Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  But not being stopped was not enough. He wanted her approval. It had always meant more than the honors and awards he had accumulated with seeming ease, even though it came infrequently and in measured doses. Her blessing would smooth the difficult path ahead. It would give him the reassurance that she thought,this, too, was within his reach.

  What he got was two days of silence, and then a visitor.

  Coming home from his first meeting with the engineering project team to which he had been assigned, he found her waiting for him outside his student flat. They hugged, more out of ritual than warmth of feeling. Her presence made him suddenly anxious, but he was too busy trying to read her mood to realize that he was telegraphing his own emotions.

  She cast a jaundiced eye at the inside of the flat, which was bland where it was not cluttered, but said nothing.

  “Still settling in,” he volunteered.

  She nodded absently, examining the netlink. “A 400 series? That’s a ten-year-old model.”

  “It does everything I need it to.”

  “I suppose,” she said, continuing her inspection. “I’ve been walking around the Institute. It seems more like a warehouse than a school. How many students are here?”

  “About twelve hundred.”

  “Twelve hundred! They can’t be very selective.”

  “It’s very competitive.”

  “Oh, I’m sure, but on what level?” she said, settling in a chair. “Merritt, would you explain why you didn’t come talk with me before doing this?”

  “It wasn’t a hard decision. I didn’t have any doubts that this is what I want.”

  “After I got your message, I went up to Georgetown to talk with Director Stowell. He told me that the door is open for you to return.”

  Thackery nodded. “I know. I didn’t think it was necessary. It was his idea.”

  “He also told me that you’ve already damaged your reputation among the faculty just by doing this, that you’ve raised questions about your ability to take the pressure. He said that if you let as little as three months go by before you return, it’ll be next to impossible for you to regain your former academic standing.”

  Aware of Andra’s mastery of the leading question, Thackery wished he could hear Stowell’s version of the conversation. “That’s sounds about right,” he said lamely.

  “You’re very sanguine about it.”

  “Andra—you don’t seem to understand. I don’t expect to go back.”

  “You don’t seem to understand that you have to go back.”

  “I know this isn’t what you were expecting from me—”

  “Merritt, I know what the cost of taking time out is. I took time out to give you life. I was thirty-one, right in the middle of my career. My column was getting good placement in all three newsnets. I had good relationships not only with my peers, but with Council insiders. I took two years out, and I never caught up.”

  “But they held your job open—” She shook her head. “The rest of the world doesn’t hold still. I was on track to become chief policy interpreter for the whole North American zone. I never got there, because of the time I took out for you. I don’t regret it—you’re the best thing I’ve ever done. But if you let this opportunity slip away, you’re not only making what you’ve done pointless, you make what I did pointless, too.”

  Never much for conflict, Thackery’s stomach had begun to chum. “I haven’t lowered my standards, just changed my goal.”

  “Do you really think that? Do you really think that your future here compares in any way with the future you can still have in Government Service? Director Stowell agrees with me that you have the potential to go all the way to the Council itself.”

  “But, Andra—that’s your script for my life, not mine. That’s not what I want.”

  “A script? Is that the way you think of it? Then what kind of role did I write for myself? I kept you at home until you were ten. How many mothers waited that long to put their children in full-time childcare? I would have kept you longer if Shelby Preparatory hadn’t been residential. Even so, I was always there to help you. I let you use my contacts for your studies. When you were on break, I took you to legislative briefings, agency hearings—not because I wanted to, but because you wanted to know how it all worked. I didn’t drag you into the GS track. You wanted it.”

  Thackery squirmed. It was true enough—for a long time he had taken the lead, had gladly applied himself toward making real what had seemed a sparkling vision. Until very recently he had not even realized that it was she who had planted that vision.

  Andra was not finished. “You made a commitment, and I supported you. We both worked very hard for a long time for this. You’re a thoroughbred, Merritt. I haven’t trained you, others have, but I know the course. You’re very close to a big hurdle, and I’m not going to allow you to refuse the jump. I expect you to go back. I will not let you quit.”

