Worse, it seemed likely that the PanEuropeans were behind the disappearance.
But Cara would not have interrupted his work if this hadn’t been something important. The MIEF staff constellations had been hard at it for almost a week, now. Six days ago, at the ops planning session, he’d given them the outlines of what he wanted, but they still had to churn out the hard data. Actually, he’d not expected any real progress for another week or two yet, so complex was this strategic problem.
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Whatcha got?”
“You requested an AI search of astronomical databases, specifically seeking information that might reveal unexpected or unknown links between known Stargates and known areas of deep space.”
“Yes.”
The worst problem the planning team faced at the moment was the lack of hard data on stargates and exactly how they interconnected across the Galaxy. Several ongoing database studies were being carried out by astronomical institutes on dozens of worlds, both in the Commonwealth and elsewhere. Alexander had hoped that the staff planning constellations might be able to mine data from those studies, acquiring a better understanding of just how the various stargates were linked together.
“You also requested,” Cara went on, “a list of anomalies associated with areas we researched … anomalies that might indicate Xul presence or interest.”
“Yes. What did you come up with?”
“The Aquila Anomaly. The information is very old … pre-spaceflight, in fact.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“The name is relatively recent. The information, however, was first gleaned from an astronomical compilation known as the Norton Star Atlas before such information was even available on electronic media. While we can’t be certain at this point in the research, the anomaly is significant enough that we felt it necessary to bring it to human attention.”
“Show me.”
A window opened in his mind, opening on to a view of deep space, scattered with stars—one bright star, five or six somewhat dimmer stars, and a background scattering of stardust.
“This is the constellation of Aquila, as seen from Earth,” Cara told him.
“The Eagle,” Alexander said, nodding. He hadn’t recognized the pattern of stars when it first appeared, but he knew the name.
Lines appeared in the window connecting the brighter stars—a parallelogram above, a triangle below, both slanting off to the right. With great imagination, an observer might imagine a bird of prey, wings raised in flight.
“As with all constellation groupings,” Cara told him, “the identification with a person, animal, or object is problematical, at least from the AI perspective. But an eagle is the historical designation, yes.”
“Beauty, and eagles, are in the eye of the beholder,” Alexander quipped. “That bright star is Altair—Alpha Aquilae.” It was, he knew, a shade over sixteen and a half light-years from Earth, and was one of the nearest outposts of the PanEuropean Republic. Commonwealth military planners had been working on contingency plans focused on how to fight a war with the Republic if things came to that unpleasant juncture. If the Commonwealth went to war with the PanEuropeans, getting past Altair would be their first big strategic requirement.
Cara ignored his sally—AIs had trouble understanding certain concepts, like “beauty”—and continued. “You are aware of the astronomical phenomenon of novae,” the AI said.
“Of course. Stars that explode—become much, much brighter in a short period of time. They’re not as violent as supernovae, of course, but they’re violent enough to cook any planets they might have. A handful are reported every year. Most aren’t naked-eye visible, but there have been a few bright ones.”
“Correct. Most novae appear to occur in close-double star systems, where material from one star is falling into the other. At least, that is the conventional theory, which seems to hold for a majority of the novae studied so far. And, as you say, novae are observed and recorded every year. My AI colleagues went through all such lists, among many others, in pursuance of your authorization for a data search on 1811, six days ago.”
“What did you find?”
“An intriguing fact. During a single thirty-seven-year period in the early twentieth century, a total of twenty bright novae—exploding stars—were observed from Earth.”
“Go on.”
“Five of those twenty novae occurred within the arbitrary boundaries of the constellation Aquila.”
It took a few seconds for the import to sink in. “My God—”
“Twenty-five percent of all observed and recorded novae, in other words, occurred within point two-five percent of the entire sky. This, we feel, is statistically important.
“One of these novae,” Cara went on, as a bright, new star appeared on the skymap just to the west of Altair, “was Nova Aquila. It appeared in the year 1918, and was the brightest nova ever recorded until Nova Carina, almost six centuries later. Two of the other novae appeared in the same year—1936—here, and here.” Two more bright stars appeared as Cara spoke, followed a moment later by two more. “And the last two, here in 1899, and here in 1937.”
“Five novae, though,” Alexander said slowly. He didn’t want to jump to unreasonable conclusions. “That’s still too small a number to be statistically significant.”
“It could be a random statistical clustering, true,” Cara told him. “Statistical anomalies do occur. But the extremely small area of sky involved—one quarter of one percent—seems to argue strongly against coincidence as a factor. And there is this, as well, a datum not available to twentieth-century cosmologists.”
The group of stars showing in Alexander’s mind rotated. The geometric figures of parallelogram and triangle shifted and distorted, some lines becoming much longer, others growing shorter.
A constellation was purely a convenience for Earth-based observers, a means of grouping and identifying stars in the night sky that had nothing to do with their actual locations in space. With a very few exceptions, stars that appeared to be close by one another in Earth’s sky—all members of the same constellation, in other words—appeared to be neighbors only because they happened to lie along the same line of sight. That was the fatal flaw in the ancient pseudoscience of astrology; one might as well say that a building on a distant hill, or the sun rising behind it, were physically connected to a house three meters away—or to one’s own hand—simply because they all appeared from a certain viewpoint to overlap.
Rotating the volume of space that included Aquila demonstrated this fact clearly. On a 2D map, the stars of Aquila appeared close together—the three brightest, Altair, Alshain, and Tarazed, for example, lay almost directly side by side in a short, straight line. Viewed from the side, however, Altair—Alpha Aquilae—was only 16.6 light-years from Earth, while Alshain, Beta Aquilae, was 46.6 light-years distant. Both, in fact, were quite close to Sol as galactic distances went. Gamma Aquilae, however, the third brightest star in the constellation and better known as Tarazed, was 330 light-years from Earth. Epsilon was 220 light-years distant; a few others were extremely distant; Eta Aquilae, for instance, was 1,600 light-years away, while dim Nu Aquilae, so distant it vanished off the window to the left when the display rotated, was actually a type F2 Ib supergiant 2,300 light-years distant.
The novae could be expected to show a similar range of distances, but this, Alexander saw, was not the case. They were clustered; Nova Aquila was about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The other four were all positioned at roughly the same distance, though they were spread across the constellation like a sheet, defining a flat region of space roughly fifty light-years deep and perhaps 200 to 300 light-years wide, some