Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “A half-strength field projected forward and aft would produce mass without motion,” said Wenyuan. “An excellent camouflage.”

  “Any chance of picking them up optically and settling this?”

  “Some. That’s why I got you up. Closest approach is in”—he looked up at the clock—“twelve minutes now. Will you take the bridge?”

  “Keep us posted via the intercom.”

  Charan sat frowning after Rankin left for the lab in mod B. “Open Audio 1 and Data 1 back to Earth,” he said finally. “Let’s send them the bridge audio and the gravity-wave data. If something happens, we’d better make sure they have enough pieces to put the puzzle together. And give us his telescanner output on the window.”

  Wenyuan complied. “With your permission, I will perform a diagnostic check on the drive, in the event it might be needed.” Charan nodded wordlessly, then touched the intercom switch. “Anything?”

  “Just hold on,” snapped Rankin.

  Charan and Wenyuan waited in silence as the minutes dragged past. The telescopic view came up clear but meaningless to them.

  “Perhaps I should wake up Joanna,” Charan mused aloud.

  “Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,” Rankin exclaimed.

  “Something?” Charan asked.

  “Not a warship. A Jupiter star!”

  “Once more?”

  “A dark companion! A star more massive than Jupiter but still too small for fusion. My God,” Rankin said with undisguised awe. “The Sun has a sister star—”

  “There is no chance of error?” Wenyuan asked.

  “It’s radiating in the infrared exactly as it should be. The smaller ones are its planets—planets where a sun has never risen. Planets cold as death. Captain Charan, we have to collect some data directly. You have to divert us, slow us down—even a few hours would be invaluable. This is an incredible discovery. At this distance and speed all I have is a blur in the telescanner and a dimple in the gravity waves. You have to let me get more.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor,” said Charan, aware of Wenyuan’s eyes on him. “Get what you can and we’ll send it back to Earth. The rest will have to wait for another ship and another time.”

  “It wouldn’t delay our rendezvous even a week,” Rankin said angrily. “Sony. No diversions. No delays. Finish your observations and resume your watch.” He switched off the intercom. Wenyuan was smiling broadly. “Well, Captain. At least you are consistent.” Charan shrugged, unstrapped, and pushed off toward the passway. ‘Take the watch until he’s done.”

  The Jupiter star incident cemented the last major dimension of Pride of Earth’s interpersonal dynamic in place. It drove Rankin away from Charan and by default toward Wenyuan. The two were united in their disgust at Charan’s singlemindedness, as well as by Wenyuan’s eager interest in the scientific package. Rankin happily showed him how to operate the telescanner node and how to read the gravity-wave plots, cheered that there was at least one other on board who thought what he did was worthwhile.

  Meanwhile, Joanna was moving ever more deeply into self-isolation, pushed in that direction by her encounter with Wenyuan and pulled by the endless pages of the Book of Deeds. The book had clearly been assembled rather than written, and hurriedly at that. Some of the stories were detailed first-person accounts, some merely clips from newspapers and data bases. Most were contemporary, but a significant minority were historical, their protagonists drafted ex post facto into a church and body of belief which had not existed when they lived. Alone in her compartment, she read, pondered, and labored to integrate into a single view of human faith and existence thousands of accounts of human suffering.

  The isolation that Joanna chose for herself imposed isolation on Charan. He did not overly regret it. There was a part of him that did not want to enjoy, even in small ways, his time on board. His presence was a duty, one final onerous duty before he would know freedom. He preferred his emotions simple and uncluttered, and to have found pleasure aboard Pride of Earth would have introduced an unwelcome ambivalence. The voyage was something to be endured, a responsibility to be discharged. Another hundred fifty watches till meetpoint, another three thousand hours to be slept or idled away—

  Enforcing the sense of isolation was the ever-growing lag in communications with Earth. Though there was a nearly constant flow of data and messages in both directions, it was a parallel monologue, not a conversation. At drive power-down they had already been ten light-days out, and every day after added eighteen hours to the lag.

  Most affected was Rankin, whose warm phone calls to his wife were turned by time and distance into cold audio letters within the first week. After that, he never heard her voice light up at the sound of his, never heard her laughter on the heels of his jokes. Her replies were disconnected somehow, like just another show on the entertainment schedule PANCOMNET beamed to them.

  That schedule brought to them images of Earth and news of those who populated it, both intended to reinforce their sense of purpose and connectedness. Instead it enforced their sense of separation, and by general unspoken consent the E-channel was blacked out except on the bridge. On its way to meetpoint, Pride of Earth was a quiet ship, as though the stillness of empty space through which it sped had reached through the hull of the ship to hush them.

  Since the first day of the voyage, Pride of Earth had monitored the radio beacon from the Sender ship, the same endlessly repeating and as yet unanswered invitation first heard by Chandliss in the Idaho hills. It was a clarion call and a navigational aid, both impelling and guiding their approach.

  One hundred twenty days from meetpoint, with the Sender ship still three-tenths of a light-year away, Pride of Earth at last began to answer with a beacon of its own.

