Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Then I agree. It’s not easy being the Chairman’s son. I’ll enjoy being an ordinary student for once. Only—”

  “Whatever name you go by, I expect you to be more than ‘ordinary,’ ” Rashuri said warningly. “I know. You didn’t let me finish. I want to choose my own name.”

  Moraji asked, “What name would you prefer?”

  “Tilak Charan.” He looked to his father. “Do you know why?” he said challengingly. “It is dangerous to keep the same name—” started Moraji. “I’ll use it as a surname. It’s common enough that no one will question it, particularly not the British.” He looked expectantly at his father.

  “I have no objection.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Charan, bowing slightly.

  “I have not answered your question. The most famous Tilak, of course, was the publisher of Kesari—the Hindu Thomas Paine, thorn in the side of the viceroys. Do you think to cast yourself in his mold?” asked Rashuri.

  “I suppose Jawaharlal would object if I did.”

  “He would not be alone in that,” said Rashuri sharply. “Use the name as a silent symbol of protest if you must. But remember always that you are there for something far more important than avenging some affront you took to heart while reading your histories.”

  The two years at Tsiolkovsky passed with lightning speed, and not unpleasantly. Charan got on well enough with his dormitory roommate Les, a youth from Manchester whose yearning to fly led him to decorate the wall with photographs of improbably futuristic aircraft he called Concorde and SR-71.

  For a time, he enjoyed a largely chaste romance with a new student who appeared one day in his Structure of Information Systems class. Gwynne was an irrepressible Swede who had the good taste to find Charan’s wry jokes amusing and the self-confidence not to fawn coquettishly the way so many English girls seemed prone to.

  The cultural mores of India had allowed little opportunity for the kind of casual fumblings and fondlings Les so triumphantly shared with him, and his own sense of being culturally displaced combined with his inexperience to keep his relationship with Gwynne on an intellectual plane. Les insisted that was a mistake, and warned Charan that he stood to lose Gwynne if he didn’t warm up.

  “She expects it,” Les said knowingly. “She’ll be insulted if you don’t.”

  But the eventual point of departure was Gwynne’s unrelenting enthusiasm for being where she was and doing what she was doing. “I am in the best possible place at the best possible time and taking part in the most exciting things possible,” she said fervently one night as they sat together, looking out at the lights of London from the roof of the Institute’s classroom building.

  Her feeling was deep, sincere, and self-re warding, and Charan was embarrassed that he could not match it. Though only he was aware of it, it was as though a yawning gulf had opened up between them. Finding he had no heart to pretend an enthusiasm he did not feel, he abruptly stopped seeing her. It came as something of a blow that Gwynne did not seek him out for an explanation. Les took it as proof that he had been right.

  Charan was not devoted to his studies, but he was at least dutiful, and on that basis alone became known in several departments as a student with outstanding potential. Untapped potential was what it remained, since Charan’s special multidisciplinary program allowed him to become conversant with all fields but master of none. In an institution of budding specialists, he was condemned to be a generalist, and more than once wondered why. But there was no answer to that one except that Rashuri wanted it, and Charan tried to think of Rashuri as little as possible.

  Which meant of course that he thought of him daily.

  As the second year wore on, the novelty of Tsiolkovsky, more important to Charan than the others, began to wear thin. He had no research projects of his own and could make only trivial contributions to others’ projects. He knew all he cared to about the limited range of subjects offered at Tsiolkovsky, and hungered for something which would possess him as so many others seemed to be possessed.

  His roommate Les was one such: wrapped up with some aspect of a hydrogen-fluorine engine, he never seemed to have time that second year for a game of chess, or perhaps it was that Charan had begun to beat him consistently. For want of something better to do and because he knew Les better than anyone, Charan spent his free research blocks with the Power Technology team as an overqualified and occasionally sulky gofer.

