Federations

Among the little services we run here is a sightseeing operation for tourists who feel like taking a close look at a red giant star. After the big stellar-envelope research project shut down a few years ago we inherited a dozen or so solar sleds that had been used for skimming through the fringes of Betelgeuse’s mantle, and we began renting them out for three-day excursions. The sleds are two-passenger jobs without much in the way of luxury and nothing at all in the way of propulsion systems. The trip is strictly ballistic: we calculate your orbit and shoot you out of here on the big repellers, sending you on a dazzling swing across Betelgeuse’s outer fringes that gives you the complete light show and maybe a view of ten or twelve of the big star’s family of planets. When the sled reaches the end of its string, we catch you on the turnaround wheel and reel you in. It sounds spectacular, and it is; it sounds dangerous, and it isn’t. Not usually, anyhow.

I tracked Fazio down in the gravity lounge and said, “We’ve arranged a treat for you, man.”

The sled I had rented for him was called the Corona Queen. Elisandra routinely handled the dispatching job for these tours, and now and then I worked as wheelman for them, although ordinarily I wheeled the big interstellar liners that used Betelgeuse Station as their jumping-off point for deeper space. We were both going to work Fazio’s sled. Unfortunately, this time there was going to be a disaster, because a regrettable little error had been made in calculating orbital polarity, and then there would be a one-in-a-million failure of the redundancy circuits. Fazio’s sled wasn’t going to go on a tour of Betelgeuse’s far-flung corona at all. It was going to plunge right into the heart of the giant red star.

I would have liked to tell him that, as we headed down the winding corridors to the dropdock. But I couldn’t, because telling Fazio meant telling Fazio’s symbiont also; and what was good news for Fazio was bad news for the symbiont. To catch the filthy thing by surprise: that was essential.

How much did Fazio suspect? God knows. In his place, I think I might have had an inkling. But maybe he was striving with all his strength to turn his mind away from any kind of speculation about the voyage he was about to take.

“You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like,” I said. “It’s unique. There’s just no way to simulate it. And the view of Betelgeuse that you get from the Station isn’t even remotely comparable.”

“The sled glides through the corona on a film of vaporized carbon,” said Elisandra. “The heat just rolls right off its surface.” We were chattering compulsively, trying to fill every moment with talk. “You’re completely shielded so that you can actually pass through the atmosphere of the star—”

“Of course,” I said, “Betelgeuse is so big and so violent that you’re more or less inside its atmosphere no matter where you are in its system—”

“And then there are the planets,” Elisandra said. “The way things are lined up this week, you may be able to see as many as a dozen of them—”

“—Otello, Falstaff, Siegfried, maybe Wotan—”

“—You’ll find a map on the ceiling of your cabin—”

“—Five gas giants twice the mass of Jupiter—keep your eye out for Wotan, that’s the one with rings—”

“—and Isolde, you can’t miss Isolde, she’s even redder than Betelgeuse, the damndest bloodshot planet imaginable—”

“—with eleven red moons, too, but you won’t be able to see them without filters—”

“—Otello and Falstaff for sure, and I think this week’s chart shows Aida out of occultation now, too—”

“—and then there’s the band of comets—”

“—the asteroids, that’s where we think a couple of the planets collided after gravitational perturbation of—”

“—and the Einsteinian curvature, it’s unmistakable—”

“—the big solar flares—”

“Here we are,” Elisandra said.

We had reached the dropdock. Before us rose a gleaming metal wall. Elisandra activated the hatch and it swung back to reveal the little sled, a sleek tapering frog-nosed thing with a low hump in the middle. It sat on tracks; above it arched the coils of the repeller-launcher, radiating at the moment the blue-green glow that indicated a neutral charge. Everything was automatic. We had only to put Fazio on board and give the Station the signal for launch; the rest would be taken care of by the orbital-polarity program Elisandra had previously keyed in.

“It’s going to be the trip of your life, man!” I said.

Fazio nodded. His eyes looked a little glazed, and his nostrils were flaring.