  On the same frequencies used to communicate with Earth, the envoy ship began to transmit a voice-normal recording of brief greetings by more than a hundred human speakers and in as many different tongues. There was no serious expectation that it would be received, nor if it were, that it would be understood. It had been assembled for local consumption, to help increase identification with the mission throughout the Consortium, and was broadcast back to Unity for that purpose.

  The real message to the Senders was transmitted using the same frequencies and code as their own beacon. After a brief introduction identifying the Pangaean Consortium as the governing body of Earth and the crew of Pride of Earth as the Consortium’s appointed envoys, the fifteen-minute message turned technical. Among the data included were the various frequencies and formats in which the ship could send and receive information.

  Also outlined in the message was the timing of the complex intercept maneuver which had been laid out by the mission planning team before departure. The intercept assumed that the Sender ship would by choice or necessity maintain its velocity throughout.

  Sixty days before meetpoint, Pride of Earth would begin to dump off its outbound velocity at a more leisurely 5g equivalent. The slower rate was partly a concession to the crew’s loss of strength, since even with the AVLO drive’s braking they would feel a half-gee of false gravity, but also an effort to mask Pride of Earth’s capabilities as long as possible.

  Turnover would come when the velocity dump was complete and the ship was motionless, sun-relative. Then the final acceleration phase would begin, this one inbound and designed to allow the alien ship to overtake Pride of Earth just as their velocities matched.

  That was meetpoint: the two ships hurtling sunward in parallel trajectories a single light-minute apart.

  While at Unity, Wenyuan had argued against giving the Senders any advance notice of their approach. But he hovered silently with the others in the bridge and made no protest as the first cycle of the message went out under Charan’s command. Perhaps he was merely bowing to Unity’s request for bridge video of the four of them (to be used during NET broadcasts of the event), or perhaps he had grown tired of fruitless protests. Charan did not know or care which.

  “RSVP,” Rankin said
softly as the first cycle of the message ended and Charan switched off the bridge audio outputs.

  But no quick answer was expected. In the strange milieu of light-years and relativistic velocities, it would take the signal some seventy-five days to reach the alien ship.

  Even were the message detected and answered immediately, which no one counted on, they could not possibly receive a reply until very near the end of the outbound deceleration phase of the intercept. More likely, they would not hear anything until after turnover, when the two ships would be less than five light-days apart and both inbound.

  Nevertheless, with the activation of the beacon a leitmotif of rising expectations succeeded the regime of simple coping.

  By the start of the velocity dump, the anticipation was almost palpable. But at a half-gee, the ship offered a completely new environment, and Charan was thankful for the diversion which relearning how to move through and work in it offered.

  The diversion did not last long enough. By turnover, Pride of Earth was gripped by a permanent tension. With everyone aboard aware that an answer to their beacon could come at any time, all except Joanna were sleeping less and spending most of their extra waking hours on the bridge. To be only 25 billion kilometres from the alien ship was to be within spitting distance psychologically, as though they should be able to see it against the curtain of stars.

  Counter to form, Wenyuan displayed a wry sort of cheer, as though he were both buoyed by the imminent meeting and at the same time amused by it. Rankin grew irascible, apparently overwhelmed by the burden of the experimental program instead of overjoyed by the opportunity to carry it out. Joanna’s self-imposed, isolation deepened as she readied herself for the rapture to come.

  Then, three days after turnover, the Senders sent an answer of sorts: their own beacon fell silent.

  From the timing of it, Charan could only take the event as an acknowledgement that Pride of Earth’s message had been received. With their open call answered, the Senders had rightly decided to waste no more energy broadcasting it. But when no new message came on its heels, Major Wenyuan lost his cheeriness.

  “We told them where we’d be and when,” Wenyuan worried aloud. “But now we have no way of knowing where they’ll be.”

  “They’ll be where we expect,” Charan said.

  . “We could ask them to resume transmitting.”

  “We could. But it would be ten days until they could do anything about it for us, and by then we’ll be nearly at meet-point. I tell you again, these are not fighter planes which can wheel about the sky at will. Both ships are committed to their courses and any significant change would light up Dr. Rankin’s instruments with the energy that would be evolved. Don’t worry, Major,” Charan said with a half smile. “We haven’t come all this way just to miss them—nor they us. They’ll keep our date.”

  “We should do more than trust to that,” Wenyuan grumbled. “If you or Dr. Rankin cares to start a search program with the telescanner, you have my blessing.”

  At Wenyuan’s insistence such a program was begun, though Rankin was a reluctant party to it. Every hour they scanned the Sender’s ship’s predicted position for a visible object, a process which took five minutes. Every twelve hours, tiny scanned all the positions it might have achieved since the termination of the beacon, a process which took nearly an hour.

  They were so engaged when, three days from meetpoint and with no forewarning at all, Joanna came to Charan’s cabin and asked him to make love to her.

  At first it was nothing but self-disclosure, a plea for someone to listen from someone with something to say.

  “You know that I was chosen for this because they thought I was a good person, maybe even a blessed person, even though I never shared that feeling. But I went along because I thought that being blessed was maybe something that you were, not something that you felt. The First Scion said that a lamp could not know how bright it was because all the light flowed outward.

