Enigma (28 page)
“Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“
Descartes
will be alongside in an hour.”
That interested Thackery enough to press the PAUSE button. “Have they posted crew assignments yet?”
“No. Do you mean they haven’t told you yet what they’re going to do with you?”
“They haven’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know. Neale’s going to continue on with
Descartes
, and I’m going to be sent back with
Munin
.”
“Well—at least you won’t have to deal with her anymore.”
“You will. You’ll be going over to
Descartes
.”
Guerrieri admitted sheepishly, “That’s kind of what I’m expecting. I haven’t had any problems with her, though. You’ve been kind of like a lightning rod—kept the rest of us safe.”
It was clearly meant as a joke, to relieve the astrophysicist’s embarrassment over what would in all likelihood be a very final separation. “Glad to have been of service,” Thackery said in similar spirit, but his mind was elsewhere. /
don’t know how to say good-bye to you, Derrel. We’ve skirted around the fringes offriendship, and I don’t know what that calls for. But there’s someone else to whom I know just what / want to say—
“Where arc you going?” Guerrieri asked, making Thackery aware that he had risen from the chair. “To see Neale. To say all the things I bit my tongue over at the inquiry.”
“Aw, Thack, why bother?”
“Because this is my last chance. And because I’ve got nothing to lose.”
When Neale’s cabin door opened, Thackery was pleased to see by her tousled hair and reddened cheek that his page had roused her from sleep.
“Tell me, are you incapable of learning shipboard etiquette, or do you just think it’s all a bore?” she asked icily.
“I want to talk to you.”
“Well, whatever Merry wants, Merry gets. Come in, come in,” she said sarcastically, stepping aside and gesturing with a sweeping motion of one arm. “What can I do for you?”
“You can stop calling me Merry, for one thing,” he snapped. “My name is Merritt Thackery. I’m not your son, or your pet, so if you want to address me you’ll use my given name and not invent new ones for me.”
“Forgive me—I didn’t realize that you were above nicknames,” she said, closing the door behind him.
“My friends are welcome to call me Thack.”
“And of course, you don’t count me among them.”
“You’re damned right I don’t.”
“Trying to display all your social failings,
Mr. Thackery?
Your attitude’s a bit lacking in command respect. If I were a disciplinarian like Cormican, I might be tempted to—”
“You’ve given up the right to respect by your conduct here.”
Neale laughed. “My conduct here? Which one of us stole a lifepod and made an unauthorized contact landing?”
“I didn’t ask for this post, and I wouldn’t have picked myself for it. You chose to leave a better man back at A-Cyg. If you’re not happy with my performance, you have only yourself to blame. Not that you’re very good at accepting blame. You ducked responsibility for what happened at Gnivi.”
“As your beloved mentor Mark Sebright took pains to point out to me, when a survey ship is in-system the Contact Leader is in charge. The blame for those two perfectly preventable deaths fell exactly where it belonged.”
“Is that why you enlisted me to help pressure him into an early landing? You were thinking about your career then and nothing else.”
“You didn’t have to say yes. And what do you claim to have been thinking about? The greater good of mankind? You were being just as self-serving as you say I was.”
“True. And I’m honest enough to admit it, and have conscience enough to regret it.”
“Oh, I see!
That
’s where you acquire your moral superiority—by wringing your hands after the fact. Now all we have to decide is where you lost your judgment. I hear you’re still pushing your D’shanna fantasy downship. Tell me, how long have you known you’re the only one gifted with the wisdom to point out our errors and save us from ourselves?”
“Dammit, I only want a fair hearing—”
“You had it. And if you keep identifying yourself with this nonsense, you just may invite a psychological evaluation and a fitness review.”
“Is that how you’ve decided to get rid of me?”
“I have no interest in ‘getting rid of’ you. You haven’t proven yourself particularly useful, but that’s hardly the basis for a vendetta.”
