Enigma (40 page)

The cities of the mountains were anchored to the rock side walls of their valleys with cables of tantalum, each shell gliding in place on its runners and clinging to those around it as the glacier slid by underneath. By that means they held station with the honeycomb of mines from which one city extracted coal, another tantalite, and a third ortholite. Gasified, the coal provided the energy to warm the shells and run the myriad engines. The tantalite and ortholite together had built the cities, the former yielding the metals used where stress or heat was greatest, the latter the catalyst for the icesteel used everywhere else.

Seeing them, he could no longer think of them as the FC. The name was hollow and faceless, a linguistic convenience inadequate to their humanity.
What did you call yourselves?
he asked, but his seeing was too unskilled for him to have an answer.
The Weichsel was the last of the Pleistocene glaciations—the name belongs to your time, at least, if not to you. You are the Weichsel
.

The Weichsel had not fled south ahead of the ice but had adapted to it. The adaptation had taken two thousand years; the glaciation had now lasted ten thousand. In the face of it, they had retained their culture, their staunch meliorism, and their sense of community. But they had been forced to give up something in exchange: horizons. With the food resources limited, the cities could not grow. With material resources limited, their technology was frozen. It would be that way until the ice retreated.

The one horizon lay overhead, in the night sky. The Weichsel learned of hotter suns and warmer worlds, and yearned for freedom from the bondage of the ice. In time, there came a generation for whom yearning was not enough.

And it was they who built the iceships.

Amy—Derrel—I’m sorry. You were right
.

But only partly so, Thackery learned as he watched. The iceships did not go out in clusters attached to a single mother ship. Each iceship was an entity to itself, attached only to a great interstellar bus which was little more than a great block of icesteel encasing the hardware of propulsion.

For what the Weichsel could make, they could also unmake. Using solar heat to begin the process, and chemical catalysis to continue it, the icesteel reaction mass was reduced to hydrogen and oxygen. In perfect proportion, fuel and oxidizer flowed through tantalum tubing to an array of combustion chambers, where pressure switches and spark generators turned them into the explosive pulses which drove the iceships up out of orbit and toward the stars.

But that was not what struck Thackery dumb with awe. That was not what made a mockery of the exploits of the Service and the putative courage of its surveyors.

For the Weichsel had learned not only how to live on the ice, but had been forced to learn how to live through it. Despite their best efforts, over the centuries the pressure on the population of the cities had continued. A lesser culture might have clamped a firmer public hand on private matters of reproduction, or consigned the excess infants to the glacier. But in their mastery of chemical polymorphism, the Weichsel had found a way to make room for the new young.

In every city, there were dozens of shells which held nothing but bodies—the cold bodies, not of the dead, but of the waiting. The water of their cells, though supercooled, had not frozen. The blood in their veins, though sluggish, had not stopped flowing. Their hearts beat once a minute, their minds dreamed languid dreams. They were fathers, mothers, and just ordinary people, stepping aside in favor of the new generation, and then waiting for the sun to grow warm again.

And it was thus that the Weichsel made their journey. Each crew of twelve chose its own destination star according to its own criteria, then boarded an iceship and settled in for the coldsleep with the gray wolves they regarded not as pets but as companions. It was audacity that powered their ships, Thackery thought, the audacious confidence which allowed them to set off believing that somewhere, sometime, the warmth of another sun would awaken the engines of both the ship and their bodies. And the knowledge that, for many, their journey would end otherwise raised rather than lowered Thackery’s profound esteem for them.

So it was with both shock and horror that Thackery watched the black star enter the solar system and rain death on the cities of the Forefathers.

The moon-sized ebony sphere with the indistinct surface was not a star, and yet he could not find another name by which to describe it. Nor could he name or even categorize the weapon, except by its effect. As though it were tuned to their resonant frequencies, the intruder’s weapon splintered the Weichsel structures, then vaporized the splinters. A filthy gray steam rose in great clouds, and the ground shook as the Weichsel cities fell. One orbit sufficed to destroy that which had survived all challenge for millennia.

