Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  It was a double blow to Tycho: having their sole discovery wrested from them, and locking in the ignominy of their failure to complete the contact. Together, they would likely seal forever her reputation as an unlucky ship.

  Poor Lin Tamm—

  It was not really his fault. Six times, USS ships had appeared in the skies above an FC colony to say, in effect, “Hello—we’re here—you’re not alone.” After a varying period of shock, the answer had always been, “By our gods, it’s good to see you!”

  But the Sennifi had told Tycho, “We know. Go away.”

  It was up to Munin to find out why.

  “How long?” Thackery called anxiously across the bridge of Munin. The gravigator—the only other person present in the semi-darkened compartment—looked up blank-faced. “How long?” Thackery repeated. “Till we come out of this craze?” The gravigator checked his instruments unhurriedly. “Thirty minutes.”

  “Not enough,” Thackery said under his breath, turning back toward his display screen. Scrutinizing the rows of green Sennifi symbols—each a logogram, much like in early Earth Chinese—he continued processing them though the linguacomp’s error-proofing program. The contact message had to be ready, and it had to be right. Unfortunately, Thackery was behind his self-imposed schedule, and the combined probability of error was holding at 19 percent—due, no doubt, to the limited Sennifi vocabulary bank with which he had been provided.

  “Mass-touch on 2 Aquilae,” announced the gravigator over the shipnet. Thackery sighed and deleted a sentence from the message. The probability of error dropped encouragingly to 12 percent. Close, Thackery thought. Better get it down to five.

  As he tinkered, the command crew began to appear on the bridge, manning stations that had sat unused throughout the 32-day craze. Captain Russell Cormican appeared presently and checked with each tech in turn, lingering at Navcon and Communication. For Thackery, he had only a single question: “Is the contact message ready?”

  Thackery touched a key and a small “4.7%” disappeared from his display. “Yes,” he said with a hint of a triumph.

  The captain nodded absently and moved on down the line.

  A winded Dr. Amelia Koi appeared at the top of the climb-way and looked uncertainly around the compartment. Thackery beckoned the interpolator over.

  “Where’s Commander Neale?” he asked as she neared him.

  “The Commander is in her cabin,” Koi replied, settling her pert frame at the open station to Thackery’s right. “She asked to be called when we make Kleine contact with A-Cyg or radio contact with the Sennifi, whichever comes first. Speaking of which, did you get the contact message buttoned up?”

  “After a fashion. But to get the level of confidence Neale wanted, I ended up making it very simple. Not much more than, ‘Hey—you—over there!’ ”

  Koi’s answering smile was friendly. “How much longer?”

  Thackery glanced at the clock. “Minute or two.”

  “Good,” she said fervently.

  Thackery caught the tone and realized she was avoiding looking at the two-metre wide bridge display centered above the tech stations. “You all right?”

  “I’m one of the ’phobes,” she confessed. “I don’t like the craze. I know better, but I can’t stop thinking that the rest of the Universe is gone and not coming back.”

  “Are you tranqed?” he asked sympathetically.

  She pulled up her right sleeve so he could see the medipump. “Not enough.”

  “There—Navcom just shut us down,” he said, nudging Koi and pointing past her to a display at the next station. “Here we go.”

  “If the Universe doesn’t come back, I’m holding you personally responsible,” she said with a nervous smile.

  Thackery looked expectantly at the imaging display, and when the dazzle cleared, found himself looking at a splendid golden planet mottled with lacy white cloud patterns. “Gorgeous,” he said. As beautiful as any since Jupiter, he added silently.

  “It doesn’t look inhabited,” Koi said at his elbow.

  “They never do,” said Thackery, surprised at her naivete. But a joking reproof went unsaid as he saw on her face the same anticipation and excitement he was happy to be feeling. Thank you, Mark. This could be fun after all—

  With his long gray caftan sweeping the ground and with his long smooth strides, J’ten Ron Tize seemed to flow, rather than walk across the chamber floor. His caftan bore on its hip the three golden slashes that marked his rank among the scholars: Tize, or “he of clear vision.” Waiting for him at the table beneath the highest point of the arched ceiling was the highest ranking scholar of Sennifi, wearing the four-slash green caftan that no other was permitted to wear.

