Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “That antiorg will kill off the first layer of your epidermis, along with anything that might have climbed on for a ride, so you might feel just a little itching a few hours from now,” Connolly advised him as he fitted the glove back in place. “If the itching is bad, or you get any other symptoms, don’t be slow about telling me.”

  Back on board Munin, Thackery experienced the itching as predicted—a gnawing, maddeningly irresistible sensation that he responded to with scratching. But he made no point in mentioning it to Connolly or even Amelia, since it seemed a nuisance he could tolerate until the irritation passed.

  But by that evening, his right hand had begun to puff up, and several other spots to itch: the fingers of his left hand; several patches on his right forearm; an area low on his left cheek, near the jawline. The moment he became aware of the new outbreaks, Thackery went searching for Connolly.

  “Could I be having an allergic reaction to the antiorganic?” Thackery asked, holding his swollen hand up for the biologist’s inspection.

  “No,” Connolly said, his voice and expression betraying his concern. “You were tested for it when you signed on. We’d better get you isolated.”

  Very shortly thereafter, Thackery was ensconced in cabin F5, which was equipped with the special ventilation, door seals, and other facilities needed to turn it into a negative-pressure Level II isolation chamber. Following Connolly’s instructions, Thackery took skin scrapings and blood and urine samples and passed them out through the small double-doored transfer lock. Later, dinner was passed in to him the same way.

  “No matter what this turns out to be, the best thing you can do for yourself now is rest,” Connolly advised via the shipnet. “You just rest while we look into this.”

  As usually follows such prescriptions, Thackery slept poorly. By morning, his fingers resembled fat sausages, and he could not bend them enough to make a fist. The skin over the swollen areas had begun to harden into a scabrous crust, and as he tried to wash and dress, the crust split open and oozed a watery fluid. Connolly demanded samples of the crust and the fluid as well, and took them without offering either information or encouragement in return.

  For those Thackery had to depend on Koi, who kept an open line between her cabin and his prison and used it as often as her schedule allowed.

  “You can beat this,” she assured him. “You’re going to be all right.”

  Thackery wondered if she believed it. He himself was not so confident—it was his body that was under attack, his body that was changing hour by hour, his body that was being violated in unpleasant and unpredictable ways. A survey ship’s lab wasn’t equipped to be a medical research facility, and Connolly wasn’t trained as a medical researcher. Lying alone in the room, regarding his affliction with both disgust and dismay, Thackery remembered the hated gnotobiotic screening back at Unity.

  Like issuing a warrior a paper shield and a rubber sword and saying, Sorry, best we can do for you.

  No new outbreaks appeared, either on Thackery’s body or among the rest of the survey team, but as the day wore on those which were already underway brought increasing misery. Presently Thackery began to pester Connolly for something to reduce the swelling, to end the itching, to blunt the growing pain.

  “You’ve got active antibodies in your bloodstream for anything we already know how to treat,” was the unencouraging answer. “I can’t give you anything else until I know what I’m trying to fight.”

  By the end of the second day, the crusting skin on Thackery’s right hand had oxidized to an ominous black, and the other patches had begun to darken as well. The sores seemed to be drying out; each new crack no longer bathed his hands in slippery fluid. But all the same, his hands were nearly useless.

  That evening, Connolly came by and joined Thackery in the isolation cabin, taking no special precautions to protect himself.

  “This must be good news,” Thackery said hopefully.

  “It is,” the biologist said with a cheery smile. “This problem is not an infection. There are no active Del-5 organisms in your system or on your skin. So we don’t have to keep you here any more.”

  “Wonderful,” Thackery said, and held up his hands. “What about this, then?”

  “Ever had toxin dermatitis?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got it now. Your body is reacting to an alkyl produced by one of Del-5’s single-celled inhabitants. We found them by the millions on the rock crawlers.”

  “A poison?”

  “Looks like an internal product or structural element rather than a defense mechanism. The antiorg pops cells like balloons, which is how you got exposed to the compound. From there on, it’s just a bad match between its biochemistry and yours. Which we can do something about now. Roll up your sleeve.”

  But the freedom to leave F5 meant less than it might have. With his hands as they were, he could not negotiate the climb-way, and so was restricted to F deck. He could not make love with Amy, and he would not let her make love to him, would not accept her willingness to give without receiving, for he projected onto her the revulsion he felt at the sight of himself.

