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Giacomo transmitted. "Everybody impatient. Good luck! "
"Giacomo needs to work on his poetry," Erin said wryly. "We're being
outclassed."
Hakim, Martin, Paola, and Eye on Sky gathered on the new-made bridge. Panels
pulled back to show steady blackness, a close-packed haze of stars.
"This is very splendid," Hakim said, touching the new bulkheads, so different
in style from the
moms' usual architecture. "Like being on a ship that might have been made by
humans, begging the Brothers' pardon!"
"We we also feel that if traveled to the stars, it might have been on such a
ship," Eye on Sky said.
Hakim nodded pleasantly, "For the time being, we still use the moms' remotes
on a wide baseline, advanced eyes and ears& "
An image of the fourteenth planet, nearest to the
Trojan Horse
, grew before them in a small star sphere. Martin leaned forward. Mottled,
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cold blue and green, a gas giant fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, the
fourteenth planet was surrounded by twenty-one moons, and more besides. Its
mushy upper atmosphere sprouted floating platforms hundreds of kilometers in
diameter, needle-like proboscises extending down through the haze to
high-pressure regions below. From the center of each platform, a crystal plume
of white rose through a ring that glowed bright as fire in the upper, clear
atmosphere. Hyperbolic lines of plasma shot from the ring, like threads from
this distance, but hot as the filament in a light-bulb.
"Gas wells," Martin said. "Tens of thousands of them. Raising gas from the
depths, packing it somehow accelerating it in those rings, retrieving it in
orbit. Impressive."
"They reveal matter-conversion technology right here," Hakim said. "They do
not care to hide it. No platform parts made of normal matter could survive in
those depths, nor contain the gases under such conditions. We see the bottom
of the fuel chain, which leads to the top the technology of the platforms
themselves."
Eye on Sky rustled and smelled of camphor and pine.
The scene shifted to the next planet nearest to them, number twelve, half a
billion kilometers closer to the star, this one a rocky world with a diameter
of ten thousand kilometers. The color of the planet's crescent viewed in
close-up was dark brown with scattered patches of tan and white. "Resolution
of about four hundred kilometers," Hakim said. "It may be made of rock and
ice. It is cold enough for ammonia and methane to lie solid on the surface,
and the atmosphere appears to be mostly nitrogen and argon. There is no
large-scale construction "
Abruptly, the planet darkened as if the illuminated limb were obscured by
shadow. Then, within the shadow and along the limb, thin lines of brilliant
white appeared like molten silver poured over a surface of carbon soot. The
lines curved into circles and ovals, scribed contours, ran straight as great
circles. The density of lineation increased, thinner lines within thick, until
the entire planet glowed hot silver. Just as abruptly, color returned but a
different color, with different details, grayish-tan with green patches.
Jennifer giggled abruptly, then clapped her fingers to her mouth. "Sorry," she
said.
"What in the hell was that?" George Dempsey asked.
Dumbfounded, Hakim looked between his colleagues, then read the fresh chemical
analysis.
"Pure argon atmosphere. The surface appears to be mostly silicates, fine sand
perhaps, small rocks. The green patches are very cold, much colder than the
rest of the planet four or five kelvins."
"I hope Giacomo saw that," Jennifer said, face ghostly. She could not stop her
hands from touching her shoulders, her elbows, her knees. She seemed
terrified. "If Hans is looking for proof of illusion& "
"Let's not draw conclusions yet," Martin said.
Jennifer giggled again.
The next planet inward that shared the same quadrant of the Leviathan system,
number two,
orbited scarcely one hundred and fifty million kilometers from the star,
barely within a
"temperate" zone allowing liquid water. Pale brownish-red, lacking any thick
atmosphere, this planet was lumpy with structure. Even with a diameter of over
twenty-one thousand kilometers, its outline was remarkably uneven.
"They're showing off again," Paola said. "How tall are those& whatever they
are?"
"Hundreds of kilometers tall," Hakim said. "Tens of thousands of them. Cities,
perhaps?"
"Are we getting any communications between the planets?" Jennifer asked.
"No artificial radiation leakage," Hakim said. "Except for the energies used
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to ship gas up from the giant planets. But even those are of a frequency
easily interpreted as solar flares. From a few light months away, the system
is rich with planets, but quiet."
"So they're not hiding, but they're not attracting attention, either. What
about commerce between the worlds?"
"It is ripe with ships like seeds in shore fruit," Eye on Sky said. "Tens of
millions of vessels rising up, falling down. Every world takes ships but the
twelfth. It orbits alone. The fourth planet is most visited." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]