Bright sunlight was creeping over the Dau’sing Mountains that surrounded Randtown to the north. Mark put his sunglasses on against the light streaming in through the window as he unrolled a paperscreen—he never had liked reading directly out of his virtual vision, the print superimposed over his field of view always gave him a headache. A dozen headlines scrolled down the left-hand side, with local items opposite them, loaded into the cybersphere by The Randtown Chronicle , the only media company on this half of the continent. With all the goodwill and loyalty in the world, Mark really couldn’t haul up enough enthusiasm to read about the new loop road around the town’s western precincts, or the proposed foresting project along the Oyster Valley. So he told his e-butler to access yesterday’s pan-Commonwealth news, and followed the start of the presidential campaign. Reading between the lines on Doi’s funding efforts, she hadn’t gotten the Sheldons, the Halgarths, nor the Singhs to back her yet.
“Here you go,” Mandy said brightly as she put a plate down in front of him. It was piled high with pancakes and bacon oozing maple syrup out of every layer; the strawberries and lolabeans on top were arranged in a smiley face. A tall glass of apple and mango in crushed ice was placed next to it. “I’ll bring your toast and coffee when it’s ready.” She winked saucily and skipped off to take the ski couple’s order. Behind the serving counter the espresso machine had started to gurgle and steam comfortingly.
The smell of food was obviously spreading down the street. People started coming into the café as Mark was eating. Some of them were tourist types, seeking a good meal before the day’s hectic activities, looking around in appreciation at the mock Roman decor before finding a free table. Locals stood at the counter to collect their microwaved paninis and hot drinks to go. Mandy barely had time to bring him his four thick slices of toast and butter with the vanilla rhubarb jam he was especially fond of. A pains au chocolat was perched on the edge of his plate, just in case.
He eventually managed to leave Tea For Two at half past eight. Outside, it was exactly the sort of morning he had traveled three hundred light-years to immerse himself in every day. He breathed down air that had that distinct crisp chill that was only ever found at the foot of snowcapped mountains. The taller peaks and plateaus of the Dau’sings were still heavily snow-covered, including both ski fields. Mark looked up at them, his sunglasses darkening against the light from Elan’s brilliant G-9 star flooding down out of the cloudless sky. They dominated the land behind the town, forming an impressive barrier of rumpled cones and peaks. Now that Elan’s southern hemisphere was coming into springtime, meltwater was starting to run down out of the snowline, filling every crevice with gushing white rivulets. Pine variants from across the Commonwealth had colonized the lower slopes, bringing a much-needed cascade of verdure foliage. Above them, the native boltgrass still flourished, a characterless yellow-green plant with ratty strands. Away from the little oasis of foreign vegetation that humans had brought to the area, it was boltgrass that carpeted every mountain in the range, covering almost a quarter of the continent.
Small elongated triangles of golden fabric were already drifting idly across the sky as the first of the days fliers flapped their way upward in search of the thermals. They normally launched themselves off the ridges on Blackwater Crag, which rose up from the back of the town’s eastern quarter. A cable car run sliced through the forest that covered the crag, leading from its ground base behind the high school’s playing fields up to the semicircular Orbit building that protruded from the top of the broad cliff six hundred meters above the town, looking as if a flying saucer were sticking out over the edge. The restaurant it housed was an overpriced tourist trap, although the view it provided across the town and lake was unbeatable.
Every day the little chrome-blue cable cars carried tourists and flight professionals and extreme sports addicts up to the Orbit. From there they’d make their way through the forest paths to a ridge that had the wind blowing in the right direction, seal themselves into a Vinci suit, and take flight. The real professionals would spend all day soaring and spiraling in the thermals, coming back down only as darkness fell. A Vinci suit was easy enough to use: it was basically a tapered slimline sleeping bag with bird wings that had a span up to eight meters. You stood up inside it on the crest of the ridge, arms outstretched in a cruciform position, and dived forward into the chasm below. Electromuscle bands in the wings mimicked and amplified your arm and wrist motions, allowing the wings to flap and bank and roll. It was the closest humans had ever got to pure bird flight.
Mark had been up a couple of times, sharing an instructor suit with a friend who lived in town. The sensation was truly amazing, but he wasn’t about to switch jobs to do it full-time.
He walked down the sloping Main Mall toward the waterfront. The stores on either side of the walkway were a collection of Commonwealth-wide retail franchises like the Bean Here and the inevitable Bab’s Kebabs fast food, interspaced with local craft shops and the bars and cafés to provide an eclectic shopping mix.
