The Indi Chair

About this book

Meridian turns in orbit around the orange star Epsilon Indi, and on Thursday afternoons it rains on schedule. At ten past four on one wet Thursday, Dr. Ilse Tamboer, forty-six, a fixed-term lecturer whose only book nobody has read, opens her office door to the man who has spent forty years trying to make the Tenant speak. For two centuries the mind in the brown dwarfs at the edge of the system has ignored every human signal. Now it has endowed a university chair, and only Ilse may hold it. The price of the gift is one lecture, delivered in person at the end of the academic year, that the Tenant cannot predict. The Navy, the university and her oldest rival all want something from her. And something that can predict almost anything has chosen her. Why?