Enigma (20 page)

A young woman—hardly more than a girl—sat behind the sickle-shaped desk in one of the offices, watching the newcomers expectantly. They took the cue and headed for her.

“One at a time,” said the aide sharply as they tried to enter together. Guerrieri and Thackery looked at each other. “You go ahead,” Guerrieri said with a shrug, and retreated outside.

The door slid shut with a hiss. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing. He could not help but briefly stare at her legs, naked to the thigh except for the Greek-style crisscross lacings which climbed upward from her sandals. When he looked up, their eyes met, and he realized guiltily that she had noticed—and probably misread—his interest.

“You’ve done remarkable things here since we left,” Thackery said as he settled in the chair, trying to redirect both their thoughts. “What’s the population now?”

She considered a moment before answering. “We just hit eleven thousand permanent residents, plus a few hundred temporaries. Including you. What’s your name?”

“Merritt Andrew Thackery.”

“Assignment?”

“Contact Linguist,
Descartes
.”

“And your Service number?”

The question surprised Thackery. “I don’t know. We don’t use them on board.”

She tsked and shook her head. “Better learn it. You’ll need it for everything around here. How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I just came on, so I don’t know—.” She glanced at a note posted to her right. “Oh, here we are.
Descartes
’s in for Kleine refit?”

“I don’t know what that is. We’re just back from the Gnivi colony.”

“I know. But you’re still going to get a refit. The schedule says thirty-one weeks.”

“I don’t expect to be on her when she goes back out.”

Her instructions apparently left no room for variables. “At the moment you’re officially attached to her, right? Then you’re looking at thirty-one weeks. Which means I can get you a double-wide instead of the standard apartment, and it’ll only cost you another three hundred a week.”

Thackery gaped. “I’m supposed to pay for this?”

“Well, of course. What did you think?”

“I thought we were all Service—”

She straightened up in her chair. “We are, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to give out free room and board. How do you expect us to earn our trade credits, if not by servicing the ships and looking after the crews?”

“But I don’t have anything to pay with—”

“Silly. Here’s the balance in your Service account,” she said, rotating her display toward him. The figure was a little over €600,000, which stunned Thackery to silence. “With that kind of money, I wouldn’t think you’d worry about the extra for a double-wide,” she continued. “My account was being managed at Unity,” he said, confused. “When did they transfer it here?”

“Transfer it? No, you don’t understand, your account is updated every day. We’re linked to all the Unity records. Oh, wait a minute. That’s right—
Descartes
doesn’t have its Kleine yet, so you wouldn’t know about all this. See, we’re in constant contact with Unity. I can call them about as easily as I can call someone down on Seacrest Level.”

“How is that possible?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know, I’m just an Operations aide. We’ve had it for sixty years, though. You’ll be one of the last ships to get it.”

The proposition implicit in her words was so jarring to Thackery’s sense of the way the Universe worked that rather than deal with it, he set it aside. “This can’t be anything like a full-time assignment for you. How much traffic are you folks getting in here these days?”

She seemed not to mind the digression. “No, not full time. But we get a packet every three months from Unity, plus the odd survey ship every now and then.”

“Every three months?” Thackery thought a moment. “That means there’d have to be forty or so packets en route at any given moment. Eighty, if you count the ones on their way back.”

“Why, sure, I guess so.”

“I didn’t think the Procurement Office would ever get us ships in those kind of numbers.”

“It hasn’t. The packets are operated by USS-Transport.”

“Do the crews wear the black?”

“Well, sure,” she said. She brushed her longish hair back and showed him her own black ellipse, worn like jewelry on the collar of her blouse. “Everybody out here does. What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think you’d understand,” Thackery said, subdued.

She did not notice his change of mood. “Anyway, there’s a packet due in about six weeks, so you’ll get to see one then.”

“How many survey ships are working this sector now?”

