Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) Read Free Page B

stopped. Taylor waited. And waited. Sometimes it seemed to be years, and there was no sanity but to wait for that next point, that next, authorized contact.
    But McDonough’s voice came back, after a long, long time, saying the captain wanted him to sit as pilot on the bridge. Goldberg would back him up. Greene, McDonough reminded him, was sick. Inoki was dead. Three years ago. Earth time.
    Datum. He had to factor in Goldberg as backup. His mind wanted to race. He held it down. There would be numbers. At long last there would be data at speed, mission resumed.
    He sat down. He felt the chair around him. Somebody said—it was an authorized voice, Tanaka, he thought—that he didn’t need the drug. That his brain manufactured it on its own now.
    Interesting datum. It accounted for things. Goldberg talked, then, saying how they were clear to hell and gone from Earth and Sol, that they still didn’t know how they’d gotten there, but they’d gone through something they hoped wasn’t attached permanently to this star.
    Watch it, Goldberg said. Are you hearing me?
    “Yes,” Taylor said, with slow patience. But numbers had begun to proliferate.
    He saw the destination mass. He had it. He couldn’t lose it this time.
    Goldberg was with him. And the universe was talkingto him again, at a rate he could understand. He skipped into the mass well and out again with a blithe disregard of gravity. He had a G5 in sight. Goldberg stopped talking to him, or had just gotten too slow to hear. He had the star and he reached for it, calm and sure now that those numbers were true.
    He brought his ship in.
    He shut down, system by system, in the light of a yellow sun.
    Then he knew he could sleep.

 

I
     
    T he foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream-bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the
o’o’o’click
of a small creature somewhere in the brush.
    There were more unfixed stars now, tiny specks of light in irregular motion about the first. Sometimes the very sharp-eyed could count them, two and three motes at a time, shining before dawn or before the dusk, in proximity to the foreign star.
    Their numbers changed. They combined and uncombined. Should one count the foreign star in their number or reckon only the attendant stars, and from what date? How could one reckon whether such activities were auspicious or not?
    Neither had the astronomers been able to say, when, a hundred and twenty-two years ago, the foreign star had first begun to grow in the heavens, a star so faint at first that only the strongest eyes could see it, so the story was—a star that rose and set with the moon, in its ancient dance with the sun.
    Then the astronomers had been embarrassed, because with their lenses and their orreries they still could not define that apparition as a moon or a star, since in appearanceand behavior it was both, and they could not swear to its influence. Some thought it good, some thought it bad and, as many events as proponents could bring up on one side to prove it good, opponents could prove as many of bad issue. Only nand’ Jadishesi had been unequivocal, insisting, cleverly, that it portended change.
    But so, also and finally, most astronomers swore, while the star grew in magnitude year by year, and gathered companions to itself: continual instability.
    Now dared one call it fortunate?
    The tracks yonder, the marks of the machines, were, beyond dispute, real, and bore out the story of repeated excursions from the landing-site—even at dusk, even to the eyes of a city-dweller. The Tachi, who herded in these hills and knew them as well as a city-dweller knew his own street, said that the machines had fallen from the