  “Sekkh quit e’nom,” said J’ten as he reached the table. His use of Paston’s Language marked the seriousness of the meeting. “They have returned, as I predicted.”

  “There is no glory in the successful prediction of evil,” Z’lin Ton Drull chided gently. “Sit, J’ten.”

  J’ten settled in the empty chair. “We were wrong to send their first envoys away. They do not follow the courtesies of Kemar. Now we have gained nothing—except perhaps their enmity.”

  “Either your ize or your memory fails you, J’ten. They chose to leave. We could not have forced them to go. We have neither the means nor, I am afraid, the will. Not that it matters. You begin to forget what we were once like. They are like that now. They would come, and come, and come—.” The Drull seemed tired; his head seemed to teeter on his slender neck.

  “They again ask to meet with us, to share knowledge.”

  “And nothing has changed. We must refuse again. We cannot let them see what we are, know what we know.”

  “Or become what we have become,” J’ten said softly.

  “Yes,” Z’lin Ton Drull said slowly. “The knowledge would mark them, as it has us. And yet, what can we do?”

  “May I presume—”

  Z’lin gestured his approval.

  “In these years, I have studied them, considered what might be done should they return. You are correct to say we cannot refuse them. But there is another way,” he said with surprising vehemence. “We are not yet reduced to cowering in their presence. We must test their will. If it is strong, then we must test their patience. But if we can make this refusal theirs, we may yet protect us both.”

  The Drull was silent, thoughtful. “This is your kam’ru,” he said presently, naming the work of advancement. A kam’ru would be judged by the Council of Pad’on—three women and two men who had once held the rank of Drull.

  J’ten squirmed, embarrassed. The only advancement open to him was to replace Z’lin Ton as Drull. “That is not my intent. I was only pursuing a subject of interest,” he said beseeching forgiveness with his eyes. “I won’t submit it to the Council without your sponsorship—I misspeak, I will not submit it at all. I wish only to be of service in this crisis.”

  The Drull sat back in his chair, his folded hands tucked delicately beneath his chin. “The Council will doubtless find your work too practical to be of merit,” he said at last. “But it may well have value to me. Tell me your thoughts.”

  Thackery had nothing to do until and unless the Sennifi answered the repeating contact message, but the respite was a welcome one. With the haste and disorganization that characterized the beginning of the mission, a period of relative inactivity and tranquility was a blessing.

  There would have been less confusion had Neale not been so insistent on leading the follow-up mission. Half of Munin’s previously assigned crew was already at Cygnus. The remainder was inbound on the packet Raphael, on which Thackery had thought to return to Earth. Waiting for the Raphael would have added only a few weeks to the timetable and kept the Munin’s crew intact. Transferring a handful of key Descartes veterans would have sufficiently reinforced the roster for the special requirements of the Sennifi mission.

  Judging from what Thackery could glean from shipboard chatter, t
hat had been the Flight Office’s original intent. Neale had lobbied for the Sennifi follow-up mission to be delayed until Descartes was ready to undertake it, and that Munin be assigned to continue the search program assigned to Descartes. The compromise which evolved called for a special crew for Munin, with Descartes to follow her to Sennifi for a reshuffling of crews at the end of the Sennifi mission.

  The aging Munin was creaky and crowded, but thanks to her recent upgrade, she was as operationally capable a ship as any the Service operated. But the same could not be said of her hybrid crew. The more experienced Descartes personnel were given precedence over that portion of the very yellow Munin crew which was available. But to fill the gaps, the Flight Office had to turn to such as Koi, drawn from the A-Cyg Archeology staff.

