitude, but both were off to port. And a cloud of stars was visible on the starboard side.

  “I do not see it,” said Barry.

  “We might simply have gotten the estimates wrong,” Hutch said. “Check the spectrums of the bright ones.”

  “Will do that shortly, Captain. I should inform you, however, that the locations of the marker stars that I’ve had time to examine are precisely correct. We should be within about three billion kilometers of the Calliope system. There is nothing within that range in any direction.”

  A few minutes later he was back with readings on the two bright stars: Neither was a match. In fact, both were among the marker stars.

  “So, where is it?” asked Derek.

  “I have no explanation, sir.”

  • • •

  A few minutes later Barry was back. “Captain, I’ve checked out almost the entire list of markers. It should be here. In plain sight.”

  Derek was seriously annoyed. “How about that cloud to our right?”

  “It can’t be. The markers would not line up.”

  “When will you be finished checking them?”

  “In a couple of minutes. So far they’re exactly where they should be if Calliope were a short distance in front of us.”

  Beth appeared in the doorway. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s missing,” Derek said.

  Beth frowned. “What’s missing? The star?”

  “Yes,” said Barry. “Calliope is nowhere visible. And let me correct myself about the markers. One of them is out of position. That shouldn’t be, either.”

  “Maybe,” said Derek, “if we maneuver into the area where everything lines up, we’ll be able to find it.” There was a note of annoyance in his voice.