“I’m no use to you because I’ve found out what kind of person you are—a selfish, amoral opportunist—” She smiled slightly. “You need to be getting more sleep—fatigue is making you testy.”
“—who doesn’t belong in command of a survey ship.”
“I agree,” she said, nodding gravely. “As does the Flight Office, you’ll be pleased to hear. You see, Merry, I’ve been appointed to fill a vacancy on the FC Committee.”
Thackery’s eyes widened in dismay. “What?!”
“I knew you’d be pleased. Of course, I can’t discharge that responsibility and hold down a full-time ship billet at the same time. So I’ll be returning to A-Cyg in
Descartes
.”
“But
Descartes
is continuing on—”
“Oh, no, that was before this news. Now it’s
Munin
that’s continuing on. Oh, and Merry—you’ll also be pleased to know I recommended you for Contact Leader, and the Flight Office found that agreeable. So you’re staying
with Munin
, along with Commander Cormican and Dr. Koi and the rest of the science team—now the survey team. Except Kellerman, of course. You do have one body to spare, and I’m going to need a new executive assistant.”
“No!”
“Oh, yes. Oh, you’ll want to know that the clock goes back to zero for you. It’ll be a three-year tour contract, with no allowance for your time on
Descartes
. It’s only fair. Most of the crew is new, and we can’t let one or two individuals dictate the timetable of an entire survey ship, can we? I hope you enjoy your new assignment, Merry. I know I’m going to enjoy mine.”
The encounter left Thackery shattered and emotionally empty. Eventually he found himself standing outside the closed door of the science lab, without quite knowing why and without the will to either leave or enter.
Then the door opened and he was nearly run down by Barbrice Mueller, the young technoanalyst. “Mr. Thackery,” she said in surprise, and sidled past, leaving the door open for him.
At the mention of his name, Koi glanced toward the door from her station. Seeing the look in Thackery’s eyes, she left her work without a word.
“She did it to me again,” he said helplessly as she joined him.
“Let’s go to my cabin,” she urged, and he followed her suggestion docilely. Once there, he sat round-backed on the edge of her bed, staring down at the floor.
“You went to see Neale?”
“It was like arguing with Andra—and I never won those, either. I never even reached her.” He craned his head and found Koi, still standing, by her desk. “I don’t think I inhabit the same world as people like that.”
“Unfortunately, you do.”
“No, I mean it. It’s like there are two realities. In one, I screwed up at Gnivi and broke all the rules at Sennifi. In the other, I distinguished myself at both places and earned promotions.”
“History belongs to she who writes it.”
“But she had me set up. With the stunt I pulled, she didn’t even have to work hard to do it. Now I’m going to be Contact Leader on
Munin
.”
Koi showed no surprise at the announcement. “Her priorities have changed.”
“But after tearing me to pieces in front of Cormican, to transfer me to his crew—”
“She probably managed to make it look like the Flight Office’s doing. Look, she’s not doing you a favor. From her point of view, this is a better way to get rid of you. She can go back to A-Cyg and enjoy the fruits of your success, while making sure that you’re not around to compete for the credit. And if she publishes a second-species proposal, it’ll be all hers.”
“I thought you said she couldn’t cope with that idea.”
“She adjusted quickly. I did some poking around in her netlink’s activity register. She’s been looking into the whole history of the idea, back to Von Daniken himself.”
“I don’t understand. When I talked to her about this once before, she laughed it down, called it wishful thinking. Are you saying she believes me?”
Koi’s voice was gentle, soothing. “Maybe she believes you despite herself. Maybe she’s finally decided that the colony problem won’t be solved in her lifetime—which means that she wouldn’t be proven wrong in her lifetime, either. There are no serious second-species theorists. If she could pull something sound out of that pseudoscientific mishmash, that’d establish her as someone of substance on the committee. Or maybe she plans to write the definitive refutation of the second-species hypothesis—which might accomplish the same thing. Whatever her plans are, she’s going to make sure that you’re not around to gum them up.”