Doors all the way along the Main Mall were being opened for business. Mark said hello to a lot of the staff, waving to even more. They were all young people, and strangely uniform in appearance; if it wasn’t for their varied skin colors they could all have been cousins. The boys had stiff hair cut short, maybe a few days’ stubble, bodies that were genuinely fit, not simply overaerobicized in a gym; they wore baggy sweaters or even baggier waterproof coats, with knee-length shorts, and trainer sandals. The girls were easy to look at in their short skirts or tight trousers, with T-shirts all showing off firm midriffs no matter how cold the day was. All of them were just filling in with these jobs: serving in the stores, waitressing, working bar, portering at the hotels, stewarding on the dive boats, hostessing the scenic tours, doing childcare for the permanent residents. They did it for one thing, to raise enough money for the next extreme experience. Randtown’s biggest industry was tourism, and what set it apart from countless other holiday destinations in the Commonwealth were the sports that were practiced in the rugged countryside surrounding it. They attracted the first-lifers, the ones moderately disaffected with the mainstream of Commonwealth life; not rebels, just thrill-junkies hell-bent on finding a quicker way down a mountain, or a rougher way to raft over rapids, or turn tighter corners on jetskis, or go ever higher for heliski drops. Older, more conservative multi-life types visited as well, staying in the fancy hotels and getting bused out to their scheduled activity each day in air-conditioned coaches. They were the ones who generated the service economy that provided hundreds of low-paying jobs for the likes of Mandy and Julie.
Mark crossed the single-lane road at the end of Main Mall, and walked along the waterfront promenade. Randtown was built around a horseshoe-shaped inlet on the northern shore of Lake Trine’ba. At a hundred eighty kilometers long, it was the biggest stretch of inland freshwater on Elan. Complementing the height of the mountains that corraled it at their center, it was over a kilometer deep in places. Lurking below the astonishingly blue surface was a unique marine ecology that had evolved in isolation for tens of millions of years. Stunningly beautiful coral reefs dominated the shallows, while conical atolls rose from the central deeps like miniature volcanoes. They were home to thousands of fish species, ranging from the bizarre to the sublime; though like their saltwater cousins of this planet they used lethal-looking spines and spindles rather than fins to propel themselves along.
After the winter skiing and snowboarding, diving was Randtown’s second largest tourist draw. The waterfront provided dozens of jetties, where the commercial diving boats were berthed. Even today, with the Trine’ba only just above freezing, ten of the operators were running trips out over the waters. Mark watched a big Celestial Tours catamaran slide past, its impellers kicking up a thick spume behind each hull. A couple of the crew waved to him from the prow, calling out something that was lost in the noise of the engines.
He carried on along the side of the stone wall, with its single line of poetry that stretched the entire length. One day he was going to read it from start to finish. The Ables Motors garage, which was his franchise, was situated a couple of streets away from the eastern end of the promenade. He got to it well before quarter to nine. Randtown, for all it was the only real town for eight hundred kilometers, wasn’t particularly large. Without the tourists and youthful transients, the population was only just over five thousand people. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a quarter of an hour.
There were an equal number of people living out in the valleys and lowlands to the north and west where the farms and vineyards were spreading. To travel about on the district’s dirt-track roads they needed decent four-wheel drive transport. That was what Ables Motors specialized in; it was a division of Farndale that produced vehicles for harsh terrain. It had seemed like the perfect solution to Mark when they were searching for a new home and career. He was good with machines, so he could do most of the light repairs himself; and trading both new and second-hand models would add considerably to that income. Unfortunately, Ables Motors was a relatively new venture for Farndale, an unproven brand, while the old familiar Mercedes, Ford, Range Rover, and Telmar products took the lion’s share of the market. Nor did it help that the Ables garage was only a couple of years old. He perhaps should have realized that when he took it on along with the outstanding mortgage. Sales were slow, and given the tiny number of Ables vehicles in the area, maintenance work was equally sparse.
It had taken Mark less than a fortnight to realize that the four-wheel drive business wasn’t going to bring in anything like a decent income for the family. When he started looking around for extra work, he swiftly found that people in town and on the farms had a lot of broken-down hardware that could be fixed by anyone with rudimentary mechanical aptitude. Mark had damn good mechanical, and electrical, aptitude; on top of which he had a fully equipped workshop. At the start of the third week he brought a few items back to the shop: a couple of janitorbots, an air conditioner, the sonar out of a dive operator’s catamaran, cookers, solar heat exchangers.
