Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Maybe,” he said, and paused. “Was it that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  Thackery frowned. “I think maybe it’s that I’ve brought my expectations in line with reality. This isn’t a bad life. It isn’t what I was expecting. But it isn’t all bad, not nearly so.”

  She looked back at the screen just as an enormous double strike mushroomed near the pole of the second planet. “Not nearly so,” she echoed. “Keep this up, Thackery, and I might actually start to find you tolerable. Not attractive, mind you. But tolerable.”

  There was a great deal of interest in 214 Cygnus-2 right from the start. It was the first world on which there was enough free water for the familiar dynamic of the water cycle to influence the topology. It was the first world on which the clouds held rain, not burning acids or strangling smog.

  Even so, the three discontinuous seas were modest by comparison with those of Earth. The largest, dubbed Mare Australis both for its size and location, averaged barely a thousand metres deep across its four million square kilometre expanse. The smallest, a circular body comparable in size to the Caspian Sea, appeared to be a Hudson Bay-type astrobleme. From the regularity of the shoreline and the surrounding plain of jagged ejecta, Eagan estimated the asteroidal impact had occurred less than a quarter million years ago.

  From the beginning of the first orbit, it was on those seas that the contact team’s attention focused. Free water was a Priority 1 anomaly, and there was no question but that there would be at least one survey landing for samples and soundings. However, Sebright had not announced whom he would send—the primary survey team of Muir, Guerrieri, and Eagan, or their impatient backups. Collins, at least, thought that the question was still an open one.

  “He’s got to even things up,” she said confidently to Thackery during the first orbit. “As long as things don’t get too interesting down there, he can justify sending us. Unless there’s something really special down there, he can’t justify not sending us.”

  The discovery that the water of Two’s seas was brackish and poisonously mineral-laden made Thackery wonder if Collins might not be right. But it was Thackery himself who made the observation that quashed that hope.

  “Donna?”

  “What?”

  “Anything on the shoreline?”

  “Not a hint. Too many salts and heavy metals. Anything that could grow there would have to have cell walls made of ceramic.”

  “Agreed. That’s what you get when a pluvial lake shrinks over time, during a warming period. But Mare Australis does have active feeder streams. What about conditions upriver?”

  “Show me the feeders.”

  She watched over his shoulder as Thackery tracked the sinuous path of the largest of the three shallow rivers. For several hundred kilometres there was no change in the signatures returned by the infrared mapper: weathered rock, salt flats, and mineral deposits. At irregular intervals, the river even disappeared underground, only to reemerge a kilometre or more further along.

  “There,” Thackery said suddenly. “What’s that?”

  “Looks like a grassland,” she said, hurrying back to her own console. “Oh, blessed, look at how big it is. Five thousand kilometres on a side.”

  “How’d we miss it?”

  “We didn’t. I’m looking at the data from the first pass. Damn, there’s even some variation in the flora—four or five different signatures, all mixed together.”

  “Like farmland?”

  “Oh, no. It’s got to be a natural distribution. But it’s still the best we’ve found so far.”

  Thackery turned the console over to Eagan a few hours later, along with a request from Tyszka and Muir to construct a model of the grassland’s aquifer and drainage patterns.

  “Michael? What kind of resolution do you and Donna want on this map?” Eagan called to the other end of the lab as he settled in.

  “What do you usually do?”

  “Three-metre contour lines.”

  “That won’t do. Can you give us one-metre?”

  “I can give you half-metre—it just takes longer to process.”

  “We’ll take it. The distribution of plant species here is a little hard to figure. Donna hopes the answer is microclimates.”

  “I’ll try to have something for you before end-of-watch.”

  The task, though time-consuming, called for no new observations. The Nebraska Prairie—as Muir had dubbed it—had already been scanned, and all data was always collected at the maximum resolution of the various instruments. The information Eagan needed was safely stored in the radiation-shielded memory modules which filled Descartes’ hull just downship from the bridge.