He shook his head despairingly. “I understand what she’s doing to me. I expected it, or something like it. But she’s hitting at you, too—why? Because you weren’t smart enough to keep your distance from me? She’s got no right to put you where you’re going to have to go through the craze time after time.”
Koi took a step toward him and tentatively stretched out her hand. “Don’t be angry with her about that.”
“I can’t help it.”
“No—I mean it. I requested the assignment.”
Beyond surprise, Thackery mustered only a feeble “Why?”
“The drugs make the phobia manageable. I think I can cope with it.”
“But why even try?”
“I want to go where you do.”
“I don’t understand.” She came and sat beside him, and he let her take his hands in hers. “Thack—I don’t know how to be shy about either part of this. Professionally, I find the possibility that you’re right more interesting than the probability that you’re wrong. And personally, I like you. I think you need an ally, a friend—. maybe a lover. I think maybe I could be all three.”
He wanted to warn her off, to make her understand how twisted and pointless his relationships with women had been.
They all wanted something from me—Andra, Diana, Neale—always wanted something more and gave so little back. I don’t even know you enough to know what it is you want. How can 1 trust you? How can I trust any of you?
But he also wanted her to hold him, to let her pull his head down to her shoulder, to have the comfort of her arms around him and her warmth close by. And in the end, that urge was stronger. He reached out to her, and found her embrace a better refuge than solitude or bitterness.
Only after the anger and frustration had drained from him did the embrace turn sexual. It did so fitfully, each of them self-conscious, neither of them certain that they were ready to face that complexity so quickly. Not surprisingly, they were awkward with each other, tentative and unsure. But for all that, their lovemaking was also tender and affectionate, a combination Thackery found he preferred over the memory of other more practiced partners. By the time they lay snuggled against each other afterward, her head resting on his chest, the self-consciousness was gone.
“What do you really want?” she asked, almost in a whisper. “If you were making all the decisions, what would you give yourself?”
He did not hesitate. “Operational command of a ship—so I could follow the trail wherever it leads.”
“Then work on it,” she urged him. “Figure out what angle will get them to go for it.” His finger traced its way lazily down to the warm hollow at the base of her spine. “Ships are too scarce, and they’re always going to be scarce. They’ll never turn one over to me.”
“No, of course they won’t,” she said, rolling over and propping her chin on her hands to look at him. “But they might commit one to a new strategy, if they thought it had potential. They’re looking down the road to Phase Three, and I can tell you on good authority that they have serious doubts whether they’ll be able to muster the ships and crews it will require. If you can make them believe you can make the search more efficient, they’ll listen.”
“But what I want to do would probably be less efficient—taking a ship out of the comprehensive search program to chase down loose ends.”
“That doesn’t matter until after the fact. Look, if the billet you want doesn’t exist yet, you have to try to get them to create it. You’ve got three years by our calendar, seventy or more by theirs to make your case, and then we’ll be back at A-Cyg and you can try to claim a place in whatever’s come of it.”
“But three years wasted—”
“They won’t be wasted. There’s a lot to do.”
He nodded and kissed her forehead. “I just wish I could somehow get my version of the Sennifi Contact into the record.”
“Already seen to,” she said with a mischievous smile. “It’s part of the anecdotal sociology file in the scientific dispatch. Neale won’t catch it, and the Analysis Office won’t make much of it—but it’ll be there when you need to go back and point to it.”
Cocking his head, he gazed at her fondly. “You’re really looking after me, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to try,” she promised. “I’m going to try.”
The Lesson of Delphinus
Though he had been aboard
Munin
nearly two months, Thackery had never been in Cormican’s quarters until called there the first morning out from Sennifi. He found the compartment spartan, practical, and uncluttered, more a place to sleep and bathe than a personal living space. That reflected the long hours required by the man’s command style, which was to make individual Contact with every member of the operations crew at least once in the course of a four-shift, 24-hour cycle.
