Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “The correct word is ‘hostages’, not ‘guests,’ ” Thackery retorted, unthinking.

  “Yes,” was J’ten’s calm response. “I believe you are right.”

  “Dammit, Thackery, don’t editorialize on the air!” Neale exploded.

  Thackery’s quick finger on the Com controls contained Neale’s anger to the flight deck. Visibly chastened, Thackery shrank into his seat to await the next volley of criticism.

  “I share your sentiment,” Neale said with surprising gentleness. “But our feelings have no place in this. Now, tell them we accept. Make it sound like it’s no big deal.”

  Thackery took a deep breath, which seemed to puff him back up to normal size. “J’ten Ron Tize.”

  “I am here, Merritt Thackery.”

  “We understand and admire your prudence, and we’re willing to provide this reassurance,” Thackery said with fluid sincerity. “We are also ready now to pass on the information you requested earlier, if you are prepared to receive it.”

  “Thank you,” said J’ten. “We withdraw our previous requests, with one exception—that you take up geosynchronous orbit directly above the city from which I now speak to you, known to us as T’rnyima. This will facilitate communications during our visit to your ship. Please prepare to pick up and receive us at this time tomorrow.”

  One of the techs laughed nervously, and another commented to no one in particular, “They’ve got chungas the size of grapefruit, don’t they?”

  Thackery was bewildered by the Sennifi’s sudden metamorphosis. “Thank you, J’ten. We’ll be in touch,” he managed to say, then looked wonderingly at Neale and Koi, as though asking for an explanation.

  Koi offered only a shrug. Neale appeared satisfied, almost vindicated. “Looks like they’re more interested in us than they first let on,” was all she would say on the subject. “Good work, everybody. Get some rest, and I’ll see the contact team on the rec level in six hours.” She left the bridge whistling.

  In the sjen, J’ten Ron Tize and the Drull of Sennifi stood and faced one another.

  “All is as you predicted it would be. Your prescience is unmarred,” Z’lin Ton Drull said somberly. “You are clever, J’ten. Perhaps I shall sponsor your kam-ru to the Council after all.”

  “We must be clever,” said J’ten, equally somber. “We have little else left.”

  There were few complexities to the exchange. The experience of the Tycho landing obviated any need for isolation procedures, which simplified matters considerably. Munin’s gig carried two awks, the sociologist, and the technical analyst to the surface, where a cottage on the grounds of the scholar complex had been prepared for their use. The gig returned with Z’lin Ton Drull and J’ten Ron Tize, who were met by Neale and shown to the adjacent double cabins on the F deck which had been prepared for them. An hour later, all the principals gathered on the edrec deck.

  “We greet you as brothers,” said Z’lin Ton Drull. “We greet you as travelers asking guidance in an unfamiliar place. We greet you as scholars. We know that you have many questions. We hope that those which we may be able to answer will offer you something which you can fold into the substance of your lives.”

  He reached up with his right hand and pressed his open palm gently against the side of Neale’s head. She did not flinch, for J’ten had forewarned them, explaining the gesture as one which “expresses respect for a fellow scholar’s mastery of reason.” Following J’ten’s instructions, she reciprocated, and then the Drull retreated a few steps to his chair.

  A good speech well said, Thackery thought. / wonder if we can believe any of it. His eyes followed Z’lin every second, as though by the force of his scrutiny Thackery could pry loose some insight into the stranger. All Thackery had so far were impressions: dignity, precision, self-confidence without ego. Anything else that might be there was masked by the visitor’s stoic reserve.

  “Since its creation, the Survey Branch of the Unified Space Service has had this as its motto,” Neale was saying. “ ‘To teach if we are called upon; to be taught if we are fortunate’. I hope that spirit will prevail in our discussions here. It is also my privilege to welcome you and your people back into the greater community of mankind.”

  As Neale went on, sprinkling manufactured charm atop a benevolent portrait of the USS, Thackery’s attention and gaze wandered. The deck had been made over with flags and tables into a conference hall. He and Neale had been made over as well. The ship’s inventory contained no ceremonial uniforms, because the Service had never authorized any such frippery. But at Neale’s insistence, a ceremonial uniform had been produced all the same, cribbed from earlier Earth designs and manufactured overnight by a pair of techs skilled with a fabtack. There were even military-style service bars, each segment representing a star system visited, and aiguillettes for the right shoulder.

  The idea of the uniforms chafed Thackery’s sensibilities almost as badly as the stiff material of them chafed his body. Still, there was nothing to be done. Be spending a lot of time in it, Thackery thought, recalling the lengthy Contact Interrogative Plan they had prepared during the craze. There were whole files of queries about Sennifi history, designed to probe for First Colonization clues or knowledge without every mentioning the colonies explicitly. The various science disciplines wanted Sennifi perspectives on the major theories they held dear: evolution, big-bang open-universe cosmology, numbers, space-time relationships, even such basics as conservation and parity. There was a grab-bag of questions from the sociologists and psychologists which would do little more than generate journal fodder: belief in one or more deities, family relationships and structure, concepts of death, sexual behavior—

  “—you may begin now.” The change to Z’lin Ton Drull’s voice alerted Thackery that Neale had finished, and Thackery glanced at his slate for the first question. The session was on.

