Enigma (12 page)

“I don’t know. You’re due on board in a half hour.”

“Did Neale or Sebright make the call?”

“I don’t know. They want everyone, with gear.”

Thackery sighed unhappily. “I’d guess I’d better be there, then. Shower with me?” She smiled coyly. “We’d just get started again, and we don’t have the time. I’ll wash up later.”

When he returned from the bath, she had donned a soft robe and gathered his extra clothing into his bag. At the door she kissed him sweetly, a kiss that lingered on his lips after contact was broken. “Thank you, Merry—for being nice to me.”

“I’ll be back.”

Her smile was small and poignant. “I don’t think so.”

Dunn and Sebright were waiting at the gangway to check in the arrivals. “Almost left without you, Thackery,” Sebright said with world-weary bemusement. “Down to G deck and join the queue.”

“Left? What’s going on?”

“Where’ve you had your head?—as if I didn’t know,” Dunn said salaciously. “It’s moving day. Next ferry should leave in about twenty minutes.”

“Leave for where?”

“
Descartes
, of course. You didn’t think we were going to stay here for ever, did you?”

“But it was supposed to take a week—”

“It didn’t,” Sebright said succinctly. “The Com found us some transportation—
Tycho
’s gig. What’s wrong, you having second thoughts?”

“Diana—”

“You didn’t fall for that, did you?” Dunn asked cattily. “She only wanted to improve her chances of getting picked for
Descartes
. But the joke’s on her, isn’t it—she was sleeping with the wrong man.”

“Lay off, Tom,” Sebright said sharply. His tone became sympathetic. “This is one of those things you wanted me to tell you, Thackery, except you wouldn’t have understood. When it comes to relations outside the ship, you’ve got to have your emotions in neutral. If you don’t, you’re just asking to be kicked.”

“But I
care
about her—”

“You can’t afford to,” Sebright said. “Because you can’t stay, she can’t leave, and she won’t be here if you ever get back. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.”

Thackery answered him with a hostile scowl and moved off toward the climbway. Dunn’s unkind laughter followed him, but he did his best not to hear it.

Despite the bustle of activity on board, the atmosphere of
Descartes
had the chill and fuggy odor of an unused basement. At the center of the bustle was Tyla Shaeffer, processing the new arrivals.

“Thackery,” she pronounced when he reached her. “E deck, cabin 5.”

“Where’s Neale?”

“Commander’s on bridge deck. Don’t you want to know who your roommate is?”

“No,” he said. “Is that all?”

“It’s Voss, the new awk.” When he showed no reaction, she went on, disappointed. “Pick up your personal gear in the hold and put your cabin in order. Then Sebright wants a power-up checkout of the equipment in the survey lab.”

Nodding acknowledgment, he brushed past her.

The cabin lock responded to his touch, and he tossed his bag onto one of the bunks. Sliding into the only chair, he switched on the netlink.

“A-Cyg net,” he requested.

“Restricted. No personal communications.” It was the system’s voice, not the comtech.

“Authority.”

“By order of Commander Neale.”

“Page op, please.”

“
Tycho—
excuse me,
Descartes
com,” said a new voice.

“Is that you, Jessie?”

“I think so,” Baldwin said, chuckling.

“Why the com restrictions?”

“I think they’re uploading data from
Tycho
.”

“That wouldn’t affect the whole net, would it?”

“Hey, I’m new here myself. Excuse me, the bridge is paging.”

“Can you get Neale for me?”

“She’s on her way down the core to see Abrams about the drive.”

“Thanks.”

It was just a few steps down a short corridor to the climbway. Stepping off the deck, he started to ascend hand over hand toward the bridge deck. He felt the vibrations of other traffic, and, looking up, spotted Neale.

“Portside up, starboard down, mister,” she snapped at him when her feet were within a few rungs of his hands.

Chastened, he crabbed around to the other side of the ladder. “Commander Neale, will you lift the com restrictions when the data upload is finished?”

“No,” she said, moving past without pausing.

“Will we be docking at the base before we leave?” he called with a note of desperation. The reply was the same. Thackery scrabbled downship to stay with her. “There’s someone on base I need to talk to—”

Neale stopped and gazed unsympathetically at Thackery. “No.”

“Commander, I have a right to my private life—”

“Forget her,” Neale said bluntly. “It wasn’t what you thought it was, whatever you thought it was.”

“It meant something—”

“Grow up, Thackery,” Neale growled irritably, “before I start wishing I was leaving you here with your old roomie.”

She went on downship, leaving him feeling helpless and hating it.
This is going to stop happening
, he thought determinedly.
Go back to what you know. You learned the game at Georgetown, that you make your place not by worrying about your needs but by meeting theirs. Accommodation, compromise, living within the rules, that’s the game here, just like it was there. You wore that suit once and it’s time to bring it out and dust it off again
.

