Infinity Beach Read online

  Jack McDevitt

  Infinity Beach

  For the Brunswick Five:

  Ted Barton,

  John Goff,

  Jack Kraus,

  Ron Peiffer, and

  George Tindle

  They haven’t quite worked out the secret of life, but they know it has something to do with lunch.

  We have always stood along a beach opening onto an infinite sea. That sea beckons us, but for ages we were limited to looking across its expanse with our telescopes and our imaginations. In time, we learned to build outriggers and we got to a few of the barrier islands. Today we have finally in our hands a true four-master, a ship that will take us beyond whatever horizons may exist.

  —KHALID ALNIRI, The “Infinity Beach”

  Speech at Wesleyan

  We’ve known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything, our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We’ve seen this particular lightning strike coming and we’ve played with the idea of what it might mean for eleven hundred years. We’ve imagined that other intelligences exist, we’ve imagined them as fearsome or gentle, as impossibly strange or remarkably familiar, as godlike, as remote, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point.

  —SOLLY HOBBS to KIM BRANDYWINE,

  On the occasion of their visit to

  Alnitak

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  “Don’t do it.” Kane, covered in blood, stood framed in…

  1

  “Nova goes in three minutes.”

  2

  In effect, Kim and her charges, a combination of commentators,…

  3

  The Germane Society held its monthly luncheon on the first…

  4

  It was after eleven-thirty when they lifted off the Gateway’s…

  5

  “You really weren’t rattled?”

  6

  “We should do more of this,” Matt said. “Get ahead…

  7

  The following evening, Kim caught a shuttle to the Star…

  8

  In the morning Kim ate breakfast with Cole, thanked him…

  9

  The big push at the Institute was to lay out…

  10

  Kile’s widowed mother, Sara Tripley Baines, lived in Eagle Point…

  11

  The package arrived at midafternoon. They checked the contents, a…

  12

  Kim caught the red-eye back to Seabright and addressed the…

  13

  It was close at both ends.

  14

  “Of course I remember you.” Jorge Gould smiled pleasantly and…

  15

  “You should never have done that,” said Solly. He was…

  16

  “Do you know,” asked Solly, “how long it would take…

  17

  Solly’s analysts thought the Hunter logs were accurate to the…

  18

  Never go to bed angry.

  19

  The Hammersmith passed into hyperspace at 12:41 A.M., Saturday, March…

  20

  “If it were going to blow us up,” said Kim,…

  21

  In the morning, they searched the vessel again, all three…

  22

  Kim was barely aware of being retrieved by the Patrol.

  23

  The Valiant stood on its shelf, polished and brilliant. Its…

  24

  The ruined buildings cast long shadows in the moonlight. A…

  25

  The flyer was too slow.

  26

  She woke up in a pleasant sun-drenched room. Yellow curtains…

  27

  Kim was up early next day. She had a light…

  28

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” It was…

  29

  Kim reran the sequence in the cargo hold. She froze…

  30

  “And you thought Tripley’s grandmother put the body in the…

  31

  Kim slept soundly through the night and was up at…

  32

  Matt met her at the boarding tube. She was carrying…

  33

  Kim was sitting with Ali in the pilot’s room when…

  34

  By morning nothing had changed. “To tell you the truth,”…

  35

  Kim had little opportunity to celebrate her victory. Within an…

  Epilogue

  The stone was set in a corner of Cabry’s Beach,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Jack McDevitt

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dates, unless otherwise indicated, are given in the Greenway calendar, whose Year 1 coincides with the first landing on that world in 2411 of the common era. The Greenway and terrestrial year are almost identical in duration, which is one of the reasons that world was selected for terraforming.

  Prologue

  April 3, 573

  “Don’t do it.” Kane, covered in blood, stood framed in the doorway.

  “—no choice—” Tripley called as the flyer lifted off the pad. “Do what you can for her.”

  As he’d feared, the bastards did not show up on his screen. But he could see their eerie companion, the spectral thing that floated through the moonlight. It was tracking northwest, toward Mount Hope. He had to assume it was escorting them. Riding shotgun.

  The village fell away, and he was out over the lake. He switched to manual, climbed to fifteen hundred meters, and gave it everything it had, which wasn’t much. The flyer rattled and creaked but got up to two hundred fifty klicks. To his surprise he saw that he was gaining ground.

  Was that possible? Or had the thing slowed down, to lure him on?

  Three of Greenway’s moons, in their first quarter, floated in a cloudless sky, illuminating the distant peaks, the cool, dark lake, the dam, the fleeing cloud.

  What was it anyhow?