On the second orbit, those humans who had not drowned in the sudden floods or been perforated by exploding icesteel found themselves torn apart from inside by energies they could neither feel nor flee. The blood of an entire civilization ran together to tint the newborn rivers red. Nor were the Weichsel the only life affected. Everywhere the great beasts were falling, mastodon and cave lion, megatheroid and dire wolf, glyptodont and short-faced bear. And when the black star left and the clouds vanished, the places which the Weichsel had called home were bare and dead.

–Why?– After witnessing the carnage, even mustering the control to ask that simple, poignant question was an all-consuming effort for Thackery.

=For that answer, we must go elsewhere.

To Thackery’s relief, they began to move uptime again. But the sight of the gallant Weichsel restored to life was hollow and bittersweet, for there was no erasing the memory of what lay in their future.

=That one, Merritt Thackery, Gabriel said, directing Thackery’s attention to a departing iceship. =The answer lies with that one.

Crossing the spindle at an angle that carried them both downtime and across space, the D’shanna and the human followed the tiny Weichsel iceship through the void. As they left Earth behind, the vividness of what Thackery had seen mercifully began to fade as his consciousness edited away the intolerable details. But he could not stop thinking about it or, when he grew stronger, talking about it.—Gabriel—did they all die?

=There was a great dying.

–But not the plants—the sea animals—the equatorial life—

=The sudden changes pressured many. Most survived.

–But none like me.

=No.

–Then how did there come to be people there again? Did one of the iceships return?

=No. Men returned to Earth because, at long last, I ceased only to watch.

–You?– The query was colored by both wonder and gratitude.

=When the colonies were strong enough to give back to their home world. It was a difficult thing for both them and us. Many died, and their deaths created a great disturbance in the spindle, a disturbance which began the migration of the D’shanna into the far uptime and which weakened me greatly. Those who did not die lost coherence and memory. When they weakened I brought more, until in time they bred and survived. They were your Forefathers, not those who lived in the cities of ice.

The tiny-ship and its frozen cargo raced on, until it neared a place where five suns whirled in a graceful ballet: greater twins at the center, so close they nearly touched, and orbited by a lesser trio. The iceship’s engines, facing the brightest of the suns, began to slow her, and its crew began to stir.

But before they could even have discerned whether the complex system before them harbored planets, a black star rose up from the neighborhood of the twins to meet it. The encounter was brief, silent, and telling. One moment the iceship was diving toward the system, the engines giving it an orange halo as they contributed their braking force. An eyeblink later it had been reduced to a spreading cloud of disassociated molecules which glittered prettily in the light of the five suns.

Thackery cried out in pain and turned away. Why the loss of a single ship cut him more deeply than the ravaging of all Earth he did not clearly understand even later, except perhaps because it was the second blow. But at that moment, he was consumed by an excruciating dolor.

–They were so close—

=This happened first,= Gabriel said. =This is what led to the greater dying.

–There was no reason, no need…

=You have seen the reason.

–For trespassing?

=For invading. As they did once. As you stood ready to do again.

–Why? Where are they now? Where are the Sterilizers?

=Where they have always been.

–Where is that?

=Look. You know the place.

Compelled despite himself, Thackery dragged himself back uptime and watched again as the Weichsel ship neared its destruction. A double star orbited by a triple—

He drew back along the ship’s line of approach and considered a larger volume of the matter-matrix. Close by was another bright binary, and far beyond a delicate whirlpool of stars. A spiral galaxy, viewed from above, the most spectacular vantage—
but there are galaxies in every direction. Have / seen this one before, or does the clarity of seeing deceive me with false familiarity—That’s M101—

–Gabriel—I do know this place. Gabriel, you have to tell them.

=If you have seen, then I have told them.

–You have to stop them.

=How, Merritt Thackery? How can I quell this impulse in your kind, that rises up again and again? After all this time, I still do not understand you, what drives you.
You
must stop them. If I knew the way, it would be long done. I have done everything I am able to. I stopped the Sennifi. I stopped the Wenlock, too well as you saw. Yet even as I saw to it that there was no danger from the colonies, you came out again from Earth. There are too many of you, and I am much diminished now. You must stop them. I have stayed here amidst the disturbances which I created too long already. I cannot do it. To bring you here and teach you is my last service. Through the spindle, you have the ear of all your kind. You must stop them, Merritt Thackery. It is why I touched you. It is why you came here. You must stop them.