After admitting Thackery, Cormican retreated to the doorway to the bathroom, where he resumed shaving his stubble-darkened jowls. “I don’t make a habit of going out of my way to have private conversations on professional matters,” he said without preamble. “If I can’t say what I have to in front of anyone who might be around, I figure I probably don’t need to say it at all. But I thought we should get a few things settled before any more time passed. You’ve got a lot of experience, Merritt, a lot more than me, but the fact is, you don’t seem to have picked up any good sense along the way.”
“Go on.”
“The fact is, I don’t believe in heroes, and I’ve got no time for grandstanders. People in positions of authority don’t have more freedom than the people they supervise, they have less. That’s the price of responsibility. The more there is at stake, the more cautious you have to be. Am I coming through?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then you understand that I’m not impressed with results. What I mean is, they won’t keep me from looking at what was done to get them and sounding off if I don’t like what I see. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always more than one way to achieve a goal, and I expect you to take the path of least risk. Clear?”
“Very.”
“Now, this business back at 2 Aquilae—you did make a breakthrough, but we’d eventually have found out what the Sennifi were all about some other way, without stretching the Protocols past the limit. I’ll tell you this, I’d damn well not have let you off with a verbal reprimand. I’d have paid off your contract and sent you packing. But that’s past and this is present, so I’ll say no more about it. That goes for the rest of your disagreements with Commander Neale. I’m not an appeals court. I can’t change any of her decisions, and I’m not interested in hearing arguments on why I should try.”
“I didn’t intend to offer any.”
“Good. You make sure you understand this—you pull that kind of stunt under my command and you’ll find yourself on a nice desert planet with a canteen and a canister of protein paste, waving good-bye as we craze. I won’t have it, you understand? I won’t have it. By the Protocols, Concom Thackery. And if you get into a gray area, you come tell me what you’re going to do and why. No surprises. I hate surprises.”
“By the numbers,” Thackery acknowledged.
“All right. I’ve had my say. Now you take your shot, and make sure you get it all, because I don’t want to be sorting this out halfway to Deneb.”
Thackery shook his head. “I don’t have much to say. What you described is exactly how I want to work. I should tell you I intend to make rehearsal landings at the first opportunity, on worlds where the risk is minimal. There’s a big difference between training and reality, and I want the contact team to know that right up front. I also want them to learn the limitations of orbital surveying. You have any problems with that policy?”
Cormican twice ran his fingers back through his thinning silver hair as he considered. “No. That seems prudent,” he pronounced at last. “Fact is, if it goes well, I’d like to see if we couldn’t get everybody down at least once in the course of this mission—techs, awks, the whole crew. Seems to me that standing on an alien planet ought to be part of the payoff for giving up a normal life. We ought to send them all back with at least one good story for their descendants, don’t you think? And I’d hate to see anybody get the idea that the survey team is better somehow, that they get all the privileges and perks. What do you say to that?”
Thackery did not welcome the prospect of looking after what amounted to tourists, but it was too early and the ground too soft for a pitched battle. “I say the gig is rated for six people,” Thackery said, “which is two more than we’ll routinely take to the surface. Those seats are at your disposal.”
“Good. Maybe we’ll be able to work with each other after all.”
“I hope so.”
Munin
’s first stop was 26 Sagittae, a cool red M-class dwarf too dim to be seen even from A-Cyg without optical aid. By the time she came out of the craze there, Thackery had completed what he expected to be merely the first installment of a continuing series of theses and position papers, this one an overview entided PHASE ID ALTERNATIVES: THE CASE FOR SELECTIVE SURVEYING.
Oh the bridge to supervise a priority dispatch of the paper, Thackery was among the first on board to learn from the update dispatch that while the ship had been out of touch an eleventh colony had been added to the human community. At the earliest opportunity, he and Koi curled up together on his bed to review the Liam-Won contact report.