  Ordinarily, the data would have remained there until needed for analysis during the outbound craze, or until the post-Contact exit dispatch to Unity. After the dispatch, only an abstract of the data would be retained on board for future reference. The rest had to be purged to make room for new observations on the next system. It was left to Unity to study the data to exhaustion, and at every order of resolution.

  But one of the reasons for having a crew on board at all was to maintain flexibility. For Descartes’ purposes, and particularly the ecologists’, the finest resolution was not the most useful. Too much detail blurred the picture, obscuring the patterns and relationships which gave order to their science. But if the ecologists needed that detail, Eagan was prepared to extract it.

  The bulk of the work, the plotting of the ground contours and the extrapolation of the Nebraska watershed, was done automatically by the geoscience computer. Nevertheless, at such a fine resolution the processing revealed dozens of topological features which cried out for Eagan’s attention.

  In the course of monitoring the mapping routine, Eagan took a closer look at one of the regions where the river became subterranean. To his surprise, he found the contour lines on either bank to be severe in the vertical dimension and angular in the horizontal, forming a hill-and-rill pattern reminiscent of spreading ripples on a pond. A central longitudinal rift split the circles into complementary arcs.

  Curious, Eagan called up the telecamera survey in place of the mapping radar. When the image of the sector he had been studying materialized on his display, Eagan’s breath caught in his throat. The hills were rows of buildings, the rills concentric streets.

  “There’s a city down there,” he breathed.

  So congested was he with emotion that no one else in the lab heard him—not Muir, who was by the door laughing with Sebright about something, not Sebright, not Guerrieri, who was yawning and rubbing his eyes tiredly. When there was no response, he whirled a half-turn in his seat and shouted as though insulted, “Didn’t you hear me?” That they heard clearly, but not having caught his first utterance, it only made them look at him wonderingly. He spun back to face his console and mashed the shipnet contact under his fist.

  “Page. Eagan for Commander Neale,” he demanded.

  The answer came from the net’s silicon caretaker. “Page mode not available. Commander Neale is—”

  “Jessie!” Eagan pleaded.

  “Here, Gregg,” Baldwin broke in. “What’s—”

  “Stop talking and listen! Get Neale up. Get her down here. There’s a city below us, on the Nebraska. A city, d’you hear? We’ve found a colony! We found a freezin’ colony!”

  When the news reached her, Neale was alone in her room in the embrace of an exercise cradle, performing the twenty-eighth of a planned fifty leg lifts, the last element of her thrice-weekly program. By the time she had disengaged herself from the machine and hastily wiped the perspiration from her face, an update hard on the heels of the first alert added the welcome detail that the city was occupied, its streets filled with life. That fillip drove out of her mind any thought of a quick shower and change of clothing.

  There for you. Glen Harrod, she thought in triumph as she danced down the climbway. There for you, Lin Tamm. Her short-cut hair was damp and tangled, and bands of perspiration stre
aked her singlet between her breasts and in the middle of her back. But her eyes were bright and eager, glowing with the triumph of her moment. There for you, Wayne Coulson. You all tried to get in my way, but you couldn’t stop me.

  This time, the familiar descent down the climbway was endless, its hundred rungs seemingly a thousand: down through the enclosed tunnel of the systems section, through the open spaces of the middecks, past a noisy celebration on the edrec level, through the longer tunnel piercing the drive, then at last to the aftdecks and the lab level. The contact lab door was closed, and Sebright was waiting for her outside it.

  “This is wonderful, Mark, just wonderful,” she exulted, throwing her arms around him in an uncharacteristic display. “Are your people all together in there? I want to meet with all of you, hear everything.”

  He shook his head stiffly. “Not yet.”

  “We have to lay out our timetable—”

  “No, Ali,” Sebright said composedly. “Not ‘we.’ ”

  She stepped back and squinted at him. “What?”