  It had drawn itself almost into a sphere, trailing long, hazy tendrils. Like a comet, he thought; unlike any other that had sailed past the world. Lethal and efficient and starkly graceful, framed against the snowcapped mountains.

  But the sensor return was getting louder. He was gaining.

  In these first quiet moments since everything had come undone, he listened to the wind and the burble of his electronics, and he wished desperately he could go back and change everything.

  Ahead, the comet-shape was moving ever slower. And beginning to dissolve.

  Tripley braked.

  He knew that the ship would be continuing straight on. He laughed, thinking of it in those terms. A ship that no one could see, that didn’t show up on the screens, that could lose itself out there without any fear of being found.

  And there lay the problem. He could not follow without the telltale cloud to lead him. And he would have to kill the cloud to survive himself. How in hell had things gotten so desperately out of hand?

  Kill the cloud.

  Was the damned thing even alive?

  They’d passed over the northwest shore. Dark forest lay below, the Gray Mountains rose ahead.

  It turned to confront him.

  He watched it spread across the night, opening for him, expanding into a kind of blossom, waiting to receive him. It had filaments, backlit by the moons, through which something, a nutrient, a life force, pulsed steadily.

  He hesitate
d briefly, suddenly fearful, and then accelerated again to full throttle. He would kill the bastard or die himself.

  Close the vents. Check windows and doors. He didn’t want any part of it getting into the cabin.

  The night was full of regrets. He’d made the wrong call at every turn, had gotten people killed, and God knew what he’d unleashed on the world. But maybe he could start making amends now.

  The wind roared across his stubby wings, and the creature floated in the moonlight, waiting. He could see the constellations in its veils.

  It was unspeakably lovely, a mixture of mist and starlight, moving easily with the wind. He aimed directly at the center of the thing. He’d plow through and come around and rip into it again and keep slicing it apart until it was scattered across the sky.

  And when that was done, he’d get back on the base course of the fleeing ship. There had to be a way to run it to ground. But one thing at a time.

  The comm buzzer alerted him that someone was trying to reach him.

  Kane.

  The apparition began to move, tried to draw aside. Tripley felt a surge of joy. It was afraid of him. No, you son of a bitch. He adjusted course to keep it in his mental crosshairs.

  The buzzer sounded again.

  He knew what Kane would say. She’s dead. And: Let it go. But it was too late now for common sense. Wasn’t that what Kane had been saying from the beginning: Use common sense? But it had been hard to sort out, to know what to do—

  Tripley braced himself, not knowing what to expect. The cloud was growing thinner as he approached, but that might have been an illusion, the way mist seems to dissipate when one plunges into it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not sure to whom he was speaking.

  And then he ripped into the cloud. Through it. Came out into clear starlight.

  He looked back and saw that he’d blown a hole through its center. Parts of it were drifting away.

  He went hard right, circling around for a second pass. He was confident now that it couldn’t hurt him. Its suppleness appeared to be gone. It was struggling.

  He raced through it again from a different angle, hurling its fragments into the night, exhilarated by the taste of vengeance.

  That was for Yoshi.

  And this—

  Everything failed. The soft murmur of the magnetics changed to a whine and died.

  The instrument panel lights blinked out. And suddenly the only sound was the whisper of the wind.

  The flyer fell through the night.

  He fought the controls, trying frantically to restart as the trees rushed up. Above him, silhouetted against Glory, the largest moon, the cloud was trying to re-form. And in those last moments, riven with fear and despair, a brilliant white light erupted on the slopes of Mount Hope. A second sun. He watched it expand, watched it engulf the world.

  And he felt a final rush of satisfaction. It had to be the ship. The thing’s masters, at least, were dead.

  And then it ceased to matter.

  1

  New Year’s Eve, 599

  It seems safe now to assume that the terrestrial origin of life was a unique event. Some will quibble that we have, after all, seen only a few thousand of the billions of worlds drifting through the gently curving corridors we once called bio-zones. But we have stood on too many warm beaches and looked across seas over which no gulls hover, that throw forth neither shells, nor strands of weed, nor algae. They are peaceful seas, bounded by rock and sand.

  The universe has come to resemble a magnificent but sterile wilderness, an ocean which boasts no friendly coast, no sails, no sign that any have passed this way before. And we cannot help but tremble in the gray light of these vast distances. Maybe that is why we are converting the great interstellar liners into museums, or selling them for parts. Why we have begun to retreat, why the Nine Worlds are now really six, why the frontier is collapsing, why we are going home to our island.

  We are coming back at last to Earth. To the forests of our innocence. To the shores of night. Where we need not listen to the seaborne wind.

  Farewell, Centaurus. Farewell to all we might have been.

  —ELIO KARDI, “The Shores of Night,” Voyagers, 571

  “Nova goes in three minutes.”