“Three, when they’re all out:
Tycho, Munin
, and your ship. But you and
Munin
are both here now.
Tycho
’s about eleven lights out. We don’t hear much from them.”

That answered the question of which ship he had seen in the yard. Thackery pursed his lips. “Look, try not to take this the way it sounds, but is everyone taking the Contact with Gnivi pretty casually?”

She laughed, a musical titter. “Oh, no, you’re wrong. We were beginning to think we’d be the last octant to find a colony—even to worry a little that there might not be any out this way at all. We’re really happy about you people. This puts Cygnus on the map, and’ll mean that much more traffic for us. Honestly, we’ve just been scraping by with the Unity shuttle traffic. But now we’ll start getting noticed by the Intercolony Support Office, and that’s where the profit is.”

Not everything she said was meaningful to Thackery, least of all the last part. He had never heard of the ISO, and the motive she cited seeming jarringly out of place. “There wasn’t much of a reception,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the awk, now dozing in front of the screen. “It seems like there’d be a little more fuss over the fifth colony.”

“Fifth? Try eighth. Gnivi is the third colony in two months. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure there’s going to be a dinner honoring you, and probably some commendations handed out, too.”

“Oh.” Again, Thackery was brought up short by a reminder that time had not stood still while
Descartes
had been on station. “What about my room, then?”

“Your apartment is on Scirocco Place, number 76,” she said, handing him a magcard that appeared at a slot near her elbow. Glancing at it, he saw that it bore his face, name, rating, and Service number. “There’s a help menu on the basenet that will tell you all about restaurants and recreation,” she went on, “just about anything you want. And you can always page the base library or our offices if you can’t find what you need.”

He slipped the card into a pocket and stood. “Thank you.”

“You were the linguist,” she said, cocking her head to study him. “You went on the landing.”

“Yes.”

“Look, I have to take care of your friend out there. But if you want to wait, I’ll be happy to help you find your apartment, show you around…” Her voice trailed off, making the offer open-ended.

Memories of Diana came rushing back, unpleasant, painful. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she said brightly.

“I’m a hundred and sixty-six,” Thackery said coldly. “I don’t think we’d have much in common.” As he passed out of the office into the concourse, he shut his eyes to the wounded look that appeared on her face.

Thackery found his apartment without difficulty, and having done so found himself with nothing to do but wait, wait for the bureaucratic wheels to grind round, wait for the word to come down that would end this misadventure and give him a chance to start again.

While he waited he made use of the basenet to try to fill in the blanks remaining from his conversation with the Ops aide. The biggest blank was the Kleine transmitter, so he started there.

According to the Worldnet announcement made some fifty-five years ago, the Kleine was exactly what Thackery had surmised: a transrelative deep-space communications system. It was not instantaneous, but the lag between Cygnus and Unity, lying some twenty-five light-years away, was a mere three minutes. “Transmitter,” however, was a bit of misnomer, since no one had been able to measure or even detect anything physical being transmitted.

The system was named for Arthur Kleine, the Technology Office drive engineer credited with the admittedly serendipitous discovery, but the homonymous suggestion of the crazy geometry of a Klein bottle was equally appropriate. Kleine had designed new development instrumentation for a pair of identical prototypes of the O-series drive. During the first field test of OX-l in deep space beyond the Oort Cloud, the data meant for the screens of the test team appeared almost instantly on the monitors before the techs preparing OX-2—half a light-day away in the labs of the Technology Office research center. The system seemed to have only two limitations: It only worked in conjunction with an AVLO drive, and it, too, did not work during the craze.

“That’s too damn easy,” Thackery protested aloud. “God knows the Service needs it, but really—”

Indignation sent Thackery in search of the technical reports on the Kleine system. To the extent that he could understand them, he found no hard data, no cogent explanations, only speculation disguised as theory.
Just like drive theory
. The most frequently cited paper, by Walters and Highsmith, proposed that an operating AVLO drive created “energy corridors” with every other AVLO drive, through which the Kleine units propagated their transmissions.

