Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  "There was nothing standard about it," Rhonda told him. "You can't just scale up an ion-capture drive that way—the magnetic field instabilities will tear it apart. Even now our biggest long-range freighters are running right up to the wire. God only knows what trick the Jovians pulled to make theirs work."

  "If you say so," Bilko said. "Engines aren't really my field of expertise."

  "Of course." I cocked an eyebrow at him. "What was that again about rampant specialization?"

  He smiled lopsidedly. "Touche," he said. "So let's hear your idea."

  I gazed out the viewport. "We start with a focused search along the vector from Sol system," I said slowly. "Even if we don't know what the spectrum looks like, we know they can't have gotten too far away from here yet. That means the drive glow will be reasonably bright, and our astrogator ought to be able to pick up on a major star that's not supposed to be there. Right?"

  "Sorry," Rhonda said. "Astrogation's not my field of expertise."

  "Give it a rest, Blankenship," Bilko growled. "Assuming it's still firing hot enough to look like a major star, yes, it'll work. Then what?"

  "Then we head at right angles to that direction for a small but specified distance," I said. "Say, a few A.U. Then we come back out, find the drive trail again, and get the location by straight triangulation."

  "Can we do a program that short?" Rhonda asked. "Even at Blue speeds an A.U.

  must go by pretty fast."

  "A shade under six hundredths of a second, actually," Bilko said. "And no, we can't do that directly."

  "What we can do is run a few minutes out and almost the same number of minutes back," I added. "Some of the bigger freighters do that all the time to fine-tune their arrival position. Jimmy should have what he needs to work up that kind of program."

  "We assume so, anyway," Bilko added. "But of course musicmastery isn't our field of expertise."

  "Look, Bilko—"

  "Play nicely, children," I said. "Bilko, get the sensors going, will you?"

  The Sergei Rock's sensors weren't quite up to the same ultra-high standard of quality as our legal and financial software was. But they were certainly nothing to sneer at, either—the myriad of transport regulators that swarmed like locusts across the Expansion made sure of that. And so it came as something of a surprise when, thirty minutes later, the result of our search turned up negative.

  "Great," Bilko said, tapping his fingers restlessly on the edge of his board.

  "Just great. Now what?"

  "They must have turned off their drive," I said, looking over the astrogate computer's report again. "That, or else it's failed. Rhonda?"

  "Seems odd that they would turn it off," Rhonda said doubtfully. "Certainly not in the middle of nowhere like this. And for it to have run 130 years and just happened to fail now would be pretty ironic."

  "Yeah, but about par for the way my luck's been going," Bilko said sourly.

  "That last game I had on Angorki—"

  "The Universe does not have it in for you personally, Bilko," Rhonda interrupted him. "Much as you'd like to think so. Jake, I'd guess it's more likely they simply changed course. If they shifted their vector even a few degrees their drive wouldn't be pointed directly at us anymore."

  Abruptly, Bilko snapped his fingers. "No," he said, turning a tight grin on me.

  "They didn't change course. Not from here."

  "Of course not," I said as it hit me as well. "All we need is to reprogram the searcher—"

  "I'm on it," Bilko said, hands already skating across the computer board.

  "Any time you two want to let me in on this, go ahead," Rhonda invited.

  "We've assumed they hit this point on the way from Sol," I explained, watching over Bilko's shoulder. "But maybe they didn't. Maybe they headed out on a slightly different vector, paused to take a look at some promising system along the way, then changed course and headed out again."

  "Passing through this point on an entirely different vector than the direct line from Sol," Bilko added. "OK, here it comes... computer says the only real possibility is Lalande 21185. That would put the vector... right. OK, let's try that focused search again. And keep your fingers crossed."

  We didn't have to keep them crossed for very long. Three minutes later, the computer had found it.

  "No doubt about it," Bilko decided. "We are definitely genius-class material."

  "Don't start making laurel-leaf soup too fast," Rhonda warned. "Now, I take it, comes the tricky part?"

