Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “But what I want to do would probably be less efficient—taking a ship out of the comprehensive search program to chase down loose ends.”

  “That doesn’t matter until after the fact. Look, if the billet you want doesn’t exist yet, you have to try to get them to create it. You’ve got three years by our calendar, seventy or more by theirs to make your case, and then we’ll be back at A-Cyg and you can try to claim a place in whatever’s come of it.”

  “But three years wasted—”

  “They won’t be wasted. There’s a lot to do.”

  He nodded and kissed her forehead. “I just wish I could somehow get my version of the Sennifi Contact into the record.”

  “Already seen to,” she said with a mischievous smile. “It’s part of the anecdotal sociology file in the scientific dispatch. Neale won’t catch it, and the Analysis Office won’t make much of it—but it’ll be there when you need to go back and point to it.”

  Cocking his head, he gazed at her fondly. “You’re really looking after me, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to try,” she promised. “I’m going to try.”

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  The Lesson of Delphinus

  Though he had been aboard Munin nearly two months, Thackery had never been in Cormican’s quarters until called there the first morning out from Sennifi. He found the compartment spartan, practical, and uncluttered, more a place to sleep and bathe than a personal living space. That reflected the long hours required by the man’s command style, which was to make individual Contact with every member of the operations crew at least once in the course of a four-shift, 24-hour cycle.

  After admitting Thackery, Cormican retreated to the doorway to the bathroom, where he resumed shaving his stubble-darkened jowls. “I don’t make a habit of going out of my way to have private conversations on professional matters,” he said without preamble. “If I can’t say what I have to in front of anyone who might be around, I figure I probably don’t need to say it at all. But I thought we should get a few things settled before any more time passed. You’ve got a lot of experience, Merritt, a lot more than me, but the fact is, you don’t seem to have picked up any good sense along the way.”

  “Go on.”

  “The fact is, I don’t believe in heroes, and I’ve got no time for grandstanders. People in positions of authority don’t have more freedom than the people they supervise, they have less. That’s the price of responsibility. The more there is at stake, the more cautious you have to be. Am I coming through?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then you understand that I’m not impressed with results. What I mean is, they won’t keep me from looking at what was done to get them and sounding off if I don’t like what I see. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always more than one way to achieve a goal, and I expect you to take the path of least risk. Clear?”

  “Very.”

  “Now, this business back at 2 Aquilae—you did make a breakthrough, but we’d eventually have found out what the Sennifi were all about some other way, without stretching the Protocols past the limit. I’ll tell you this, I’d damn well not have let you off with a verbal reprimand. I’d have paid off your contract and sent you packing. But that’s past and this is present, so I’ll say no more about it. That goes for the rest of your disagreements with Commander Neale. I’m not an appeals court. I can’t change any of her decisions, and I’m not interested in hearing arguments on why I should try.”

  “I didn’t intend to offer any.”

  “Good. You make sure you understand this—you pull that kind of stunt under my command and you’ll find yourself on a nice desert planet with a canteen and a canister of protein paste, waving good-bye as we craze. I won’t have it, you understand? I won’t have it. By the Protocols, Concom Thackery. And if you get into a gray area, you come tell me what you’re going to do and why. No surprises. I hate surprises.”

  “By the numbers,” Thackery acknowledged.

  “All right. I’ve had my say. Now you take your shot, and make sure you get it all, because I don’t want to be sorting this out halfway to Deneb.”

  Thackery shook his head. “I don’t have much to say. What you described is exactly how I want to work. I should tell you I intend to make rehearsal landings at the first opportunity, on worlds where the risk is minimal. There’s a big difference between training and reality, and I want the contact team to know that right up front. I also want them to learn the limitations of orbital surveying. You have any problems with that policy?”

  Cormican twice ran his fingers back through his thinning silver hair as he considered. “No. That seems prudent,” he pronounced at last. “Fact is, if it goes well, I’d like to see if we couldn’t get everybody down at least once in the course of this mission—techs, awks, the whole crew. Seems to me that standing on an alien planet ought to be part of the payoff for giving up a normal life. We ought to send them all back with at least one good story for their descendants, don’t you think? And I’d hate to see anybody get the idea that the survey team is better somehow, that they get all the privileges and perks. What do you say to that?”

  Thackery did not welcome the prospect of looking after what amounted to tourists, but it was too early and the ground too soft for a pitched battle. “I say the gig is rated for six people,” Thackery said, “which is two more than we’ll routinely take to the surface. Those seats are at your disposal.”

  “Good. Maybe we’ll be able to work with each other after all.”

  “I hope so.”

  Munin’s first stop was 26 Sagittae, a cool red M-class dwarf too dim to be seen even from A-Cyg without optical aid. By the time she came out of the craze there, Thackery had completed what he expected to be merely the first installment of a continuing series of theses and position papers, this one an overview entided PHASE ID ALTERNATIVES: THE CASE FOR SELECTIVE SURVEYING.

