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Jack McDevitt

odyssey

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted to Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, to David DeGraff of Alfred University, and to Athena Andreadis, author of To Seek Out New Life (Three Rivers Press, 1998), for technical assistance. To Howard Bloom, for his excellent The Lucifer Principle (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). To Ginjer Buchanan, for editorial support. To Ralph Vicinanza, for his continuing encouragement. Special appreciation to Walter Cuirle for the Origins Project. Thanks to Sara and Bob Schwager. And, as always, to my wife and in-house editor, Maureen.

Dedication

For Robert Dyke The ultimate time traveler

prologue

ORDINARILY, JERRY CAVANAUGH would have been asleep in his cabin while the AI took the ship closer to the Sungrazer, the gas giant at Beta Comae Berenices. A world on fire, as the public relations people referred to it. And there was no denying it was a spectacular sight. This flight marked his eighty-eighth visit, and he never tired of looking at it.

The Sungrazer was a Jovian, four times more massive than Jupiter, with a tight orbit that took it literally through the solar atmosphere, where it burned and flared like a meteor. He marveled that the thing didn’t explode, didn’t turn to a cinder, but every time he came back it was still there, still plowing through the solar hell, still intact. The ultimate survivor.

It orbited its sun in three days, seven hours. When you got the angle of approach right, got black sky behind it, it became even more spectacular. Of course, the view on the ship’s screens didn’t reflect the view from the ship.

In order to get the kind of perspective management wanted, that gave Orion Tours its reputation, the Ranger would have had to approach much closer to the sun than was safe. Instead, when the dramatic hour arrived, he would put the Sungrazer chip into the reader and people would look through the viewports and see images taken from the satellite. It was breathtaking stuff, and if it was a trifle deceptive, who really cared? Orion did not keep the method secret. Occasionally someone asked, and Jerry always told them, yes, the view they were getting was not really what it looked like from the bridge or through the ship’s scopes. Too dangerous. This is what you would see if we could get in sufficiently close. But of course you wouldn’t want that.

Of course not, they always replied.

That would not happen, of course, until tomorrow morning, when they made their closest approach. The tour was timed so that the visual changeover happened during the night, when the passengers were — usually — asleep in their cabins. At around seven or so, when they began getting up, the first thing they saw would be the Sungrazer, and it was probably the most dramatic moment of the entire flight.

He had thirty-six passengers, a full load, including three sets of honeymooners, seven kids fourteen or under, one clergyman who had saved for a lifetime to make the trip, one contest winner, and two physicians. The contest winner was a young woman from Istanbul who had never before been outside her native country. He wasn’t clear on the precise nature of the contest, and his language skills did not allow explication. But she sat wide-eyed near the main display all during the approach.