3.8
28 October
I.R.V. Intercession
Extra-Kuiper Space
2,000 A.U. from Earth
The crew of Intercession started pasting the ship’s velocity on every screen capable of displaying it. At first, the number was meaninglessly large. Fifteen hundred KPS? What did that even mean, in real-world terms? Seventy-five times the speed of a comet? But that speed was slowly dropping. It took 16.6 minutes to drop just one KPS, and yet, magically, this added up so that every day, they shed another 86.4 KPS, which did seem like a lot. And then, finally the day arrived when the velocity was less than 86.4 KPS, and would drop to zero before the night shift started.
This was way more exciting than simply turning the ship around, because it meant they’d arrived at their destination. True, that destination was literally nowhere, but perhaps the most important nowhere that had ever been visited.
Unless this whole thing were crazy! Michael had tried for months to keep that thought mostly out of his mind, but now was the time when the real and the hypothetical either merged or recoiled. If nothing happened, if there were no Beings, then all this was simply a shakedown cruise for a ship that would eventually, when all the glitches were ironed out, make the much longer trip to Proxima, and the planet that circled it. (A lifeless planet, by all accounts, geologically dead and battered by stellar flares. But nicer than Mars in most ways.) And Michael would not summit with God’s other children, but simply be a member of the shakedown crew.
On the other hand, Pope Dave had agreed to send him—to leave Saint Joe’s in the care of dour Brother Groppel—on the possibility that these aliens actually existed. Surely the Church’s participation in a meeting of such magnitude would be (a) good for the Church, and by extension (b) good for the billion-plus people who, one way or another, depended on the Church to light their way in a world of confusion and ambiguity.
If the Beings were real, the theological implications were beggaring, and Pope Dave wanted eyes and ears and hands on the scene to help him—him!—make sense of it. That Lisa Jablonski’s little boy now found himself in such a role was itself beyond any usefulness he’d ever imagined for himself.
And if the Beings were not real, then a lot of people—not only the crew and passengers—would have wasted years of their lives. And he supposed his role, in that case, would be to help them (and himself) find meaning in that. In a life dedicated to service, perhaps that was enough. Perhaps it was good for the mission and good for the Church that he be present for that as well.
A little after midday, he and the rest of the crew were gathered around the dining table for lunch, surrounded by the octagonal frustum of their eight sleeping berths, with the doors open and their meager personal effects on display. Video displays, one over each berth, displayed clouds in a bright blue sky. This was the homiest, most comfortable part of the ship, and here he sensed, finally, that he was not the only person thinking these thoughts.
“I hope we really do make contact,” Harv said at one point. “I can’t have two reasons for people to think I’m crazy.”
At another point, Rachael said, “I deal exclusively in measurable quantities. This business of . . . As far as I can tell, there’s nothing measurable here.”
Even Igbal’s excitement seemed tempered with a grouchy realism.
“Here’s hoping we haven’t wasted a trip,” he said, as the meal was wrapping up.
“No point worrying about it now,” Hobie said. “Things are about to get busy, and we all got jobs to do.”
Everyone was, in their own ways, preparing themselves for what was about to happen, and everyone nodded at Hobie’s words.
“Speaking of which . . .” Sandy said, nodding toward the ladder that led up to the bridge.
“It’s a bit early, gal.” Hobie said. But he put his hands on the ladder and launched himself upward.
Sandy followed behind him, and everyone else cleared the dishes, folded up the table, and then started climbing into their cabins and strapping in. It was early, but there was, finally, nothing else to do.
In the end, despite nearly everything being under manual control, Sandy and Hobie managed to stop the engine with the ship moving at just under fourteen meters per second.
“On a dime!” Hobie called out happily.
And then he did something reckless and stupid: he used the attitude control thrusters to try and make up the difference.
“Stop!” Michael said into his headset mic, as thrusters groaned on each side of the vehicle. Then, more insistently: “Hobie, stop! Cut the thrusters.”
Hobie did so, but then complained, “What’s the problem?”
“You’re wasting chemical propellant we might need later,” Michael snapped, more cross than he’d been in months. “And you . . . the . . . that velocity reading is only an estimate, anyway. The nearest reference point is a million light-seconds away.”
“Quit showing off,” Igbal seconded. “We’re here.”
“As you wish, man,” Hobie said, with mingled sarcasm and chagrin.
But he’d mostly achieved his goal already; the velocity now stood at just 6.3 meters per second.
“We’re as stopped as a spaceship can reasonably be,” Michael said.
“Relative to the Sun, at least,” Harv chimed in. “We’re still in orbit around the center of the galaxy, moving something like two hundred kilometers per second.”
“And the galaxy is moving,” said Dong.
“Everything is moving,” Sandy called down the ladder, with languorous impatience, like it was something she’d grown tired of explaining. “Everything orbits everything, while the universe expands. There are no privileged reference frames; there’s no such thing as ‘stopped.’”
“Well, the engine is off,” said Igbal. “Hopefully, that will cut out the last of the quantum interference.”
That was a thing, Michael knew, that the Beings had complained about to both Igbal and Hobie, and perhaps a few others as well, in their communications to ESL1 Shade Station. When he thought about it at all, Michael imagined the Beings standing on the far side of a roaring river, shouting at humanity and hearing nothing but “What?” in return.
“We’ll know in a few days,” he said. And then it really hit him: yes, they would know in a few days. And regardless of the outcome, mankind’s place in the universe would never be the same.