  Oh the bridge to supervise a priority dispatch of the paper, Thackery was among the first on board to learn from the update dispatch that while the ship had been out of touch an eleventh colony had been added to the human community. At the earliest opportunity, he and Koi curled up together on his bed to review the Liam-Won contact report.

  “All I’ve heard was that it was the Edwin Hubble,” she said, tugging at the slate he held so that she could read its display.

  “The colony’s on a free-water planet orbiting 85 Monocerous.”

  “What kind of spectrum on the primary?”

  “F5 HI.”

  “That’s right on the Galactic equator,” she said, noting the celestial coordinates. “A very popular choice this season. So is Gnivi. So is Sennifi.”

  “Actually, that’s seven colonies in or near the plane of the Galaxy, with only two colonies each in the whole northern and southern galactic hemisphere,” she mused. “There might be a case there for focusing the Phase III search in the plane, maybe pulling ships out of the Bootes and Eridanus octants.”

  “Tech rating of 3.1,” he read. “Another Bronze Age civilization.”

  “That’s four in that range.”

  “Another very popular model. Yelp if you see anything new—I’m beginning to think I’ve seen it all before.” They scanned the remainder of the summary at a fairly fast scroll, then laid the slate aside and reflected. “What’s your gut feeling?” Thackery asked. “Have we found most of the colonies, or just scratched the surface?”

  “It would be easier to say if we had any idea what the FC starships were like.”

  “Is that the only answer you’re going to give me?”

  “No. That’s the excuse that comes before the answer. I suspect we’ve found almost all of them. I’ve always thought of forty light-years as about the outside limit for most of the possible non-AVLO technologies, and most of our ships are pushing that now.”

  “And when we’ve found them all and we still don’t know any more than we do now—”

  “I thought you were counting on
the D’shanna sorting it all out.”

  “You don’t expect me to not think about it until then, do you?”

  “If you’re so jaded about having a live, warm woman in your bed that you’re so easily distracted—” A sharp poke in the ribs interrupted her teasing. “Don’t you know, I’m attracted to you for your brains, not your body?” She sat up, shucked off her blouse, and struck a pouty, bare-breasted pose. “Really?” That precipitated a forty-minute interruption that was as much playful as passionate.

  “I was serious, though,” he said when they settled back into a more restful embrace. “How much more do we really know now than we did just after Jiadur reached Earth? Not a hell of a lot. In fact, the problem’s worse now than it was then. Every colony we find makes it that much harder to believe that the FC civilization just up and vanished. The farther each new colony is from Earth, the harder it is to explain how they accomplished the colonization. I think our search has been too narrow in scope. The answer has to lie outside ourselves.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t agree. The difference between one colony and ten is incremental. But the gap between a planet—bound civilization and an interstellar one is several orders of magnitude. You’re just experiencing a kind of delayed incredulity. If the Forefathers could do it once, they could do it a dozen times. If they could reach Journa, they could reach Sennifi.”

  “Whereupon they abandoned any traces of the level of technology required to get them there.”

  “You mean that the colonies lack spaceflight capability? What point was there in retaining it once they reached a suitable planet? And they wouldn’t have had the technological base to sustain it. There’s a limit to how much you can bring with you, even in a starship the size of Jiadur.”

  “If they had starships at all.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just that I don’t find any of the alternatives convincing. If they used small slowships, then how did they manage to live long enough to start colonies this far out? If they used generation slowships, then why haven’t we found at least some remnant or wreckage of something that large? And if they used fastships, why isn’t that level of technology reflected in the colonies they founded?”

  “The colonies had to fall back to a simpler lifestyle. You can’t expect them to start their new society at the same level as the one they left.”

  “Of course not—but it’s been thousands of years since then. The knowledge base that they brought with them should have put at least some of the colonies on our level by now.”

  “That’s a fair argument,” she conceded.

  “Here’s another. Consider it from the point of view of the FC civilization. How many ships did they send out? How many could they before we have to think that, glacier or no, they’d have to have been so large and so powerful as to necessarily leave some traces? There’s another variable that’s even more disturbing. Did every ship survive to start a colony? Highly unlikely. Then is there one colony for every ten ships that set out, or one for every hundred? That gets us into some very difficult numbers.”

  “So let’s hear some answers.”

  “I’m only good at the questions,” he admitted. “That’s why this whole tiling is going to make me crazy.”

  26 Sagittae offered only a pair of small moonlike planetoids, suitable for rehearsal landings but of no other value. Thackery went on both landings, nominally to supervise the command crew hitchhikers. His real purpose was to flesh out his Service record as favorably as possible; each landing was entered as a discrete item, while he received no specific credit for directing a landing in which he did not take part.

  So he continued the practice in the next system and the next, stretching the definition of a suitable planet from min-E to E-1 and even E-2 where necessary. Hard work and Koi’s company made the time go fast. After each craze, he would send out the latest addendum to his growing treatise on high-probability searches. Only once was there any explicit response, and that was a copy of another paper refuting most of the points in Thackery’s last exposition. He shrugged it off and proceeded to refute the refutation.

