by David Brin
John E. Pfeiffer
21. DEJA PENSE
“Have you ever wondered why most of our starships jump out with crews that are seventy percent female?”
Helene handed Jacob the first liquitube of hot coffee and turned back to the machine to punch out another for herself.
Jacob peeled back the outer seal on the semi-permeable membrane, allowing steam to escape while keeping the dark liquid contained. The liquitube was almost too hot to hold, in spite of its insulation.
Trust Helene to think up another provocative topic! Whenever they were alone together, as alone as one could get on the open deck of a Sunship, Helene deSilva had. never missed a chance to engage him in mental gymnastics. The odd thing was that he didn’t mind a bit. The contest had lifted his spirits considerably since they had left Mercury ten Hours before.
“When I was an adolescent, my friends and I never really cared about the reasons. We just thought it was an added bonus for being a male on a starship. ‘Of such thoughts are pubescent fantasies born…’ Who was it who wrote that, John Two-Clouds? Have you ever read anything by him? I think he was born in High London, so you may have known his parents.”
Helene sent him an accusing glare. Jacob had to fight back, for the nth time, a temptation to tell her that the expression was endearing. It was, but what fully-grown female professional wanted to be reminded that she still had dimples? It wasn’t worth getting a broken arm, anyway.
“Okay, okay,” he laughed. “I’ll stay on the subject. I suppose the male-female ratio has to do with the way women respond better to high acceleration, heat and cold… better hand-eye coordination and superior passive strength. That must make them better spacemen, I guess.”
Helene sipped from the siphon of her liquitube. “Yes, all that’s part of it. Also more fems appear to be more immune to Jump-sickness. But you know those differences aren’t all that big. Not enough to make up for the fact that more males volunteer for spaceflight than females.
“Besides, more than half of the crewmen on in-system ships are male, and seven out of ten on military craft.”
“Well, I don’t know about commercial or research ships, but I’d think that the military selects for an aptitude for fighting. I know it’s still not proven, but I’d guess that…”
Helene laughed. “Oh, you don’t have to be so diplomatic, Jacob. Of course mels make better fighters than fems… statistically that is. Amazons like me are the exception. Actually, that is one factor in the selection. We don’t want too many warrior types aboard a star-ship.”
“But that doesn’t make sense! The crews on starship go out into an immense galaxy that hasn’t even been fully explored by the Library. You have to face a wild variety of alien races, most of them temperamental as hell. And the Institutes don’t forbid fighting among the races. They couldn’t even if they tried, judging by what Fagin says. They only try to make it tidy.”
“So a starship with humans aboard should be ready for a fracas?” Helene smiled as she rested her shoulder against the wall of the dome. In the mottled red light of the upper chromosphere in hydrogen alpha, her blonde hair looked like a close fitted ping cap. “Well you’re right, of course. We do have to be ready to fight. But think for a moment about the situation we face out there.
“We have to deal with literally hundreds of species whose only thing in common is the one thing we lack, a chain of tradition and uplift stretching back two billion years. They’ve all been using the Library for aeons, adding to it, albeit slowly, all of the time.
“Most of them are cranky, hyper-mindful of their privileges, and dubious of that silly ‘wolfling’ race from Sol.
“And what can we do, when we are challenged by some two-bit species whose extinct patrons uplifted them as talking; obedient riding steeds, who now own two little terraformed planets that sit right astride our only route to the colony on Omnivarium? What can we do when these creatures with no ambition or sense of humor stop our ship and demand an incredible forty whale songs as a toll?”
Helene shook her head and her eyebrows knotted.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to fight, at a time like that! A great beauty such as Calypso, filled to the brim with things badly needed by a struggling little community, and with an even more precious cargo of… stopped dead in space by a pair of tiny, ancient hulks that were obviously bought, not built, by the “intelligent” camels aboard!” The woman’s voice thickened, as she remembered.
