There were none, and the gathering broke up quickly as the officers left and the various crew scattered to their posts. Thackery fought his way through the congested corridor and caught up to Neale and Rogen at the former’s cabin door.
“Commander, a request?” Neale looked back over her shoulder, then turned to face him. “Thackery,” she acknowledged. “Permission to observe the craze from the bridge. Commander?”
“I’ve sent them as many observers as they will accept. I’m the commander of Descartes, not of Tycho.”
“Then permission to observe from the library.”
She shook her head. “There’ll be time enough for that later.”
“What’s your interest, Thackery?” Rogen interjected.
Thackery glanced sideways at the bridge captain and hesitated before answering. “I understand that any phobes will be rousted out at Cygnus.”
“That’s correct. They’ll be transferred to the permanent staff there.”
“Well—I’d like to find out right away.”
A bemused smile slowly spread across Rogen’s face, and he walked away chuckling to himself.
“The craze phobia is psychological, not perceptual,” Neale said coldly in answer to Thackery’s baffled look. “If that were not the case, we would be able to screen for it more effectively.”
Flushing rapidly, he said, “I always heard it compared with claustrophobia—”
“An analogy only. Its effect becomes evident only over a period of time. So we won’t know right away whether you are fit to continue on this ship,” she said pointedly. “You have as much to prove here as anyone, Thackery, if not more—and not just in your flight adaptation. So I would suggest you spend less time letting the vets mislead you and more time working to improve your skills.”
She turned her back and entered the cabin, leaving him alone in the corridor. The moment Neale’s door closed, Thackery smacked his thigh sharply with a fist. Idiot! How could you—
“Second warning. Fifteen minutes to craze,” the shipnet intoned. “Prepare to terminate local telemetry handshaking. Receiving final inmail. Last call for personal outmail.”
Unable to readily shed the foolish feeling or forget the sound of Rogen’s laughter, Thackery made his way back to his quarters. Mercifully, McShane was with the second watch in the library. Mercifully for him, considering his contribution to Thackery’s blunder.
Thackery flung himself lengthwise on his bunk and blew a weighty sigh between his lips. Well, let’s add up the day. You had to come aboard without being able to reach Andra, found out your new commander thinks most of her crew isn’t worth a straw, and then you proceeded to prove her right. A great start, Thack. A great start.
Unpinning the Intersystem insignia from his collar, Thackery held it up at eye-level and stared into it, the first time he had had a chance to examine one closely. True to its reputation, the black crystal’s invisible internal facets created a marvelous illusion of a dimensionless void. Though barely three centimetres across the long axis, it was almost possible to believe that it contained a universe as infinite as the one in which it existed.
My compliments to the crystallurgists.
Thackery recalled having heard on Unity that a vet from the Hugin was arrested for trying to sell his black ellipse to a Filipino businessman. Though nothing had appeared in any official media to confirm any part of the story, the asking price was said to be €75,000.
How many are there, six hundred scattered through 65,000 cubic light-years?—And I have one of them. How could he sell it? Why would he even consider it?
Meaningless in itself, Neale had said. You’re wrong, Commander, Thackery thought as he returned the insignia to his collar. It means enough to make up for what we gave up to get it, what we put up with because we wear it, what it will cost us to keep it. And on days like today, it means everything.
“Thack?”
He reached across and tabbed the shipnet. “Here.”
It was Baldwin. “Just passing the word. You got mail.”
“What?”
“In the last dispatch before we crazed. It was a big batch. We were receiving almost right up to the last minute.”
“Oh. When can I access it?”
“It’s already queued up under your file number.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Thackery retrieved his slate from one of the drawers beneath his bunk and switched it on, wondering what he had left unfinished or who he had failed to settle with. To his surprise, there was not one but three messages in the queue.
Touching an icon, he brought the first of them to the slate’s display. He recognized the header immediately: It was the formal letterhead of the Government Service Academy at Georgetown.
The face of Director Stowell appeared. He smiled briefly. “Good morning, Merritt. Or at least it’s morning where I am. I don’t suppose that term applies where you’re heading.
“One of the things I’ve learned in twenty-two years as an educator is that the talented students will find their own way, no matter how bone-headedly determined the institution is to hinder them.
“I believe I told you once that I couldn’t see you as a follower. I didn’t realize then that you had it in your head to be a pioneer. I never had the desire to be where you are today, but the task you have chosen is an important one, and I wish only that your part in it brings you great satisfaction.” He smiled again, in fatherly fashion, and the picture was replaced by a fax of Thackery’s student record. In the space where it had once said ON HIATUS, the legend now read WITHDRAWN WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
The second message was text only, and Thackery found it puzzling at first. There was no header, only a twenty-four-year-old clip from POLINET.
FOR RELEASE: 3:00 p.m. GMT May 12, A.R. 172
)CAPITOL ISLAND—World Council insiders are pointing to Associate Director John Merritt Langston as the most likely candidate for the seat of 75-year-old retiring Councilor Den-Buodi Kuoinmoni.
