Enigma (22 page)
“Then what are you here for?”
Sebright paused a moment before answering. “Derrel came by a week or so ago and told me a lot of things you probably rather he hadn’t. Tom filled in the rest, or enough of it. When I heard what happened this morning, I decided it was time to stop listening and start talking.”
“Talking about what?”
“I think you should go to Sennifi. Not because they want you to, certainly not for Neale. Because I think it’s the right thing for you—and because I can’t.”
“They’re trying to give me a damn promotion. Neale’s paying me off for helping her get rid of you.”
“I know. But she’s not the only one who recommended you.”
Thackery stared.
“This is an important one—the most advanced society since Journa,” Sebright said. “The Sennifi have a unified planet-wide culture with a high level of intellectual achievement. Their language is sophisticated, very subtle. And they’ve told us to mind our own business.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“If it’s so important, why don’t they want someone with your kind of experience?”
“Neale won’t have me,” he said easily. “She’s probably right, too, though for the wrong reason. I’m a good Contactor, Thack—”
“I know. I’ve seen you work.”
“But I’m a lousy Contact Leader. I don’t delegate responsibility well, I can never be bothered to explain myself, and I’m not interested in ‘managing’ people—only in getting the job done.”
“So what are they going to do to you?”
“They haven’t decided yet. I’m not even sure what I want them to do. I’ll never tire of the work. Strange as it may sound, I loved every minute on Gnivi. But I’m very tired of the bullshit that goes with it.”
“Come back to Earth with me in
Raphael
.”
Sebright shook his head. “That’s the wrong choice for you, Thack.”
“Why are you so sure?” He sighed. “You once tried to get me to tell you what it was like to be where we are now. You’re here now, and you still don’t seem to see it. I don’t know what waits for you at Sennifi and beyond. But I do know what waits for you on Earth. You’ve had a taste of it here on Cygnus, if only you’d realize it. Try to understand what it would mean to see this kind of change when you have an emotional investment. You think you’re going back because of Diana, but what you’re really trying to do is go home. But home isn’t there anymore.”
“I have to see for myself—”
“No. I’ve been watching you ever since you came on board
Tycho
. You’ve spent all of your life letting those around you define what you are and what you should do and how you should feel. Isn’t it time to take charge and do that for yourself? If you go back, it’s only because you’re desperate to go back to an environment that will treat you more gently than the Service has, flatter you and make you feel good about yourself again. But that environment isn’t Earth. It’s childhood, and there’s no getting back there. Your eyes are open now. You can’t forget what you’ve seen. Life is short, brutish, and unfair—but it’s the only game in town. If you ever try to run from it, it wins, and you lose. Don’t go to Earth, Thack. Go to Sennifi.”
Slowly Thackery raised his head until his eyes met Se-bright’s. “You’re the only one I would have accepted this from.”
“I know.” Thackery nodded, his eyes growing wet. “All right. Sennifi, then.”
Sebright nodded approvingly. “Then you’ll need one of these,” he said, holding out his hand and opening his fist. Lying on his palm was a black ellipse.
“How did you get that back from them?”
“I didn’t,” Sebright said. “It’s mine.” He stepped toward Thackery and pinned the insignia on his chest, above the tear in the fabric. Thackery looked down at it, then up at Sebright, and tried to speak, but his voice failed him. In the next moment, naturally and unselfconsciously, the two men fell into a long, emotional, and reassuring hug.
Thackery could not say for certain, but he thought it was the kind of hug a father would give a son.
MUNIN
Sennifi
The first time Thackery got a look at the Sennifi records, he understood perfectly why Neale had insisted on leading the followup mission:
<≠> Primary sun: 2 Aquilae
<≠> Planet: Type B4N (Fe-silicate-oxide crust/&8204;active core/&8204;N atm)
<≠> Highest lifeforms: (Dreyer hierarchy) Homo sapiens aquilae
<≠> Civilization: planet-wide, city-based, geoforming
<≠> Technological Scale Rating (preliminary): 7.48 <= > Social-Ethical Scale Rating (preliminary): 8.10
<≠> First contact:
Tycho Brahe
(USS-81), Cmdr. L. Tamm
∧
The key was in the last line: Neale could not pass up a chance for a final victory over an old rival.
