Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “They have prepared them for aliens. They expect Eddington’s MuMans, or their kin. Not our kin. What will they make of that news? You know as I do there is no predicting, and what cannot be predicted cannot be controlled.” Wenyuan smiled engagingly, an expression which suited his face poorly. “And there is a personal dimension. You can hardly be less eager than I am to be free of this ship, to put this burden behind you.”

  “What happens to the Journans in your scheme?”

  “They continue on as they are, toward their arrival in 2027. By then we will be ready. Tilak—comrade—it is not our problem anymore.”

  Ready to do what? Charan wondered. But the specifics did not matter. Once she knew enough, Tai Chen could play the outcome of Pride of Earth’s mission as a trump against Rashuri at a time of her choosing. Or hold it in reserve indefinitely and use it to extract an endless string of concessions. The end result of either would likely be the destruction or exploitation of the keep of Journa itself.

  “Those are not our problems either,” Wenyuan said presciently. “Home, Commander, and the final discharge of our duty. That is the course for us now.”

  With Joanna, Charan’s tone was gentler, but his opening question just as direct. “You came here prepared to worship them, but found out that they worship us,” he said. “Where does that leave you?”

  “I believe that this is meant a lesson for us, a great lesson in humility,” she answered. She spoke deliberately, as though sight-reading a speech she had not yet taken to heart. “I see now that we were presumptuous and self-centered. It’s been an article of faith from the beginning for Christians that the infinite Universe was created for us alone. But it seems we’ve read our Scriptures too narrowly. I believe God is telling us that He has blessed many worlds with life in His image. Earth and Journa are just two of that number.”

  “You reject the Journans’ explanation, then.”

  “Of course. It’s a pagan myth, nothing more.”

  “So what now? What do you hope to do?”

  “I must carry the good news back to Earth.”

  “What good news is there in a rebuke for hubris?”

  “But it’s also a wonderful affirmation that God exists. I’ve talked with Dr. Rankin at length. This revelation will blow away forever the false science of evolution. We owe our existence to God’s divine hand, not blind chance. No one can doubt that now. The Church will have to change, but it will become stronger in doing so. Much stronger. It will sweep away the unbelievers, and usher in a new Age of Faith.”

  “The Joumans doubt it. In fact, they don’t seem to believe in your God at all. I saw no reference to such a being in the entire keep. If the Joumans are God’s children, why don’t they seem to know it?”

  Joanna bit at her lower lip as she thought about her answer. “Their revelation is yet to come,” she said finally. “They’re as the Jews were before Abraham. He hasn’t shared with them His Holy Word, His plan of salvation. That may be why they were chosen for this encounter. This may be meant as the beginning of their salvation.”

  “Or perhaps they don’t need salvation,” Charan said lightiy. “You see life in too narrow terms, Scion. I suspect that the Joumans might see your god as nothing more than our own Founder myth.”

  Uncharacteristically, anger flashed across Joanna’s face. “What, then? Do their myths falsify our truths? Do you expect me to forget my faith because they haven’t any? Because two disagree, are both wrong?”

  “They don’t have to be—but they could be. I’m just wondering what happened to the approaching host you were so certain were coming, Joanna. What happened to the voices of revelation and the messages they were sending you? Did they send one saying the Second Coming’s on hold?”

  “Why do you want to tear down my faith?” Joanna asked, her anger turning to tears.

  Charan sighed, regretting the tone he had taken. “I’m looking for answers, Joanna,” he said tiredly. “Everybody but me seems to have one to offer. I’d like to know that the one I pick is a good one. A faith that can’t stand up to questioning and a theology that can’t bear close examination don’t give me much comfort.”

  “I have no doubts that what I’ve said is true,” she said with stiff pride.

  “That’s unfortunate,” Charan said with sincere regret. “Because my instinct is to be suspicious of anyone who’s too certain of anything just now.”

  But Rankin, who had doubts aplenty, was no more help. “I’ve been around the block several times on this one,”

  Rankin admitted. “It keeps getting harder to figure.” His breath smelled of port wine. “Those additional tests you did with the samples from Sialkot—what did they tell you?”

  “The cytochrome C studies. You understand the principle? Mutations provide a kind of clock that keeps track of how long it’s been since two lines split from the same stock. You’d like to have more than two specimens before you go draw conclusions—”

  —“but there aren’t any more Journans handy. So how long has it been?”

  “Based on those two samples, the lines haven’t split, as far as a population biologist is concerned. I mean by that an upper limit of 100,000 years.”

  “Is there no way around their having been one with us at sometime?”

  “There’s lots of ways around it, just none that will hold water. But for audacity, I like the captured-by-flying-saucers-and-used-as-fronts-for-an-evil-purpose idea best myself. You can also have fun with passed-into-an-altemate-universe—”

  “I have heard of such a tiling as convergent evolution—”

  “Probability zero. It applies only to grosser physical characteristics where the same solution is produced in response to the same problem, not to the fine points of biochemistry.”

  “And Joanna’s explanation?”

  “I prefer the Journans’.”

  “Can you offer any support for it?”

