13 Lattice
Vienna International Centre · Friday, 1 March – Monday, 4 March 2030.
The first frame came up on the big screen a little before midnight on Friday. It was fourteen pixels by twelve, gray on black, lit from the left, with a caption in Chinese and English underneath.
Dana sat in the second row behind the United States placard, with a headset on and the English channel turned low. Across the horseshoe Lin was in the second row behind China, writing. Kessler sat behind the ESA placard at the far end, his notebook shut in front of him. The chair, the quiet Uruguayan from the Secretary-General’s office, had the frame up on her own monitor and was reading the caption with her glasses pushed up into her hair. On the US desk a conference phone sat open to Pasadena, where Delgado was listening from JPL with Lookout’s team around him.
It looked like an asteroid. Every approach she had ever seen began with this, a lump that could have been anything, and for a moment she let herself want it to stay that way.
“Dr. Lin’s idea, I gather.”
Hale had come up behind her chair with a cup of coffee from the delegates’ lounge. He had not spoken to her in November.
“The feed?”
“Live, to everyone. Beijing wanted it released by the day.” He looked at the screen. “Generous of her.”
He went back to his seat.
The probe on the screen was the only thing in the solar system that could check the line she had given Lin, and Lin had made sure every delegation in the room would be watching when it did.
The frames came down at six minutes each, top to bottom, because the downlink would carry nothing faster. Every one was eight minutes old when it arrived. The room learned to stop talking while a frame was filling.
By Saturday morning the range had halved twice, and the lump had come apart into planes. A long block, flat along one side, squared off at one end. The other end tapered to a blunt, pitted horn.
At the Russian table the delegate said something to his aide, a single word, short and not meant for anyone, and his microphone was still live. In Dana’s headset the English booth gave it to her a beat later, in the interpreter’s careful voice.
“Anvil.”
A few people laughed, not much. Within the hour the Indian delegate was using it in a question to the chair, and the French interpreter had stopped translating it and was saying it in English. By lunch the chair said it too, and then corrected herself, and then didn’t.
The horn led. Dana had the inbound path reconstructed to a fraction of a degree, and when she laid it over the frame the taper sat on it. That face should have shown a few big craters and many small ones, the size spread every rocky body had. It didn’t. It was frosted: a fine, even pitting with no large craters at all, as if every hit had come in at the same speed from the same direction for a very long time.
The Japanese delegation’s scientist asked for the floor and said it plainly. Erosion by dust, at high speed, over a very long path. Faster, and for longer, than anything between the planets. He didn’t say interstellar. The chair thanked him and asked whether any delegation wished to comment. None did.
Saturday afternoon the terminator swung far enough to show a dark, smooth hollow near the edge of the long face, about 400 m across. No rim, no thrown-out debris, a floor too flat and an edge too clean for anything that had hit it from outside. Three frames at three viewing angles gave her its shadow, and the shadow gave her the depth: about 50 m.
“That’s where it’s been coming from,” the colonel beside the legal pad said quietly. “The mass.”
Dana worked the volume on her pad while the next frame filled. Iron, that size, was a few tens of millions of tonnes. Against China’s own mass-loss figure, that was a few days’ worth. The object had been losing mass for more than a year. The hollow was real, and it was nowhere near enough.
She looked across the horseshoe. Lin was looking at the same frame, and her pencil had stopped.
On Sunday morning the Chinese head of delegation read a notice into the record. Tianxun would complete its survey of the sunward hemisphere today. At about five thousand kilometers it would transfer to autonomous terminal navigation, since the light delay did not permit control from the ground at close range. On Monday it would circle the object at between eight hundred and fifteen hundred kilometers and image the far hemisphere. The data would continue to be shared as received.
Lin’s chair was empty. It stayed empty for most of an hour. Twice Dana saw her through the glass panel of a side door, standing in a small room with a phone to her ear, one hand flat on the table.
When she came back she sat down behind her head of delegation, squared her pencil to her notebook, and didn’t write anything. The notice stood.
At the coffee break she passed behind the American chairs on her way to the lounge. She didn’t stop or look down.
“It is a mistake,” she said, in English, to no one, and went on through the door.
When the session resumed, Dana pressed the request-to-speak button on her desk. The little ring of light came on red.
On the chair’s monitor, which she could see from where she sat, the speakers’ list added a line. United States.
She knew exactly what she would say. Two people in this room had ever read it. One was across the horseshoe. The other was in the front row of her own delegation, with a legal pad.
To say it here, she would have to say it as the United States. She would have to say where it came from. And every delegation in the room would watch the probe go around the far side, and see what she had told them it would find, and then ask how China had known to send it.
The man with the legal pad looked down at the light on his own console, the one that showed his delegation had asked for the floor. Then he looked back over his shoulder at her.
She pressed the button again. The red ring went out. On the chair’s monitor the line was gone before the chair reached it.
At ten past eleven Vienna time a field on the shared status board changed from GROUND to AUTO.
Delgado had been on the line from Pasadena all weekend, with the volume low and Lookout seven weeks out and three months from L5, saying almost nothing.
“I’d have done the same,” he said, through the little speaker. “At that range you can’t fly it on a sixteen-minute round trip.”
Dana leaned forward to the phone. “Would you? Fly it like that?”
The line hissed. She thought he hadn’t heard her.
“Not now,” he said.
By Sunday night nobody went back to the hotel. The delegates’ lounge sent up sandwiches and then stopped sending anything. Kessler had his notebook open by then, and drew in it, and showed no one. The British end of the table was empty except for Hale, reading.
Tianxun swung off its approach plane and around the horn, into the shadow. The frames came down darker. The room was almost silent while each one filled.
The one that started a few minutes before six on Monday morning, with the windows over the Danube still black, read for its first few hundred rows as texture. Fine parallel grain across the far face. Then the grain was too even, and it ran the wrong way to be anything on the surface. It came off the surface and out into the dark.
Columns. Hundreds of them across the frame, straight and parallel and evenly spaced, each one a string of bright points a pixel or two across, all the same size, all the same distance apart. Where the columns ran far enough out to clear the body’s shadow, their ends caught the sun.
“Spheres,” someone said on the English channel, and nobody corrected them.
It was the night side, within a kilometer of the far face. It was where she had said.
She took the boresight from the frame header and set it against the ephemeris, and worked the direction the columns ran, and worked it again from another pair because one pair was an anecdote. She had it in under two minutes. She wrote it on her pad and drew a box around it.
It was the Earth line, to within a few degrees.
She didn’t raise her hand. Three minutes later the Indian delegation’s scientist did the same arithmetic aloud, slower, and asked the chair whether any delegation could confirm the direction. The colonel beside the legal pad said the US had the same number. He said it without looking at her pad.
Across the horseshoe Lin was looking at Dana, not at the screen.
The next frame began to fill.
It was sharper. The range was down to about a thousand kilometers, and the points had pulled apart, with dark between them. The columns ran on into shadow, row after row, and the room watched them come down the screen.
Row twelve hundred. Fifteen hundred.
At row 1,840, low on the left, a thin bright line appeared. Four pixels long, at an angle to everything else in the frame, sharper than anything around it.
“Cosmic ray,” someone said.
Row 1,847.
The rows stopped.
The board held for the interval it was supposed to hold. Then the carrier field went yellow, and then red, and the letters in it read LOS.
In front of every delegation at once, the screen held what had come down: the columns, the dark between them, the four-pixel line, and below row 1,847 nothing at all.
In her headset the English channel was silent. She switched to French, then Russian, then Chinese. All six booths had stopped talking.