)A 52-year-old native of Newfoundland, Langston would be the youngest ever selected to the 17-man executive body, and the first North American so honored since the turn of the century…
The rest of the article comprised an unusually positive biography of Langston, in which he came off as being bright without being snobbish, fast-rising without being ambitious, and one who practiced traditional values without being a shill for them. It was sharp, well written, and incisive. And it made not a whit of sense until Thackery reached the end and the creditline:
A NEWS ANALYSIS BY ANDRA THACKERY,
POLINET CORRESPONDENT.
Even then, he only understood who had sent it, with just the barest hint of why. It took Andra’s trailing note to fill that gap—
Merritt—son—
Within an hour of your leaving that day, I came to admit (I always realized) you did indeed deserve to know. Since then I also realized other difficult truths: Most importantly, that when I could not have him, I tried to make you into him, and that I think is a far greater offense.
Even so, I can only make myself tell you now because you are beyond reach, and you cannot disturb him, or me, with your hunger for an alternate past. Don’t wonder at his silence, for he never knew—another choice I made for all of us.
It is impossible to control and too late to change what you feel toward me. But please believe that I am as proud of you as I can be. I have asked a friend to drive with me into the country and help me find Cygnus, so that I can look into the night sky and think of you often.
Andra
Numbly, Thackery asked the netlink for a picture of John Langston. He looked a long time into the eyes of the gaunt face which appeared on the display, then asked for a younger picture. The eyes became stronger, the chin firmer, the folds and wrinkles fewer. He asked for a younger picture yet, and a chill went through him when it appeared. It was as though he were looking into an unfaithful mirror, or at the face of a brother, or—
There was one message remain
ing in the queue, and for one brief moment of wish-fulfilling weakness Thackery allowed himself to hope it might be from Langston—from his father. Even now, as little as it would be, it would mean so much—
But there were to be no tidy endings. The final message was a routine congratulatory from the current dean of Tsiolkovsky Institute, a man whose name meant nothing to Thackery and whose words were formal and meaningless.
Thackery retreated to his bed as a wounded animal goes to his lair. There was almost deliberate cruelty in the way Andra had told him, for it was already too late for him to use the knowledge. There was no way to reach out to Langston, no way to heal the trauma. Descartes had crazed, and the wall had gone up. When it came down again, Langston would be dead.
And so would Andra.
He saw with renewed clarity how selfish she was, even at the last. She had given him what he had demanded, but only after waiting long enough to render it valueless. For all her apologies, her message did more to free her conscience than it did to restore what had been stolen from him.
Damn you, Andra! Better you hadn’t told me at all than to tell me now, in this way. You’ve made leaving harder, not easier. And instead of redeeming yourself, you’ve given me another reason to hate you—
Except that she was dead, and he was beginning a new life.
In his mind’s eye, he would still her voice and freeze her form, and he would bury her. With a will, perhaps he could forget her.
That way, he would not have to find a way to forgive her. Because he did not see how that would be possible.
THE VETERANS
(from Merritt Thackery’s
JIADUR’S WAKE)
… For some reason, the Flight Office was eager to see that there was Survey experience aboard every outbound ship. Older surveyors saw it as a sign of creeping conservatism, since the all-novice crews of the Pathfinder and Argo ships had managed to cope with what they encountered.
Nevertheless, the Flight Office worked hard to see that, at minimum, the commander, exec, and contact leader on each new ship were veterans. That was a deceptively ambitious goal. To place three vets on each new Pioneer-class ship and keep even that number for each refitted Pathfinder-class ship, nearly half of each returning crew had to be coaxed into going out again.
But asking a vet to sign a second contract, even a limited-term, three-year mission contract, meant asking them to give up the country-club atmosphere of the resynchronization center at Benamira, New Zealand. It meant asking them to pass up figuring out how to spend the enormous fortune which resulted from sixteen years’ salary invested (even at the Council-imposed ceiling of 3 percent) for more than a century.
There were only two kinds of veterans to whom returning to space was the more attractive alternative: those happy few who had found their identities there, and those unhappy few who had lost their souls…
Chapter 4
* * *
Hysteresis
Contact Leader Mark Sebright sat on the edge of the lab workstation, crossed his arms over his chest, and surveyed the expectant faces of his surveyors. The team was studying him just as intently, for they had seen little of him since he came aboard.
The last name added to the Descartes roster, Sebright was the long-awaited and often despaired-of replacement for Jaiswal (who, according to rumor, had left the Service entirely and gone back to teaching at Hzui-Tyu). And he promised to be a more than adequate stand-in: Sebright was not only a Pathfinder, but a veteran of Hugin, the ship which had discovered the Muschynka colony in Eridanus.
Sebright’s assignment was finalized a bare five days before departure, the minimum required to pass him through the gnotobiotic tortures, and two days after the team had transferred to Tycho. Thackery had caught only a glimpse of Sebright since then, as the vet had spent most of his time huddled with Neale, Rogen, and Dunn. What little Thackery had seen encouraged him. The rangy, tangle-haired Sebright comported himself confidently and casually. Where Neale seemed to be constantly on edge, Sebright had the worldly-wise eyes and demeanor of someone for whom life holds no more surprises.