  “You’ve already heard everything. Gregg spotted a city on the Nebraska, straddling the river. The population might be as much as fifty thousand. There’s some evidence in the ecological data which suggests cultivation in the surrounding prairie. We’re searching right now for other cities. That’s all we have, to the minute.”

  “Which is why we need to review our strategy—”

  “No, Commander,” Sebright said, more sharply than before. “There’s pressure enough on them right now. I won’t have you adding to it.”

  His words, his very attitude, brought a flash of rage to her gut and a cold rigidity to her features. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “We’ll make this Contact as expeditiously as possible. But that may mean six weeks sitting up here learning what we can about them. It may mean six months.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I doubt very much if you do. Everyone on this ship knows how much you’ve invested in the colony problem.” She stored her anger in a tightened spine, keeping the tension from her face. “What exactly are you accusing me of?”

  “It’s not an accusation, just an observation. You have one objective, getting information. I have a whole series of them—a good survey, a safe landing, a successful Contact, and then, only then, data on the colony problem. I don’t want you suggesting to those people that the first three are any less important than the last, or infecting them with your impatience. If we’re going to do this right, we’re going to have to take it step by step.”

  “Are you telling me I don’t know how to handle my own crew?”

  Sebright crossed his arms over his chest. “No. I’m reminding you that they aren’t your crew. Not now. When we’re crazed, Descartes is all yours,” he said calmly. “But when we’re surveying, the Concom sets the agenda. Maybe I haven’t asserted that as much as I should have up to now. But we’re on Sebright time now. Before you go in there you’re going to have to acknowledge that.”

  “I do, do I? Will you tell me what to say when I get in there, too?”

  “After a fashion. You can go in there to congratulate them, and you can go in there to talk them up for what’s coming. You can tell them you have confidence in them and you can tell them you’ll be looking forward to the results of their work. And that’s all. I won’t have you down here looking over their shoulders and getting in the way.”

  “You make it sound like they’re children. Do they know how little confidence you have in them?”

  “When it comes to this, they are children. And I don’t want you getting them excited about the carnival across the street before they’ve learned how to look both ways.”

  Tight-lipped, she asked, “And later? Do you have a script for me then, too?”

  “We’ll hold an update briefing at every change of watch to go over new material. You’re welcome to monitor those sessions, or even to come and sit in as a spectator.”

  “How very gracious of you. And how exactly do you intend to enforce your edicts?”

  “I don’t need to,” Sebright said. “Because you know I’m right, and because you know I’m within my rights. You know this is the way the Flight Office meant for the chain of command to go, why they wanted a vet and why they weren’t happy with my predecessor.”

  “You’re awfully confident of my good will.”

  “No. Of your professionalism and your sense of duty. Ali, you did your job. You got us here. But you’re not the expert now. We are. Let us do our job.”

  Be damned if I’ll let you have anything, least of all my colony, she thought fiercely. This is a grab for glory, nothing more. And it won’t work. It won’t work. But for the moment, she could do nothing. Maddeningly, infuriatingly, Sebright was right.

  “I’m not entirely convinced that anyone’s an expert,” she began curtly, “considering that this is only the fourth colony Contact the Service has attempted. And I hope this discussion isn’t a sample of your ability as a diplomat. Luckily for you, I’m able to separate what you had to say from the downright abrasive way you said it. And to overlook being accused of something I wasn’t about to do. We’ll proceed according to the Protocols—as I always intended.”

  But as she moved past him into the lab and congratulated each member of the team individually, her mind was occupied with far less conciliatory thoughts. I’ve outlasted and outmaneuvered far better than you, Sebright, went the silent refrain. And I’ll deal with you, too, soon enough.

  “Padwa gnir par batu.”

  “Sar tan we—”

  “Belotoy gnivi.”

  Gnivi, with a hard G. Thackery and the linguacomp agreed that it was the colonists’ name for the city, but it had quickly been adopted as the name of the planet and the people as well. It seemed only fair, since Gnivi appeared to be the only city on its surface. There was a rural population numbering perhaps a hundred thousand scattered throughout the Nebraska, but their most complex social organization appeared to be the family, and their ties to the city seemed to be stronger than to each other.