  "You take it correctly," I said, unstrapping. "I'll go tell Kulasawa we've found her floating museum. And then go have a chat with Jimmy."

  Kulasawa was elated in a grim, upper-class sort of way, managing to simultaneously imply that I should keep her better informed and that I also shouldn't waste time with useless mid-course reports. I escaped to Jimmy's cabin, wondering if maybe Bilko's suggestion of upping our price would really be unethical after all.

  As Rhonda had suggested, the tricky part now began. Two successive performances of Schubert's "Erlkonig," the versions differing by exactly point five seven second gave us our triangulation point. Another reading on the Freedom's Peace's drive glow, and we had them nailed at just over fifty A.U. away.

  "Not exactly hauling Yellows, are they?" Bilko commented. "I mean, fifty A.U.s in ten years?"

  "The engines were probably scaled for low but constant acceleration," Rhonda said. "They would have lost a lot of their velocity when they stopped to check out the Lalande system."

  "Just as well for us they did," I pointed out. "If they'd been pulling a straight acceleration for the past 130 years we wouldn't have a hope in hell of matching speeds with them."

  "Good point," Rhonda agreed. "Any idea what speed they are making?"

  "As a matter of fact, I do," I said smugly, keying for the calculation I'd requested. "I took a spectrum of their drive at both our triangulation points.

  Because we were seeing the red-shifted light from two different angles—well, I

  won't bore you with the math. Suffice it to say the Freedom's Peace is smoking along at just under thirty kilometers a second."

  "About three times Earth escape velocity," Bilko murmured. "Can the engines handle that, Rhonda?"

  "No problem," she assured him. "We'll probably pop a few preburn sparkles, though. So what's the plan?"

  "We'll set up a program that'll put us just a little ways ahead of them," I told her. "That way, we'll get to watch them go past us and can get exact numbers on their speed and vector."

  "Provided they don't run us down," Rhonda murmured.

  "They're not hardly going fast enough for that," Bilko scoffed. "Fifty A.U.s means another forward-back program, of course."

  "Right," I said, nodding. "You work out the course while I go help Jimmy set it up."

  "Right," he said, turning to his board. "You going to give our scholar the good news on the way to Jimmy's?"

  "Let's let it be a surprise."

  Fifteen minutes later we were ready to go. "Okay, Jimmy, this is it," I called toward the intercom. "Let's do it."

  "Okay," he said. "Here goes Operation Reverse Columbus."

  I flicked off the intercom. "Operation Reverse Columbus?" Bilko asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  I shook my head as the pre-music C-sharp vibrated through the hull. "He thinks he's being cute," I said. "Just ignore him." The pre-tone ended; and as the strains of Schumann's Manfred Overture began the stars vanished, and I settled in for the short ride ahead.

  A ride which turned out to be a lot shorter than I'd expected. Barely two notes into the piece, with the music still going, the stars abruptly reappeared.

  "Jimmy!" I snarled his name like a curse as I grabbed for my restraints. Of all times to break his concentration and lose our flapblack—

  And then my eyes flicked to the viewport... and my hands froze on the release.

  Flashing past from just beneath us, no more than twenty kilometers away, was the Freedom's Peace
.

  And it was definitely cooking along. Even as I caught my breath it shot away from us toward the stars, its circle of six drive nozzles blazing furiously from the stern and dimming with distance—

  And then, without warning, it suddenly flared into a brilliant blaze of light.

  My first, horrified thought was that the colony had exploded right in front of us. My second, confused thought was that an explosion normally didn't have six neatly arranged nexus points... and as the six blazing circles receded in the direction the Freedom's Peace had been going, I finally realized what had happened. Not the how or the why, but at least the what.

  On that, at least, I was ahead of Bilko. "What the hell?" he gasped.

  "The music's still going," I snapped, belatedly hitting my restraint release and scrambling to my feet. "As soon as it got far enough ahead of us, we got wrapped again and caught up with it."

  "We what? But—?"

  "But why are we unwrapping when we get close?" I ducked my head and peered out the viewport, just in time to see us do our strange little microjump and catch up with the asteroid again. "Good question. Let me get Jimmy shut down and we'll try to figure it out."