Randtown was a tight-knit community, people got to hear about anyone with that kind of talent. Pretty soon he was deluged with appliances and equipment that needed to be patched up. Most of it was done for cash. They’d been paying off the mortgage on the vineyard faster than they’d originally planned.
That morning had three autopickers waiting for him in the workshop. Each unit was the size of a car, with enough electromuscle appendages to fit a Raiel with prosthetics. They belonged to Yuri Conant, who owned three vineyards in Ulon Valley, and was now a good friend and neighbor. One of Yuri’s kids was the same age as Barry.
Mark pulled on his overalls, and started running diagnostics on the first machine. Its magnetic drive bearings were shot to hell. He was still underneath examining the superconductor linkages when his garage sales assistant, Olivia, came in.
“Have you heard?” she asked excitedly.
Mark propelled his flat trolley out from under the mud-caked autopicker and gave her a wounded look. “Wolfram finally asked if he could come in for a coffee last night?” It was a saga of frustrated romance that had been playing out for two weeks now; Mark usually got the latest installment each morning.
“No! The Second Chance is back. They came out of hyperspace above Anshun about forty minutes ago.”
“Goddamn! Really?” Mark couldn’t possibly pretend lack of interest in that. If he hadn’t been married with family responsibilities he would have applied to go on the voyage himself. It was all part of the more interesting universe that existed away from Augusta. As it was he’d hunted down a lot of information on the project until he was able to bore plenty of people with all the statistics and trivial factoids. His e-butler was supposed to alert him on all new developments connected with the flight, but while he was driving into town that morning he’d put a blocker on his e-butler’s access to the cybersphere to avoid any more emergency calls like that from Tea For Two. Family could get through, but no one else. He’d forgotten to take it off when he reached the garage. “What did they find?” he asked as he hurriedly removed the blocker.
“It’s gone, or something.”
“What has?” The data began to line up inside his virtual vision.
“The barrier. It vanished when they started to examine it.”
“Holy cow.” His virtual hands started to flash over icons, bringing up information. In the end there was so much coming on-line they went into the little office at the back of the salesroom to watch the images on a holographic portal. CST was releasing video segments of the exploration as the starship downloaded its data. The media companies were gleefully swooping on it, putting together their own analysis and commentary teams in the studio.
Olivia had been right, the barrier was no more. Its disappearance was shocking, affecting him like the news of a sudden death in the family; that was one thing he absolutely hadn’t been expecting. Nor had any of the studio experts, judging by the way they struggled to make sense of it.
There was little traffic on the road outside the Ables garage. The Russian chocolate house opposite had the same images playing in their portals above the counter. Customers sat at the tables, drinks ignored as they stared at the incomprehensively massive barrier. He called Liz to see if she was accessing. She said yes, she was sitting with the rest of the staff at the Dunbavand vine nursery where she worked, looking at the scenes on one of the office screens.
Mark watched, awestruck, as the spheres and rings of the Dark Fortress revolved within the portal on his desk. The scale was so hard to appreciate. Then there was the system-wide Dyson civilization. The safe thrill of watching the nuclear firefight between ships made him feel as if he were doing something illicit. None of the commentators Alessandra Baron brought into her studio liked the implications of the battle. She turned to a cultural anthropologist to try to explain why a space-faring species would fight in such a fashion. He clearly didn’t have a clue.
Hours passed without Mark really being aware of them. It was only when Olivia said, “Time for my lunch break,” that he finally glanced around at her, frowning as he tried to work out what she was saying.
“Right. Sure,” he replied. “I don’t suppose anyone’s going to buy a vehicle off us today.” He decided he ought to take a break himself, and shut the garage doors behind him. The promenade was unusually quiet for midday. He pulled up his jacket hood against the bitter wind blowing off the lake. Those who did stroll past had the glazed otherwhere expression symptomatic of someone absorbed by their virtual vision. Everybody was hooked on the starship’s return. It was as momentous as the Cup final, when all through the first half Brazil had actually looked like they were going to lose. Instinctively he glanced up at the Black House where Simon Rand lived, wondering if he, too, was having life put into perspective on this day. The building was a huge Georgian mansion perched on the slope above the eastern wing of the lake’s inlet, set in ten acres of its own immaculately maintained grounds. There were dozens of big houses arrayed on the slopes around it, the most expensive and exclusive in the town, though they didn’t match its grandeur. A lot of them belonged to the first arrivals, the men and women who’d joined Simon’s quixotic crusade and helped lay the highway through the mountains.