“Picture it. New and beautiful, yet primitive, using only the tiny portion of Galactic science we’d been able to absorb when she was refitted, mostly in the drives… stopped by hulks older than Caesar but made by someone who used the Library all his life.”
Helene stopped for a moment and turned away.
Jacob was moved, but even more he felt honored. He knew Helene well enough, now, to know what an act of trust it was for her to open up like this.
She’s been doing most of the work too, he realized. She asks most of the questions — about my past, about my family, about my feelings — for some reason I’ve been reluctant to ask about her, the person inside. I wonder what’s been stopping me? There must be so much in there!
“So I suppose the idea is not to fight, because we’d probably lose,” he said quietly.
She looked back and nodded. She coughed twice, behind a closed fist.
“Oh, -we’ve a couple of tricks we think we might surprise somebody with sometime, simply because we haven’t had the Library and it’s all they’ve known. But those tricks have got to be saved for a rainy day.
“Instead, we flatter, fawn, bribe, sing spirituals… tap dance… and when that fails, we run.”
Jacob imagined meeting a shipload of Pila.
“Running must be awful hard at times.”
“Yes, but we have a secret way of keeping cool,” Helene brightened slightly. For a moment those appealing recesses reappeared at the corners of her smile. “It’s one of the biggest reasons why the crew is mostly women.”
“Now come on. A fem is just about as likely as a mel to take a poke at someone who insulted her. I don’t see that as much of a guarantee.”
“Nooo, not normally.” She eyed him again with that “appraising” expression. For an instant she seemed about to go on. Then she shrugged.
“Let’s sit,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
She led him around the dome and across the deck to a part of the ship where none of the crew or passengers were, where the circular deck floated two meters away from the shell of the ship…
The sparkling glow of the chromosphere refracted eerily where the stasis screen curved away below their feet. The narrow suspension field allowed light to pass, but twisted it slightly. From where they stood, part of the Big Spot could be seen, its configuration changed considerably since the last dive. Where the field intervened, the sunspot shimmered and rippled with new pulsations, added to its own.
Slowly, Helene lowered herself to the deck and then approached the edge. For a moment she sat with” her feet inches from the shimmering, holding her knees under her chin. Then she placed her hands behind her on the deck and allowed her legs to drop into the field.
Jacob swallowed.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.
He watched as she swung her legs languidly. They moved as if in a thick syrup, the snug sheathing of her shipsuit rippling like something animate.
She lifted her legs straight out and up above the level of the deck, with apparent ease.
“Hmmm, they seem to be all right. I can’t push them down very deep, though. I guess the mass of my legs shoves a dimple into the suspension field. At least they don’t feel upside down when I do it.” She let them drop again.
Jacob felt weak in the knees. “You mean you’ve never done that before?”
She looked up at him and grinned.
“Am I showing off? Yes I guess I was trying to impress you. I’m not crazy though. After you told us about Bu
bbacub and the vacuum cleaner I went over the equations carefully. It’s perfectly safe, so why don’t you join me?”
Jacob nodded numbly. After so many other miracles and unexplainable things since he left Earth, this was rather small, after all. The secret, he decided, was not to think at all.
It did feel like a thick syrup that increased in viscosity as he pushed downwards. It was rubbery and pushed back.
And the legs of Jacob’s shipsuit felt almost, disconcertingly, alive.
Helene said nothing for a time. Jacob respected her silence. Something was “obviously on her mind.
“Was that story about the Finnila Needle really true?” she asked at last, without looking up.
“Yes.”
“She must have been quite a woman.”
“Yes, she was.”
“I mean in addition to being brave. She had to be brave to jump from one balloon to another, twenty miles up in the air, but…”
“She was trying to distract them while I defused the Torcher. I shouldn’t have let her,” Jacob heard his own voice, remote and faded. “But I thought I could protect her at the same time… I had a device, you see „…”
“…but she must have been quite a person in other ways as well. I wish I could have met her.”