  I sprinted back to his cabin, cursing the unknown bureaucrat or planning commission hotshot who'd come up with the idea of locking out the musicmaster's intercom whenever the music was playing. If these insane little wrap/unwraps were damaging my transport—

  I reached the cabin and threw myself inside. Leaning back on his couch with his eyes closed and the massive headphones engulfing his head, Jimmy probably never realized anything was wrong until I slapped the cutoff switch.

  At which point his reaction more than made up for it. He jolted upright like someone had applied electrodes to selected parts of his body, his eyes snapping wide open. "What—?" he gasped, ripping off his headphones.

  "We've got trouble," I told him briefly, jabbing the intercom switch.

  "Rhonda?"

  "Here," she said. "Why have we stopped?"

  "It wasn't our idea," I said. "We lost our flapblack."

  "About six times in a row," Bilko put in tensely from the flight deck. "As soon as we get close enough to the Freedom's Peace, we lose them."

  "What's going on?" a voice demanded from behind me.

  I turned around. Kulasawa was standing in the open doorway, her gaze hard on me.

  "You heard everything we know so far," I told her. "We've lost our flapblack wrap six times now trying to get close to the Freedom's Peace."

  Her gaze shifted to Jimmy, hardening to the consistency of reinforced concrete.

  "It wasn't me," he protested quickly. "I didn't do anything."

  "You're the musicmaster, aren't you?" she demanded.

  "It's not Jimmy's fault," I put in. "It's something having to do with the Freedom's Peace itself."

  The glare turned back to me. "Such as?"

  "Maybe it's the mass," Jimmy spoke up, apparently still too young and inexperienced to know when to keep his mouth shut and pretend to be furniture.

  "That's why flapblacks can't get too close in to planets—"

  "This is an asteroid, musicmaster," Kulasawa cut him off icily. "Not a planet."

  "Yes, but—"

  "It's not the mass," Kulasawa said, dismissing the suggestion with a curl of her lip. "What else?"

  "It could be their drive," Rhonda suggested over the intercom. "Maybe the radiation from an ion-capture drive that big is scaring them away."

  "Or else killing them," Bilko said quietly.

  It was a strange, even eerie thought, but one which I think had already occurred to all of us. We knew nothing about how flapblacks lived or died, or even whether they died at all. What we did know is that we traveled with them, and the thought that we might have been even indirectly responsible for killing a half dozen of them was an unpleasant one for all of us.

  Or at least, most of us. "Regardless of the reason, we know the result,"

  Kulasawa said briskly. "How do we proceed, Captain?"

  "Actually, the situation isn't much different from what we were expecting anyway," I said, trying to push the image of dying flapblacks from my mind.

  "Except that it's going to be easier than we thought to get close to the Freedom's Peace. We should have gotten a good reading on their vector while we were tailgating them that way, so all we have to do now is boost our speed to match them and then get a flapblack to wrap us and get us close again."

  "Even if it means killing another one of them?" Jimmy asked.

  "What if it does?" Kulasawa said impatiently. "The Universe is full of the things."

  "Besides which, we don't know it's hurting them," I added.

  And immediately wished I hadn't. The expression on Jimmy's face was already somewhere between stricken and loathing; the look he now shot toward me was the sort you might give someone who'd just announced he enjoyed ripping the heads off small birds.

  "Then let's get to it," Kulasawa said into the suddenly awkward silence.

  "We've wasted enough time out here already. You in the engine room: how long to bring us up to speed?"

  "Depends on how much acceleration you want to put up with," Rhonda said, her tone a little chilly. Apparently, she wasn't happy with my comment, either.

  "At one g, we're talking an hour or so."

  "You ran two gs lifting off Angorki," Kulasawa said.

  "That was for ten minutes," I reminded her. "Not thirty."

  "You're all young and healthy," she countered. "If I can handle it, so can you.

  Two gs, Captain. Get us moving."

