Chindi

by Jack McDevitt

  “What happened here?” said Hutch. Her voice sounded a few decibels higher than normal.

  There were more corpses. Three in the galley, three in cargo, several in the living compartments.

  Alyx wondered what had killed them. Had they simply run out of air?

  Hutch seemed to know where she wanted to go, and Alyx stayed close. Her ankle was still a problem, but only if she lost track of what she was doing and forgot not to push off on it. Nick’s voice crackled over the commlink, asking what they had found.

  Hutch told him. “Must have been a major mechanical malfunction,” she added.

  Alyx was still concentrating on thinking about other things. Nick back in the Memphis. The audience reaction at the conclusion of opening night for Grin and Bare It. A prop handler who’d been the most torrid sexual partner she’d had in years.

  “You okay?” asked Hutch.

  “I’m fine.” She was suddenly aware she was standing with her arms folded across her breast, as if she were fending something off. “Place is a little creepy. But I’m all right.”

  “You want to go back?”

  “No. Not unless you do.”

  Hutch indicated a hatch in the overhead. “Bridge is that way,” she said.

  “You first.” Alyx tried to sound lighthearted. Hutch released her grip shoes and floated up, opened the hatch after a brief struggle, and disappeared.

  “No ladder,” Alyx commented.

  “They didn’t have artificial gravity.”

  There were four more corpses. Alyx imagined she could smell them, and that, too, she had to push out of her mind. Hutch threaded her way among them and leaned over a console. She touched the keys, and Alyx was surprised to see a row of lamps blink on.

  “Power’s residual,” said Hutch. “The Venture won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

  “Can you tell what caused this?”

  “No idea.”

  “How about asking the AI?”

  Her fingers were moving across the keyboard, but nothing much seemed to be happening. “It’s defunct.” A green glow appeared. “But we’ve got a log.”

  “You can read it?”

  “Don’t know. We don’t seem to have enough power to turn on a screen.” She looked around the console, found a small storage compartment, opened it, and extracted two disks.

  “I never saw one like that before,” said Alyx.

  “Bill doesn’t think it’ll still hold data. But we can try.” She looked for a slot, found it, inserted one of the disks.

  More lamps came on. Hutch produced a power core which she’d apparently brought from the Memphis and connected it. The system clicked and sputtered and wheezed and stopped. She reset and tried again.

  It took several attempts before she looked satisfied.

  “Are you copying the log?” Alyx asked.

  “Yes. I think we’re in business.” She extracted the disk and put it in her pocket. “Let’s try some diagnostics.”

  She pulled the jack on the core, moved one of the corpses out of the way, slipped into a seat in front of what appeared to be the captain’s console, buckled herself down so she wouldn’t float off, and reconnected her power source.

  “Will we be able to read the log when we get back to the Memphis?” Alyx asked.

  “We can probably jury-rig something.” She searched the instrument panel, found what she was looking for, and inserted the second disk.

  “You couldn’t get the same information,” Alyx asked, “from the other position?”

  “If I knew what I was doing.” She threw switches and pressed pads, and the console came to life. She studied it, spoke to it, gave up and tapped the keyboard. A computer display came to life. A parade of images began. “It wasn’t the engines,” she said finally. “They’re okay. Both sets.”

  This bridge felt claustrophobic. The lack of a viewport, of a way to see outside, compounded by the darkness, and the presence of the things (one could hardly call them bodies), squeezed her lungs. She held on to the back of the chair that Hutch was using and felt the room move around her.

  “It wasn’t the fuel. And apparently not the reactor.”

  Alyx was concentrating on trying to breathe normally. She turned her suit temperature down and felt better as soon as the cool air hit. Looking for something to distract her, she turned her lamp toward the rear of the bridge. There was an open hatch, and she recalled from the schematic that there were more living quarters and a common room back there. Without letting go of Hutch’s chair, she pointed her lamp toward it, and saw more moving shadows.

  “Hull integrity’s okay.” Hutch sounded puzzled.

  “Got to be something,” said Alyx, who was wishing Hutch would get her answer so they could clear out.

  The pilot stiffened. “Now this I don’t understand at all.”

  Her tone was disquieting. “What’s that?” Alyx asked.

  “The hypercomm checks out.”

  Alyx needed a moment to understand. The hypercomm was the FTL communication system. If it was okay, and they’d gotten stranded out here, all they had to do was call for help.

  “But they never used it, did they?”

  “No. They used the radio instead.”

  The crew had to know that a radio distress call could never arrive back home during their lifetimes. “Makes no sense,” Alyx said.

  Hutch was running another diagnostic. A red lamp began to burn brightly. “It wouldn’t work now,” she said. “The ship doesn’t have enough power to support it, but it would have worked forty years ago. Why didn’t they use it?”

  She moved methodically through the Venture, recording everything. Alyx pursued the assignment she’d given herself, committing the images and sensations to memory, knowing that one day she would relay them in one form or another to an audience. She even had a title: Everything’s Under Control Now.

  “Shouldn’t we recover the bodies?” she asked reluctantly. “Before the chindi gets here?”

  Hutch nodded.