Jacob realized that he hadn’t said a word aloud.
“Um, yes, Helene. Tania would have liked you.” He shook himself. This was getting no one anywhere.
“But I thought we were talking about something else, uh, the ratio of females to males on starships, wasn’t that it?”
She was looking at her feet. “We are on the same topic, Jacob,” she said quietly.
“We are?”
“Sure. You remember I said there was a way to make a largely female crew more cautious in dealing with aliens… a way to guarantee that they’ll run rather than fight?”
“Yes, but…”
“And you know that humanity has been able to plant three colonies so far, but transportation costs are too great to carry many passengers, so increasing the gene pool at an isolated colony is a real problem?” She spoke rapidly, as if embarrassed.
“When we got back the first time and found that the Constitution stood again, the Confederacy made it voluntary for the women on the next jump instead of compulsory. Still, most of us volunteered.”
“I… I don’t understand.”
She looked up at him as she smiled.
“Well, maybe now isn’t the time. But you should realize that I’m shipping out on Calypso in a few months and there are certain preparations I have to make beforehand.
“And I can be as selective as I want.”
She looked straight into his eyes.
Jacob felt his jaw drop.
“Well!” Helene rubbed her hands on her lap and prepared to stand up. “I guess we’d better be heading back. We’re pretty near the Active Region, now, and I should be at my station to supervise.”
Jacob hurried to his feet and offered her his hand. Neither of them saw anything funny in the archaism.
On their way to the command station, Jacob and Helene stopped to examine the Parametric Laser. Chief Donaldson looked up from the machine as they approached.
“Hi! I think she’s all tuned and ready to go. Want a tour?”
“Sure.” Jacob hunkered down next to the laser. Its chassis was bolted to the deck. Its long, slender, multi-barreled body swung on a gymballed swivel.
Jacob felt the soft fabric covering Helene’s right leg brush lightly against his arm as she stepped over beside him. It didn’t help him keep his thoughts straight.
“This here Parametric Laser,” Donaldson began, “is my contribution to the attempt to contact the Sun Ghosts. I figured that psi was getting us nowhere, so why not try to communicate with them the way they communicate with us — visually?
“Well now, as you probably know already, most lasers operate on just one or two very narrow spectral bands, particular atomic and molecular transitions, mostly. But this baby will punch out any wavelength you want, just by dialing it in with this control.” He pointed to the central of three controls on the face of the chassis.
“Yes,” Jacob said. “I know about Parametric Lasers, though I’ve never seen one. I imagine it has to be pretty powerful to penetrate through our screens and still look bright to the Ghosts.”
“In my other life…” deSilva drawled ironically (she often referred to her past, before jumping with the Calypso, with defensive sardonicism) “…we were able to make multicolored, tunable lasers with optical dyes. They put out a fair amount of power, they were efficient, and incredibly simple.”
She smiled. “That is, until you spilled the dye. Then, what a mess! Nothing makes me appreciate Galactic science more than knowing I’ll never have to clean a puddle of Rhodamine 6-G off the floor again!”
“Could you really tune through the whole optical spectrum with a single molecule?” Donaldson was incredulous. “How did you power a… ‘dye laser,’ anyway?”
“Oh, with flashlamps sometimes. Usually with an internal chemical reaction using organic energy molecules, like sugars.
“You had to use several dyes to cover the whole visible spectrum. Poly-methyl coumarin was used a lot for the blue and green end of the band. Rhodamine and a few others were dyes for tuning in red colors.
“Anyway, that’s ancient history. I want to know what devilish plan you and Jacob have cooked up this time!” She dropped down next to Jacob on the deck. Instead of looking at Donaldson, she fixed Jacob with that disconcerting, appraising look.
“Well,” he swallowed. “It’s really quite simple. I took along a library of whale songs and dolphin-ditties when I boarded Bradbury, in case the Ghosts turned out to he poets along with everything else. When Chief Donaldson mentioned his idea of aiming a beam at them to communicate, I volunteered the tapes.”