… The linguacomp’s inference processor represented the highest successful application to date of expert systems technology—thinking machines. But despite the heuristic marvels of the Interlisp-P programming language, the inference processor could do nothing without an extensive knowledge base. Aboard the survey ships, that knowledge base consisted of a syntax and vocabulary file for every known language and dialect, from dead languages such as Latin and Gaelic, to invented ones such as Esperanto and Cobol, to the native languages of Journa, Muschynka, and Pai-Tem.

But the linguacomp was only one application of a basic technology for which a bigger job was waiting: the colony problem itself. The inference processor was ready whenever the knowledge base was large enough. The Service was hungry for information, a hunger barely slaked by the hundreds of entry and exit dispatches streaming back from the survey ships to Unity, filling more and more volumes of subatomic memory with the portraits of a profusion of suns and worlds. Every colony discovery was a feast, a thousand more pieces for the billion-piece puzzle.

At some point, the knowledge base would reach a threshold of completion, and the machine would at last unravel the five fundamental mysteries of the First Colonization—to where from where, when, how, why, and, most tantalizing, what happened afterward. That was the hope, nay, the expectation, of the Committee on the ReCreation of First Colonization Planning. They had nothing else on which to pin their hopes, convinced as they were by their own failures that the intricacies of the problem were beyond the scope of an individual human mind.

But until that threshold was reached, until the machine proved itself the equal of those expectations, it was the insights and energies and inspirations of those individual humans on which so much depended…

At first, the star and planets comprising 118 Lyra were mere dimples, tiny space-time pocks on the gravigator’s mass detector. Then
Descartes
dropped out of the craze, and, with an urgent curiosity that seemed to belong more to the ship than the parasites within, reached out with her many senses and made them worlds.

The ship was already within the heliosphere, that living, pulsating halo of charged particles which bathed some planets in death and battered relentlessly at the magnetic armor of the rest. On the bridge, the immediate priority was to sample the plasma pouring outward from the cool orange star and gauge its threat to the crew.

If, as the remote survey had suggested, the host star was a normal Main Sequence inhabitant in stable mid-life, then the Survey Protocols would come into play. But if 118 Lyra were an undiagnosed flare star or other miscreant,
Descartes
would leave hastily and with no regrets, for no star hostile to
Descartes
could be a friend to dirt-bound life.

Downship in the survey lab, a cheer went up when Guerrieri confirmed that it was a planetary system, and not a primordial nebula, which was responsible for the excess infrared measured by the A-Cyg observatory.

“We’ve got rocks!” he exulted. “Two, no, three big ones—looks like eight altogether.” But Sebright did not join in the celebration, and his reserve put a damper on their exuberance.

The gravigator’s data was already being processed into a map of the system and a timetable for visiting its components. But most of the instruments lay inert, and would remain so until
Descartes
fell into orbit around its first new world. Only the telecameras, probing the still-distant face of the nearest planet, and the com scanner, searching hopefully for new voices in the ether, were in use.

Presently, lights flickered throughout the ship as the entry dispatch, a high-intensity burst of radio waves carrying the report of their arrival, was transmitted toward Earth. The lights flickered again, less severely, as the same message was directed at A-Cyg. It was one of the ironies of the Service that had either message been one of real urgency, it would have been necessary for
Descartes
herself to return, since the dispatch was bound by a celestial speed limit which the ship’s drive was empowered to ignore.

At last the ship’s ecologist gave her blessing to an extended stay in the system, and the real work of
Descartes
began. By that time Muir had determined that only the second planet fell within the star’s biosphere, as defined by human-biased criteria. But her pleas to begin there fell on deaf ears.

“There’s three planets more or less between us and Two that need surveying first,” was Sebright’s reply.

“But Commander Neale—”

“Doesn’t know enough about stellar ecology to start telling us how to set our priorities,” Sebright finished for her. “I know, the Corn’s real eager to find a colony. But possible isn’t the same thing as probable, and probable’s nothing close to certain. We’re going to do this efficiently, without a lot of jumping around and doubling back. Be patient. Anything that’s there on Two now will be there ten days from now.”

So the first world to be studied was Seven, a cold gray-green globe tracing a slow, lonely path near the rim of the system. In the course of twenty-four hours, more than 95 percent of the planet’s gaseous face was scanned simultaneously by more than a dozen instruments: photopolarimeters, imaging radars, ultraviolet spectroscopes, magnetometers, and more. Data poured in far faster than it could be reviewed, much less analyzed, forcing each team of specialists to focus on just one or two key items.