  THEY BROUGHT OUT nineteen corpses in three loads with the lander, and stowed them in the cargo-section freezer. Nick couldn’t help, but Alyx made all three trips, sitting quietly beside the pilot. On the Memphis, Bill turned off the artificial gravity, and they brought in the bagged remains quite easily.

  Hutch seemed to get through it okay although her eyes looked a bit strange afterward.

  She went below for a while and left Alyx and Nick to have lunch. But Alyx had no appetite, and she satisfied herself with a glass of orange juice while Nick ate his way through a couple of roast beef sandwiches and commented about how gratified he was that the passengers and crew of the Venture would finally get proper disposition.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “when people die in out-of-the-way places, and their families are left to wonder what happened. The consolation of a final ceremony is a very important part of closing the book on a life. Of giving their loved ones a chance to move on.” He looked at her, and she smiled weakly at him. One of the great funeral directors of our time, as he’d occasionally referred to himself. “Even now, so many years later, it’ll help the surviving families, bringing the remains back.” He turned a somber gaze in her direction. “Did you know that every intelligent species for which we have a record engaged in memorial services, funerals, for its dead? Other than the development of religion and tribes, the farewell ceremony seems to be the only true sociological universal.”

  Hutch came back wearing a wide smile and holding a standard disk. “I think we’re ready,” she said.

  They went into the room no one thought of as mission control anymore, and Hutch inserted the disk into a reader. A couple of screens lit up, and Alyx found herself looking at portraits and biographical information on one, and launch data, passenger lists, inventories, and system status reports on the other. It was all dated May 6, 2182.

  Departure from the Liberty space station (long since replaced by the Wheel) would occur later that morning after
a virtual rendition by the Peabody, Nebraska, Volunteers High School Band, a few speeches, and a tribute to Senator Edith Caswell, “the first senator-to-the-stars.” Captain Hollin noted that they had everything except fireworks.

  Hutch fast-forwarded through the ceremony. Senator Caswell (dark-haired, attractive, eyes glowing with enthusiasm for the coming adventure) came on board, everyone shook hands, and, while the band played a stirring rendition of the Jupiter Symphony, the Venture eased away from the space station.

  Transition to hyperspace occurred smoothly a few hours later, with only a few passengers reporting upset stomachs. Hull-mounted imagers were turned on, and passengers and crew got their first look at the sack, the hyperdimensional mist through which the ship had to pass, in a casual glide, en route to Wolf 359.

  Six hours after transition, halfway to their destination, the upset stomachs grew worse. And spread to others. The captain recorded the names of those affected in the medical log, and noted that they were being treated.

  It was the last entry.

  “That wasn’t very helpful,” said Nick.

  Alyx stared at the disk, which Hutch had removed from the reader. “You sure that’s all?” she said.

  “That’s what the computer says.”

  Nick shook his head. “Sounds like food poisoning. Or something in the water.”

  Hutch put the disk away. “Maybe there’ll be something in the other records,” she said. She was frowning.

  “Something wrong, Hutch?” asked Alyx.

  “We’ve been here about thirty hours.”

  The others understood the point.

  Where was the chindi?

  MOGAMBO STOOD QUIETLY over the two graves. What I would not give to have known you. To have been able to speak with you. The library will be a poor substitute.

  Inside, his people were busy doing analysis, trying to understand the language of the books. He could see them moving behind the curtained windows. But they were peripheral, shadows at the edge of vision, images not quite grasped.

  They were good people, basically, but they were Philistines. Hodge had even wanted to dig up the graves. Eventually, he knew, it would come to that. But not now. Not while he was here.

  He had spent hours simply wandering through the Retreat, absorbing it, standing in the cupola while the two great planets moved majestically about each other, gradually changing places, the rings seeming to tilt first toward him and then away as Vertical moved in its orbit. It was hard not to see the hand of an Artist at work. He knew better, of course, knew that the universe was a machine, that everything—well, almost everything—could be explained by the presence of gravity and hydrogen, weak force and strong force. And yet…

  His wrist tingled. Incoming from the captain. “Yes, John? What is it?”

  “Professor, we received a request from the Memphis a little while ago. They wanted us to check to see whether the chindi was still running on course.”

  “You mean, they don’t think it’s jumped yet?”

  “They don’t know. It’s clear from the message that it hasn’t arrived out at 97.”

  “Well, what’s the situation, John? Has it gone into hyperspace yet? I take it we don’t know.”

  “No, sir. We can’t tell from here. It’s too far out. With your permission, I’m going to go have a look.”

  “How long will you need?”

  “Only a few hours.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do it.”

  LIKE HUTCH, MOGAMBO had no way to penetrate the books. He wandered through the Retreat, touching the open volumes, brushing his fingertips along the spines of the volumes on the shelves. Those hours brought a mixture of pleasure and longing, of exquisite pain, quite unlike anything he’d experienced before during a long and eventful life.

  His subordinates were already laying plans, determining how best to move the structure and its contents back to Arlington. He disapproved of the idea, and had already fired off a message to Sylvia telling her how wrongheaded the plan was. He hadn’t realized until he’d arrived on the scene that the Retreat and its environment were what mattered, that it wasn’t possible to move it back to Virginia, that the essence was here, and that it needed to be left here.

