"I still need a reviewer with common sense." She shrugged. "Very well. Per your direction, we have run two of the astrophysicists on a continuous Watch since before the Relight. Keep in mind, they've had five years to think about this report." Reynolt waved at the air, and they were looking out on a modified Qeng Ho taxi. Auxiliary fuel tanks were strapped on every side, and the front was a forest of sensor gear. A silver shield-sail was propped on a rickety framework from one side of the craft. "Right before the Relight, Doctors Li and Wen flew this vehicle into low orbit around OnOff." A second window showed the descent path, and a final orbit scarcely five hundred kilometers above the surface of the OnOff star. "By keeping the sail properly oriented, they safely flew at that altitude for more than a day."
Actually it was Jau Xin's pilot-zipheads who had done the flying. Nau nodded at Xin. "That was good work, Pilot Manager."
Xin grinned. "Thank you, sir. Something to tell my children about."
Reynolt ignored the comment. She popped up multiple windows, showing low-altitude views in various spectral regimes. "We've had a hard time with the analysis right from the beginning."
They could hear the recorded voices of the two zipheads now. Li was Emergent-bred, but the other voice spoke in a Qeng Ho dialect. That must be Wen: "We've always known OnOff has the mass and density of a normal G star. Now we can make high-resolution maps of the interior temperatures and dens—" Dr. Li butted in with the typical urgency of a ziphead, "—but we need more microsats....Resources be damned. We need two hundred at least, right through the time of Relighting."
Reynolt paused the audio. "We got them one hundred microsats." More windows popped up, Li and Wen back at Hammerfest after the Relight, arguing and arguing. Reynolt's reports were often like this, a barrage of pictures and tables and sound bites.
Wen was talking again. He sounded tired. "Even in Off-state, the central densities were typical of a G star, yet there was no collapse. The surface turbulence is barely ten thousand kilometers deep. How? How? How?"
Li: "And after Relight, the deep internal structure looks still the same."
"We can't know for sure; we can't get close."
"No, it looks perfectly typical now. We have models... ."
Wen's voice changed again. He was speaking faster, in a tone of frustration, almost pain. "All this data, and we have just the same mysteries as before. I've spent five years now studying reaction paths, and I'm as clueless as the Dawn Age astronomers. Therehas to be something going on in the extended core, or else there would be a collapse."
The other ziphead sounded petulant. "Obviously, even in Off state the star is still radiating, but radiating something that converts to low-interaction."
"But what? What? And if there could be such a thing, why don't the higher layers collapse?"
"Cuz the conversion is at the base of the photosphere, and thatis collapsed! Ryop. I'm using your own modeling software to show this!"
"No. Post hoc nonsense, no better than ages past."
"But I've gotdata !"
"So? Your adiabats are—"
Reynolt cut the audio. "They went on like this for many days. Most of it is a private jargon, the sort of things a close-bound Focused pair often invents."
Nau straightened in his chair. "If they can only talk to each other, we have no access. Did you lose them?"
"No. At least not in the usual way. Dr. Wen became so frustrated that he began to consider random externalities. In a normal person that might lead to creativity but—"
Brughel laughed, genuinely amused. "So your astronomer laddie lost sight of the ball, eh, Reynolt?"
Reynolt didn't even look at Brughel. "Be silent," she said. Nau noticed the Peddlers' startlement at her words. Ritser was second-in-command, the obvious sadist among the rulers—and here she had abruptly put him down.I wonder when the Peddlers will figure it out. A scowl passed briefly across Brughel's features. Then his grin broadened. He settled back in his chair and flicked an amused glance in Nau's direction. Anne continued without missing a beat: "Wen backed off from the problem, setting it in a wider and wider context. At first, there was some relevance."
Wen's voice resumed, the same rushed monotone as before. "OnOff's galactic orbit. A clue." The presumptive graph of OnOff's galactic orbit—assuming no close stellar encounters—flashed in a window. Anne was dredging from the fellow's notebooks. The plot extended back over half a billion years. It was the typical flower-petal figure of a halo-population star: Once every two hundred million years, OnOff penetrated the hidden heart of the galaxy. From there, it swung out and out till the stars spread thin and the intergalactic dark began. Tomas Nau was no astronomer, but he knew that halo-pop stars don't have usable planetary systems, and as a result aren't often visited. But surely that was the least of the strangeness of OnOff.