  Rankin shook his head. “I’m no archaeologist. But I have trouble imagining that we could fail to miss the signs of a space-going technological civilization preexistent on Earth. If we are the Pounders—and, mind you, it’s a wonderfully attractive idea if you’re a human chauvinist like I am—what could have happened to make us forget that era so completely? This is really a better puzzle by far than if the Senders had turned out to be something with two brains and slimy tentacles, or those silly moth-eared MuMans.”

  “You go around the block all right, but you never go inside the house. What’s the answer, then? Tell me something positive.”

  Rankin squinted at Charan. “There is one idea I’m playing with, a kind of update of Hoyle and your countryman Wickramasinge—”

  Charan grimaced at Rankin’s mangled pronunciation of the name.

  “—sorry. Their ideas cm directed panspermia. The concept is that an altruistic species takes it upon itself to spread life through the galaxy. Hoyle and his coworker.” he said pointedly, grinning, “talked about using microbes to kick off evolution on hospitable worlds. It’s really been a bastard child, not much taken seriously. Though I think there was once a semi-serious proposal, seems to me a Nobel-prize winner made it, for travel by sperm-and-egg, a kind of brood starship.” He laughed harshly.

  “And this is the best answer you have? It sounds like nothing more than a dressed-up Founder myth. For that matter, it sounds a lot like Joanna’s explanation, too.”

  “I know,” Rankin said unhappily.

  “You haven’t been much help to me.”

  Rankin shrugged apologetically. “You haven’t been much help to me, either.”

  “What would you have us tell Earth?” Rankin smiled wryly. “You can tell them for me that the first paper on extraterrestrial physiology is going to look awfully bloody familiar.”

  Charan sat by himself for several minutes after Rankin left, then roused himself and quietly reimposed lockout. When it was discovered by Wenyuan and an explanation demanded, Charan shut down internal communications as well. Let them wonder.
If they were the least bit perceptive, they would know that he needed time to weigh and consider and decide, that even if the decision seemed simple to each of them individually, it was far from simple when all dimensions were considered.

  “The others are slaves to their orders and their ideologies,” Moraji had said. “But you must stand for more than that.”

  But stand for what? When all interests conflicted, how could he serve any one? And left out of every equation were the equally valid interests and expectations of the Journans. How could he choose? He asked himself, and grew angry all over again that the choice was even his to make.

  For he could never forget that he had been encouraged, steered, and manipulated into a position and a circumstance he would never have sought for himself. He was there because Rashuri could not be—an obedient proxy, a strong-backed servant for a grasping, domineering man.

  Why had Rashuri done it?

  Charan had evolved a number of satisfyingly bitter thoughts with which to silently release his rage, and they came bubbling forth now. I am your child but not your son. You are my father but not my parent. You gave me nothing and I owe you nothing.

  Why did he do it? It was a new voice asking the question, a voice Charan did not recognize or welcome.

  You made every interest of mine subordinate to an interest of your own. You encouraged me only when it suited you. You mapped out my life for me and offered me a Hobson’s choice at every decision point—take any horse so long as it’s the one by the door.

  Why, Father? Why? There was childish hurt in the question.

  I would hurt you if I could, Devaraja Rashuri, but you never showed your heart to me. I would shake you until you finally saw me as me and realized that you were wrong to treat me as just one more gamepiece. If only there were some way to strike at you.

  And then Charan realized that there was. It was within his power to literally hand the future to Tai Chen or the Church of the Second Coming, née Galactic Creation. If he chose to, he could bring the unsteady house of the Pangaean Consortium tumbling down and laugh while Rashuri cried. By allowing the proper message to go out to an Earth which would be made near-frantic by the silence of Pride of Earth’s crew, Charan could preside over the final, precipitous failure of Rashuri’s emprise.

  And in the moment that he realized that he could, he knew that he would not.

  Moraji had understood, had understood from the beginning. Would that I could have chosen him for my father! “Whatever else you may think of him, your father’s vision for Earth is a selfless and noble one,” Moraji had told him. “All of us now entrust that vision to you.”

  The Consortium was more than Rashuri. It was Charan’s friends in the pilot corps and Greta at Unity, it was Kevin Ulm who had risked all and Allen Chandliss who had given all, it was a world reaching out for the fullness of life after decades of retreat.

  Charan could not condemn all that in the name of retribution. Whatever answer he might find, it would have to allow at least a chance for the Consortium to succeed and to survive. None of its flaws would be corrected by replacing it with either an Eastern tyranny of arms or a Western tyranny of minds.

  Why did he do it? What did it gain Rashuri to act as he had? TTie question was as unwelcome as was the answer. In terms of wealth and comfort, Rashuri had nothing as Director that he had not been entitled to as Prime Minister—less, now that he had made Unity his home. He took little time out for what would be considered a personal life, and the example he set by working long hours was widely despaired of by less motivated subordinates. What power he had, he used calculatingly and effectively in pursuing his goals, but never impulsively or vengefully. As much as it annoyed Charan to acknowledge it, Moraji was right. Rashuri had sacrificed much for his ideals.

  Including the love of his son, he thought fiercely.