  The sound of Gnivian voices had been a constant in the contact lab for weeks. The night after the city had been discovered, Tyszka had taken the gig down to scatter a hundred pebble-sized relays across the city in a nighttime, lights-out pass five hundred metres above the rooftops. Sixty-four of the peepers had survived, and fully a dozen had fallen where they regularly picked up conversations and relayed them back to Descartes.

  Of that group, the most useful was Number 41, which had come to rest on the sloping roof outside the second floor great-room window of a Gnivian merchant family. Since the Gnivi did not seem to have invented glass, the team was treated to a fairly intimate aural glimpse of Gnivian family life.

  Next most useful was Number 5, which lay in the courtyard of an open-air eatery, from which it relayed the discussions of a much wider strata of Gnivian society. Though even with the directional selectivity of the instrument, the cacophony at the peak of business was often more a source of humor than insight.

  Nevertheless, the constant influx of information allowed Thackery and the linguacomp to make steady progress on what seemed to be a very basic, functional language with simple constructions, little use of modifiers, and few if any inflections. A handful of the peepers were located where Thackery could use the telecameras to get at least an overhead view of who was talking and, thereby, a clue of what the topic of discussion might be. With that boost, the confirmed vocabulary list of what Sebright called the “language hard to lie smilingly in” grew daily.

  It was Sebright, not Thackery, who had decided the feed from a choice peeper should be audible in the lab during at least half of each watch. Thackery actually joined Muir and Collins in protesting that their concentration would be adversely affected by the alien chatter.

  “Even if you don’t understand it now, you’ll have the sound of it in your ear,” Sebright said in rebuffing them. “When it’s time to start learning Gniv
an, it’ll come to you that much faster.”

  The work of the rest of the surveyors was proceeding nearly as smoothly. What surprised them most was how little surprised them. Each new revelation fit neatly into the patterns and ranges established by ten thousand human societies through ten thousand years of Terran history. For the biologists, it was more evidence that biology was the primary shaper of human behavior. For everyone else, it added up to an irresistible urge to identify with the Gnivi.

  “They’re so like us,” Collins blurted out during one early change-of-shift briefing. “They’re too like us,” was Sebright’s gruff response. “I trust you’re ail making an effort to remember that they aren’t us.”

  But it was through thinking in terms of the known that most progress was made. It was impossible not to use terms drawn from the anthropological bank of their own experiences, and once those terms were firmly attached to some aspect of Gnivi, it was impossible to be uninfluenced by their previous associations.

  One example was Eagan’s map of the city, which was full of familiar names. Gnivi’s only two entrances, East Gate and West Gate, lay at either end of Broadway, the great central corridor which bisected the city. At each of the entrances, a half-dozen major thoroughfares fanned out from a great plaza like fingers of a hand, leading into other parts of the city. The thoroughfares were officially identified by letter codes, but it was Eagan’s more informal names—Camino Del Real, Via Appia, Champs-Elysées—which gained currency.

  To the bare bones of Gnivi’s physical layout the team quickly added details of the patterns of traffic, commerce, and habitation. Within the first few days, they identified an industrial sector along the presumed path of the river, a civic complex at the heart of the city, and scattered residential and business districts. No one quarreled with the anthropocentric flavor of the labels.

  There were more cautionary parallels, as well. Overall, Gnivi had the look of a walled fortress city. Each half of the outer ring of buildings was in fact one contiguous structure, an unbroken barrier which clearly marked the boundary between the city and the prairie beyond. Not even the river breached the fortress wall, for the Gnivians had bridged over its waters and built part of their city atop it. Inside the city, even though many smaller, secondary streets branched off of the main byways, all were dead ends, channeling traffic—or invaders—along those main roads rather than between them.