It was fifty-five years ago now when Simon Rand arrived at Elan’s planetary station with a whole train loaded with JCB roadbuilders, a fleet of various bots, and trucks jammed full of civil construction systems. He was moderately rich even back then, a first-life son of a minor Earth Grand Family who had cashed in his trust fund to buy a dream. Inspired by legends of the Oregon Trail he was determined to set out for somewhere fresh and new, and protect it from modern desecration. Elan, opened to settlers for only a couple of decades back then, was a good starting point. Developers and investors were cut a lot of slack by the planetary government if they helped establish new neighborhoods and facilities. The idea was such entrepreneurial folk would import entire factories and build housing around them. But Simon’s very different vision of a clean green community was harmless enough, so the bureaucrats granted him his land licenses while privately believing the venture was doomed. After all, the Confederation worlds were littered with the follies of eccentric romanticists and their lost fortunes.
Simon immediately set off for the almost uninhabited southern continent of Ryceel. Once there he began the ultimate foolishness of building his road through the imposing Dau’sing range—as if there wasn’t plenty of open land available north of the mountains. Several news shows ran derisive reports on their bulletins, which attracted other idealists and supporters to his cause, willing to get their hands dirty for the payday of living in a quiet, off-mainstream community when they were finished. And Simon, for all his quirky attitude, had at least prepared for his venture with a pragmatic thoroughness.
Three years and seven hundred eighty kilometers later his last surviving JCB monster roadbuilder chewed its way around the base of Blackwater Crag amid the death-screeches of disintegrating rock and churning clouds of filthy steam like some earthbound dragon. Behind it was a dual carriageway of enzyme-bonded concrete that bridged seventeen rivers and tunneled through eleven mountains. Walking along the newly-laid surface that crackled and gave of reeking urealike fumes was Simon, leading a chaotic caravan of mobile homes, trucks, and even a few horses and mules pulling carts. The three other roadbuilders that had begun the trip were now abandoned behind them; cannibalized, rusting hulks slumped beside the road as monuments to its conception.
Like Moses so long before him Simon gazed out across Lake Trine’ba and said, “This is where we belong.” He could see that it was the cool blue water that had parted the continent-spanning mountains, leaving their massed ranks pressed together along its shores. The massive ramparts stretched on and on into the distance, reflected perfectly by the unsullied mirror surface. On both sides, hundreds of waterfalls fed by the meltwater poured out over jagged cliffs, from tiny silver trickles barely wetting the rock to great foaming cascades throwing out spray thicker than rain. Tiny, delicate scarlet and lavender coral cones were poking out from the center of the lake. And filling the huge gulf of air above the water was a silence so deep it absorbed his very thoughts.
In fifty-two years, the majestic view hadn’t changed. Simon was very determined about that. Buildings, forests, fields, drainage ditches, and roads now spread out over the virgin land in the valleys behind Randtown, but there was no industry, none of the factories and business units that normally barnacled the outskirts of human settlements. The inhabitants could import what they liked down the long toll highway that was still their only physical link to the rest of the human race—it wasn’t economical to build a railroad beside it, and there was nowhere for an airport. Simon wasn’t out to change the majority Commonwealth culture, he just wanted to keep the worst aspects out of his little part. So the farms were organic, the town’s principal income came from tourism, its energy was geothermal and solar; combustion engines were illegal; recycling was a minor religion, and sewage was treated in secure bioreactors to prevent the slightest chance that any foreign human-derived chemical could ever pollute the precious pure water of Lake Trine’ba.
As environments went, Mark had gone from one extreme to the other.
Virtual vision showed him a ghostly image of the Second Chance slowly maneuvering itself into its assembly platform dock high above Anshun. He was struck by its condition, how unworn it was. After such a voyage there should surely be some signs of stress, a few meteor impacts, scorch marks—just something to prove how far it had been and what it had seen. But it looked as new and clean as the day it departed.
He stopped at one of the stalls behind the promenade and bought a tuna, shrimp, talarot, sweetcorn, and mayo salad sandwich for lunch, along with some vegetarian sushi and a small something for dessert. It was Sasmi who sold it to him; she’d arrived in town a few months ago for the start of the snowboarding season. Judging from her raven hair and flattish face, Mark had thought her heritage was Oriental, until she told him her ancestors were actually Finnish. A sweet girl who had dived headfirst into everything Randtown offered: the friends, parties, sports. Who always found the time to talk to Mark, not that he was singled out, she just had an irrepressibly sunny nature.
