they’d streaked toward the nearer of the two white dwarfs and were visible once again as dust-mote silhouettes against the raw, pearly white glare of the star’s surface.
“They seek to end their existence,” a voice said in » DEVCAMERON’S « mind.
“I don’t think so. Why would they come here, from wherever they came from in the first place, to do that? Can we signal them?”
“We are attempting to get their attention, using both radio and laser communications. There has been no response.”
“Keep trying.”
It was difficult to follow the alien vessels’ descent into the stellar corona. The Perceivers’ optics had not been designed to handle such light levels, and several of the creatures went off-line, their vision destroyed.
Then the mystery ships were gone, vanished into the star.
“Have they been destroyed?” a voice asked.
“I… I still can’t believe they deliberately destroyed themselves,” » DEVCAMERON « said, but his thoughts were unsteady, uncertain. Various possibilities occurred to him. They were probes of some sort, sent to plumb the star’s depths. They were starminers, seeking energy or raw materials.
A third possibility was more chilling. If these were the people who’d once made a star explode, perhaps they were trying to do so again.
But minute followed minute, and there was no change in the white dwarf’s complexion as it continued its swing about the Device, paired with its opposite number on the far side.
Were these the same people? The ones who’d destroyed a star? Were they the same as the builders of the Device?
So many questions and not answers enough by half.
“The Perceivers’ scan has found planets,” the voice announced. “Four. They are far beyond the star’s zone for liquid water, however.”
“They would be. These dwarfs don’t shed much more than a few percent of the light and heat they used to. Where?”
A silent thought indicated direction and distance. Piggybacking himself onto the nervous system of a battery of DalRiss and Perceivers, he focused on one world, then another. Three were gas giants, so distant that at the highest magnification they showed no detail at all.
A fourth was closer, about three astronomical units away. It was a rocky world, its surface a patchwork of ice and rock, without even a trace of atmosphere. But » DEVCAMERON « felt a stirring as he watched that distant world, for his DalRiss senses indicated that the planet possessed very nearly the mass of the Earth.
“I think,” he said, “that that ice ball should be our next stop.”
“There is no life.”
“No. But I’d like to know if there was life there once.”
“We go, then.”
The host accelerated out from the enigmatic, rapidly spinning whisker and all of its hidden secrets.
Chapter 5
To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
— The Divine Comedy,
Inferno, Canto XVI, l. 79
D ANTE A LIGHIERI
C . E . 1320
Dr. Daren Cameron stopped, pausing for breath as kata vines dripped scarlet beneath a lowering orange and green sky. On the horizon, beyond the swells of a shallow sea, a volcano rambled, staining the sky with a pall of greasy blue-gray ash as lightning played and flickered about the mountain’s crest. Sulfur tainted the air, giving it a burned, unpleasant taste.
He knew the world as Dante, though that was not its true name. The second world of a type K3 star cataloged as DM-58 5564, some thirty light years from Earth and over seventy-six from New America, it had originally been named Dantai, a Nihongo word meaning, roughly, social organization or group. Western survey team members, however, had twisted the name in literate wordplay, pointing to the world’s sweltering heat, its sulfurous air, its bizarre and, at times, demonic
“They seek to end their existence,” a voice said in » DEVCAMERON’S « mind.
“I don’t think so. Why would they come here, from wherever they came from in the first place, to do that? Can we signal them?”
“We are attempting to get their attention, using both radio and laser communications. There has been no response.”
“Keep trying.”
It was difficult to follow the alien vessels’ descent into the stellar corona. The Perceivers’ optics had not been designed to handle such light levels, and several of the creatures went off-line, their vision destroyed.
Then the mystery ships were gone, vanished into the star.
“Have they been destroyed?” a voice asked.
“I… I still can’t believe they deliberately destroyed themselves,” » DEVCAMERON « said, but his thoughts were unsteady, uncertain. Various possibilities occurred to him. They were probes of some sort, sent to plumb the star’s depths. They were starminers, seeking energy or raw materials.
A third possibility was more chilling. If these were the people who’d once made a star explode, perhaps they were trying to do so again.
But minute followed minute, and there was no change in the white dwarf’s complexion as it continued its swing about the Device, paired with its opposite number on the far side.
Were these the same people? The ones who’d destroyed a star? Were they the same as the builders of the Device?
So many questions and not answers enough by half.
“The Perceivers’ scan has found planets,” the voice announced. “Four. They are far beyond the star’s zone for liquid water, however.”
“They would be. These dwarfs don’t shed much more than a few percent of the light and heat they used to. Where?”
A silent thought indicated direction and distance. Piggybacking himself onto the nervous system of a battery of DalRiss and Perceivers, he focused on one world, then another. Three were gas giants, so distant that at the highest magnification they showed no detail at all.
A fourth was closer, about three astronomical units away. It was a rocky world, its surface a patchwork of ice and rock, without even a trace of atmosphere. But » DEVCAMERON « felt a stirring as he watched that distant world, for his DalRiss senses indicated that the planet possessed very nearly the mass of the Earth.
“I think,” he said, “that that ice ball should be our next stop.”
“There is no life.”
“No. But I’d like to know if there was life there once.”
“We go, then.”
The host accelerated out from the enigmatic, rapidly spinning whisker and all of its hidden secrets.
Chapter 5
To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
— The Divine Comedy,
Inferno, Canto XVI, l. 79
D ANTE A LIGHIERI
C . E . 1320
Dr. Daren Cameron stopped, pausing for breath as kata vines dripped scarlet beneath a lowering orange and green sky. On the horizon, beyond the swells of a shallow sea, a volcano rambled, staining the sky with a pall of greasy blue-gray ash as lightning played and flickered about the mountain’s crest. Sulfur tainted the air, giving it a burned, unpleasant taste.
He knew the world as Dante, though that was not its true name. The second world of a type K3 star cataloged as DM-58 5564, some thirty light years from Earth and over seventy-six from New America, it had originally been named Dantai, a Nihongo word meaning, roughly, social organization or group. Western survey team members, however, had twisted the name in literate wordplay, pointing to the world’s sweltering heat, its sulfurous air, its bizarre and, at times, demonic
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