Gabriel’s insistent repetitions battered at Thackery until he was forced to close himself off, to shut down the new senses he had only just learned how to use. There was too much power in the D’shanna’s ideograms, the waves of energy too threatening to his coherence. He turned away and folded himself into a ball of cold light as tenuous and fragile as a soap bubble. But as he huddled there, keenly aware of his mortality, he sensed Gabriel’s resonance enveloping him, cocooning him once more.

And when Thackery at last felt strong enough to unfold again and look around him, it was the inside of Dove’s drive core that he welcomed back with joyful tears.

For a long time, Thackery did nothing but shake inside his E-suit and cling with an iron grip to the reassuring solidity of the drive core bus conduit. His body was numb and unfamiliar, yet his nerves jangled with intense sensory messages.

While he struggled to reassert control over his physical self, Thackery was also fighting wave after wave of unchecked primal emotion. Bound to the spindle, he had had no outlet for the intense feelings evoked by what he had seen and heard there. Without a physical existence through which to cry, shout, strike out, or flee, the normal homeostatic mechanisms were short-circuited.

Now those bottled emotions broke over him in concert, terror and awe, anger and grief. Later, Thackery would wonder if that were not the explanation for what happened to the unprepared who found themselves in Gabriel’s universe. Strong emotions could be debilitating enough in the matter-matrix world. On the spindle, they were a short road to death or madness.

But for the present, Thackery simply clung to his handholds in a state of agitation for which he had no name. He kept seeing the black star and the Earth wearing a deathmask of gray steam, and the glittery remnant of the Weichsel iceship.

Presently the blue glow still dancing over the drive core reminded him of
Munin
, and he came to understand that the presence of the intrusive energies meant that Gabriel was still in control, slowing
Dove
and bringing her to a second rendezvous with her sister ship. “Did you get it?” he paged eagerly. “Amy? Gwen? Derrel? Did you see? Did you tear?”

There was no answer, and Thackery’s mercurial spirits fell precipitously. If
Munin
were not close enough to hear him and answer now, then
Dove
must have kept her distance throughout Thackery’s time on the spindle.
Or did it matter? Would the suit cameras or transceiver have relayed anything of what I experienced?

That line of thought led Thackery to wonder how long his communion with Gabriel had lasted. Subjectively, there had been no reliable indicator of time, and even recalling the sequence of events he could not say how much time they seemed to require. The suit chronometer showed something less than two hours had passed, which jibed with the healthy oxygen and water reserves reported by the environmental monitors. But he could not say how much of that time he had spent cowering after his return, or even be confident his body had stayed behind while his consciousness had crossed over.

Unable to cope with the uncertainty required to further pursue the question, Thackery shifted his attention to more concrete matters. His body was still conspiring to overload him with input—the variation in temperature between his torso and feet, the smell of his own fear-sweat, the hundred
¹
and one places the suit bound or chafed or pressed against his skin. It was as though every set of nerve endings which he had learned through years of living to ignore was suddenly clamoring for attention.

Trying to give his thoughts focus, Thackery repeated his call to
Munin
. There was no response.
If only some of this power were available for the ship’s systems—then maybe they could hear me—

The idea of asserting himself by taking action, even in pursuit of such an unlikely goal, appealed enough to Thackery to loosen his grip on the conduit and send him out into the climbway and down. Though each step, each individual volitional movement, seemed to require a distinct decision, his progress filled him with confidence all out of proportion to the achievement.

Three bodies were drifting free on E deck, all bearing stomach-turning witness to the sudden decompression
Dove
had undergone. Barely aware of what he was doing, Thackery brushed past the corpses and moved toward the contact lab. The lab was deserted, the equipment intact but inert.

There was one last possibility. The gig should be undamaged, and its communication systems were far more powerful than an E-suit’s. If there were still power, he might reach
Munin—

Returning to the climbway, Thackery continued his deliberate descent. From there he could see that the pressure hatch at the foot of the climbway was sealed.