“All I’ve heard was that it was the
Edwin Hubble
,” she said, tugging at the slate he held so that she could read its display.
“The colony’s on a free-water planet orbiting 85 Monocerous.”
“What kind of spectrum on the primary?”
“F5 HI.”
“That’s right on the Galactic equator,” she said, noting the celestial coordinates. “A very popular choice this season. So is Gnivi. So is Sennifi.”
“Actually, that’s seven colonies in or near the plane of the Galaxy, with only two colonies each in the whole northern and southern galactic hemisphere,” she mused. “There might be a case there for focusing the Phase III search in the plane, maybe pulling ships out of the Bootes and Eridanus octants.”
“Tech rating of 3.1,” he read. “Another Bronze Age civilization.”
“That’s four in that range.”
“Another very popular model. Yelp if you see anything new—I’m beginning to think I’ve seen it all before.” They scanned the remainder of the summary at a fairly fast scroll, then laid the slate aside and reflected. “What’s your gut feeling?” Thackery asked. “Have we found most of the colonies, or just scratched the surface?”
“It would be easier to say if we had any idea what the FC starships were like.”
“Is that the only answer you’re going to give me?”
“No. That’s the excuse that comes before the answer. I suspect we’ve found almost all of them. I’ve always thought of forty light-years as about the outside limit for most of the possible non-AVLO technologies, and most of our ships are pushing that now.”
“And when we’ve found them all and we still don’t know any more than we do now—”
“I thought you were counting on the D’shanna sorting it all out.”
“You don’t expect me to not think about it until then, do you?”
“If you’re so jaded about having a live, warm woman in your bed that you’re so easily distracted—” A sharp poke in the ribs interrupted her teasing. “Don’t you know, I’m attracted to you for your brains, not your body?” She sat up, shucked off her blouse, and struck a pouty, bare-breasted pose. “Really?” That precipitated a forty-minute interruption that was as much playful as passionate.
“I was serious, though,” he said when they settled back into a more restful embrace. “How much more do we really know now than we did just after
Jiadur
reached Earth? Not a hell of a lot. In fact, the problem’s worse now than it was then. Every colony we find makes it that much harder to believe that the FC civilization just up and vanished. The farther each new colony is from Earth, the harder it is to explain how they accomplished the colonization. I think our search has been too narrow in scope. The answer has to lie outside ourselves.”
She shook her head. “I can’t agree. The difference between one colony and ten is incremental. But the gap between a planet—bound civilization and an interstellar one is several orders of magnitude. You’re just experiencing a kind of delayed incredulity. If the Forefathers could do it once, they could do it a dozen times. If they could reach Journa, they could reach Sennifi.”
“Whereupon they abandoned any traces of the level of technology required to get them there.”
“You mean that the colonies lack spaceflight capability? What point was there in retaining it once they reached a suitable planet? And they wouldn’t have had the technological base to sustain it. There’s a limit to how much you can bring with you, even in a starship the size of
Jiadur
.”
“If they had starships at all.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just that I don’t find any of the alternatives convincing. If they used small slowships, then how did they manage to live long enough to start colonies this far out? If they used generation slowships, then why haven’t we found at least some remnant or wreckage of something that large? And if they used fastships, why isn’t that level of technology reflected in the colonies they founded?”
“The colonies
had
to fall back to a simpler lifestyle. You can’t expect them to start their new society at the same level as the one they left.”
“Of course not—but it’s been thousands of years since then. The knowledge base that they brought with them should have put at least some of the colonies on our level by now.”
“That’s a fair argument,” she conceded.
“Here’s another. Consider it from the point of view of the FC civilization. How many ships did they send out? How many
could
they before we have to think that, glacier or no, they’d have to have been so large and so powerful as to necessarily leave some traces? There’s another variable that’s even more disturbing. Did every ship survive to start a colony? Highly unlikely. Then is there one colony for every ten ships that set out, or one for every hundred? That gets us into some very difficult numbers.”