  Torn between incompatible yearnings, Thackery could not mount an effective defense. “All I want is your support,” he said pleadingly, his eyes wet. “Why can’t you give me that?”

  “Because if you stay here, you’re going to fail,” she said coldly. “Not just fail to live up to your potential. Did any of the track-jumpers who came into Georgetown last? No. You know what happened to them. It didn’t matter how bright they were. It didn’t matter how much they wanted it. They didn’t have the background, and they didn’t know how the system worked. They were outsiders, and they stayed outsiders until they gave up. And that’s what will happen to you if you don’t come back with me.”

  “I can’t,” he said helplessly. “I can’t.”

  She stood, and for a long moment searched his face with a hard gaze. “You mean you won’t. Which tells me not only what you think of me, but what you think of yourself. And I don’t like either part of that message.” Stopping at the door, she looked back. “I’m going to arrange a prepaid fare in your name for the transatlantic shuttle, one that’ll be good for the next three months. I hope you won’t be too proud or wait too long to use it.”

  For a long time, Thackery had cause to wonder if Andra had been right.

  He discovered quickly that the Tsiolkovsky students were no less intellectually able than those at Georgetown. Hobbled by his weak background in physical science, Thackery barely made an impression, much less a splash, in his classes and engineering project team—just as Andra had predicted. Nearly all of his previous training, save for the advanced mathematics, was useless. It took him a month to reach the point where he could follow conversations, and three months until he could contribute to them.

  But he did not go back. He viewed the expiration of the shuttle ticket to be a message to Andra, a message that said, You’re wrong, Andra. I can, loo, make it here.

  Yet by the end of the first year, Thackery had come to the sobering realization that he would in all likelihood never catch up to his new trackmates. He had started too far behind in a race in which there were no shortcuts. He took solace in knowing that he was stretching himself, was learning how to sustain a higher level of effort than he had ever needed before. And he held on to the hope that though he might never be the best again, he would be good enough.

  Toward the end of his second year, he sent Andra a letter that both took cognizance of and ignored the breach between them. He filled it with personal social details and his perceptions of London and environs, while avoiding mention of his studies or plans. A month later, he received a short reply from her in which she similarly avoided any mention of Tsiolkovsky. The fact that she responded at all he took to mean that she had come to at least a grudging understanding that he was not coming back to Georgetown; the way in which she responded suggested that they had established the ground rules for some sort of rapprochement, if not a complete end to hostilities. From that point on, he made an effort to write her every three or four months. Usually she answered.

  In all, it took Thackery three years to pass his technical exams. But p
art of that extra time was a strategic delay. Unlike GS and the various free industries, which snapped up talent whenever and wherever they found it, the USS did not accept applications until and unless they had openings. Instead, it maintained a short “Qualified—Call As Needed” list to fill short-term needs, and posted a Notice of Opportunity when the QCAN list became too short or a new project or ship was approved.

  So Thackery waited at Tsiolkovsky, sharpening his skills, avoiding the binding commitments which would have come with graduation. He watched the Placement Services list like a broker with an order to buy until, one morning, he dialed in to find a short-term USS Notice of Opportunity posted. He would not know the reason until later that day: overnight, a fierce chemical fire had broken out in the cargo compartments of the packet Moliere. Nineteen of the twenty-five techs being ferried back from Mars’ orbital Materials Reprocessing Center were dead.

  Thackery went directly to the Tsiolkovsky testing center. Nine hours later, he returned home with his Technical Service Auxiliary (sysawk) rating, a post with USS-Transport, and a seat on the Friday morning shuttle for his first trip to the orbiting city called Unity.

  The shuttle Vulpecula’s liftoff was smooth and on time. Due to its inverted attitude, the Earth would remain visible through cabin ports throughout the four-hour flight. But Thackery soon tired of looking back, and began to watch for the first glimpse of Unity.

