the table. “There are some names you may want to look at.”
Regis peeled his own flexy from the wall: it had fluttered there to recharge its batteries, drinking power from the embedded grid. When he touched it, the two devices exchanged secure data via the myoelectric field of his own body, bypassing ShipNet’s open channel.
“I still don’t know where to begin,” he said.
“Let me show you something,” Bella said. She turned to the year-old image of Janus on the wall. Her hands moved across the keys on her desk. With a flourish of flickering hexels, the image changed abruptly. It was still Janus, but now the image was fuzzy, like a photo of a stone taken through smeared glass.
“This is a synthetic image,” Bella said, “a visible-light composite assembled using long-baseline optical interferometry, put together from data obtained by six different deep-space telescopes within the orbit of Mars. It’s the most recent long-range picture we have of Janus: it was taken less than a day ago.”
The picture showed a different angle from the fly-by snapshot, so the shape of the moon and the distribution of craters looked different, but more than that had changed. There were dark patches in the ice that had not been there before. A second glance showed that the patches were actually wounds: voids where huge scabs of ice, kilometres thick, had come free, or boiled off, or simply ceased to exist. In the dark zones, suggestions of mechanical structures twinkled at the limit of clarity: enormous dark machine parts, curved and coiled, nestling tight as intestines.
“Definitely the money shot,” Parry said.
“The camouflage is breaking away,” Bella said. “Janus — whatever it is — is starting to show its true form. We already have something to work with: the fact that we really are dealing with an alien artefact, and not some bizarre physical process we just didn’t understand.”
“That’s not much,“ Parry said.
“There’s more. I mentioned that Janus is leaving our system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Well, now we have a much better handle on the trajectory.” Bella made the image shrink until it was an off-white pinpoint against a star map marked with star names, constellation boundaries and faint lines of right ascension and declination, the astronomical counterparts to latitude and longitude. “Ladies and gentleman: we have a star, and we have a name.”
“Which is?” Parry asked.
“Alpha Virginis, the brightest star in Virgo.” Bella highlighted the relevant star: it was the nearest one to the small image of Janus. “Now, I’ll admit it’s not exactly the kind of sun we’d have expected aliens to come from,” she said. “Not only is it hot, heavy and blue, but it’s also part of a binary system. Maybe they didn’t evolve there. But we can’t ignore the evidence. That’s where Janus is heading. That’s the place it now calls home.”
“So the Janus builders,” Svetlana said, “what do we call them? Virgins? Virginians? Alphans?”
“None of the above,” Bella replied. “We name them after the classical name of their destination star. Alpha Virginis is Spica.” She pronounced it carefully, “spiker”, lingering over the syllables. “The Janus builders are the Spicans, and they live two hundred and sixty light-years from Earth.” She beamed at her little gathering. “There. Don’t you feel as if you know them better already?”
“About this mission,” Parry said, “is it too late to change my mind?”
They all laughed. But not as much as Bella might have hoped.
* * *
CNN wanted an interview. Bella took a cam down into the aeroponics lab, attaching it to one of the plant racks with a dab of geckoflex. Aeroponics, with its humid air, mechanical breezes and the soothingly regular chuffing of the aerators, always put her at ease. It was the only place on Rockhopper where she could close her eyes and feel, fleetingly, as if she were back on Earth.
“It
Regis peeled his own flexy from the wall: it had fluttered there to recharge its batteries, drinking power from the embedded grid. When he touched it, the two devices exchanged secure data via the myoelectric field of his own body, bypassing ShipNet’s open channel.
“I still don’t know where to begin,” he said.
“Let me show you something,” Bella said. She turned to the year-old image of Janus on the wall. Her hands moved across the keys on her desk. With a flourish of flickering hexels, the image changed abruptly. It was still Janus, but now the image was fuzzy, like a photo of a stone taken through smeared glass.
“This is a synthetic image,” Bella said, “a visible-light composite assembled using long-baseline optical interferometry, put together from data obtained by six different deep-space telescopes within the orbit of Mars. It’s the most recent long-range picture we have of Janus: it was taken less than a day ago.”
The picture showed a different angle from the fly-by snapshot, so the shape of the moon and the distribution of craters looked different, but more than that had changed. There were dark patches in the ice that had not been there before. A second glance showed that the patches were actually wounds: voids where huge scabs of ice, kilometres thick, had come free, or boiled off, or simply ceased to exist. In the dark zones, suggestions of mechanical structures twinkled at the limit of clarity: enormous dark machine parts, curved and coiled, nestling tight as intestines.
“Definitely the money shot,” Parry said.
“The camouflage is breaking away,” Bella said. “Janus — whatever it is — is starting to show its true form. We already have something to work with: the fact that we really are dealing with an alien artefact, and not some bizarre physical process we just didn’t understand.”
“That’s not much,“ Parry said.
“There’s more. I mentioned that Janus is leaving our system at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Well, now we have a much better handle on the trajectory.” Bella made the image shrink until it was an off-white pinpoint against a star map marked with star names, constellation boundaries and faint lines of right ascension and declination, the astronomical counterparts to latitude and longitude. “Ladies and gentleman: we have a star, and we have a name.”
“Which is?” Parry asked.
“Alpha Virginis, the brightest star in Virgo.” Bella highlighted the relevant star: it was the nearest one to the small image of Janus. “Now, I’ll admit it’s not exactly the kind of sun we’d have expected aliens to come from,” she said. “Not only is it hot, heavy and blue, but it’s also part of a binary system. Maybe they didn’t evolve there. But we can’t ignore the evidence. That’s where Janus is heading. That’s the place it now calls home.”
“So the Janus builders,” Svetlana said, “what do we call them? Virgins? Virginians? Alphans?”
“None of the above,” Bella replied. “We name them after the classical name of their destination star. Alpha Virginis is Spica.” She pronounced it carefully, “spiker”, lingering over the syllables. “The Janus builders are the Spicans, and they live two hundred and sixty light-years from Earth.” She beamed at her little gathering. “There. Don’t you feel as if you know them better already?”
“About this mission,” Parry said, “is it too late to change my mind?”
They all laughed. But not as much as Bella might have hoped.
* * *
CNN wanted an interview. Bella took a cam down into the aeroponics lab, attaching it to one of the plant racks with a dab of geckoflex. Aeroponics, with its humid air, mechanical breezes and the soothingly regular chuffing of the aerators, always put her at ease. It was the only place on Rockhopper where she could close her eyes and feel, fleetingly, as if she were back on Earth.
“It
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