  And damn the inconvenience to anybody who didn’t want to make the trip.

  It seemed as if Yurkiewicz had barely left when he was back on the circuit. “It’s still out there,” he said.

  “It hasn’t jumped yet?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand that at all. Well, have you informed Hutchins?”

  “Yes sir. Sent the message out a few minutes ago.”

  “What’s it doing? The chindi?”

  “That’s what amazes me. It’s up to a quarter cee. That doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I would certainly think not. It’s not still accelerating, is it?”

  “No. It’s in cruise.”

  Mogambo sighed. A quarter light-speed. And in cruise. Did that mean what he thought it did? How could they possibly have been so wrong?

  “Are you okay, Professor?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.” But he suspected he would never, in this lifetime, set foot on the chindi.

  AFTER SHE SENT off her message to the Longworth asking for a sensor sweep, Hutch settled down to wait through a long and increasingly discouraging evening. The chindi had to be coming. The bottle satellite, the marker, was here. The Venture was here. Where else could it be going?

  If it was operating with Hazeltine technology, it had to make the transition into hyperspace within a reasonable time after achieving jump velocity. Whatever that might be for a ship so massive. “Reasonable” was defined by the capability of the vessel to go on burning fuel in order to maintain acceleration after it was no longer necessary.

  Nick had dozed off in his chair. Alyx was reading when Bill notified her that a transmission had come in from the Longworth. “From Captain Yurkiewicz.”

  “Hold your breath, Alyx,” she said. “Let’s see what the good captain has to say.”

  Yurkiewicz was a big, ruddy man, a bit rough around the edges compared with most of the superluminal captains. He’d been around a long time, and had done a brief stint with the Academy when they first went out to Pinnacle. “Hutch,” he said, “it’s still out there. It’s at the limit of our long-range sensors. But it’s there.” He looked both relieved and worried. “Thank God we haven’t lost it altogether.

  “It’s 323 A.U.s from Gemini. Moving at .26c. I say again, .26c. In cruise. I doubt it could jump now if it wanted to.”

  In cruise. No longer accelerating.

  When the transmission ended, when the screen had gone back to the Memphis icon, Alyx looked hard at Hutch. “How bad is it?” she asked carefully.

  They’d missed the obvious. My God. A quarter light-speed. Tor was dead. How could they not have known what was happening?

  “Isn’t it coming?” Alyx asked.

  “It’s coming,” she said. Nick stirred, but didn’t wake. “But it’s going to be later than we expected.”

  “How much later?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe two centuries.”

  chapter 30

  Alone, alone, all all alone,

  Alone on a wide wide sea!

  And never a saint took pity on

  My soul in agony.

  —SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE,

  THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, IV, 1798

  TOR’S CONDITION HAD deteriorated from nervousness to dismay to despair.

  To give him his due, he was not only afraid for himself, but a grim conviction crept over him that something terrible had happened to the Memphis. Maybe another of those ship-eating gadgets that had jumped the Wendy. Or maybe they’d never gotten out of the Slurpy. It was distinctly possible they were all dead.

  That Hutch was lost among them. What else could explain their silence?

  The days passed, and the chindi floated quietly among the stars, where anyone who happened to b
e in the neighborhood could easily collect him. But no one came.

  He could go outside now that the ship had stopped (or seemed to have stopped), and often did. He wandered across the bare rock, searching the stars for moving lights, asking his commlink why someone, somewhere, didn’t answer up. Even if something had gone wrong on the Memphis, Mogambo was out there somewhere. And Mogambo knew he needed rescuing.

  He ate well. There was plenty of food and no reason to ration. His power supply would last only a few more days. If that ran out before Hutch, or somebody, got to him, life support would fail. He’d then have only the six-hour supply in his air tanks.

  The reddimeals prepared for Academy personnel were not at all bad as field rations went, and he enjoyed mandarin steak and meat loaf, chicken teriyaki, and gulliver stew. He had BLTs and pork sandwiches, and he drank too much wine.

  Several times he started a journal, determined to leave a final record for whoever eventually showed up. The long nights without rescue, without any reasonable explanation why no rescue came, began to wear him down. He was inclined to conclude that he would die there. That he should make his peace with his Creator.

  So he wrote. And he drew.

  The entries, reviewed each morning (he insisted on maintaining the diurnal standard in this timeless place), invariably sounded angry and bitter. It wasn’t the tone he wanted to convey. But it was hard to pretend to be cheerful.

  His sketches, he thought, captured the ghostly chambers and the empty doorways. He gave humanity to the werewolf, and compassion to the war between the airships.

  If the worst had happened, if the Memphis had indeed been lost, Mogambo and the Longworth knew about his predicament. Last he’d heard, Mogambo had been approaching the Twins. That put him out of radio range.

  He looked at the relay transmitter and wished he’d learned something about electronics. The device was capable of putting out a long-range signal. But the chindi had to complete its jump first to arm it, or whatever the proper term might be. It wouldn’t start transmitting until it had reached its destination.

  Maybe Mogambo thought Hutch had already taken him off. Who knew? Certainly no one was telling him anything.