  Early in its history, Unity had been home to the offices and ministers of Rashuri’s Pangaean Consortium. That highly symbolic “government-in-the-sky” position seemed progressively less important in the years after Rashuri’s death, and when the World Council supplanted the Consortium, it moved to a 1600-hectare free-floating artificial island built for it in the Mediterranean.

  Rather than being a blow to Unity’s fortunes and status, the departure of the bureaucrats actually opened the door to its explosive growth. Freed of the thousand and one restrictions imposed in the name of security, Unity quickly became the primary hub of orbital activity. Now it was more a city than a space station. It first appeared on the cabin display as a bright star surrounded by five smaller, dimmer satellites. The central star soon resolved itself into the starfish-like radial shape of Unity, the satellites into globular automated production centers.

  As Vulpecula closed on the city Thackery made out the slender communications masts which extended in both directions from its central hub, giving the structure the appearance of a five-spoked child’s jack. New construction was underway, skeletal structures spanning the gaps between the spokes like webbing growing between the fingers of a hand. The dozens of construction waldoids moving among the girders were like so many scurrying orb-weavers, creating their web even as he watched.

  Thackery’s contemplations were interrupted by a tone from the seat speaker.

  “This is Commander Gerhard. The crew and I just picked up something in the intership traffic that we’re sure will be of interest to you. The word is that Orpheus, the USS-Survey ship working the Vela octant, has discovered a fourth human colony!”

  The shuttle’s cabin erupted into applause and chest-beating celebration, with Thackery contributing as much as anyone. Gerhard must have been either monitoring or expecting the outburst, for he waited until it moderated to go on.

  “We don’t have much more information for you at the moment. I can tell you the colony is called Pai-Tem by the inhabitants, which number only about twenty thousand. I can also tell you that Orpheus is under the command of SC Alvin Reed, and that the crew and I and all of USS-Transport are damned proud of what our brothers and sisters in the Survey branch are doing.”

  So are we all, Thackery thought. It’s easy to be proud. But would you trade places with them, Gerhard? Would you give up everything to be where they are?

  “We’ll be docking at Unity in just a few minutes, and there may be more information on the base net by the time we’re processed.”

  There was another spattering of applause as the end-of-message chimes sounded. His seat partner, apparently a member of the Universal Creation Church, joined several others on board in chanting aloud the opening phrases of the hour-long Prayer of Thanksgiving.

  Thackery, at once exhilarated by the news and fiercely jealous of Reed and the others aboard Orpheus, barely heard them. Fighting to contain both emotions, he turned his eyes toward Unity, his thoughts toward others’ past, his hopes toward his own future.

  Journa, Muschvnka, and Ross 128—all cold history, discovered long before I was born. And now Pai-Tem. Let there be more, Thackery begged silently as Vulpecula eased into the empty dock at the tip of Unity’s wing C.

  Let there be more! And leave one for Merritt Thackery. One world in a billion. Not so my name is applauded a hundred years later and a hundred trillion miles away. All I want is Jupiter again. To lose myself in the magic of discovery again. Because there can only be one first time.

  THE PATHFINDERS

  (from Merritt Thackery’s

  JIADUR’S WAKE)

  … The radio beacon from Mu Cassiopeia stirred a somnolent Earth into a social and technological metamorphosis, a metamorphosis symbolized by Tilak Charan’s Pride of Earth. Considering the technological, logistical, and sociological obstacles, the successful construction of Pride ranks as the high-water mark of Devaraja Rashuri’s reign.

  But Pride was the product of an infant technology. Its voyage was one of risk and hubris. Its mission meant an encounter with an alien society of unknowable inclination. Because Pride never returned nor reported, it was widely assumed that it had failed to survive. But no one could say which of the factors was to blame.

  As a result, the USS began to build the only survey ships explicitly authorized by the World Council. What turned out to be a follow-up mission was conceived as a pioneering one, and so the ships were collectively named The Pathfinders. Their individual names remembered the aerial vanguards of Odin and Noah: S2 Hugin, S3 Munin, and S4 Dove.(The honorary designation SI was assigned “posthumously” to Pride of Earth herself.)