Today even she was caught up in the drama of the starship’s return. They swapped: “Have you heard?” and “Did you see the bit where…” as he watched her assembling his bap. He walked away back down the promenade, her parting smile lingering in his mind. There had never been so much temptation in his life before. It was an undisputed quality of Randtown; everybody here was so busy cramming their life full of events that mostly seemed to be parties and meeting other people, yet with all that they were never hurried. He had taken months to learn how to slow down and chill out after Augusta’s lean, focused routine of work and family, where enjoyment was centered solely around entertainment. His only fear about living here now was that he would give in one day, some of the girls were just divine.
Olivia was still on her break when Mark got back to the garage. He’d only just sat down and started on his triple chip chocolate and quorknut muffin when CST released the real bombshell. Two people had been left behind. The news was only just breaking because the company had been informing and counseling the families. Mark had enough trouble coping with that, never mind that one of them was actually Dudley Bose. For a while he was furious with the rest of Second Chance ’s crew for abandoning them out there, such a thing was surely the ultimate betrayal. Just thinking about that much distance made him shiver. Then Captain Wilson Kime made a real-time statement. He was dressed in his full dark uniform, hair clipped neat and short, staring unflinchingly into the camera, knowing how many people would be staring back. All of them with one question on their lips. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for them?
“It is with the most profound regret that I find myself ending our historic voyage with this saddest possible news,” Wilson said. His deep solemn voice was so sincere Mark immediately switched to feeling sorry for him and the terrible weight of command. “I was forced to make the decision which every captain fears the most, to risk the lives of every person on board, or to leave our friends and colleagues behind. This mission was launched with the express commitment of bringing back vital information on Dyson Alpha, and the remarkable barrier surrounding this star. While the safety of my crew is paramount to me personally as well as enshrined in my duty, I could not overlook our ultimate objective. We found ourselves in a situation that placed the entire ship in grave danger. Faced with these circumstances, I had no choice other than to leave. It is a choice that I will have to face down every day for the rest of my life, always asking myself if we’d just stayed that fraction longer would they have got back in contact? But those few extra moments could equally have brought us calamity. Then we might never have brought back the information we have. The Commonwealth might not have been warned that the barrier is down, and the aliens it contained do not appear to be friendly. It is that information which I considered more important than the lives of our comrades. I know that if the tragic situation had been reversed, and I was out there lost in the alien station, that I would have wanted my shipmates to carry the essential knowledge home no matter what the personal cost. All of us undertook this voyage knowing there would be danger involved. None of us hoped it would be so profound. Thank you for your time.”
Mark slumped back in his seat, and pushed out a long breath. Given those circumstances, he supposed he would have done exactly the same thing. It was still a pretty frightening decision, though. And the captain thought the aliens were dangerous. That wasn’t good, not good at all.
The news company started playing images of the Watchtower. Mark followed the astronauts as they slid through the dark tunnels of the station. There seemed to be miles of the eerie passageways knotted together. The harsh breathing of the contact team members reverberated around the showroom office; Mark felt himself being there as gloved hands stretched out at the edges of the image, grabbing frayed sections of the tunnel wall to haul himself along. Then he was slow-motion somersaulting into an empty chamber. Conduits on the wall had split open, allowing optical fibers to drift out like some kind of slender aquatic plant. He followed them along to a box containing circuit cubes, resembling fogged glass. Excited voices called out. The gauntlets tried to tease one of the cubes out, but it started crumbling at the touch. Another, calmer voice instructed them to cut the whole box free of its mountings.
Mark shook himself. He wanted to go through the Watchtower inch by inch, examining its dark mysteries for himself. One night this week he’d take the time and lie on his bed, running a TSI of the exploration.
The news company switched to Senator Thompson Burnelli who was standing in front of Washington’s imposing Senate Hall. A broad semicircle of reporters was gathered around him, while he was flanked by two aides.
“Obviously I am disappointed by certain aspects of the flight,” Burnelli said. “Although I would like to take this moment to express my sympathy to the families of both Dudley Bose and Emmanuelle Verbeke for the shock they received today. In relation to that, I do think there are some very serious questions raised by the way the Second Chance left the area so abruptly. I believe a lot more effort should have been made to ascertain the nature of the Dyson aliens. As to the supposed threat: nothing actually fired on our ship, a few robot devices were getting close, that’s all. We don’t know they were missiles. Kime could have taken a second, a third, even a fourth look; kept on trying until we got some real information. The Second Chance was equipped with FTL, they could leap out clean and free from any genuine danger.”
“What’s going to happen now?” a reporter asked.
“The full Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council will be convening as soon as possible to review the results. Once we have done so we will make our recommendation to the President and the Commonwealth Senate.”
“What will your recommendation be, Senator?”