Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “That one-half of the rescue mission broke down. What else can I say?”

  “You’re not going to put it like that, I hope?”

  “No. Of course not.” He looked puzzled. How else could one put it?

  “Just attribute it to insufficient resources to meet an emergency of this magnitude.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “We did the best we could with what we had.”

  “You think they’ll buy that?”

  “It’s true, Eric.”

  “That doesn’t always guarantee that we can get by with something.” He tried his drink and made a face. “Anyhow, if we go that route, it might offend the Senate committee, or maybe even the Council. See, that’s the problem. It sounds as if we’re trying to blame somebody.”

  “And you’d rather blame—”

  “—A technician. Somebody who can always get another job with somebody else.” He smiled weakly. “Not you, Hutch. I’d never think of blaming you.”

  “Good.” She’d been wondering about that all day, whether in the end, needing to point a finger at somebody, Asquith wouldn’t find it expedient to target her. Admitting to the media he should have kept an eye on things himself. Hutchins tried to get it right, but I should have stayed on top of it. Not really her fault though. Bad luck. She wondered what Sylvia was doing these days.

  “Just tell the truth,” she said. “It’ll come out in the end anyway.” She had to bite down on that line, knowing the truth that came out would depend on the way the media perceived what Eric had to say, and what they wanted to stress. Generally, they were inclined to go after people in high places. Which meant that they would probably bite the Senate committee and the commissioner.

  She was becoming cynical. A few years back, she’d have considered her present job more than she could possibly have hoped for. But here she was, the director of operations, eminently successful in her career by any reasonable measure. And she wondered why she was doing it.

  The job had turned out to be not what she’d expected. She’d thought it would be operational, with some politics mixed in. Truth was, all her critical functions were political. The rest of it could have been handled by anybody who could count. She’d discovered a talent for politics, and didn’t mind jollying people along provided she didn’t have to compromise herself. Asquith didn’t altogether approve of her. He thought she was something of a crank. But she was good at her job, and she thought he’d be reluctant to let her go. Although not so reluctant he’d be willing to face fire from the Hill.

  “I hate days like this,” Eric said.

  She nodded. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not the end of the world.” At least not for us.

  EARLY THAT AFTERNOON she got a call from Charlie, who’d been serving as director pro tem of the astrophysics lab. “I’ve been debating whether to bother you with this, Hutch,” he said. She came to full alert. “Can you stop by the lab either today or tomorrow?”

  It didn’t sound like a breakthrough. “I’ll be over in an hour or so, Charlie.”

  It was more like three hours, and by then a rainstorm had moved in and turned into a downpour. In dry weather she’d have gone outside, strolled past the pool, and tossed some popcorn to the ducks. But she descended instead to the tunnel that connected the Academy’s complex of buildings.

  The walls were concrete, painted a hideous ocher, the long monotony broken only by pictures of the Academy’s ships and stations, and some astronomical shots, galaxies and nebulas and planetary rings. Somebody had added one of the omegas. It was dark and menacing, sections of it illuminated by interior power surges. Long tendrils of cloud reached forward, threatening the observer, and an escorting asteroid was front and center.

  She wondered what the Goompahs would think when they saw it up close.

  There were three other known races who had ventured into interstellar space: the unknown architects of the chindi, who were apparently a race bent on preserving everything of value, who had found their own unique way to defeat time. The Monument-Makers, who had obviously gone to a lot of trouble for the civilizations at Quraqua and Nok. And, finally, the Hawks, who had performed a rescue when Deepsix went into a long-term ice age several thousand years ago.

  And now her own species, trying to help where it could. They were in good company. And she felt a modicum of pride. If Darwin ruled on planetary surfaces, it appeared that a concern for one’s neighbor was a working principle at higher levels.

  Unless, of course, one counted the agency behind the omegas.

  She’d have liked to talk with representatives of those three races, but nobody knew where the chindi had originated, the Hawks were lost in time, and the few remaining members of the race that had spawned the Monument-Makers were savages on a backward world with no knowledge of their former greatness.

  Charlie Wilson must have been alerted she was coming. He met her in the corridor and escorted her into the lab. “Now understand,” he said, “I don’t really know what any of this means.”

  “What any of what means?”

  Charlie was still filling in as acting lab director. He was doing a good job, but eventually she’d have to bring in somebody with an established reputation.

  He took her into the tank, which was a small amphitheater. Thirty-two seats circled a chamber. Like so much of the Academy, it had been designed with public relations in mind. But it had turned out the general public wasn’t all that interested. Usually, it was used by only one or two people at a time, but it occasionally served visiting groups of schoolchildren.

  They sat down, and Charlie produced a remote. The lights faded to black, the stars came on, vast dust clouds lit up, and they were adrift somewhere in the night. The sensation that they were actually afloat among the stars, the two of them and their chairs, was broken only by the presence of gravity and a flow of cool air.

  “We now have forty-seven tewks on record. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “All forty-seven are in places where we would have expected to find omegas. So we can assume they are all the same phenomenon.”