“So let’s hear some answers.”
“I’m only good at the questions,” he admitted. “That’s why this whole tiling is going to make me crazy.”
26 Sagittae offered only a pair of small moonlike planetoids, suitable for rehearsal landings but of no other value. Thackery went on both landings, nominally to supervise the command crew hitchhikers. His real purpose was to flesh out his Service record as favorably as possible; each landing was entered as a discrete item, while he received no specific credit for directing a landing in which he did not take part.
So he continued the practice in the next system and the next, stretching the definition of a suitable planet from min-E to E-1 and even E-2 where necessary. Hard work and Koi’s company made the time go fast. After each craze, he would send out the latest addendum to his growing treatise on high-probability searches. Only once was there any explicit response, and that was a copy of another paper refuting most of the points in Thackery’s last exposition. He shrugged it off and proceeded to refute the refutation.
As the count on his personal scorecard climbed into double figures the worlds he had seen and walked all began to merge together in his mind. Was the patterned tundra ground they briefly mistook for evidence of human engineering on 27 Sagittae-5 or 5 Serpens-5? Was it 61 Aquilae-6 which had the great white kaolinite plains? Where was it that Barrister nearly put us down in a bog?
Only Thackery’s growing collection of memorabilia kept the record clear. There was one object from each landing: the Gnivian fertility icon, a scrimshaw-like mosaic tile pried from the plaza on Sennifi, a spike-leaved flower (encased in a block of clear preservative) picked on 12 Vulpeculae-6, a chunk of glittery itacolumite from 26 Sagittae, and more—each with the standard A.R. date on which he acquired them engraved on the underside.
They were his memory crutches, without which he doubted he would remember in detail much more than the two contact landings. Rehearsal landings and survey landings alike were, by necessity, made on worlds which fell into a narrow range of all possible worlds. He was not geologist enough to read a planet’s morphology and see not just a landscape but an unfolding drama, nor biologist enough to see in each organism a unique natural history and ecology. He knew that those things existed, and learned of them through the team, but even so, the worlds without man made little impression on him. Until 61 Delphinus-5.
Afterward, Thackery blamed himself. He had not conducted the time-consuming prescribed inspection of his E-suit after each decontamination procedure. In retrospect, he knew that the right glove had gone on too easily as he dressed for the landing on Del-5. That was the telltale sign of a degraded binding ring. That should have been all the warning he needed.
But the string of unremarkable landings on forgettable worlds had made him casual about safety and contemptuous of the risk. After sixteen planetfalls, he had come to regard the descent and ascent as the only potentially dangerous part of the landing ritual.
Del-5’s largest continent had a drier climate than might have been expected on a planet four-fifths covered by water, but a range of rugged, geologically new mountains along the eastern coast stripped most of the moisture from the prevailing sea breeze. Nevertheless, the interior savanna was home to a variety of simple lifeforms, some plant-like, some animal-like, and some of uncertain classification.
The most interesting of the last group were the colorful, lichen-like autotrophs which clung to the near-vertical surfaces of crumbling volcanic dikes and sills throughout one 500-hectare region. What made them interesting was that they were motile, migrating slowly across the barren rock in the course of each day, trying to avoid being caught in the shadows.
Though a full study of Del-5’s ecology and of the autotrophs’ niche would have to wait for later visitors, Norris was set on adding one of the creatures to
Munin
’s storehouse of geological and biological samples. Capturing one for examination meant a bit of rock-climbing, however, since the most accessible ground the team spotted while scouting in the gig was some sixty metres up on the side of a well-weathered scarp.
It was Thackery who volunteered to accompany Norris on the hunt. Together they went scrambling up the sloping talus pile of rock litter to the bottom of the sunbattered rock face on which the creatures were arrayed. The talus was composed of fine bits of weathered quartzite, banked to the limit of the local gravity, and the climbers started minor landslides with each step.