  By the end of three hours, Thackery had posed thirteen CIP questions and Neale nearly twice that many follow-ups. They had received answers ranging from a single word (“No” to “Do you pair-bond for life?”) to a fifteen-minute dissertation (on the meaning of scholarship). Z’lin Ton Drull was patient, lucid, and cooperative. Thackery found himself tempted to trust the soft-spoken Sennifi leader but managed to keep his skepticism alive—though not without a struggle.

  Then, the Sennifi retired to the quarters that had been cleared for them downship in Contact, while Neale and Thackery hurried upship to the library, where Koi and her team had watched and recorded the session.

  “I think we made an excellent start,” Neale said twice en route.

  But Koi showed no such buoyant enthusiasm. “Positives. We have the Sennifi power structure: the Drull, or ‘decisionmaker’; Tize, or ‘he who sees clearly’; Chen, or ‘diligent one’; and Bazi, ‘he who yearns’. As the titles suggest, it shapes up as a typical meritocracy. The relative youth of the Drull—about forty, if we converted correctly—confirms the selection procedure he described.

  “As for the rest, we can say that they answered, or attempted to answer, all the questions we asked, from systems of measurement to diet.

  “Now the negatives. Your charm was wasted on them, Commander. There was neither an immediate response nor a long-term thaw—facial expressions and emotive content were the same from first to last. And, overall, there was very little substantive information—their answers were—not very illuminating. That was to be expected, since the first session questions were chosen particularly for their low potential for controversy. But it also means that we haven’t yet found their uniqueness, their signature, and until we do we’re going to have to tread carefully.”

  “This afternoon should take care of that,” Neale said, unperturbed. “We should begin the colony problem sequence sometime before the end of the session. Break for rats and rest now—back here in one hour.”

  As the others filed out Thackery held Koi in her chair with a wordless touch. “I want to check something with you.”

  �
��What’s that?”

  “That the Sennifi didn’t ask us a single question.”

  “What? Of course they did.”

  Thackery shook his head. “Run it up, please, and check. The only questions that they asked were to clarify questions we’d asked them. They didn’t show a tad of curiosity about us.”

  Koi squeezed her eyes shut as if to shut out distractions. “All right,” she said finally. “You’re right—”

  “Thank you,” Thackery said, standing.

  “Whoa,” she said, reaching out and grabbing his wrist. “There are a lot of possible reasons, and it isn’t going to last. What’s running through your mind? Why do you think it’s important?”

  “Can you think of any good reason why the Sennifi didn’t take our concessions once they’d won them?”

  “Sure. Because they didn’t want them. They got the only one they really wanted, which was to park this ship where they could keep an eye on it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it. They wanted to test our interest. They were posturing, and we caught them at it. You have a different idea?”

  “I can’t reconcile the way they treated Tycho with them being aboard now. They can’t both be honest reflections of what they want.”

  “They’ve had almost fifteen years to think it over.”

  “What I can’t stop thinking is, what if that was their real feeling—and this whole exercise is posturing? What if they’ve just used that time to find a more subtle way of saying no?”

  Koi tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear before answering. “Have you brought this up to Neale?”

  “Do you think she’d listen?”

  Koi considered. “Probably not, at this point. For that matter, you haven’t persuaded me. You can’t argue with the fact that they’re here, and answering our questions.”

  Thackery’s expression turned dour. “ ‘A civilization that will empty a city overnight to avoid contact with outsiders won’t balk at a little duplicity,” he said pointedly and moved toward the door.

  Koi sighed. “Thack—,” she called after him, and he stopped to look back over his shoulder. “I’ll keep the suggestion on file. And if I see anything that suggests you might be right, I’ll see that you know about it.”

  Thackery nodded wordlessly and was gone.

  It took two hours and the conscious omission by Neale of several opportunities for follow-ups, but at last they reached the first question in the colony problem sequence. It was a simple question, and Neale preempted Thackery’s role to ask it.

  “Who was the first Sennifi?”

  “The question is without meaning.”

  Neale looked to Thackery for help. “What is the earliest event recorded in your histories?’ he asked, stepping in smoothly. Z’lin Ton Droull’s answer could hardly have been more unexpected. “We have no histories.”

  Neale spent several minutes establishing to her satisfaction that there had been no misunderstanding, that the Drull understood both the purpose and nature of a “history.” Once over that hurdle, Neale asked the obvious follow-up: “Why not?”

  Z’lin’s involved answer consumed the remaining hour of the session, and painted a picture of a society firmly rooted in the present. “When the nature of the Universe is found in cycles,” the Drull explained patiently, “what point is there in arbitrarily selecting a starting or stopping point, then tallying up the cycles as if each repetition were unique? It is an unworthy formulation.”

  Steadfastly, the Drull rejected the idea that life was a progression from some past origin to some future ending. “My entire life has been spent in the present,” he said. “I have never left it for a moment.”

  But, Neale protested, didn’t great scholars of the past, now dead, contribute to the present? Didn’t what they accomplished shape the present?