As it turned out,
Tycho
had stayed at A-Cyg a full six months after
Descartes
’ departure. The first third of the delay was apparently due to the distractions of the base, the remainder by the installation of its Kleine system.
Tycho
’s Kleine was the first in the octant, trans-shipped aboard the first of the new packets and intended for the base itself, but placed on
Tycho
when the opportunity presented itself.
But after that bit of fortuitous timing,
Tycho
’s luck turned sour, and its log became a record of unparalleled futility. Every system they visited was painfully ordinary. Every planet they studied was completely lifeless, either an inhospitable gas giant or a radiation-seared rock nugget without so much as a protobacterium to call its own.
That track record made the unexpected sound of Sennifi’s planetary radio-band communications a compelling siren song. Skipping over the four inner planets of the 2 Aquilae system,
Tycho
had rushed to settle in orbit around Sennifi. Her linguists eavesdropped on the radio traffic, while her technoanalysts and anthropologists spied on the cities—sixty-eight in all, scattered through the lightly vegetated temperate zone. The physical scientists, forced for the first time to stand in line for instrument and processing time, grumbled but were ignored.
Then things started to go wrong. Without warning, the Sennifi transmitters fell silent, after the general form of the language had been identified but before much vocabulary or grammar could be deciphered. The population surveys gave erratic, ultimately contradictory results. And when a four-man contact landing team was set down outside one of Sennifi’s cities, they entered it to find it completely empty.
There were no signs of the disorder of an evacuation, and every sign of a city in use—except that there were no Sennifi. Yet the telecamera records from the last light of the evening before showed normal street traffic. The only conclusion possible was that the Sennifi had somehow known the team was coming, and had gone to great lengths to avoid meeting them.
In the grasp of both impatience and frustration, Tamm then made what proved to be a tactical blunder. By asking the Sennifi for permission to land the contact team at a site of their choosing, he gave them a chance to say “No.”
They said no. Firmly and unequivocally.
Nonplussed, Tamm appealed to A-Cyg for guidance. Guidance came back in cold tone and insulting detail. Finish geological and geopolitical mapping. Transmit all data back to A-Cyg. Continue on to the next system. After a cooling-off period, a special team will follow up on Sennifi.
It was a double blow to
Tycho:
having their sole discovery wrested from them, and locking in the ignominy of their failure to complete the contact. Together, they would likely seal forever her reputation as an unlucky ship.
Poor Lin Tamm—
It was not really his fault. Six times, USS ships had appeared in the skies above an FC colony to say, in effect, “Hello—we’re here—you’re not alone.” After a varying period of shock, the answer had always been, “By our gods, it’s good to see you!”
But the Sennifi had told
Tycho
, “We know. Go away.”
It was up to
Munin
to find out why.
“How long?” Thackery called anxiously across the bridge of
Munin
. The gravigator—the only other person present in the semi-darkened compartment—looked up blank-faced. “How long?” Thackery repeated. “Till we come out of this craze?” The gravigator checked his instruments unhurriedly. “Thirty minutes.”
“Not enough,” Thackery said under his breath, turning back toward his display screen. Scrutinizing the rows of green Sennifi symbols—each a logogram, much like in early Earth Chinese—he continued processing them though the linguacomp’s error-proofing program. The contact message had to be ready, and it had to be right. Unfortunately, Thackery was behind his self-imposed schedule, and the combined probability of error was holding at 19 percent—due, no doubt, to the limited Sennifi vocabulary bank with which he had been provided.
“Mass-touch on 2 Aquilae,” announced the gravigator over the shipnet. Thackery sighed and deleted a sentence from the message. The probability of error dropped encouragingly to 12 percent. Close, Thackery thought.
Better get it down to five
.
As he tinkered, the command crew began to appear on the bridge, manning stations that had sat unused throughout the 32-day craze. Captain Russell Cormican appeared presently and checked with each tech in turn, lingering at Navcon and Communication. For Thackery, he had only a single question: “Is the contact message ready?”