It took nearly five minutes to manually retract the outer hatch and enter the dress-out compartment. There he found the suit racks full, and two more bodies, both wearing blissful expressions that suggested a quiet drug-aided death.

Thackery pressed on into the gig bay, where dozens of pieces of equipment loosened from their tiedowns by the collision floated in the open spaces. He made his way through them to the gig itself, which he found still held a pressure-normal atmosphere.

It had also retained the bodies of two men and three women. This time Thackery could not help but take note of their open-eyed stares and shrunken, gangrenous skin. Cocooned in the protective shell of the gig, the corpses had had days or even weeks to decompose before the systems failed and slowly falling temperatures halted the process. Thackery did not even trouble to try the gig radios; it was clear that the gig’s final task had exhausted its power generators. Fighting a rising gorge, Thackery fled the gig and the bay.

As revolting as they were, the corpses were as a bright light to Thackery’s mental fog. In their blank, decayed faces he saw Jael and Mike, lying dead on the boards of a Gnivian dray, hanging naked from the branches of a wax tree. The emotional jolt of that reminder awakened Thackery’s somnolent faculties.
None of this matters
, he chided himself as he climbed upship.
Why are you avoiding what does?

The blue light still filled the drive core, but Thackery climbed past it until he reached the open expanse of the edrec deck, where he used a short tether to secure himself. Only then did he begin to try to come to grips with the responsibility with which Gabriel had charged him.

He soon began to wonder whether his earlier dimness hadn’t been a defense against thinking about what seemed an insolvable problem. Yes, the Kleine would allow Thackery to reach the other twenty-four survey ships. But that was meaningless, for he did not have anything approaching the authority to recall them. Only the Central Flight Office could do that, or the Chairman of the FC Committee above it, or the Director of the Service above it.

What all three had in common was that they were based at Unity, a fifty light-year craze away. Would
Munin
’s log records of the encounter with
Dove
be enough to persuade them to call a halt? Thackery decided it would have as much impact as throwing a marshmallow at an advancing tank. He did not even know yet if he would be able to convince Amy and Derrel, his closest friends and the nearest witnesses.

Hell—I barely can believe it myself, and I’m the one that has to do the convincing. If I wanted to, I could probably persuade myself that I’m suffering from a nasty shock to my nervous system and the disorientation that goes with it. I can’t even prove to myself that that experience was real
.

Those thoughts reflected despair, not real self-doubt. Just as he had admitted, Gabriel clearly did not understand the human mind. The D’shanna did not realize that human communication was not restricted to true thought, or that others Thackery tried to tell would require proof. Waiting for the welcome sound of
Munin
’s page, Thackery started numerous imaginary conversations, none of which he could make end satisfactorily.

(Supervisor, there’s an alien species inhabiting the Mizar-Alcor system which poses a threat to all the human settlements.)

(Very interesting theory. Any evidence?)

(There’s my testimony on the subjective out-of-body experience I had aboard a derelict survey ship, culminating a period of erratic behavior that began when I threatened to lock up one of my officers—)

(Next!)

On top of all the other problems, the unhappy fact was that Thackery could not even be sure that the Sterilizers were still in, or only in, the Mizar system. What if, just like humans had, they had gone through a period of expansion? What if they were now scattered all through the Ursa Major Cluster, or even farther afield? If so, then any ship could stumble on them—not just in Lynx, but in any neighboring octant. It’s been twenty thousand years or more. Where might they have gone in that time?

(Chairman, you have to recall all the survey ships.)

(Why is that?)

(Because the Sterilizers could be anywhere.)

(Well, now, that seems a little extreme. I’ll tell you what, we’ll just send a ship on out where they were last to collect some more data—)

No, that would not do. The survey ships had to be recalled, or someday they would find—and arouse—the Sterilizers again. Thackery had witnessed their savagery, and knew that there could be no halfway measures, no investigations, no studies, no indecision. That meant that the person he had to deal with was the Director. That way Thackery would only have one performance to give, only one person to persuade. The Director was the highest authority in the Service; decisions bearing that office’s stamp were final.