“Morning,” Sebright said, his inspection complete. “This won’t take long.”
There were several skeptical smiles, for that was a promise Graeff had made often and never kept.
“I’ve been over your records,” he continued. “You’re a damn sight more educated than we were. Half of you have quals in specialties that didn’t exist until we found out the Service needed them.
“Unfortunately for you, the Com doesn’t agree with me. She says we don’t know enough. She wants to solve it by sending everybody up for another qual test when we reach A-Cyg. That’ll be worth a few more Coullars in the pay account, so I suppose there’s some of you who won’t kick too hard,” he said with a shrug. “But the way I see it, it’s not that we don’t know what to do—”
Eagan, sitting at Thackery’s elbow, whispered, “He should have seen us in Queen Maud Land.”
“—It’s that what we know how to do doesn’t need doing yet,” Sebright continued. “I suspect she’s a lot more worried about idle time on the leg out than she is about your quals. If it were up to me, I’d say enjoy it while it lasts. It’ll probably be the last vacation you have until you die or transfer out.
“You wouldn’t know it from your simulations, but once we hit our first system, we’ll be working harder than anyone on board. And when we leave the first system, we’ll be running three shifts during the craze just to analyze the data we collected. Unfortunately, we’ll reach the second system before we’re done with the first—and the backlog will build from there.”
He paused and scratched his chin. “So I can’t tell you what freezin’ good passing another technical will do you. But Neale expects it. I’ll leave it up to you to see that you’re ready. Pick a new area or try to move up to the next level in your current ratings, I don’t care which. And you can sync yourself to whatever shift you choose.”
“Do you want to approve our study plans?” asked Tyszka.
Sebright shook his head. “I don’t even want to know that you have one. Hell, you’re not students or trainees. You’re professionals. That little trinket you’re all wearing proves it, right? So start living up to it these next few weeks.” He stood up and tucked his hands into the thigh pockets of his old-fashioned jumpsuit. “That’s all.”
As the meeting broke up, Muir planted her gamine body in front of Thackery.
“What do you think?” demanded the exobiologist. “I think I like him, Donna,” Thackery said, watching Se-bright out the door. “Did you hear? He intended all along to bump someone from either Tycho or Descartes.”
“So?”
“He didn’t tell them until the last minute because he wanted to avoid the ‘nuisance’ of preflight training.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From someone in the Flight Office.” A cross look took over her face. “They should have let Raji stay on. It wasn’t his fault we screwed up down south.”
“Sure it was. He was Contact Leader,” Thackery said, standing. “Look, Sebright is the only one aboard, command crew included, who’s actually been involved in a successful Contact. We’re going to learn a lot from him.”
“I don’t think so,” Muir said, shaking her head.
“You come to conclusions too fast,” Thackery retorted as he edged past her. “You’ll have to watch that. It’s a bad habit for a surveyor.”
The rush of good feeling stayed with Thackery, and at mid-rats he pursued the topic with Collins. “We’ve done really well, you know?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“To have five vets in our crew.”
“I thought there were four.”
“The Com, the exec, Graeff, Dunn, Sebright.”
“Oh—I forgot about Dunn. He’s that quiet one, isn’t he, who’s always in a little crowd of awks.”
“He is senior tech. Anyway, we are lucky, aren’t we? There’s only
three on Tycho.”
“I suppose,” she said, nibbling the edge of a pastry. “I wonder sometimes what they’re doing here.”
“The Dove reups are easy to understand,” Thackery said defensively. “They have something to prove.”
“Because they didn’t find a colony? Maybe there aren’t any more.” She sighed. “No, I shouldn’t say that, it’ll jinx us. But they’ve seen—well, look at it this way. When they step out on their patio at night and look up, there are eighteen flickery points of light that to them are real places. They can point and say, ‘I’ve been there. That’s a place that I know.’ ” She shook her head. “That must be the most wonderful feeling in the world. I don’t know what else they could want.”
Thackery smiled. “Maybe the best feeling isn’t remembering, but being there.”
“Then why don’t they all go back? Oh, I don’t know. Did you hear about Sebright?”
“Stalling the Flight Office? Yeah, that’s made the rounds.”
“No, this is something I heard from Jessie. I guess Sebright doesn’t have full Contact Leader quals.”
“No?”
“No, you know they’re supposed to be qualified in all six survey specialties, like the Com is on operations specialties. But he’s only passed resource geology and technoanalysis. Kind of makes you wonder how far down they had to dig to get him.”
Thackery shook his head. “There’re face quals and real quals. Raji had face quals, and we saw how that worked out. Sebright’s going to be good for us. Besides, I figure the reason he doesn’t want to be bothered with our study plans is because he’s going to be busy with his own.”
“Maybe. He just better not try to tell me how to do my job until he knows at least as much as I do.” She looked at her watch, then wiped her lips on her napkin. “Speaking of which, I’ve got some work to do with Donna,” she said, pushing back from the table.
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