  It took Rhonda ten minutes to bring the engines up from standby, roughly the same amount of time it took Bilko and me to double-check the Freedom's Peace's vector and make sure the Sergei Rock was configured for high acceleration.

  After that came our half hour of two gs, unpleasant but certainly nothing any of us couldn't take.

  More unpleasant was the subtle but definite chill I could feel all around me.

  Orders were scrupulously obeyed and reports properly given, but all of it in crisp, formal tones and without the casual give-and-take that was the normal order of the day. I was used to frosty air between Jimmy and me, but for Rhonda and Bilko to have joined in struck me as totally unfair.

  And yes, I blamed all of them. Maybe my comment had sounded insensitive; but damn it all, we didn't have any evidence that were killing or even hurting the flapblacks by pushing them close to the Freedom's Peace. My personal theory was that there was something about the asteroid that was simply distracting them enough to lose their wrap, and I tried to tell the others that.

  But it didn't seem to make any difference. In their minds, I'd sold out to Kulasawa, and I'd now shown that nothing was going to keep me from getting hold of that money. Not even if it meant slaughtering flapblacks right and left.

  The acceleration process seemed to take forever, but at last we had the Sergei Rock up to speed and it was time to go.

  Theoretically, we didn't need to use the flapblacks at all, since the Freedom's Peace was close enough that boosting our speed a little more would enable us to catch up with it. But that would have meant more acceleration, more delay, and pushing the engines more than we already had, so I told Jimmy to set us up with another program. He wasn't at all happy about it, but I was long past caring about Jimmy's happiness. If Bilko and Rhonda had opinions on the subject, they were smart enough to keep quiet about them. The music started, sparking a wrap/unwrap that was again too fast for human eyes to see, and once again we were flying above and behind the Freedom's Peace.

  Even twenty kilometers away and only glimpsed for an instant, the colony had looked impressive. Now, with us steadily approaching it, the thing was flat-out awesome. It was one thing to read the numbers; it was something else entirely to actually see a huge asteroid driving its way through deep space.

  It looked just like the handful of publicity shots that had survived the War of Reclamation: a craggy-surfaced, vagu
ely ovoid asteroid, roughly eighteen kilometers long and maybe twelve across at its widest point, lit only by the faint sheen of reflected starlight. The glare from the drive washed out any details of the engines themselves, but it was obvious that they were massive.

  Slightly brighter spots here and there across the surface indicated the presence of antenna or sensor arrays and a couple of rectangles that looked like access hatchways.

  "It's rotating," Bilko breathed from beside me. Apparently, he was so dazzled by the view that he'd forgotten we weren't on speaking terms. "Look—you can see that drive nozzle array turning around."

  "Using rotation to create artificial gravity," I agreed. "They didn't have false-grav back then."

  "I'm going to take a spectrum off the hull," he decided, keying his board and swiveling around his viewer. "A Doppler will give us better numbers on the rotation than—yow!"

  I jerked against my restraints. "What?" I snapped.

  "Something just flicked across the stars," he said tightly, punching keys on the spectrometer.

  "Relax," Rhonda's voice came over the intercom. "It was probably a flapblack."

  "Yeah, but it didn't wrap," Bilko said. "I've never heard of a flapblack coming in but not wrapping."

  "Maybe they can't wrap this close to the Freedom's Peace," I said. "Like I suggested earlier—"

  I broke off at the look on Bilko's face. "What is it?"

  "It reads like a flapblack, all right," he said, his voice low and rigidly under control. "Only it's not a kind we've ever seen before. This one's spectrum was in the infrared."

  I stared at him. "You're joking."

  "Check it yourself," he said, keying the analysis over to my display. "The spectrum's definitely below the standard flapblack red—let's call it an InRed."

  I looked at the numbers, and damned if he wasn't right. "OK," I said. "So we've found a new breed. So we get into the history books."

  "You're missing the point," he said grimly. "We have a new breed of flapblacks, all right: a breed that chases other flapblacks away."

  There was a soft whistle from the intercom. "I don't like the sound of that,"

  Rhonda said.