Now, if I only knew who the current Director was
, Thackery thought, and laughed sardonically. The Director’s authority reached out into the Service’s operating theater impersonally, through channels—the same channels Thackery was determined to bypass. The last Director Thackery had taken note of by name was Anton LeGrande, and that only because it was LeGrande’s name which appeared on Thackery’s commission.

His ignorance on the subject was not a source of concern. Accessing a complete biography of the Director would be a matter of only a few seconds with
Munin
’s library. But Thackery’s thoughts kept returning to an obstacle that did concern him: space itself.

Whoever the Director was, Thackery would have to make his case with him through the Kleine. That was a far from ideal situation; though the lag was only a matter of a few minutes, it was enough to kill off the rapport and feedback a real-time link provided. But there was no other way. Thackery could not even consider taking
Munin
back to Unity for a face-to-face encounter. The ships were already too far out for that. Every second
Munin
was traveling inbound, the other ships would be forging farther and farther into unexplored regions, at terrible risk. It had to be the Kleine. As Gabriel had warned, time was short.

Gabriel
—Thackery had a momentary impulse to blame Gabriel for not arming him with some bit of knowledge so compelling that no one could fail to believe him. That was followed by an equally brief urge to blame himself for failing to ask the right questions—the location of the undiscovered colonies, or the exact year of the Sterilization, or some less dramatic but more readily verifiable fact which he could not have learned except through Gabriel.

But he quickly saw that both impulses were wrong-headed. In his own way, Gabriel was as limited in what he knew as was Thackery. Gabriel had all of time and space open to him—but he was not omniscient. As powerful as he had seemed, he knew only that which he had sought to learn and then made a part of his pattern. To know all there was to know about the Universe, Gabriel would have to
become
the Universe.

As for himself, Thackery found it hard to envision what he could say that would have the desired impact.
How can I ever make them believe me? I feel as helpless to stop us as Gabriel did. I can’t take the Director where I’ve been, and 1 don’t have the first bit of tangible evidence. How can I make anyone believe?

And even as he thought the question, he suddenly saw a way—a way so simple, so certain of success that he wondered why he had not devised it sooner.
He has to do it. He owes me
. Suffused with hope, Thackery unhooked his tether and started back down the climbway once more.

The glow in the drive core had grown pale and weak, and fluctuated alarmingly as it coursed around its path. Thackery stood where he had stood the first time and called out, “Gabriel! I need to talk to you.” When nothing happened, he moved to the gap in the damaged core and bravely placed his hand in the flux. For a moment, he stood straddling the two realities.—Gabriel!

=I am here, Merritt Thackery.

Thackery was shocked at Gabriel’s appearance. The sharp definition and strong amplitude of his inner resonances were almost completely gone. Thackery formed the most perfect namepattern he was capable of for the D’shanna and sent it in Gabriel’s direction. When it was received and absorbed, Gabriel seemed to flicker, then reformed into a better likeness of Thackery’s memory.

–I need your help, Gabriel.

=Your ship and companions are near. You will rejoin them soon.

–Not that. Something else, Gabriel.

Thackery made the name the center of every thought, and each time he did the D’shannan grew incrementally stronger.

=Show me.

–Gabriel—when I transfer back to
Munin
, I want you to take
Dove
to Earth through the spindle, the way you did the Weichsel for the reseeding.

–No, Merritt Thackery. I cannot.

–Why, Gabriel?

=Look at me, Merritt Thackery. Look at me. You ship has great mass. It would have been a difficult task for me then. I am too weak to even attempt it now.

–Gabriel—are you dying?

=I need the sharing of other D’shanna. As soon as you have rejoined your kind, I must go downtime.

Thackery thought furiously. The
Dove
was a unique and unmistakable artifact—to have it suddenly transported fifty light-years, to have it disappear from the screens of
Munin
and reappear moments later in the skies of Earth, would have given Thackery’s message all the credibility that it required.

But the bodies downship were likewise unique and unmistakable, and could serve the same purpose. Eagerly he posed the question.

The answer came back tinted a ruddy red. = No, Merritt Thackery. You have lessened the task, but you have not strengthened me. When I have brought
Dove
to its rendezvous, I will have only enough coherence remaining to reach the D’shanna downtime. I have stayed too long and done too much already.