GOODBYES

2416 CE

On Freeze Day at Quito, they lined up in the equatorial heat under the sleep-entry building’s white canvas awning, sweating, nervous, naked except for veil-like shifts that hid very little. Behind Allan, Miriam giggled at his buttocks. “They bounce when you shift like that,” she told him. She giggled again, thinking, I hope I can settle down before we go in. Her empty stomach, calmed with tranquilizing fluids, felt like a stone.

Allan turned to her, his face reddened. “Shut up,” he said to her, smiling a little. His hands shook. He turned to a compact but muscular man, with Oriental features, standing behind them. “Say, you look familiar.”

The man nodded, and smiled a little. “I am Xiang Juo, one of Deng Yi‘s assistants in the lander training program. We are going on the same ship. You are?”

“Allan Windham. This is my wife Miriam Parker. Perhaps you can answer a question for me,” Allan said, glancing back at Miriam as she listened intently. “We never found out what the dwarf star’s gravitational effects would be on the Earth. Is Hau Ren keeping that information confidential?”

“No,” said Juo. “The answer is simple, but not everybody wants to hear it. Nobody knows what the effects will be.” His smile faded slightly.

“But it’s just an N-body problem, with the Sun, the dwarf, and the planets and major moons. That’s hard to solve, but the resources we have can solve it.”

“Unfortunately, that is not true. There is one critical piece of information discovered in the survey of Thorin 74 which makes the problem too hard to solve. Thorin 74 has a planetary system of its own, and we have already plotted two lunar near-collisions in the encounter with the solar system. One is between a Titan-sized satellite of Thorin, and Oberon, the moon of Uranus. The nearness of the encounter creates a wide band of uncertainty in several encounter windows later on.”

Miriam broke in, feeling suddenly cold in the equatorial sun. “Are you saying Earth is in danger?”

Juo shook his head. “No. I can’t say that, and I can’t say that Earth is safe from an encounter. Neither can anyone else, at least not until after the key initial encounters are completed. But I will say this: staying on Earth is still probably safer than what we’re doing.” He and Allan moved on into a discussion about N-body simulations with droplet fragmentation, and Miriam‘s attention wandered.

She looked out from under the awning, off into the cirrus-clawed sky. No matter what she tried, life seemed harder and harder, weighing on her as if her bones were made of stone. A doctor should be saving lives. What was she doing here? But what difference would saving a life make if it simply ended for some other reason?

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The line of people under the awning moved obediently forward. Miriam found Allan‘s hand, and held it tight. Her questions had the same answers as Allan‘s question: no way to know until later.

Going into the Sleep was almost too easy. Miriam squeezed Allan‘s hand one last time, walked between two attendants, laid down on a white table, and took the mask over her face. Both attendants gave her broad, bored smiles.

A dream began; the big garish lights overhead faded into a strange sun that spread across her vision into a coruscating arc. Allan drew her up with a bony hand; she floated up above the rainbow sun into the house rafters and training-bay struts, and through them, and into an endless night of stars.