  He shifted in his chair, turning so he could face her. “Some of the Weathermen were close enough to the events to allow us to look for purpose. That is, what was the explosion supposed to accomplish? All of them took place in interstellar space. No worlds nearby. So it’s not an attempt to cause general havoc. It’s not somebody being vindictive.”

  “Tell that to Quraqua.”

  He nodded, conceding the point. Civilization on Quraqua had been obliterated. “All the clouds we’ve checked, each one is programmed to follow the hedgehog at a slightly higher velocity. When it overtakes the thing, it attacks the hedgehog, which then explodes, triggering the cloud, and you get the tewk.”

  “Okay. But why?”

  “Who knows? Anyhow, it puts out as much light as a small nova. Somebody else will have to figure out why. We just know it happens.”

  “So what’s the point? Why has someone gone to all this trouble?”

  “I can’t answer that question. But I can tell you that these things happen in bunches. Harold saw that from the first. Even when we only had a handful to look at. There’s a pattern. There are six distinct areas where we’ve had events. But that’s not to say we won’t find others as Weatherman proceeds.

  “The yellow star on your right is the supergiant R Coronae Borealis. Seven thousand light-years from here.” He touched the remote. A hand’s width to one side of the supergiant, a new star sizzled into existence. “Coronae 14,” he said. “The fourteenth recorded event.”

  And a second new star, a few degrees away. “Coronae 15.” And, a few degrees farther on, a third. Sixteen.

  If there were to be a fourth, she could have guessed where it would be. But there wasn’t.

  “They’re all this way,” he said. “We get five here, six there. All within a relatively short time span. Maybe a
thousand years or so. And each series is confined to a given region.”

  “Which means what?”

  He looked frustrated. “Hutch, it’s a research project of some sort. Has to be.”

  “What are they researching?”

  “I don’t know. It must have to do with light. Some of our people have made some guesses, but we don’t have anything yet that makes sense. But you understand that would be the case if they were on a level sufficiently beyond us.”

  “Like Kepler trying to understand gravity fluctuations.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  NEWSCOPE

  (Extract from Eric Samuels Press Conference)

  New York On-line: Eric, can you tell us precisely what happened to the al-Jahani?

  Samuels: There was a problem with the engines. With the jump engines. Uh, Bill?

  Cosmo: A mission as important as this, with so much hanging on it: Weren’t they inspected before it left port?

  Samuels: We always do an inspection before ships leave the Wheel. In fact, this one was due for routine maintenance, but there wasn’t time to finish. Jennifer.

  Cosmo: Wait. Follow-up, please. Are you saying it was sent out in a defective condition?

  Samuels: No. I’m not saying that at all. Had we known there was a problem, we would have corrected it, no matter how much time it took. In this case, we didn’t see a problem, we were pressed for time, so we went ahead. We just got unlucky. Jennifer, did you want to try again?

  Weekend Roundup: Yes. If there was a question about this one, why didn’t you send another ship?

  Samuels: We didn’t have another ship. Not one with the carrying capacity we needed. Harvey, did you have something?

  London Times: You’re saying the Academy didn’t have another ship?

  Samuels: That’s correct.

  London Times: How is that possible? The Council and the White House both claim they’re doing everything they can to support this effort.

  Samuels: Well, there are limits to what can be done on short notice. Lookout is extremely far. Janet.

  UNN: Eric, what is the prognosis for the Goompahs?

  Samuels: We’re still hopeful.

  In the morning she hauled Charlie out of the lab for a walk along the Morning Pool.

  The forty-seven events, he said, were concentrated in a half dozen widely separated areas. None of the areas was even remotely close to the bubble of space through which humanity had been traveling for the past half century. “Which is why,” he told her, “we haven’t seen these things in our own sky. But a few thousand years from now, when the light has had time to get here, there’ll be some fireworks.”

  Two of the areas were out on the rim, one near the core, and three scattered haphazardly. “And none anywhere else?” she asked.

  “Not yet. But the Weathermen are still arriving on station in a lot of places. We’ll probably find more.”

  There was something solid about Charlie. He wasn’t going to get caught up in wild speculations, and in his presence Hutch always felt things were under control. It was a valuable quality in a man so young. Charlie lacked his former boss’s genius, but everybody did. And you don’t need genius to have a bright future. You need common sense, persistence, and the ability to inspire others. And she could under no circumstances imagine him telling her he understood what the omegas were, then leaving her to wait while he gathered more evidence. He wouldn’t even have set it up as a big announcement. He’d have simply told her what he knew. Or suspected.

  She looked at the sky and wondered who would be there when the light show began.

  Harold had been at the Georgetown Gallery, he’d said, when the epiphany came. When he decided he knew what was happening. But if Charlie were right, if they were doing advanced research, research on areas currently beyond human understanding, how could that have happened?

  Was it possible he’d seen something at the gallery?

  She called them, something she should have done long ago.

  An automated voice asked how the Georgetown Gallery could be of service.

  “Have you anything currently on display, or anything that’s been sold over the past six months, that has as its subject matter the omega clouds?”