  But now the angry voice was the intruder. Everything that Rashuri had done, had been done because Rashuri held one goal to be more important than any other value. Enough of that goal was in place that Charan was obliged against his will to admit that it was worthy. He would never forget nor likely forgive what Rashuri had done to him, but he could at least understand and to some degree respect why-it had been done.

  It was an awkward compromise emotionally, but adequate to allow him to push his own selfish motives out of the factors in the matter at hand. I must free myself of klesha if I am to find the answer, he thought. Egocentrism is the enemy of enlightenment.

  But how could he avoid subjecting the Consortium to a shock from which it could not recover? If Charan had gained anything from his studies prior to Tsiolkovsky, it was a sense for the flow of events that after the fact becomes history. In every scenario he could conceive, the Consortium came out the big loser.

  There was a second equation to be solved simultaneously: the Joumans. With no more facts than he had, he could not justify a course of action which would have said to the Journans, in effect, “We’re not the Founders, and you were pretty damn silly to think so.” Even if true, and that was far from clear, it was not his place to say so.

  The set of solutions which would satisfy either equation was small. The set that would satisfy both could well be empty.

  But Charan would not be rushed, would not act or allow action, until he was certain that was the case.

  The others waited with some impatience, but more resignation, as one day, then a second slipped by. On the third day they felt and heard the AVLO drive come to life, and demanded Charan explain what was happening. When he would not offer an answer they came together in the bridge to try to discover it themselves.

  What they saw was Jiadur growing larger in the bridge window as Charan nudged Pride of Earth toward the alien ship. He brought it in daringly close, halting the approach when the ships were a mere five hundred metres apart.

  “What’s he doing?” fumed Wenyuan. “There is no purpose to this.”

  Wenyuan had his answer shortly, when the bridge instruments informed them of the cycling of the mod E airlock and one of the telescanners picked up the sight of the tiny white waldoid jetting toward Jiadur. As if aware they were watching, Charan raised one hand in what could have been a salute, a greeting, or a wave goodbye.

  A hatch in the hull of Jiadur, large enough that it might have been used by cargo carriers to bring its precious cargo aboard, irised open to admit the waldoid.

  “He can’t just be going over to talk to them,” Rankin said as they watched the Jiadur’s hatch close. “He has the radio for that.”

  “So what’s he doing, then?” Joanna demanded.

  Rankin flicked a forefinger against the console repeatedly. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  “That is my evaluation as well,” Wenyuan said gravely. “What do you mean?” demanded Joanna. “Surely you understood it was a possibility,” Wenyuan said.

  “Each of us in our own way poses a problem for Charan. He may have settled on a surgical solution.”

  “Abandon Pride of Earth,” Rankin said, continuing the thought.

  “While he rides home with the Journans as a conquering hero?” Joanna asked angrily.

  “Just so,” Rankin agreed.

  “I don’t believe he would do it,” she said firmly.

  “But he is gone all the same, and we are effectively disabled,” said Wenyuan. “We must be able to get into mod E somehow,” Rankin protested.

  “How? And what would we do if we were successful? You can be sure that nothing so simple as destroying the terminal will free the control systems.”

  “What were you going to do if you’d gotten in a week ago?” Rankin’s face was flushed. “Employ persuasion,” Wenyuan said with a cold smile. “But there is no one there now to persuade.”

  Rankin’s face was pale. “So if he abandons us like this, we win the race back, but we can never stop,” he said slowly. “We’d flash through the solar system so quickly no one could do anything for us.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t mind admitting that I
don’t want to die out here.”

  “None of us do,” Joanna said. “So we had better pray that Charan comes back.”

  They waited on the bridge for some sign that would confirm or refute their worst fear. Though all three were in close quarters, they had little to say to each other. Rankin passed the time completing his scientific report on the Journans and their ship, optimistic that it would eventually be needed. When he was finished Joanna took his place and added to the lengthy message she still hoped to send to Cooke and the Church.

  Wenyuan sat at his station, rocking almost imperceptibly back and forth, and watched the area on the hull of Jiadur where Charan had last been seen. Though his eyes did not wander, his attention did, so that when a line of yellow light appeared, betraying that the hatch was opening, he was not the first to see it.

  “Something’s happening,” said Rankin, who was. He allowed only the faintest hint of hope to color his voice.

  They watched in silence as the great hatch opened wide, a bright wound in the dark-patterned hull. A few moments later, a small solid object came spinning out of the opening and continued off on a line down and away from both ships.

  Rankin moved quickly to track the object with the telescanner node. When he poked the magnified image into the lower half of the window, all recognized it immediately.

  “Why throw away the com unit?” Rankin wondered aloud. No one had time to offer an answer before Joanna cried out, “There’s the waldoid.”

  Emerging from the hatch was the white worksuit, its four grapples each securing a burden: a nearly featureless gray-white case. Charan was screened from their sight by the cargo. They followed the waldoid to the mod E hatch, where it discharged its burdens one at a time.

  “Explosives?” Rankin asked under his breath. There was no answer except that Joanna’s body stiffened.

  Charan made a second trip to Jiadur in the waldoid, this time returning with three of the gray-white cases. When they were loaded aboard, he came inside and closed the hull hatch behind him.