But there was vanishingly little evidence, experimental or mathematical, on which to evaluate the Walters/Highsmith theory. In fact, considering its metaphysical flavor and the impossibility of direct observation, the theory had all the marks of being both unprovable and irrefutable.

Which is no doubt why it’s so popular. Where’s Karl Popper when we really need him?
Thackery thought wryly as he cleared the screen to take up a new subject.

Thackery found the “free enterprise” turn that Advance Base operations had taken to be, after examination, equally incomprehensible. He freely admitted that biases carried over from Georgetown and his first career track were at the root of the problem.

Except for the capital-formation mechanisms and a few independent corporations left alone for efficiency’s sake, the World Council had diligently rooted out the profit motive from the Earth’s economic life. The financial infrastructure that remained, transfer payments and community service fees, salaries and prices, merely provided a familiar handle on what was, in effect, a planet-wide barter market.

With a less complex system and a better educated population, the Survey service had foregone even that crutch. Since boarding
Tycho
ever so long ago, Thackery had not once needed to think of money. His salary was nothing more or less than a recruitment bribe, paid according to mission elapsed time (but earning interest according to Unity elapsed time) and collectible on his return to Earth and its monetized economy. He had never expected to see a penny of it until then.

But suddenly he was in a pay-as-you-go world, drawing against that account for every minor service and amenity. There was an immigration fee, a lodging fee, an environmental services fee, a net access fee, a maintenance and housekeeping fee—Thackery had only begun to learn the variations, and already the list seemed endless. Though the rates quoted by the Ops aide would hardly make him a pauper, not even through the remainder of a full normal lifetime, Thackery bitterly resented every debit and considered the entire practice piracy and worse.

It was obvious from the Ops aide that the residents did not share his outrage. The four-place packets, their run sliced to eleven years actual, sixteen days perceptual by the I-series drives, brought in trade goods, emigrants, USS inspectors, even a few tourists. Cygnus Base could have anything Unity had to offer—when they could pay for it.

Their community-wide goal was full shipbuilding capability, the stated intent building, staffing, and supporting a survey ship to be named
Cygnus
. But there were also studies underway on the feasibility of opening “corner-to-corner” trade routes with the Advance Bases in adjoining octants, or, barring that, selling packets to USS-Transport itself.

If this is what the Service is coming to, then it’s past time I got out
, he told himself lugubriously.

Dispirited, Thackery asked for a summary directory of the colonies. The directory confirmed that Gnivi was, in fact, eighth on the list. The new colonies were Daehne, thirty-three lights out in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Weber in
Magellan;
Dzuba, twenty-nine lights out in Canis Major, credited to Hiscox
and Amundsen;
and an extinct colony on 22 Herculis-5, uncovered by Higuchi and the crew of
Hillary
.

And in none of the Contacts had any surveyors died.

Turning off the display, Thackery settled back on his bed to mull over what he had learned. And when he was done, he walked three blocks to a rec outlet and brought back a jeroboam of the local sweet red wine.

When the wine was half drunk and Thackery thoroughly so, he returned to the basenet and tried to access one last bit of data to fill in one last blank. When he could not, he corked the bottle, left the apartment, made an unsteady trip to Castle Place to see the base librarian.

“This may seem like a strange request,” he said, his words less slurred than they seemed to him, “but I wonder if you could get me some information on one of the base’s original crew.”

“Of course,” the Com aide said brightly. “May I have your card, please?”

Thackery felt several pockets before finding the one to which he had consigned the hated object. Extracting the card with some difficulty, he slid it across the counter.

“That’s actually a fairly common request for people of your era,” she said, clued by his low Service number. She was unconscious of the insult in her words, but at that point so was Thackery. “What’s the name?”

“Diana Marks.”

“It’ll be just a moment, those records aren’t kept online. When were you last here?”

Thackery had to make an effort to remember. “’13.”