  “They sent me because they thought I was a good example of their faith. And maybe I am. But shouldn’t I be something more than that? Shouldn’t I also be a good example of what a human being can be? Is one the same as the other?”

  Charan said nothing.

  “There’s so little joy in the Book of Deeds,” she burst out in protest. “It’s full of stories of people who had one only part of their lives in order. They were right with God, but they still let themselves be cold or selfish or cruel to other people. They lived by the faith but they didn’t learn from it.

  “Like me.

  “Only part of me is alive. Someone killed the rest in a hotel room in Chicago and I never troubled myself to bring it back to life. I told myself I felt no anger and believed it, that I wasn’t even changed by what happened. It wasn’t true. When Major Wenyuan treated me as though that part of me were alive, I got angry at him as if there were something wrong with him for thinking so or for having that part alive in him. ”

  “Did you know, they wrote up my story for the Book of Deeds? It’s the very last one in it. I don’t know who wrote it. It wasn’t me, and it isn’t the way I told it. They sanitized it, took away all the rough edges. Reading it didn’t touch me, not my memories or my feelings. It was as though I were reading about something that happened to someone else, a someone else that I didn’t even particularly care about.

  “Someone like I used to be.” Charan remained silent. Joanna did not need his advice; she needed a sounding board so that she could hear her own.

  “I have to find that lost part of myself and take joy in it again. I have to be whole or I won’t be able to stand in the light. I can’t be like a cardboard wise man from a nativity set, one-dimensional. What if someone wants to see the other side?”

  “What, then?” Charan asked cautiously.

  She paused and took a deep breath.

  “I need you to touch me. I need to touch you.”

  Charan looked away from her to hide his surprise and did not answer right away. “What would the First Scion think of that, or does that matter at this point?” he asked gently.

  “I think he would approve,” she said slowly. “It was important to him that I not hate my attackers. But even if he disapproved, I’ve come to understand that there’s more to being right with God than being right with any one church. Only those who hate the way God made them can find anything noble in chastity. Sex should be a celebration of God’s kindness to us.”

  She unzipped the long center zipper of her flight jumpsuit and slipped it off her shoulders. “I can take the lead if you want, but I would rather just share.”

  He smiled at last and opened his arms to her. They celebrated, at first tentatively, then tenderly, then fiercely. For the first two, an eye for impending collisions sufficed to overcome the novelty of weightlessness. For the last, they found the confines of Charan’s wall-mounted sleeping bag more accommodating.

  They were still there, cradling each other in the afterglow, when Wenyuan burst in. Joanna’s discarded jumpsuit floating free in the compartment said everything. The look he gave Joanna seared her. But the anger passed quickly from Wenyuan’s face, to be replaced by an uncharacteristically vulnerable expression.

  “Come when you can,” he said numbly. “Dr. Rankin has spotted the alien ship.”

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  Meetpoint

  For all the use that had been made of it during the outbound leg, mod E might as well have been sealed with a time lock. But then, none of its three compartments offered much utility. Had Pride of Earth set off with its planned complement of twelve and five-module design, claustrophobia and cabin fever would have made mod E a refuge—open space where no one lived, no one worked, and privacy might be had.

  The aftmost compartment was crowded with the hardware needed to blend up to a dozen gases into a specialized atmosphere, then heat, cool, pressurize, or humidify the mixture as required. The central compartment, smallest of the three and the location of the sin
gle hatch connecting mod E with the core of the ship, boasted a computer terminal, storage for a waldoid and its supplies, and little else.

  The meeting chamber took up the forward half of mod E. It was divided in two by a deceptively strong transparent wall capable of withstanding a fifteen-atmosphere differential between the human side and the Sender side. In the Sender half, a hull hatch led to a flexible ship-to-ship transfer tunnel.

  Forced by Rashuri to make mod E part of the ship, Driscoll had determined to make it useful, designing three scenarios for contact with the Senders around it. Mounted in the dividing wall was a pressure hatch, allowing the Sender end to be used as an airlock. In the most probable scenario, Charan or Wenyuan would don the waldoid and jet across to the alien ship, carrying the self-powered communications link and leaving it there.

  Alternately, or possibly at a later juncture, a member of the crew might use the transfer tunnel to go aboard the Sender vessel. Despite official expectations and technical provisions to the contrary, the use of the tunnel to bring a Sender aboard was considered both less likely and less desirable.

  But even this close to meetpoint, mod E sat largely empty and silent. At times Joanna would go into the meeting chamber to pray, and Rankin had spent several hours conducting a test of the atmospheric system just after turnover. Other than those intrusions, mod E simply waited for its time.

  Now, with the Sender ship spotted, its time had come. Rashuri had had more than Eddington’s followers in mind when he shepherded the idea of a meeting module through the gauntlet of scientific ridicule. Now, before Charan joined the others on the bridge, there was a small task to be performed at the mod E terminal. logon user 00116, he typed. The use of the extra zeroes told the operating system not to echo the transaction to the bridge or lab terminals. That such a function existed appeared nowhere in the general documentation. ready run meetpoint password protected command, replied the operating system. enter password.