  “One moment please.”

  A human voice picked up the conversation. “This is Eugene Hamilton. I understand you’re interested in Omega.”

  “I’m interested in anything you have, or may have had over the past six months, that uses the omegas as its subject.”

  “That would be René Guilbert’s Storm Center. You’re familiar with it, of course.”

  “Of course.” In fact, Tor had mentioned it, but she couldn’t remember the context. “May I take a look at it, please?”

  “If you wish. You understand, of course, that the power and elegance of this piece, even more than most, cannot begin to be adequately conveyed electronically.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Perhaps you would prefer to come by the gallery? Ms. — ” He hesitated, inviting her to introduce herself.

  “Hutchins,” she said. “I’d prefer for the moment to see it here.”

  “Of course. One moment, please.”

  Moments later the work materialized on-screen. Guilbert had captured all the gloom and foreboding of the objects, had caught the immensity and overwhelming power. The malevolence, however, was not there. This was not an object that was out to kill; it just didn’t give a damn. Don’t get in its way and you’ll be fine. Pretty much like Moby-Dick.

  She made a copy and thanked Hamilton, assuring him she would run by to take a look.

  Had Harold seen it?

  She showed the copy to Charlie and he shrugged. “It’s an omega, all right.” He produced a disk. “I thought you might like to have this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A history of what we’ve tried to do with the tewks. If anything occurs to you, I’d love to hear about it.”

  SHE SAT IN the tank for more than an hour watching the results of Charlie’s efforts to find a rationale for the tewks. He and his team had tried to establish a real-time sequence, depicting what the events would look like if light traveled instantaneously. That took them nowhere. They had looked at energy yields, at electromagnetic variations, at the ranges to nearby objects that might be affected by the events.

  It was a hodgepodge.

  For all she knew, it could be a code.

  She smiled at the thought while a cloud lit up on the far side of the room, near the emergency exit. And went out. A minute later, fifty years in real time, another, a hand’s width away, flared and blinked off. They were like fireflies.

  She increased the pace, the flow of time, and saw seven consecutive events coming down from the top of the chamber on her left, then six behind her. She had to take Charlie’s word that they were not occurring at precise intervals. She really couldn’t tell, just looking at a watch. But it was close enough. A series here, a series there.

  They knew now that the events had a range of anywhere from twenty-seven to sixty-one days. And there were different spectra, which is to say the lights came on in different colors.

  And that was another strange thing: A series was always the same color. Blue overhead, white at the back of the chamber, red on her left. What the hell was going on?

  SHE HAD A conference that afternoon, attended a planning session with the commissioner’s staff, and got out well after seven o’clock. Between meetings she resolved a dispute between department heads, arranged a visit to Serenity for a senator, and signed a special award for Emma, Sky, and the Heffernan, to be presented when they arrived back at their home station.

  It cooled down considerably when the sun set, and she strolled into the roof transport complex thinking that she should have dressed more warmly.

  “Where to, please, Ms. Hutchins?” the cab asked after she’d wiped her card.

  On a whim, she said, “Georgetown,” and gave the add
ress of the art gallery on Wisconsin Avenue.

  “Very good,” said the cab as it lifted away.

  They turned north over the Potomac, much swollen since the days of the Roosevelts. Constitution Island, with its cluster of public buildings, glowed in the encroaching night. The Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Brockman memorials watched serenely from their embankments. And the Old White House, with its fifty-two-star U.S. flag spotlighted, stood behind its dikes. A cruise ship, brightly illuminated, moved steadily upriver.

  The night was filled with traffic. A shuttle lifted off from Reagan, headed for the Wheel. Glidetrains were everywhere. She called Tor, warned him she’d be late.

  “What’s in Georgetown?” he asked.

  “I’m headed to the gallery.” Tor was, of course, familiar with the place. Years ago, they’d handled much of his work.

  “Why?”

  “Not sure. I want to get a look at Guilbert’s Storm Center.”

  He seemed satisfied. She almost thought he’d been expecting something like this to happen.

  The flight needed only a couple of minutes. They descended into Wisconsin Park, and the cab asked whether she wanted it to wait.

  “No,” she said. “That won’t be necessary, thank you.”

  “Very good, Ms. Hutchins.”

  She smiled. The AI had a British accent.

  The gallery was located on the east side of Wisconsin Avenue, which had been designed originally for carriage traffic and horses, given over later to motorized ground vehicles, and was now restricted to pedestrians and, once again, horse-drawn coaches. She touched her commlink to the reader and climbed out.

  Every night was date night in Georgetown. The restaurants were full. Shoppers and tourists wandered the streets, music and laughter drifted out of a dozen cafés, and in the park a mime was entertaining a group of children.

  The Georgetown Art Gallery was located between a furniture store and an antique shop. The entire block of buildings had a dilapidated, run-down look. The architecture suggested these were the kinds of shops where you could get quality merchandise with the sheen rubbed off, but at bargain prices. The front door of the gallery was open, and she could see two men talking. As she watched, the conversation moved inside, and the door closed.