Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [107]
“I hear what you’re saying,” said Solly. “But we’ve done that. We’ve set foot in a lot of places over the last few centuries. What’s that have to do with celestials?”
“We’ve accepted the notion we’re alone.”
“We probably are.” Solly reached for the decanter and refilled their glasses. “Maybe there’s somebody out there somewhere, but they’re probably so far away it’ll never make a difference. Yes: for practical purposes, I think we can proceed as if we’re alone.”
“The problem with that,” she said, “is that we’ve become complacent and self-satisfied. Bored. We’re shutting down everything that made us worthwhile as a species.”
“Kim, I think you’re overstating things.”
“Maybe. But I think we need something to light a fire under us. The universe has become boring. We go to ten thousand star systems and they’re always the same. Always quiet. Always sterile.”
“Is that why Emily was on the Hunter? Is that the way she felt?”
“Yes,” said Kim. “She tried to explain herself to me when we used to go down to the beach.”
“You remember that?”
“She asked me if I knew why ships always traveled along the coast? Why they never put out to sea?”
“Oh,” said Solly. It was because there was nothing there. Just water for thousands of kilometers, until you’d rounded the planet and arrived at the western side of Equatoria. Back where you started.
“That’s where we are, Solly. On the beach, looking out at an ocean that doesn’t go anywhere. As far as we know.” Her eyes slid shut. “But if there’s really nowhere to go, I don’t think we have much of a future.”
After dinner they watched On the Run, an irreverent chase comedy in which several unlikely characters discover they’re clones of some of history’s arch criminals and find themselves the targets of a desperate manhunt. An interactive version was available, but they were both tired and satisfied just to sit and watch.
She fell asleep toward the end and woke after midnight, alone in the room. The projector had shut itself off, Solly had apparently gone to bed, and she sat for a time staring at the Milky Way.
For meals, they eventually took over the mission control center. It was small and consequently more intimate than the dining area. They spread a tablecloth over one of the consoles and discovered it worked very nicely.
Solly varied the views in the windows. Sometimes she looked out at star fields or at generated worlds, sometimes at waterfalls or a mountainscape or even downtown Seabright.
“What’s it really like outside?” she asked.
“Utterly black,” he said. “No stars, of course. Ship’s lights seem to lose some of their intensity.”
“Anybody ever actually been outside during hyperflight?”
“No,” Solly said. “Not that I know of.”
There was no sense of movement in this environment, which seemed more like a condition than a place. Seven weeks to Alnitak. It would be a long time to spend cooped up with a single person. Even Solly.
Vessels traveling in hyperspace were completely cut off from the outside world. They could receive no sensor information, no communications, no data of any kind. Nor could they transmit. Solly could have brought them out to satisfy their curiosity as to whether the Taratuba mission had got off okay. He thought they’d have used the Mac. And they were curious whether the theft of the Hammersmith had been made public, whether the Institute was trying to communicate with them. But it would have taken time, they’d have had to adjust the clocks, and Kim would have had to correct the program to get the calculations right for the intercept. So they let it pass.
One of the more curious aspects of hyperspace was that time seemed to run at an indifferent rate. Timekeeping devices on a transdimensional flight always had to be reset later. Sometimes forward, sometimes back. No one knew why this was so, but fortunately the differential was never more than a bare fraction of a percent, so that it did not unduly interfere with navigation. This was essential because TDI flights could navigate only by dead reckoning.
They fell quickly into a routine. They ate breakfast