Eagan and Thackery mapped the thick atmosphere in three dimensions and determined its composition, while Guerrieri and Tyszka gauged mass and rotation and listened in on the squealing and booming of the magnetosphere doing battle with the stellar wind. At their elbows Muir and Collins worked out Seven’s energy budget and modeled its unpromising ecosphere. Sebright contented himself with the narrow-angle telecamera and its subjective portrait of the planet’s face.

They expected few surprises, and found none. In truth, the Service had only modest interest in planets per se. A few facts sufficed to place most new worlds firmly in the Rogermann planetary classification system: the major constituent of the planetary mass (ices, oxides and silicates, or gases), the primary source of internal heat, and the primary constituent of the atmosphere.

Virtually all possible combinations of those three characteristics had been seen during Phase I, and most of them more than once. Uranus had a hundred known cousins, and Mercury a thousand. As a consequence, unless there was some compelling anomaly, no uninhabitable planet warranted more than a day’s intensive study. Not even Seven’s third satellite, an ice world puddled by nitrogen lakes fed by nitrogen rain from a dense nitrogen sky, was deemed worthy of a lingering look.

The lesson of Rogermann’s system was that it is in the fine structure that worlds achieve uniqueness. The Valles Marineris of Mars and the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the lobate scarps of Kapteyn’s Star Three and the equatorial plateau of Muschynka—from such things proceeded all individuality, all identity. A corollary lesson was that such considerations matter only on a world which harbors life or temporarily enjoys its company.

It was the search for such life, then, and not reflexive scientific hoarding or the need for exacting classification which prompted the wholesale collection of data. The story of the Pai-Tem contact provided a sharp reminder of the wisdom of that practice. That small, pretechnological colony was discovered not during the initial survey, but during the analysis of data on the craze to the next star.

The alternating six-hour watches, which began the day before a planetary encounter and ended a day after it was concluded, were eye-fatiguing and bottom-numbing. The surveyors took short breaks when they could, most often at their consoles or no more than a few steps away. Housekeeping went by the board, and meals were eaten on the fly if at all.

“Sebright wasn’t exaggerating, was he?” a yawning Tyszka asked at one point during the encounter with One, a parched cinder orbiting just outside the star’s Roche limit.

“About what?” Thackery said, eyes trained on the columns of numbers rolling up the screen of the geoscience console. “About how hard we’d be working. Even if I had a sex life, which I don’t, I wouldn’t have one now.” At the other end of the lab, Muir rolled her eyes and turned away.

“It isn’t so bad,” Thackery said.

“No? I get maybe four hours sleep in a six-hour block. And I’m developing lower back pain from spending too much time sitting in this damn ergonomic chair.”

Thackery shrugged. “I’m getting along all right.”

“Come to think of it, I haven’t heard you complain—not even when Sebright’s away.” Tyszka peered narrowly at Thackery. “What’s your secret?”

“No secret.”

“Give, or I’ll tell the joke about the Councilman and the pavement princess again,” Tyszka said threateningly. “For life’s sake, tell him,” Muir pleaded. “I’ve heard it four times already, and it wasn’t funny when it was new.”

Thackery, grinned. “No secret. I keep thinking that a single system, even a single star or planet, would be a lifetime’s work to properly study, and that there’s no telling when anyone will come here again. Makes me want to make the most of the time we have.”

“Stars, a serious answer. How dull,” Tyszka said disappointedly. “Didn’t think you cared that much for this part of it. What happened, did Gregg infect you with rock fever?”

Thackery shook his head. “I want to do my part. I realize I may never get a chance to prove myself as a contact linguist. So if I’m going to contribute, it has to be this way.”

“Nice speech,” Muir said cynically. “Should have saved it for when Sebright was around.” Tyszka clucked. “Now, Donna, you wouldn’t be impugning Thack’s motives here, would you?”

“Ask
him
.”

“Woof,” said Tyszka to himself as he turned back to his work. “And I thought / wasn’t getting enough sleep.”

During the first watch at Four, Thackery amassed enough data to demonstrate that the planet was a volcanic nightmare, the heat from its rich lode of radioactives driving a restless geothermal engine which continually bathed the surface in a patchplaster of liquid rock.

“Let’s send down a couple of spike seismographs,” Eagan said after reviewing the report. “I thought you might want to. I’ve got some candidate sites picked out ”

Passing up the chance to return to his cabin and sleep, Thackery stayed and helped prepare the two-metre-long torpedo-like instruments for deployment. Then he hovered behind Eagan at the teleoperator station as he flew the first of them down to a stable landing and a successful implant.

“How about letting me handle number two?” Thackery asked as Sebright entered the survey lab and joined them. Sebright raised an eyebrow, but Eagan genially said, “Why not?” and gave up the chair.

