Intellivore - Diane Duane [6]
“The so-called planetary Marie Celeste phenomenon,” Picard said. It was a proposition that had haunted his dreams, some nights. How does a whole civilization just disappear like that? One ship, five ships or ten, in the dangerous vastness of space, yes. But whole worlds … ?
Ileen nodded, looking a touch cranky, as if the vanished planets were a personal affront. “That’s right. Well, all we’ve had to go on, until we started these surveys five years ago, were rumors about a lot of these species. Now, slowly, we’re beginning to amass some data, as we’ve started to work on the archaeological side of our studies.” She looked sideways at Picard, grinning, as he suddenly straightened in his seat. “Yes, I thought that would get your attention. Some of these ‘missing’ or vacated worlds turn out, after all, to have suffered the planetary equivalent of ‘natural deaths.’ You remember all those rumors about the Disarrui?”
“A little ‘pocket empire,’ ” Picard said, nodding; he had done some research into them, a couple of years back. “They were based around Eighteen Sixty-five Serpens, I think. Star-capable, and very active traders, a couple of thousand years ago—”
“That’s right,” Ileen said. “And then all of a sudden, poof! They were gone, no one could figure out where. Well, the poof was real enough, as it turns out, but rumors of something suspicious about their demise turn out to have been exaggerated. We managed to track down the original Disarrui home system—it was one of those that suffered from abnormal drift, and that drift, unfortunately, took them into the path of a large gravitationally affiliated association of post-planetary-formation debris.”
“A meteor,” Picard said immediately, horror and interest intermingled. “A big one.”
“About the size of Earth’s moon,” Ileen said, “if the fracture signatures in the planet’s remains are to be trusted, and I think they are—there was almost no time for tidal effects. Well, the planet was completely destroyed. The ancillary planets in nearby systems weren’t harmed; but unfortunately the Disarrui, as far as we can tell from records left in those systems, were one of those species who have a ‘geobond’ to the homeworld, an empathic or maybe telepathic connection to the physical structure of the planet itself. When their homeworld was destroyed, the Disarrui couldn’t survive the blow; they all died as well—just withered away over the course of a century or two. Their remaining worlds have been pretty conclusively plundered, over time, but there were enough clues to make clear what happened.”
Picard shook his head sadly. “Grave robbers,” he murmured, frowning.
“There’s a lot of that up here,” Ileen said. “But still, not as much as you might think. The area has a reputation, it seems, for being a little strange. Those ‘vanished worlds’—” She made a vague, “disappearing” gesture with her fingers. “No one knew quite what to make of them, even a couple hundred years ago. No one who was routinely in this part of space had drift analysis technology that was advanced enough to predict correctly where things had gone. So legends started springing up. Old lost races, hiding their whole star systems from the curious or the rapacious. Incredibly rich species, incredibly wise ones. Sometimes, incredibly dangerous ones … species whose worlds it was literally death to find. There was never any evidence for most of these … but the legends linger.”
“I suppose,” Clif said, leaning back in his chair and stretching, “you have to explain mysterious losses somehow. Who really enjoys acknowledging accident, or stupidity, for what they are?”
“Still,” Picard said, “among a great number of species—our own included—there’s a delight in mystery, in the unexplained that lurks out past the edges of the maps.”
“True enough,” Ileen said.
Clif looked thoughtful as he sipped his own wine. “Ah, but mystery is so often accompanied by danger. Without any major force present to provide