  Where Pride of Earth had been a fragile lifeboat, the Pathfinders were comparative dreadnoughts. Three years after Jiadur reached Earth, they set off for the Mu Cass system. There they “discovered” Journa, its inhabitants, and one lone survivor from Pride of Earth—a meeting thereafter commemorated on both worlds in the annual Reunion Day festivities.

  But that meeting was also the beginning of the Service’s colony problem. The Journans claimed to be children of Earth, a claim that proved as irrefutable as it was inexplicable. How could a space-going technological culture have flourished on Earth ten or a hundred thousand years ago and then vanished without a trace? What twisting of history could allow for such a dissonant fact?

  There were no answers on Journa.

  Absent appropriate instructions, the Pathfinders separated and began a roundabout return to Earth. Their self-set purpose was to define the parameters of the problem by searching for other possible remnants of the First Colonization. If there were none, then perhaps some relatively painless revisionism might suffice—

  Then Hugin, under the command of Kellen Brighamton, found a neoprimitive human community on a planet orbiting the white dwarf component of 40 Eridani. When Brighamton’s report on the Muschynka reached Earth, it became clear that a more ambitious effort to locate and explain the worlds of man was called for. The shipyards went to work, turning out five new survey ships of the Argo series. USS strategists went to work, drawing up a plan to visit each star system within twenty-five light-years of Earth.

  Phase I proceeded largely as planned. The inbound Pathfinders and outbound Argonauts recorded visits to more than 130 star systems over a span of a century and a half. And Commander Yabovsky of Castor earned permanent fame when his crew discovered an extinct human colony on a cold world orbiting a dim star in the constellation Virgo.

  But despite these labors, the colony problem remained impervious to solution. So even as the aging Pathfinders and their Van Winkled crew
s neared Earth, Survey brass were planning for them not rest but a role in an even more ambitious Phase II…

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Ambition

  No announcement was made, but everyone on Dove nevertheless knew when it was time for the ship to come of out the craze. Those pulling duty away from the bridge listened in on the shipnet, while the others drifted by ones and twos into the contact lab, edrec compartment, or onto the bridge itself.

  Among those who came to the bridge was SC Glen Harrod, commander of the Dove. But he made no move to displace bridge captain Alizana Neale from the pedestal, choosing instead to stand in the back with the talkative, almost childishly giddy techs and awks.

  Dove had come out of craze eighteen times before, and there was no technical reason why the nineteenth should prove any more eventful than the others. “Craze” was a fanciful description of what the D-series Avidsen-Lopez drive did to the local fabric of space. Only a few Service researchers claimed to fully understand the “why” of the AVLO power plant. It was commonly known that it was a gravity gradient drive (dubbed the pushmi-pullyu because of the twin bow and stern field projectors). It was also commonly known that to go beyond that casual description, it was necessary to deal with Driscoll’s abstruse grand unified field theorem.

  The drive’s effect, however, was easy to describe. The ship, accelerated beyond the speed of. light, and the rest of the universe disappeared. No chronometers ran backward, no one’s gray hair turned black again, no theatrical pyrotechnics punctuated the transitions past c, but when you got to your destination the numbers always added up so that you were there sooner than Einstein said you should have been. A fifteen light-year craze in a Pathfinder-class ship extracted barely a month from the crew’s biological calendar. When such a ship crazed, nothing in the Universe could catch it—not even the electromagnetic radiation on which all sensing and communication depended.

  That fact contributed to the secondary meaning of the term “craze.” To some surveyors, referred to unsympathetically as “the phobes,” the blank screens and dead air meant an enforced isolation in a universe that ended at the ship’s hull. Craze fear had elements of cabin fever, Gansel’s syndrome, and prisoner’s psychosis. Unmoderated by drugs, victims of mild cases suffered from anxiety, poor concentration, and irritability: those more seriously afflicted experienced sexual dysfunction, insomnia, and panic.