“Well be adding a modified version of an old math contact code. He rigged that one up too.” Donaldson grinned. “I wouldn’t know a Fibonacci series if one came up and bit me! But Jacob says it’s one of the old standards.”
“It was,” deSilva said. “We never used any of the math routines, though, after the Vesarius. The library makes sure everyone understands each other in space, so there was no use for the old pre-Contact codes.”
She pushed lightly on the slim barrel. It rotated smoothly on its swivel. “You aren’t going to let this thing swing freely when the laser is on, are you?”
“No, of course we’ll be bolting it firmly, so the laser beam fires along a radius from the center of the ship. That should prevent those internal reflections you’re probably worryin’ about.
“As it is, we’ll all want to be wearing these goggles when it’s on.” Donaldson pulled a pair of thick, dark, wraparound glasses from a sack next to the laser. “Even if there were no danger to the retina, Dr. Mar-tine would insist on it. She’s a positive bug on the effects of glare on perception and personality. She turned the whole base upside down, finding bright lights no one even knew were there. Blamed them for the ‘mass hallucination’ when she arrived. Boy did she change her tune when she saw the beasties!”
“Well, it’s time for me to get back to work,” Helene announced. “I shouldn’t have stayed so long. We must be getting close. I’ll keep you men posted.” Both men rose as she smiled and departed.
Donaldson watched her walk away.
“You know, Demwa, first I thought you were crazy, then I knew you had it all together. Now I’m starting to change my mind again.”
Jacob sat down. “How’s that?”
“Any mel I know would grow a tail and wag it if that fem so much as whistled. I just can’t believe your self-control, is all. None of my business, of course’
“You’re right. It isn’t.” Jacob was disturbed that the situation was so obvious. He was beginning to wish this mission was over so he could give the problem his undivided attention.
Jacob shrugged. It was a mannerism he’d made a lot of u
se of since leaving Earth. “To change the subject, I’d been wondering about this internal reflection business. Has it occurred to you that somebody might be pulling a big hoax?”
“A hoax?”
“With the Sun Ghosts. All someone would have to do is smuggle aboard some sort of holographic projector…”
“Forget it,” Donaldson shook his head. “That was the first thing we checked. Besides, who’d be able to fake anything as intricate and beautiful as that herd of toruses? Anyway, a projection like that, filling our whole view, would be given away by the columnated rim cameras on flip-side!”
“Well, maybe not the herd, but what about the ‘humanoid’ Ghosts? They’re rather simple and small, and the way they avoid the rim cameras, spinning faster than we can to stay overhead, is pretty uncanny.”
“What can I say, Jake? Every piece of equipment carried aboard is carefully inspected, along with everyone’s personal items as well, for that very reason. No projector’s ever been found, and where could anyone hide one on an open ship like this? I’ll admit I’ve wondered about it myself at times. But I don’t see any way anyone could be pulling a hoax.”
Jacob nodded slowly. Donaldson’s argument made sense. Also, how could one reconcile a projection with Bubbacub’s trick with the Lethani relic? It was a tempting idea, but a hoax didn’t seem very likely.
Distant spicule forests pulsed like waving fountains. Individual jets fenced with one another along the rim of the slowly thobbing supergranulation cell that covered half the sky. In its center lay the Big Spot, a huge eye of black, rimmed by areas of hot brightness.
About ninety degrees around the deck from them, a group of dark silhouettes stood or knelt near the Pilot Board. Only the outlines could be made out against the bright crimson blaze of the photosphere.
Two clumps of shadow could be distinguished from those near the command station. The tall, slender, figure of Culla stood slightly to the side, pointing ahead at a tall, wispy filament arch that hung, suspended, over the Spot. The arch grew slowly, perceptibly closer as Jacob watched.