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The star exploded!

Three hundred generations of farmers tilled the Po River Valley before light from that explosion reached them. On July 4, 1054, the star that had previously been invisible to the naked eye was invisible no longer. In fact, it was difficult to miss, (although everyone in Europe seems to have managed the feat). In China, astronomers noted with alarm the sudden appearance of a “guest star” in the sky, as did the native people of the North American continent. The new star swelled until it rivaled Venus in brightness. In fact, it was so bright that it was seen in daylight for three long weeks. After that, the star slowly sank back into obscurity.

The star was discovered again soon after the invention of the telescope. In place of the dead star was now a misty cloud of material thrown out by the explosion. In the 18thCentury, Charles Messier made a list of things in the sky that appeared to be comets, but were not. The remains of the dead star were so prominent that Messier gave the supernova remnant the preeminent place on his list. He labeled it M-1.

Later astronomers gave the cloud a name. They called it the Crab Nebula.

#

The apparition on the screen resembled nothing so much as the puff of smoke from an exploding artillery shell - which, in a way, was precisely what it was. At the center was a furiously radiating star that appeared dull, almost black, against the whiteness surrounding it. In reality, it was anything but dull. The star, though dead, radiated furiously in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum and would burn out any unprotected human eye that observed it. The ship’s sensors were even more sensitive than human vision, and the hull telescope’s overload circuits automatically protected the pixels onto which the star’s image fell by reducing their sensitivity, making the image little more than a representation of the star’s true image.

Surrounding the star was a large expanse of electric-white gas and dust, a region that glowed with the pure light of a fluorescent lamp. Beyond this central glow, the cloud darkened and became translucent, showing the stars and the blackness of space beyond before transitioning to an opaque reddish-purple band at the periphery. The whole central region was striated with tendrils of glowing gas and darker dust that appeared as though they had been whipped together by some giant hand. The contrasting strands were tangled into a complex Gordian knot that had been frozen in time.

The cloud was all that remained of those outermost layers of the pre-nova star. Unable to dissipate the 400 million-fold increase in energy resulting from the furious fusion reaction in its outer layers, the star exploded. That explosion ripped away the star’s atmosphere and much of its mass, ejecting fully 70% of its substance out into space. The explosion had done more than merely blast the outer layers of the star skyward, however. The pressure on the core forced the electrons of the individual atoms out of their orbits and down into the nuclei with the protons. The collapse of the electrons was accompanied by the collapse of the star’s core. Before the explosion, the star had been a glowing ball of gas as large as the orbit of Mercury. After the explosion, it was a madly spinning sphere with a mass more than three times that of Sol, yet a diameter of only 20 kilometers.

Out of the fires of the supernova had been born a neutron star.

“Gawd!” someone muttered as the image of the dead star floated at the center of the screen. Even though it was ten light-years distant, the computer had the hull camera set to maximum field of view, and the gas cloud still overflowed the edges of the screen.

Tearing his gaze away from the apparition on the screen, Dan Landon pressed the control that would put him on the command circuit. “All stations, report!”

The reports quickly flowed in from all over the ship as departments announced their successful return to normal space. When it came time for the communicator to report, he said, “Strong interference across all of the radio bands, Captain. It is all 30-cycle hum, just as predicted. Looks like we’ll be transmitting via laser for the duration.”

Even with the atomic nuclei jammed together, the star retained both its original angular momentum and magnetic flux. The neutron star rotated on its axis more than 30 times each second, sweeping surrounding space with a magnetic field that was a billion times stronger than the one it had formerly possessed. The spinning magnetic field whipped the surrounding gas and dust into a frenzy and broadcast an intense beam of light and cosmic rays to the heavens like a lighthouse on some unknown shore.

“Understood, Kelly,” Landon replied. “Dr. Bendagar.”

“The background radiation is high, Captain; but well within the capability of our shielding. We have nothing to fear as long as we stay inside the hull. Work parties are another story. I wouldn’t want to be out in that stuff for any longer than necessary.”

