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Peter Watts 41 Blindsight
a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black
glass. "Oasa object. Infrared emitter, methane class."
On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a
black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at
over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly.
It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the
reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for
a brown dwarf.
"When did that show up" Bates squeezed her rubber ball in one
hand, the knuckles whitening.
"X-ray spike appears during the '76 microwave survey." Six
years before Firefall. "Never confirmed, never reacquired. Like a
torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big
enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that
bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact."
Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers.
"What changed"
Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. "The metabase
gets—crowded, after Firefall. Everyone skittish, looking for clues.
After Burns-Caulfield explodes—" He clicked at the back of his
throat. "Turns out the spike might arise from a subdwarf object
after all, if the magnetosphere's torqued enough."
Bates: "Torqued by what"
"Don't know."
Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti
sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the
world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most
intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been
stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before
something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band
and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even
been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough
to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten
Jupiters.
Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had
barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals.
That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other