  Thackery did not question Koi’s ability. She was a far more highly skilled interpolator than Jael had been (an ability for which Thackery had the utmost respect—from time to time his interpolation instructor would show up in a nightmare, droning, “Every stated fact implies an n-dimensional matrix of related facts”). But Koi’s craze phobia had obviously prevented her from having any field experience, making her less than an ideal candidate for the mission.

  Nor did Thackery think much of how the chain of command had been juggled. To soothe ruffled feathers, Cormican had been retained as captain. To keep Neale superordinate, as her seniority and experience demanded, the new position of Mission Commander was invented. As near as Thackery could figure it, that arrangement left Neale with the authority to do anything and the responsibility for nothing.

  Thackery’s own position was an uncomfortable one. As Contact Specialist, he stood between Neale and the five-man strategy team, with a contact leader’s responsibility but none of the autonomy that customarily went with it.

  Only this time, 1 understand the rules—

  The thought was interrupted by the yelping of the Com tech. “They’re answering!” he cried, as Sennifi symbols began to appear on Thackery’s screen. Koi quickly paged Neale, then came to stand behind Thackery and watch over his shoulder.

  By the time Neale reached the bridge, her chest rising and falling from the exertion of climbing the length of the ship, Thackery had the short message translated.

  “ ‘Send full language information,’ ” he read aloud.

  “That’s all?” asked Neale, peering at the display.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I assume they’re talking about our language, rather than asking what we know of theirs.”

  “That’d be my assumption,” Koi offered. “All right. Do we have a Standard English tutorial bank that’s suitable? Something that wouldn’t confuse them more than it would help them?”

  “I’m not sure,” Thackery said. “As far as I know, the first contact has always been in the language of the colony. I don’t think it ever occurred to the previous colonies that we have our own language—at least not at this point in the contact.”

  “It’s occurred to this one,” Neale said, straightening up and brushing her hair back off her face. “Send an acknowledgment, tell them we’re working on it, and then see what you can come up with.” Koi was openly horrified. “Commander, we can’t send them a language bank.”

  “Why not?”

  “A language defines a people. With interpolation techniques and implication analysis, I can tell more from a thousand words of a civilization’s language than I can from a thousand kilos of artifacts. Even without those tools, they’re going to learn a lot about us, and we nothing about them.”

  Neale was unswayed. “If I were in their position, it would take a lot of information to lower my anxiety level. Let’s not forget—they’re advanced enough to be afraid of us.”

  “Then give them just enough to talk to us, and make them work for what they can read between the lines,” Koi pleaded. “Give them a basic conversational vocabulary, not the whole unabridged.” She looked to Thackery for support, but he made his face blank and avoided eye contact.

  Neale shook her head. “You forget, we want these meetings, and they apparently don’t. I’ll agree to screening out technical vocabulary that’s clearly beyond their level—AVLO drive and other high T-rating items—but they get everything else. Merry, see that it’s taken care of. I’ll be in my cabin.” Neale rose and left the bridge, leaving Koi wondering what she was up to and Thackery the same about the Sennifi.

  It took nearly fourteen hours to transmit a 50,000 word language bank and accompanying chrestomathy in a form and at a speed the Sennifi could accept. The hours of silence which followed were broken at last when Munin was hailed from the surface by a voice which was clear, mellifluous, and uncolored by any accent. “This is J’ten Ron Tize,” it said. “I speak for Z’lin Ton Drull and the people of the autonomous planet of Sennifi.”

  “Damn good English for a day’s work,” Neale said respectfully.

  “It has to be synthetic,” Koi whispered, “generated through some sort of data processor, their equivalent of the linguacomp.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody masters a new language that quickly—”

  “We’ll see,” Neale said, and nodded to Thackery.

  “This is Merritt Thackery. I speak for Commander Alizana Neale, the crew of the Unified Space Service survey ship Munin, and the United Community of Humankind.”

  “What the hell is the United Community of Humankind?” Koi wondered aloud.

  Neale winked in her direction, a smile breaking through her pensive expression. “We’ll see their planet and raise them a federation.”

