Chapter 1 1 I rode into the dark, expecting to see my love in the moonlight; But there was no moon, and not even a star. Nevertheless, she was there. I had but to find her. --Walford Candles, "Ride by Night," 1196 It started on an early spring afternoon while I was playing volleyball. We were on an outdoor court at the Tara Center when somebody began shooting off fireworks. Sirens sounded and I heard a commotion inside the center. We stopped for a couple of minutes and looked at each other, and when nothing more happened, we resumed playing. I don''t recall any more of the volleyball details, whether my side was winning or losing.
I don''t even remember whether it was a league game or just a couple of teams that we''d put together. All that disappeared in the turmoil that erupted that evening. We showered, and as soon as I got access to my link, I checked it to find out what was going on. We were informed that the research vehicle Columbia had discovered intelligent life. The only details were that they''d found a small town and that they''d seen the inhabitants, who were green-skinned. The town was a long way out. It was an exciting time. Real aliens.
We were informed that plans already existed for a follow-up mission. I was excited not only because of the discovery, but for another reason: Robbi Jo Renfroe had been piloting the mission. I hadn''t known anything about it except that she''d been gone a long time. There wasn''t much detail available about the flight. They''d named the place Korella IV but released minimal other information. There was no data regarding the world''s location. I tried doing a search for it, but I didn''t know at the time that the name had been selected by McCann. Robbi Jo and I had been out of contact for a few years, but I hadn''t been surprised when I''d seen her name listed as the mission''s pilot.
I remembered standing with her under a starlit sky when we were both about twelve years old. Robbi Jo asked me if I thought it ever ended, the sky. If it did, what was at the edge? Was there a wall of some sort? Her mom had told her no, that the universe wasn''t like that, that space was skewered. That was the term she''d used. So it didn''t come to a stop, it just became circular in a way that seemed impossible to understand. But if you went in one direction far enough, eventually you came in from the other side. And she recalled her refusal to believe it when her mom said it was pretty much all empty out there. Nobody home.
Robbi Jo made it her lifetime goal to find someone. Anyone. Which was more or less how she eventually got caught up with the Columbia . And she''d made it happen! Good for her. Actually, we''d never been especially close, but we''d met as Girl Troopers during our grade-school years. We both played on our high school''s basketball team, and for a time we''d hung out together. She''d always had a fascination with stars and galaxies. She''d told me once that she planned to become an astronomer.
If anyone I''d known was going to be on that flight, she would be the one. The teachers loved her. She won the highly acclaimed Orion Award two years after high school for her article "Why Is It So Empty?" which appeared in the Antiquarian . It was a prize I''d have killed for, but I simply didn''t have the writing skills. Or maybe I just didn''t know how to dig into the cultural issues in a way that would hold a reader''s interest. I knew she wouldn''t be home for a while, but I couldn''t resist sending her a congratulatory note. "Wish I''d been with you," I wrote. And I added a reference to our basketball days in case she''d forgotten who I was.
The street was filled with people laughing and embracing and staring at their links. GREETINGS, ALIENS said the headline in the Andiquar Sentinel . There wasn''t much detail on what they looked like, other than their green skin, but the hunt that had been going on for thousands of years, producing nothing other than ruins and the Mutes, was finally at an end. United Media had an anchor and two guests discussing the story and wondering whether we''d wind up in a war again. Several of us crossed Weyland Street to the Akron Bar, where we could join the celebration while the reports came in. The pictures of the town, which had arrived as part of a hypercomm transmission, revealed a village that might have been located outside Casper County. Modest houses, dirt roads, a long building that looked like a school. Despite the town''s simplicity, there was a harmony and polish that underscored its unity.
Everything seemed to be connected. It was somehow a single configuration rather than a group of individual houses and small buildings. The mission also reported they''d found nothing else on the planet. Of course the assumption was that they''d probably sent the report immediately after sighting the village. But as time passed, we learned that they''d searched the planet and found no additional dwellings. How could that happen? It became the question of the hour. The operation had been sponsored by the Visitation Project. The Columbia reported that in accordance with the Spaulding Mandate, they''d not made contact, would keep a respectful distance, and that there was no indication that their presence had been detected.
They suggested a backup unit be dispatched to establish communications. It was certainly not the kind of first contact we''d been hoping for, a lonely desolate village. But it was better than nothing. The Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research (DPSAR) maintained an office in Andiquar. One of their primary responsibilities was to maintain a training program designed to create specialists who could establish friendly communications should we discover aliens somewhere, or if they showed up over the Melony River. That was the Xenocon program. It was a tricky business, since nobody had had any experience with communicating with aliens. I don''t think anyone had ever taken the program very seriously, for that matter, but the lack of preparation led us into the war with the Mutes.
If we came into contact with another alien species, we certainly didn''t want to do a repeat. It was inevitable, I guess, that the day would come. So when it finally did, we were prepared to do some bridge-building. Connect our AIs with theirs, if they had any. Speak softly. Smile. Don''t do anything that could be interpreted as threatening. And don''t tell anyone where the Confederacy worlds are located until we have a good handle on their intentions.
And hope we had it right. There was also a branch of DPSAR people who maintained that we should just stay away and keep our hands off. A few days after the initial Columbia transmission had arrived, we got word that the mission had started home. There was no indication that anything had changed. Since it took two weeks for a hypercomm signal to arrive from Korella, the Columbia by then was halfway back. DPSAR called in its Xenocon volunteers. I was among them. Don''t ask how I got involved.
Even now I''m not sure. They had parties and the conferences were interesting, so I signed on. The director was Henry Cassell, who''d spent a lot of time with the Mutes. He started that first day by telling us DPSAR was looking for volunteers to travel to Korella IV and establish communications with the aliens. "They have electricity," he said. "The houses look good. But beyond that, they don''t seem to have much technology. And one aspect that is especially curious is that they seem to be alone on the planet.
" Henry was a middle-aged guy with a kindly appearance and amicable green eyes, though they had an intense appearance that night. He looked around at us and asked who was willing to go. He was going. They needed five other people, plus a pilot. They had no way of knowing how long they would stay in the area, but Henry doubted it would be more than a few days. "But don''t sign on if you can''t manage a flight of at least three months." There were only a dozen of us physically in the building. But there were probably twenty more electronically present.
Most were positioned on other Confederate worlds, and even though they were locked in through hypercomm, there was a delay of up to several minutes while messages went back and forth. Meanwhile three of those present raised their hands. Jim Pollard, who''d always maintained he would love to be part of a contact mission, hesitated and then put his hand in the air. I was still thinking about it when the electronic results started to show up. There weren''t as many as I would have expected. Aliens living in log cabins and stone houses just didn''t cut it. Since everyone knew this was coming, I''d talked it over with Alex before signing on. He gave me an okay, with the comment that it didn''t sound very exciting.
A woman on one of the electronic connections asked why we were taking only seven. "The Harbinger ," s he said, "can carry twice that many." Henry delivered a tolerant smile. "Not for this distance," he said. "Aside from that, we should all be aware there''s a degree of risk about this type of mission. We don''t need twice as many people as we can carry. And, for the record, we expect to take one of the people from the Columbia ." The major question that dominated the meeting was whether we were actually going to establish contact.
"We haven''t decided yet," he said. "That''s a difficult question. We''ll go and take a look. And I suspect we''ll decide depending on what we learn about them. And don''t ask me how we''re going to.