Landon touched another control. “Sar-Say!”

“Yes, Captain?” came the pseudo-simian’s voice.

“Is that ‘Sky Flower?’”?

“Yes, Captain. It is just as I remember it, although much larger and more complex.”

“But it is the nebula you saw in the skies of the Zzumer world?”

“No doubt about it, Captain. It is the Sky Flower Nebula.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Dan Landon let out a silent sigh of relief. They were near one of the worlds of the Broan Sovereignty. That meant this whole expedition had not been a wild goose chase, the result of misidentification of the nebula.

“Very well. Astrogator, find us our target star!”

“I have it on the alternate screen, Captain.”

“Switch to main viewscreen.”

At the front of the bridge, the screen changed to show a yellow-white star silhouetted against the blackness of space. Hideout was where it was supposed to be, too. So far, so good.

“Take her in, Mr. Fairfax. Mr. Klein, I want continuous circumambient sweeps on sensors. Let me know if there is even a twitch that indicates the presence of a ship other than our own. Also, keep a full watch on the Broan communications bands.”

Landon waited for acknowledgement of his orders, and then grinned widely for the first time in a month.

“All right, people, let’s go find the rest of our fleet. Twist her tail, Chief Engineer!”

Laura Dresser’s words echoed instantly in his ears. “Consider it twisted, Captain.”

Thrust followed a moment later.

#

“Is it truly Sky Flower?” Lisa Arden asked Sar-Say after the captain signed off and the thrust-gravity had caused the two of them to settle into their acceleration couches.

“Yes, Leesa, it is really the nebula of the Zzumer sun. My memory for such things is quite good.”

Lisa nodded. The alien had subtly mispronounced her name for the first time in months, making the long

“e” too long. That was as good an indication as any of the excitement that Sar-Say felt. She could not blame him. She was excited herself.

“How does it feel to be nearly home?” she asked.

“It feels very good,” Sar-Say replied. “But there is still much work to be done. We must find your fleet before we can begin looking for the Zzumer world, no?”

“We must find our fleet, yes! Space is a big place, as you well know.”

Sar-Say “nodded.” As he often remarked to himself, living with humans was hugely educational, if not always pleasant. Frankly, the thought that stars were arrayed in the universe much as cities are arrayed across the surface of a planet was a new one for Sar-Say. He had no use for astronomy before coming to live among these strange people.

He had a use for it now.

Travel via stargate meant that you did not have to concern yourself with the space between the stars.

Rather, you moved from stargate to stargate. It was the topology of the gates themselves that was important, not the positions of stars around which the gates orbited. Lisa had related an apt analogy to explain the situation in human terms early in their language lessons. She had likened Sar-Say to a traveler on one of the terrestrial subway systems.

As she had explained, the average rider of the London Underground cared not what buildings he or she was passing beneath at any given moment, nor even the subway car’s location with respect to the Thames River, which the cars crossed without hindrance or notice. What was important to a rider of the Underground was that South Kensington came before Victoria Station, which in turn came before Westminster. Because of this independence from actual geography, the map that subway passengers used was a stylized representation of the Underground rather than a true map of London. For example, the scale of the map was larger in the central region of London where the stations were close together and smaller in the outlying districts where they were farther apart. The map had been designed to give riders maximum information about that which was important to them, namely the arrangement of the stations along the rail line; and suppressed irrelevant information about the lay of the land overhead. In other words, the map showed the topology of the system without too great a correlation to its geography.

That was precisely the situation in Civilization with regard to interstellar travel via stargate. When he traveled, Sar-Say had not been concerned with the “lay of the interstellar land,” only with the sequence of stargates that would get him where he was going. On his fateful final voyage, for instance, he had been en route from Vith to Persilin. The normal stargate sequence was Vith, Armador, Nala, Colsta, and Persilin.

Where each of those stars was located with respect to one another, Sar-Say had no idea. They might well be in a straight line, or on different sides of Civilization. With a stargate at one’s disposal, it really did not matter.