  Presently he became aware that what he found objectionable about remaining at Tsiolkovsky was that there was nothing there for individuals. Synergy was the organizational byword. Tsiolkovsky’s teacher-researchers encouraged independent thinking but interdependent action. Even the rumor that all the research projects were somehow connected to the building of a starship was not enough to coax him into real involvement. He had taken what he could from Tsiolkovsky and had discovered he had nothing to give back.

  “It’s time to move on,” he told Les.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why exactly are you here?”

  “At my father’s request.”

  “What would you rather be doing?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Not this, anyway.”

  “They’re not keeping you here, are they? Why don’t you just leave?” As an afterthought, he added colloquially, “It’d make room for a sharpie with some fire. Even with Croyden open now up north, there’s more that wants than has.”

  It made sense—so much so that when the second anniversary of his arrival came and went, Tilak Charan walked out the front gate of the Tsiolkovsky Institute with his clothing in an English knapsack and his future in his own hands.

  “Swaraj at last,” he breathed to himself.

  He took several days to make his way down to Dover, where he bought passage to Calais on a slow and crowded ferry. For the first few weeks he fully expected Moraji or some of his operatives to swoop down and whisk him back to Delhi to face his father. But the shapes in the distance remained nothing more than French farmers’ wagons, and the sounds in the night merely other vagrants. He did not think for a moment that he was capable of eluding a determined search by Moraji; in fact, he had made no real effort to do so. The obvious conclusion offered itself: he had been forgotten.

  A curious series of emotional states followed on the heels of that revelation. The first was disappointment. He realized he had been not only expecting Moraji, but counting on him. Over the last two years, there had been little communication with home, and a dearth of praise for what he was doing at Tsiolkovsky. The former he could ascribe to security—but even a Telugu father was allowed to hand out praise to a noteworthy son.

  Next came confusion, as Charan struggled to decide in what particularly heinous way he had failed in order to earn the privilege of being ignored. He could identify none, and so gave up guilt for anger. He had been shunted out of the way, shipped away because for some reason it was inconvenient to have him in Delhi. Now, he did not seem to matter at all.

  Which meant that he had no obligations to anyone but himself, and he intended to let that be his guiding principle.

  He found the worldly-wise cynicism of the French—at least as displayed by the stratum he was interacting with—wearying. He was in France only long enough for a side trip to Paris. Its charms were largely lost on him, and he stayed but two days before heading north to Brussels.

  As long as his money lasted, Charan city-hopped through Europe, working his way by foot and thumb as far north as Copenhagen and as far south as Rome. Since he spent little except for food, that period lasted nearly three months. He lost his virginity the second week to an aggressive Dutch girl, and for a short time was caught up in the easy sexuality of the runaways’ subculture. A painful case of gonorrhea put an end to that phase.

  He spent much of his time in Germany, which provided a chance to bring his textbook German closer to reality and to appreciate the hours he had spent learning it. But encountering French, Fl
emish, Dutch, German, and Danish in one twenty-day, seven-hundred-kilometre stretch showed him graphically how language can be a barrier as well as a bridge.

  En route from Italy to Barcelona and Madrid to try his textbook Spanish, he stopped for a night in an empty barn with two other transients. They woke to find anything they had not been wearing stolen. Charan was hit the hardest: thanks to his carelessness, his knapsack contained not only his extra clothing but his remaining funds. That was how he came to be job-hunting in Marseilles, and shortly thereafter part of the crew of a steel-hulled cargo barkentine working the Mediterranean.

  Though fond of sailing since introduced to it at the age of eight, he had thought to stay on only for a single run to Algiers and back. But he stayed on for a trip to Palma in the Isles Baleares, and then another to Tunis. In all he stayed four months, toughening and trimming his frame, and gaining glimpses of Oran, Bastia, and several other Mediterranean ports to which they brought cargoes.

  More importantly, he had time to think—about whether what he had been doing was worth going back to, and when the answer proved to be no, whether what he was doing now was any better. The latter question took rather longer to answer. His job on the Medea was the first he had had with any relevance to the real world. He felt useful, needed. The question he had to answer was whether “any” relevance was enough relevance.

