Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [118]
“You make it sound easy,” Solly said. “Too bad you weren’t with them.”
She drew up her knees and put her arms around them. Emily was with them.
Solly was showing signs of frustration. “How about some breakfast?” he suggested.
“No, thanks. I want to stay here.”
“You won’t miss anything. I don’t mind getting it.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not hungry. Really.”
He shook his head. “I’m going to exercise my prerogative as captain and insist. This might go on for another twenty-four hours or so, and I don’t need you getting sick out here.”
She looked at the status panel. At the glowing lamps. “All right,” she said.
He brought out two plates of ham, biscuits, and pineapple slices. Kim ate quietly, subdued, annoyed at the apparent inability of the Hunter to create an effective strategy. Solly suggested the celestials might have been scared off by the open door. Or that they might have a cultural bias prohibiting them from befriending a different species. Or—
“How could that happen?” she asked. “These critters have spaceflight. Since they’re in the vicinity of Alnitak, they must have FTL. Surely they wouldn’t be afflicted with preconceptions about another sentient species.”
“Maybe they’d have a religious problem about us,” he said. “Maybe we’re not supposed to exist, and we’ve trashed a theological system.”
“I don’t think you’d find that kind of thinking among space-travelers.”
“Really? We had Christians and Muslims arguing all the way out to Carribee. Even the Universalists are inclined to look down on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the official theology.”
“Which is that there is no official theology.”
“Doesn’t matter. The same tendency is there. I don’t know. Maybe the celestials don’t come in a lot of packages the way humans do. If there’s basically only one type of critter, it would never have been required to deal with anything different.”
Solly slowly ate through his breakfast, let his head drift back, and fell asleep. After an hour or so he woke up, went to his room, showered, and changed. When he came back he looked neater but still fatigued. “I can’t believe they’re just sitting there doing nothing,” he said.
“Maybe they’ve launched the lander,” suggested Kim. “It’s possible they’re trying a meeting.”
“No. There’d be radio traffic. The Hunter would need to tell them—show them—what they wanted to do.”
During the course of the morning the screens remained quiet. Solly and Kim went over the same ground again and again. By midafternoon Kim thought the quality of the signal had probably disintegrated to a degree they were simply not acquiring it anymore.
“It’s possible,” said Solly. “But not likely.”
They went down to the rec room and worked out. Neither said much and when they were finished, had showered and changed, Solly asked whether she thought it was over.
“Probably,” she said.
“So what do we do now?”
“We listen some more. If we don’t hear anything, we move to another intercept site and listen to it all again. That’ll allow us to take a second bearing and pin down their location.”
“How long do we stay here?”
The Hunter had been in the Alnitak area almost two days. “Let’s stay put through midnight tomorrow. If we haven’t heard anything by then, we’ll clear out.”
That evening he came to her with a tenderness and a passion that overwhelmed her. “I’m glad you got what you wanted,” he told her after the first flush of lovemaking had passed. “We don’t have all the details yet, but at least we know it happened.”
“Kiss me, you fool,” she sighed.
The night filled with laughter and a few tears, and she didn’t know why, couldn’t explain the tears either to herself or to him, but just let them flow.
“I’m in bed with an immortal,” he said.
And she knew it was so. Eventually they’d sort everything out, get the answers, learn what had happened to Emily and find out how Yoshi ended up in a river and what had blown the face off Mount Hope. It was just a matter of time, and kids a thousand years from now would be learning how to pronounce her name.
She had never, ever, felt more alive than she