  “Merritt Thackery. You have requested an exchange of knowledge.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We believe that we have common interests. We believe that we have a common heritage. Such meetings would benefit us both.”

  “Merritt Thackery. No meetings are possible without a suitable gesture of friendship on your part.” Thackery looked to Neale. “Ask them what they want,” she directed.

  “J’ten Ron Tize,” Thackery said, turning back to his station. “We understand that our presence may have alarmed you. We are willing to provide reassurance, if you can tell us what would constitute a suitable gesture.”

  “I can,” said J’ten, then paused. “Tell us the location of your home world and of any space habitats with a population exceeding fifty. Identify, both in three-dimensional celestial coordinates and travel time, the location of all spacecraft capable of following you to Sennifi.”

  Thackery’s eyebrows flew up. “Could have asked for all the colonies,” Neale remarked casually. “We screened out all references to that concept,” Koi said, her face showing her shock.

  But J’ten was not through. “—Take up a geosynchronous orbit of our specification and maintain it throughout your stay—”

  “First-born child of the Commander will be next,” Koi muttered.

  “Shhh,” Neale chided without rancor.

  “—Provide us with the design and operating principles of the propulsion system which brought you here. Details for the transfer of information can be arranged. However, we require your decision within thirty minutes. We await your consideration of these requests.”

  For what seemed to be minutes but was not, silence reigned on the bridge. “Well, there’s one for the books,” Thackery said finally.

  Neale shook her head, as though rousing herself from some trancelike state of concentration, and turned toward Koi. “See to collecting the information they requested and organizing it in some accessible format. Get what help you can from ship’s crew.”

  “You’re agreeing to their demands?”

  “Yes,” said Neale, unruffled by her accusatory tone.

  Koi stared at the older woman, disbelieving. “Someone has to say it,” she said finally. “Those demands are outrageous—deliberately so, I’m sure. It’s an asking price. We can’t accept it—not without haggling first.”

  “Not for discussion,” Neale said curtly.

  Koi, stony-faced, w
ould not be dissuaded. “I know that we provide all the colonies with everything the Sennifi asked for, in one form or another—and more. But that comes later, after we’ve had a chance to size them up and prepare them for the cultural shocks,” Koi said. “You’re letting them dictate to us.”

  Silently, Thackery applauded Koi. How much has Neale been authorized to give away? he wondered.

  “Yes,” Neale was saying amiably. “They can dictate to us. All we can do is say, ‘The price is too high.’ It isn’t yet. So please get started on gathering that information.”

  Neale turned then to Thackery, who was belatedly considering adding his voice of objection to Koi’s. “Call them back, Merry. Tell them we agree.”

  J’ten Ron Tize and Z’lin Ton Drull met again at the table under the high arch ceiling of the sjen, debate hall, of the scholar complex of T’rnyima.

  “This is a large gift they offer us.”

  “By their measure, a very great gift indeed. It expresses great inner confidence, and great desire.”

  “Was it your belief that they would refuse?”

  “No, though I may be forgiven a measure of hope-without basis.”

  “Of course. Will we accept the gift?”

  “We dare not. They would see us as in debt to them, and not be content until that debt were satisfied.”

  “Then I must meet with them.”

  “I regret the truth of that conclusion.”

  “We are pleased by your willingness to make these small gestures,” said J’ten Ron Tize. His voice, emanating from the bridge’s several speakers, seemed to surround Thackery and the others. “Are you now prepared to make a more tangible guarantee of your good conduct?”

  “We show weakness, and they up the ante,” Koi said. “As I told you they would.”

  “Pin them down. Merry,” Neale instructed.

  Grating his teeth at the nickname—which, absent a timely protest from Thackery, Neale had permanently added to her lexicon—Thackery nodded and touched the SEND key. “Please explain your question.”

  “We are willing to place envoys aboard your ship to meet with your scholars and answer your questions. You must guarantee their safety. For each of our envoys, two of your number must agree to be our guests on Sennifi while the envoys are with you.”