Conscious of the appraising eyes behind him, Thackery shrugged off his fatigue and marshaled his concentration. Unexpected upper-air winds in the turbulent atmosphere threatened to carry the seismograph downrange, but he was able to kill off the extra velocity with a series of controlled stalls and guide the glider to a gentle three-legged landing within metres of its intended target, half a globe away from the first.

“I thought languages were supposed to be your long suit,” Sebright said afterward.

“They are,” said Thackery, unaware that his answer came across as bragging.
This part isn’t so different from what I was doing aboard
Babbage, he was thinking.
Wouldn’t that give Hduna a few laughs at my expense—

Sebright grunted. “Well, it’s good to know we don’t lose too much when Gregg’s catching his six.”
You don’t lose anything
, Thackery thought but did not say.
And before I’m done you’ll know it
.

At last
Descartes
moved on to Two, a clear-skied rust-faced world with the thin air of the Himalayas and a temperate-zone climate like a sunny November day. At the end of five orbits Sebright called the team together. Their subdued expressions spoke volumes about their findings.

“What’s the prospect?” asked Sebright.

Muir responded as though the question had been addressed to her alone. “Gregg says there’s no methane signature in the atmosphere. None of my instruments are showing any ground cover. The oxygen’s all in the crust and the water vapor’s all in the air, and the geochemical cycles that might move them are sluggish or nonexistent.”

“Conclusion?”

“Livable, but not without a fairly high level of environmental technology,” Tyszka offered. “A level we would have detected by now.”

“So nobody’s home.”

“In a word, no.”

“Did you seriously expect otherwise? On our first semi-terrestrial planet in our first system?” He was answered with sheepish smiles. “All right.” He squinted at them. “Anyone living upstairs? You are, aren’t you, Mike?”

Tyszka nodded.

“Get yourself moved down here, pronto. You’ll be bunking with—”

“Me,” said Thackery. “You’ll have to move out Voss.”

“With Thack. Find his roommate and tell him he’s being chased.”

A grin broke out on Tyszka’s face as he realized what the order meant. “Right away,” he said, and left the room with long, bounding strides.

“We’re going down?” Eagan asked, surprised.

Sebright nodded.

“But there’re no indications to justify it. This has every earmark of an ordinary B2N world. Oxysilicate crust, primary nitrogen atmosphere, three-strength magnetosphere—God knows I wish it were a more interesting place, but it’s not.”

Sebright waited patiently until Eagan was through. “I intend for us to make a survey landing on every surface where a minimum E-suit is enough protection,” Sebright said. “Or at least one in every system.”

“But what about the Survey Protocols—”

“I haven’t read them,” was Sebright’s offhand reply.

“Survey Protocols are advisory,” Thackery offered from his station at the far end of the lab. “The Concom has discretion in all matters related to landings.”

“The protocols say that, do they?” Sebright mused idly.

“Yes.”

“Well, good. Then let’s go down and have a look.” He reached across the board to the shipnet. “Ali, this is Mark. We’re going into isolation mode in thirty minutes.”

Neale’s tone communicated her displeasure. “There’s no colony on Four, is there?”

“No indications of one to this point.”

“Then I assume you have some other good reason. This will hold us here for at least another day, and there’re four more planets to look over before we can move on.”

The comer of his mouth curling upward, Sebright glanced at Thackery. “It’s just a three-hour survey landing, Ali. Per the Protocols.”

Neale sighed audibly. “All right. Flag your landing site on the map and I’ll see we’re moved into an appropriate orbit.” Switching off, Sebright grinned. “Let’s make a house call. Donna, Gregg, Derrel, get going.”

As the trio rose and hastened out, disappointment flashed momentarily across Thackery’s face. Then the mask fell back in place—but not so quickly that Sebright missed the transition.

“What’s the matter, Thack?” Sebright said, standing. “Think you should be going?”

Thackery’s response was quick and evenly modulated. “No. Backups take part in planetary landings only when the primary specialist is unavailable.”

Sebright snorted bemusedly and shook his head. “I almost believe you mean that. All the same, I don’t think I’ll play any poker with you. Don’t worry—you’ll get your chance.”

“I’m not worried,” he said, jumping up. “Any objection to me going down and helping them with their E-suits?” Sebright regarded the younger man thoughtfully, and for a moment Thackery thought he had gone too far. “Never mind,” Sebright said, sighing. “Go ahead and give them a hand.”

By universal agreement, the difficult part of an E-suit was the gloves. The suit itself, a close-fitting single-piece garment, resembled a Service allover and was put on the same way. To that basic foundation were added boots, gloves, and a soft helmet, all made of the same thin polymerized sandwich of synthetics and all attached by rigid and uncooperative binding rings. A wearer could usually get both boots secured in place, frequently the helmet, rarely the first glove, and almost never the second glove.