  For a while, it was.

  But he also thought about the “friends” he had made while freelancing across Europe—people who would look on what he was doing as a horrible fate. He had had a long and intimate contact with the subculture of the listless, homeless, and purposeless. It grew on him slowly but came with crushing force when it did that he not only did not like them, he did not want to be like them.

  One week later, he left the Medea in Ajaccio harbor, walked to the PANCOMNET station, and sent a nine-word message to Moraji by electronic mail:

  In Ajaccio without a paddle. Come get me. Charan.

  When there was no reply in the first ten minutes, Charan stretched out on a couch in the lobby to wait for one. Within an hour, three Pangaean Security Office agents arrived and took him in tow. They escorted him to a white four-seat helicopter bearing the Consortium seal and bundled him into one of the back seats, with one of the agents taking the other passenger seat.

  At the Rome airport, he and the agent transferred to a small white jet. Nine hours later, most of which Charan spent sleeping, he was in New Delhi.

  It was after midnight, and he did not expect to see his father until the next day. But instead of being taken home, he was taken to the nearly deserted Consortium headquarters and his father’s office.

  “Ah, Charan. Come in. You look well,” said Rashuri. “A bit taller and a bit tauter, I would say.” Charan sat down stiffly. “Why didn’t anyone come after me?”

  “I sent you to England for an education. There are kinds of learning that you can’t get inside a classroom.”

  “You wanted me to skip out?”

  “I would have been disappointed if you had not. It would have meant that you did not have the qualities you will need.”

  “But didn’t you care? Didn’t you wonder?”

  Rashuri smiled slightly. “I always care. If I did not, I would have left you here blithely wasting your time and talents. Your performance at Tsiolkovsky confirmed my higher estimation of you. And you have come back a young man where you left a child.”

  “I might not have come back at all.”

  “I do not think there was ever a risk of that,” Rashuri said carefully. Charan stared. “What does that mean?”

  “Only that I have growing confidence in you.” Charan shook his head. “If I thought there was some way you could have stage-managed the last seven months—”

  “We made efforts to know where you were, at least in general terms and often exactly. But beyond that—”

  “I made my own decisions and went where I wanted.”

  “Yes. And I am taking the fact that you are back as a sign that you are ready now to accept the plan I have for you. Or would you prefer a knapsack and a ticket to Ajaccio?”

  Lowering his eyes, Charan said, “No, sir. I’m ready to get back to work.”

  “I am very glad to hear that. Because you still have a great deal to do.”

  “I’d appreciate knowing what it is I’m qualified to do.”

  “Nothing, yet. But do not worry. Your calling does not exist yet. By the time it does, you will be ready.” Nodding, Charan eyed the chess table on the far side of the room.

  “Care to play?” asked Rashuri, following his glance.

  “I’ve been looking forward to it.”

  The game lasted more than an hour, unusual in the history of their competition. When it was over, Rashuri was the victor as usual.

  “You seem to have rid your play of fatal blunders,” he said in dispatching his son to bed. “But you still make too many weak moves. You do not want victory enough. You wish only to avoid being defeated. Rid yourself of that outlook and you may yet become a player to reckon with.”

  Within two weeks, Charan found himself part of the first class of pilots training for the Earth Rise orbital program: ten men and five women culled from the various Consortium schools and divisions. Charan knew two of them from Tsiolkovsky, both top students: a statuesque astrophysicist named Riki Valeriana, and Anthony Matranga, a round-faced systems engineer.

  Of the others, there were three pilots, one an orbital pilot down from the OOC to keep up with the new technology. The rest were technical specialists of one sort or another. Since they also had to be healthy, that meant that they were young, considering recent history. The oldest in the class was a twenty-seven-year-old New Zealander. At eighteen, Charan was within two months of being the youngest.