  “If the creation of a person’s mind—an idea, a work of art, a work of music—affects today, exists today, then the creator is still with us. To say that this person died in cycle one thousand or ten thousand is to say that he gave us nothing and is remembered by no one. The mind is only alive in the present, for the present is all that there is.”

  A Hindu might understand, Thackery thought as he listened. It was clear, however, that Neale did not, or did not want to.

  The longer Z’lin explained, and the more reasonable his tone, the closer Neale came to losing the struggle to keep anger off her face and out of her voice.

  “Then where did the Sennifi come from?” she asked sharply. “Why are you here?”

  “The question is without meaning. We are here,” the Sennifi leader said simply. “That knowledge suffices.”

  At that, Neale slumped back in her chair, her body language shouting her frustration, and let Thackery carry the last few minutes of the session alone. When it was over, she launched herself out of the chair and descended on the library.

  “Can he be telling me the truth?” she demanded of Koi. “Can that really be what they believe?”

  “When you pose questions under these circumstances, you tend to get answers that reflect idealized understandings rather than operational truth—like the difference between Service Protocols and how things are really done. But with that caveat, yes, he probably is telling the truth, at least as he sees it. They are not unaware of time, mind you—they showed that in setting a deadline for us, and in scheduling their pick-up and the upcoming sessions. But that doesn’t contradict the likelihood that where we see ourselves moving forward, they see themselves running in place.”

  Neale threw up her hands in disgust and stalked out without a further word. Koi sighed and looked to Thackery. “Is she always going to be like that?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then I’ll tell you and let you pass it on when the right time comes. I’ve got two little things that might bear some closer examination.”

  “Shoot.”

  She motioned him over to one of the terminals. “You might have noticed that the Sennifi equivalents for ‘hour’, and ‘minute’, which are their only quantitative units of time, both follow the rule of formation for words indicating a subunit of a greater whole. Except in the case of ‘hour’, there is no greater whole, at least not in the data they provided us. It’s as if we called the second a milliday but had no unit called a day.”

  “I see that. Their ‘day’ is a qualitative term, like our morning or twilight. So?”

  She pointed at an expression in the midst of a crowded screen of numbers. “The length of their ‘hour’ doesn’t match up with any of the natural cycles of their planet, in any multiple.”

  Thackery frowned. “At the risk of being thought dim, so? Earth’s basic time unit doesn’t, either. The second is defined as some 9-billion-odd periods of the radiation from a transition in a cesium atom, or some such.”

  “Now. But at one time it tied into other units that tied into Earth’s rotation, and between that and cesium is a lot of political and technological history. There is no system of time that I’m aware of that did not begin with physical constants, usually astronomical rhythms. So this might be a clue to where the Sennifi came from, and maybe even when. I’ve got somebody checking to see if the Sennifi hour correlates with any Earth rhythms or time-keeping systems.”

  Thackery was disappointed, and let it show on his face. “What’s the other thing?”

  “The evacuation of the city of Rijala when Tycho was here. We’ve had a chance to completely review the Tycho observations, and explaining how the Sennifi did it has become a bit of a problem. They can’t have gone out into the countryside, or the Tycho imaging team would have detected them. They weren’t in hiding in the city, or the contact team would have found them.. And we’ve found no roads or mass-transit systems linking Rijala with the nearest other cities—which are a good two hundred klicks away in any event. But the telecameras clearly show people were there the evening before and two hours after the contact team’s visit. I recommend we ask the Dr
ull about it. The answer should prove interesting.”

  To no great surprise, Thackery found Neale’s cabin anteroom darkened and whirling with stars. He had time to spot and silently name the nine green colony markers before Neale brought up the lights.

  “What’s on your mind, Merry?”

  Thackery took a step forward. “Dr. Koi had some observations we might want to consider in relation to tomorrow’s session.”

  Neale listened attentively, nodded occasionally, as Thackery recapped his conversation with the interpolator. When he was finished, Neale made a sound deep in her throat and traced a fingertip along the line of her jaw.

  “Let me make this as clear as I can, Merry,” she started slowly. “If we never find out why they brushed off Tycho—if we never know why they upped the ante and then folded—if we never discover how they can evacuate a city of fifty thousand overnight—but we get some light shed on the colony problem”—she said each word deliberately, then paused for emphasis—“then I’ll go home happy. I won’t take the chance of pushing on what might be sensitive ground.”

  “After today, you still think they’re going to be of any help with the colony problem?”

  “We’re far from finished,” said Neale, and Thackery realized that the impatient Neale of an hour ago was gone. “We’ll stick to the CIP. But Merry—I do appreciate the way you’re staying on top of this.” Neale’s smile was pleasant but empty, and Thackery, realizing he was being dismissed, took his leave.

  But each succeeding session with the Sennifi seemed to chip away at Neale’s determined patience. “We’re getting answers—but are we getting information?” she asked after one concluded. The question was rhetorical, for everyone within earshot knew the answer was no.

  It was Koi who finally identified the problem, seventeen days after their arrival and thirty-one sessions into the CIP. “We’ve all been asking, ‘What’s happening here? Why are we getting so little new information?’ It’s almost as if we’re talking to ourselves.