Thackery touched a key and a small “4.7%” disappeared from his display. “Yes,” he said with a hint of a triumph.
The captain nodded absently and moved on down the line.
A winded Dr. Amelia Koi appeared at the top of the climb-way and looked uncertainly around the compartment. Thackery beckoned the interpolator over.
“Where’s Commander Neale?” he asked as she neared him.
“The Commander is in her cabin,” Koi replied, settling her pert frame at the open station to Thackery’s right. “She asked to be called when we make Kleine contact with A-Cyg or radio contact with the Sennifi, whichever comes first. Speaking of which, did you get the contact message buttoned up?”
“After a fashion. But to get the level of confidence Neale wanted, I ended up making it very simple. Not much more than, ‘Hey—you—over there!’ ”
Koi’s answering smile was friendly. “How much longer?”
Thackery glanced at the clock. “Minute or two.”
“Good,” she said fervently.
Thackery caught the tone and realized she was avoiding looking at the two-metre wide bridge display centered above the tech stations. “You all right?”
“I’m one of the ’phobes,” she confessed. “I don’t like the craze. I know better, but I can’t stop thinking that the rest of the Universe is gone and not coming back.”
“Are you tranqed?” he asked sympathetically.
She pulled up her right sleeve so he could see the medipump. “Not enough.”
“There—Navcom just shut us down,” he said, nudging Koi and pointing past her to a display at the next station. “Here we go.”
“If the Universe doesn’t come back, I’m holding you personally responsible,” she said with a nervous smile.
Thackery looked expectantly at the imaging display, and when the dazzle cleared, found himself looking at a splendid golden planet mottled with lacy white cloud patterns. “Gorgeous,” he said.
As beautiful as any since Jupiter
, he added silently.
“It doesn’t look inhabited,” Koi said at his elbow.
“They never do,” said Thackery, surprised at her naivete. But a joking reproof went unsaid as he saw on her face the same anticipation and excitement he was happy to be feeling.
Thank you, Mark. This could be fun after all—
With his long gray caftan sweeping the ground and with his long smooth strides, J’ten Ron Tize seemed to flow, rather than walk across the chamber floor. His caftan bore on its hip the three golden slashes that marked his rank among the scholars: Tize, or “he of clear vision.” Waiting for him at the table beneath the highest point of the arched ceiling was the highest ranking scholar of Sennifi, wearing the four-slash green caftan that no other was permitted to wear.
“
Sekkh quit e’nom
,” said J’ten as he reached the table. His use of Paston’s Language marked the seriousness of the meeting. “They have returned, as I predicted.”
“There is no glory in the successful prediction of evil,” Z’lin Ton Drull chided gently. “Sit, J’ten.”
J’ten settled in the empty chair. “We were wrong to send their first envoys away. They do not follow the courtesies of Kemar. Now we have gained nothing—except perhaps their enmity.”
“Either your
ize
or your memory fails you, J’ten. They chose to leave. We could not have forced them to go. We have neither the means nor, I am afraid, the will. Not that it matters. You begin to forget what we were once like. They are like that now. They would come, and come, and come—.” The Drull seemed tired; his head seemed to teeter on his slender neck.
“They again ask to meet with us, to share knowledge.”
“And nothing has changed. We must refuse again. We cannot let them see what we are, know what we know.”
“Or become what we have become,” J’ten said softly.
“Yes,” Z’lin Ton Drull said slowly. “The knowledge would mark them, as it has us. And yet, what can we do?”
“May I presume—”
Z’lin gestured his approval.
“In these years, I have studied them, considered what might be done should they return. You are correct to say we cannot refuse them.
But there is another way
,” he said with surprising vehemence. “We are not yet reduced to cowering in their presence. We must test
their
will. If it is strong, then we must test their patience. But if we can make this refusal
theirs
, we may yet protect us both.”
The Drull was silent, thoughtful. “This is your
kam’ru
,” he said presently, naming the work of advancement. A
kam’ru
would be judged by the Council of Pad’on—three women and two men who had once held the rank of Drull.