  He sat with the others and listened as Kevin Ulm, Pangaea’s first astronaut and now director of personnel for orbital operations, welcomed them to the training program.

  “I do myself and the others now manning the Operations Center no disservice in admitting that we were amateurs, pretenders. In my case especially, my fame is far out of proportion, to my contribution,” said Ulm. “But you, you are to be the first of the professionals. You come to us professionally prepared, and the Consortium is building for you a professional tool: the Earth Rise system. Within a matter of months the booster and LEO spacecraft will be ready and soon after that, the orbital transfer tug, with which we will build an Assembly Station in high earth orbit. Within ten years, we hope to have a planetary transfer tug, so that we can mine the resources of the moon and eventually the asteroids.

  “Space was always the only way to escape a zero-sum resource game. You will have the chance to prove that to the world—if you stick it (Hit and earn (me of these,” he said, tapping the blue metal ellipse on his collar—the insignia of the orbital pilot.

  Within six weeks, Matranga transferred, with the blessing of the coordinators, to the parallel orbital engineer training program. Another classmate left the program completely, at the coordinators’ request. But Charan stayed on, finding that his scattershot education had better prepared him for the role than the specialized work of the others. He had the physics for navigation and orbital mechanics, the engineering for systems maintenance and payload support—Charan decided that this was the future Rashuri had been planning for him, and that it was not disagreeable.

  But the loss of Riki and Anthony in the first manned Earth Rise test chilled his enthusiasm. He had thought himself the logical choice to fly that test flight, had angled for it with the administration, and had been cross and withdrawn for a week when Riki was chosen over him. The horrifying fireball shook his confidence, and the widespread and generally well-accepted rumor theorizing that the Chinese had sabotaged the flight because they wanted to keep control of launch operations did not fully restore it. And he was unable to mourn the dead without thinking at the same time that it was better to be a mourner than mourned, and hating himself for thinking that.r />
  In time, Charan quashed both his fears and his guilt, and when he was told that he would pilot the next test of Earth Rise, he accepted the news with equanimity. In the months that he waited for his ride, several of his classmates beat him into space atop Long March vehicles launched from Shuang-ch’eng-tzu. But he earned his blue ellipse all the same, riding in front of a cargo pack that included components of the first orbital tug.

  Over the next eighteen months, Charan split his time between the Earth-OOC supply run and the OOC-Assembly Station tugs. Of the two, he preferred the latter. The last ten minutes of countdown and the ten minutes of powered flight that followed never failed to bring back the images of Riki’s doomed flight.

  Piloting a tug was a more soothing experience. The delta vee was low, the acceleration smooth and quiet, and he enjoyed seeing Gauntlet and the various comsat platforms take shape with each successive visit to Assembly Station.

  He would have asked for full-time assignment on orbit, especially after taking up with a winsome German environmental engineer at Assembly, except such things were Not Done. Flight assignments were in the hands of Ulm and the orbital-operations schedulers and not to be questioned by ordinary mortals.

  That fact did not begin to bother him until his father’s announcement of the Senders’ message and the starship that would go to meet them. He suddenly began to wonder if Rashuri were finished with him after all. It was with some relief, then, that he learned he was one of five OP’s tabbed to train on the Shuttles being transferred from Dixie. One assignment seemed to rule out the other. There would be no deep space voyages for him, and he was glad. He would be content to watch the video relays from bed with Greta.

  The Shuttle II was a sweet ship. The hard work during liftoff was handled by the crew of the winged booster, the hard work during reentry by the ship’s own computers. The orbiter had a dozen times the volume of Earth Rise and five times the payload capacity. It wasn’t nearly as nimble as a tug, but made up for that with its rock-steady attitude and almost regal bearing. In the year after the Shuttles became operational, Charan flew twenty-two Shuttle missions, commanding a four-man crew and finding that he was good at it. He was patient, thorough, unflappable, and even-handed. And, he discovered, he was happy.