The human method of star travel was completely different. He remembered the shock he had felt when he had realized this awful truth. The human ships traversed the space between the stars, rather than jumping over that same space. As the interminable journey they had just completed had demonstrated, where the stars were located with respect to one another was the most important thing to a human starship captain.

The disadvantage of not being able instantaneously to jump from star to star was compensated for by the fact that human ships were not constrained in their choice of destinations. Astrogation involved pointing the nose of one’s ship at any star one chose, and then going there. This freedom of movement would not sit well with Those Who Ruled once they heard of it. Moreover, until they learned the location of the human home world, there was little they could do about it.

That made knowledge of where the human sun was located potentially valuable, and therefore, Sar-Say had quickly decided to see if he could determine its location for himself. As part of his education, the humans had provided him access to their planetary database system, and he had called up various educational files relating to astronomy.

Determining where the human sun was located had proved to be childishly simple. Not that he had actually succeeded in answering the question himself. His knowledge of astronomy was too rudimentary for that. However, he carried in his brain the data that would allow an astronomical specialist to determine Sol’s location within a few hundred heartbeats.

Like most self-centered species who believed themselves alone in the universe, the humans had developed a science of the heavens that was Earth-centric. They thus recorded the position of every object in sight, not with respect to some universal coordinate system, but rather, where they appeared in the night sky over Earth. The human sky maps were marked much as their maps of the human world were marked, namely in lines of longitude and latitude. They called their lines of longitude “right ascension” and their lines of latitude “declination.” Consequently, each astronomical coordinate was a vector pointing directly back toward Sol and Earth.

The positions of the local stars around Sol were of little use to Sar-Say. Being local, it was likely that the astronomy specialists at home would not know of these particular stars, or if they did, would not be able uniquely to identify them. However, certain features around the galaxy were sufficiently prominent that they appeared in the skies of both Earth and the worlds of Civilization. The Sky Flower Nebula was one such object and the great blue-white beacon stars such as S Doradas (the human name) were others. By memorizing the human-assigned coordinates of these most prominent features of the galaxy, Sar-Say could provide his people’s astronomers with dozens of vectors pointed directly back to the human home world.

With the identification of as few as six prominent landmarks and their corresponding right ascension and declination values, the humans’ secret would be a secret no longer.

Mark Rykand floated in front of the viewport of one of the Ruptured Whale’s landing craft and gazed at the blue-white world in the distance and the black-brown moon below. They had dubbed the planet

“Brinks” and the moon “Sutton,” in keeping with Hideout’s impromptu system of nomenclature. The airless moon, which was three times the size of Earth’s Luna, had been the terrestrial expedition’s headquarters for the past three months.

They had been busy months, if frustrating. They had been months of preparation, necessary work to support their primary goal of finding a world of the Broan Sovereignty, but work that did not obviously advance their cause. As Lisa liked to say, “they had been making progress sideways.” Now that their preparations were nearly complete, things would go more quickly - he hoped. It was a hope shared by every one of the expedition’s three thousand members. Aboard the starships and in the newly carved maze of tunnels beneath Sutton’s rocky surface, the feeling of anticipation was almost palpable in the metallic-tasting air.

Their frustrations had begun shortly after the Ruptured Whale had flashed out of superlight and began its approach to the star they called Hideout. Their mission orders read, “… Upon reaching the staging area, each ship will make contact with the others of the force, while being on the alert for the presence of aliens in the system.” That there were no aliens in the system had become more obvious hour by hour, as they swept toward the yellow-white giant sun that was their goal. Had the Hideout system once supported native life, that life had come to an untimely end nine thousand years earlier when the nearby nova lit up the sky and sent a lethal dose of radiation sleeting through the system. If the nova had appeared three times as bright as Venus in Earth’s sky at a range of 7000 light-years, Mark had difficulty imagining the awesome sight that must have greeted Hideout’s denizens a mere ten light-years from the cataclysm.