  Dr. Kimberly Brandywine looked out across the dozen or so faces in the briefing room. In back, lenses were pointed at her, sending the event out across the nets. Behind, her projections read HELLO TO THE UNIVERSE and KNOCK and IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

  Several flatscreens were positioned around the walls, showing technicians bent over terminals in the Trent. These were the teams that would ignite the nova, but the images were fourteen hours old, the time required for the hypercomm transmissions to arrive.

  Everyone present was attractive and youthful, except sometimes for their eyes. However vital and agile people were, their true age tended to reveal itself in their gaze. There was a hardness that came with advancing years, eyes that somehow lost their depth and their animation. Kim was in her midthirties, with exquisite features and hair the color of a raven’s wing. In an earlier era, they would have launched ships for her. In her own age, she was just part of the crowd.

  “If we haven’t found anybody after all this time,” the representative from Seabright Communications was saying, “it can only be because there’s nobody to find. Or, if there is, they’re so far away it doesn’t matter.”

  She delivered her standard reply, discounting the great silence, pointing out that even after eight centuries humans had still inspected only a few thousand star systems. “But you may be right,” she admitted. “Maybe we are alone. But the fact is that we really don’t know. So we’ll keep trying.”

  Kim had long since concluded that Seabright was right. They hadn’t found so much as an amoeba out there. Briefly, at the beginning of the Space Age, there’d been speculation that life might exist in Europa’s seas. Or in Jupiter’s clouds. There’d even been a piece of meteoric rock thought to contain evidence of Martian bacteria. It was as close to extraterrestrial life as we’d ever come.

  Hands were still waving.

  “One more question,” she said.

  She gave it to Canon Woodbridge, a science advisor for the Grand Council of the Republic. He was tall, dark, bearded, almost satanic in appearance, yet a congenial fiend, one who meant no harm. “Kim,” he said, “why do you think we’re so afraid of being alone? Why do we want so much to find our own reflections out there?” He glanced in the direction of the screens, where the technicians continued their almost-ceremonial activities.

  How on earth would she know? “I have no idea, Canon,” she said.

  “But you’re deeply involved in the Beacon Project. And your sister devoted her life to the same goal.”

  “Maybe it’s in the wiring.” Emily, her clone actually, had vanished when Kim was seven. She paused momentarily and tried to deliver a thoughtful response, something about the human need to communicate and to explore. “I suspect,” she said, “if there’s really nothing out there, if the universe is really empty, or at least this part of it is, then maybe a lot of us would feel there’s no point to the trip.” There was more to it than that, she knew. Some primal urge not to be alone. But when she tried to put it into words she floundered around, gave up, and glanced at the clock.

  One minute to midnight, New Year’s Eve, in the two hundred eleventh year of the Republic and the six hundredth year since Marquand’s landing. One minute to detonation.

  “How are we doing on time?” asked one of the journalists. “Are they on schedule?”

  “Yes,” Kim said. “As of ten A.M. this morning.” The hypercomm signal from the Trent required fourteen hours and some odd minutes to travel the 580 light-years from the scene of detonation. “I think we’re safe to assume that the nova is imminent.”

  She activated an overhead screen, which picked up an image of the target star. Alpha Maxim was a bright AO-class. Hydrogen lines prominent. Surface temperature 11,000° C. Lu
minosity sixty times that of Helios. Five planets. All barren. Like every other known world, save the few that had been terraformed.

  It would be the first of six novas. All would occur within a volume of space which measured approximately five hundred cubic light-years. And they would be triggered at sixty-day intervals. It would be a demonstration that could not help but draw the attention of anyone who might be watching. The ultimate message to the stars: We are here.

  But she believed, as almost everyone else did, that the great silence would continue to roll back.

  We live along the shores of night,

  At the edge of the eternal sea.

  The effort was called the Beacon Project. Its sponsor was Kim’s employer, the Seabright Institute. But even there, among those who had pushed the project, who had worked for years to bring it to fruition, there was a deep, pervading pessimism. Maybe it resulted from the knowledge that they’d all be dead before any possible answer could come back. Or maybe, as she wholeheartedly believed, it grew from a sense that this was a final gesture, more farewell than serious attempt at communication.

  Emily, who had given her life to the great quest, would have been ashamed of her. It just demonstrated, Kim thought, how little the DNA really counted.

  The Trent lay at a distance of five AUs from its target. The ship was an ancient cargo vessel refitted specifically for Beacon. Immediately after detonation, its crew and technicians would transfer to another vessel, which would transit into hyperspace, out of harm’s way. The Trent would be left to probe and measure the nova until the blast silenced it.