Lights in the Deep Read Online Free PDF

well beyond the confines of the planetary system proper—the sun having become just another pinpoint in the star-filled sky. What chance did we have, in going back? How would we look for anyone while avoiding the robot killers?
    Better to forge on.
    • • •
    For my thirteenth birthday, Tab told me she would teach me to be an astronomer.
    It was easy, since everything I needed to know was in Howard’s databanks. And it helped pass the time, keeping my mind off things I still didn’t want to think about. Mama and Papa and Irenka were still there, like deep sores newly scabbed over. But somehow, day by day, Tab and I grew closer. And the hurt got a little bit less, and a little bit easier to carry.
    She and I manipulated the observatory’s sensors and equipment, cataloguing various large and small objects in their path.
    Tab told me that, contrary to popular conception of centuries past, deep space was not a total void. The Kuiper and Oort regions were actually a combined debris field that bled inexorably into the sparser debris that populated the interstellar medium—where the planemos ruled.
    Planemos. Planets without stars. Worlds unto themselves.
    Perhaps the Outbound had ultimately reached and settled on one of them? After a voyage spanning centuries?
    Howard diverted our course on several occasions in order to investigate anomalies that showed up on the observatory’s impressive sensor array.
    In each case, we found nothing; even if the comets and icy worldlets themselves were interesting.
    Mostly, they were rocky bodies which had accrued a shell of water and gas ice. Perfectly routine, once you got out beyond Pluto.
    On only one of these did we find something which indicated humanity.
    It was a smallish snowball of a world, irregularly shaped, yet giving off radioactive emissions from one of its many craters.
    Closer inspection with the telescopes revealed signs of mining, long since abandoned.
    It was enough to make Tab whoop and spin, shaking her hips side to side while she floated through the observatory’s control center while Howard jabbered with as much excitement as his computer-cooled mentality could muster.
    We matched with the ice body and Tab and I went outside in one of the observatory’s two dories. Landing, we then took suits—one of which I’d helped Tab extensively modify to fit me—and we were disappointed to find only ice-crusted garbage and a small pile of spent fissile material.
    No messages. No clue to how long the Outbound had stayed, nor where they had gone.
    Though there was no sign of Pioneer 10 either.
    We returned to the search.
    Twice more in two years, we found similar pit-stops on similar worlds. The Outbound had needed hydrogen isotopes and reaction mass for their fusion drives. It must have taken them many decades to travel as far as we had gone in just a few years on antimatter drive.
    Tab risked active communications, tight-beamed to the fore.
    For weeks we waited for a reply, and nothing came.
    The longing to see other living humans became like an itch to me. Beyond missing my family, I also missed the wide open plazas and parks of home, where I’d been able to race my electric chair between the fountains and startle the pigeons and laugh like a boy ought to laugh.
    At ship’s night, I began dreaming of home, and…other things. It was embarrassing to talk about with Tab. I had an easier time talking about it with Howard, who had been a man once, and before that, a teenaged boy.
    Howard said he was surprised that I was getting the kind of physical response I was getting, even though I had never felt anything below my hip bones my entire life. When our conversations turned specifically to women and women’s bodies, Howard hesitantly uncorked a database of pictures he’d been keeping—pictures that my mother would have been scandalized by, had she caught me looking at them on my laptop back at home.
    “Don’t tell Tab,” Howard had warned in a fraternal fashion.