  As the count on his personal scorecard climbed into double figures the worlds he had seen and walked all began to merge together in his mind. Was the patterned tundra ground they briefly mistook for evidence of human engineering on 27 Sagittae-5 or 5 Serpens-5? Was it 61 Aquilae-6 which had the great white kaolinite plains? Where was it that Barrister nearly put us down in a bog?

  Only Thackery’s growing collection of memorabilia kept the record clear. There was one object from each landing: the Gnivian fertility icon, a scrimshaw-like mosaic tile pried from the plaza on Sennifi, a spike-leaved flower (encased in a block of clear preservative) picked on 12 Vulpeculae-6, a chunk of glittery itacolumite from 26 Sagittae, and more—each with the standard A.R. date on which he acquired them engraved on the underside.

  They were his memory crutches, without which he doubted he would remember in detail much more than the two contact landings. Rehearsal landings and survey landings alike were, by necessity, made on worlds which fell into a narrow range of all possible worlds. He was not geologist enough to read a planet’s morphology and see not just a landscape but an unfolding drama, nor biologist enough to see in each organism a unique natural history and ecology. He knew that those things existed, and learned of them through the team, but even so, the worlds without man made little impression on him. Until 61 Delphinus-5.

  Afterward, Thackery blamed himself. He had not conducted the time-consuming prescribed inspection of his E-suit after each decontamination procedure. In retrospect, he knew that the right glove had gone on too easily as he dressed for the landing on Del-5. That was the telltale sign of a degraded binding ring. That should have been all the warning he needed.

  But the string of unremarkable landings on forgettable worlds had made him casual about safety and contemptuous of the risk. After sixteen planetfalls, he had come to regard the descent and ascent as the only potentially dangerous part of the landing ritual.

  Del-5’s largest continent had a drier climate than might have been expected on a planet four-fifths covered by water, but a range of rugged, geologically new mountains along the eastern coast stripped most of the moisture from the prevailing sea breeze. Nevertheless, the interior savanna was home to a variety of simple lifeforms, some plant-like, some animal-like, and some of uncertain classification.

  The most interesting of the last group were the colorful, lichen-like autotrophs which clung to the near-vertical surfaces of crumbling volcanic dikes and sills throughout one 500-hectare region. What made them interesting was that they were motile, migrating slowly across the barren rock in the course of each day, trying to avoid being caught in the shadows.

  Though a full study of Del-5’s ecology and of the autotrophs’ niche would have to wait for later visitors, Norris was set on adding one of the creatures to Munin’s storehouse of geological and biological samples. Capturing one for examination meant a bit of rock-climbing, however, since the most accessible ground the team spotted while scouting in the gig was some sixty metres up on the side of a well-weathered scarp.

  It was Thackery who volunteered to accompany Norris on the hunt. Together they went scrambling up the sloping talus pile of rock litter to the bottom of the sunbattered rock face on which the creatures were arrayed. The talus was composed of fine bits of weathered quartzite, banked to the limit of the local gravity, and the climbers started minor landslides with each step.

  When they reached the top, Guerrieri moved in with the gig and maneuvered it so that its wedge-shaped shadow fell over a cluster of some twenty of the autotrophs. Those in the middle of the shadow simply froze where they were, while those farther out began to move toward the sharply defined edge of the shadow. With Thackery and Norris directing, Guerrieri eventually herded three of the creatures down within reach of the long-handled specimen scoop, and Norris swept two of them into the scoop’s pouch with a single practice
d motion.

  Then it was back down the slope to where they had left the back-pack sized Specimen Preservation Unit. All that was left to do was transfer the specimen from the scoop to the holding chamber of the SPU, wherein a blast of liquid nitrogen would render the specimen ready for examination. For fast-moving organisms, the scoop could be attached directly to the SPU. But when the specimen allowed, it was decidedly simpler to open the top of the SPU chamber and place the specimen inside by hand.

  Using the latter method, Norris quickly transferred one of the autotrophs. But the second specimen resisted, clinging by some means to the inside wall of the scoop like a cat with its claws dug into a bed. Watching the struggle with some amusement, Thackery suddenly noted movement at the lip of the SPU chamber as the first autotroph began to crawl? glide? wriggle? over the edge.

  “Trying to get away,” he warned.

  The two men reacted with incompatible responses: Thackery reached out to brush the creature back into the chamber, while Norris reached out to slam the chamber’s lid shut. Having seen the motion first, Thackery’s reaction was the faster but also placed his hand in peril. He snatched it away as the lid came down, but not fast enough to keep the tip of the middle and index fingers of his right glove from being pinched between the metal edges.

  The thin, flexible fabric showed the strength for which it was reputed, and did not tear. Instead, the wrist ring of Thackery’s glove popped loose, and the glove was left dangling from the seam of the closed lid, while the skin of Thackery’s right hand felt the warm sunlight and gentle breezes of 61 Del-5.

  It was a matter of only five minutes to free the glove, call the gig down, and retreat to the safety of its flight deck. There Connolly bathed both the bare skin and the glove with a powerful cell-disrupting antiorganic. The chemical caused a burning sensation which grew steadily more intense until washed away under a water jet a short time later.