  That was the worst part: the constant reminder of vulnerability, of mortality, represented by the repellant disfigurement he carried everywhere with him. For what? he demanded of himself. Why am I taking these risks? His own attitude shamed him, and he would not talk about the feelings with Amy. Instead, when she came downship to see him he found himself talking about a world she had never seen: Earth.

  Munin was ten days into the craze before the black scabs began to break away, revealing large patches of a fragile-looking reddened skin which wrinkled strangely when he moved. In time the red blotches became white, the skin thickening into keloids like those of a burn victim. Hair would never grow there again, nor would his normal, lightly tanned coloration return. But at least there was no longer any doubt that he was going to recover.

  In retrospect, the Del-5 episode ended relatively well. The discomfort and disability were temporary, the disfigurement minor. Thackery’s worst fears were not realized. He had not infected the crew. He had not died.

  But he was left changed, all the same.

  Thackery was sure that Koi would notice—sure that, as close as they had become, she could not avoid noticing. That was the best way. He wanted her to notice, and understand, and accept, so that he never need to defend it, so that it would never be an issue between them. It did not happen that way.

  The last night of the craze, he and Amy sat arm-in-arm among a dozen so sprawled in chairs and on the floor of the edrec deck. A clear-voiced awk named Johnna had coaxed Guerrieri into bringing his dulcimer and his music upship for an informal concert. Since neither knew the other’s repertoire, they took turns singing old ballads and new chanteys, songs of Earth and lost lovers, of selkies and starships. When Guerrieri played alone, there was a reverent silence as the scythe-shaped hammers flashed in his hands and the steel strings rang.

  Presently a tech named Kemla joined them, offering what seemed to be an endless treasury of quaintly bawdy songs in a sonorous voice which made up with enthusiasm for what it lacked in training. Norris absented himself for a few minutes, returning with an accompanist’s Key tone on which he displayed unexpected skill. The rest, including Thackery and Koi, contented themselves with joining in whenever the chorus of a given song permitted, at first tentatively and half-throated, later confidently and vigorously.

  Whether it was the songs themselves or the spontaneous, familial way in which they were shared, Thackery was drawn under their spell. It was one of the songs sung by Johnna that stayed with him the longest, a wistful century-old wish-song with a haunting melody and a poignant vision:

  Give my children wings, but not the ghosts of wings

  I have found in the words of the dreamers

  Let them fly away to a world so far away from the fools and the cruel and schemers

  Give my children life, a vast eternal life

  An
d a universe teeming with wonders

  Continents and skies, a million different skies,

  Full of rainbows and snowflakes and thunder…

  Lying in bed with Koi afterward, Thackery was suffused with an uncomplicated sentimentalism that brought him to the brink of whispering I love you, words which to him carried such a burden of risk and commitment that he had never before used them. But Koi’s mind, he soon learned, was occupied with very different thoughts.

  “I can’t find your new dispatch anywhere in your personal library,” she said as she snuggled on his shoulder. “Haven’t you been working on one?”

  “What are you doing poking around in my library?” he demanded, pulling away.

  She sat up in bed and turned to face him, making no effort to cover up. “You always have me review your work, and we reach 29 Sagittae tomorrow. I thought you’d just neglected to transfer it to my library.”

  “I’m not working on one.”

  “I figured that out by now. It’s not too late. I can help you. We can have something ready before we’re finished in this system.”

  He shook his head and avoided her eyes. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing any more of them.”

  “Having trouble hitting your stride again? I said I’d help—”

  “No. It’d be a waste of your time and mine.” He looked up and met her questioning gaze. “I don’t know what I was thinking—what kind of Messiah complex I had. I’m never going to get a chance. My papers come in at A-Cyg six, eight, ten years apart—they aren’t going to make any impression. I’d have to be there, fighting for what I want when the opportunity came up—if it ever did.”

  She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “So what do you plan to do instead?”

  He reached out and enfolded her hands in his. “Leave the Service. Go back home, with you. With you there it wouldn’t matter how much it’d changed.”

  She reclaimed her hands. “What’s happened to you?”

  “Nothing’s happened. I’ve just reevaluated my priorities. I’ve realized that I’m a fool to take time away from being with you for a long shot.”

  “That long shot is part of why I’m here to spend time with.”

  “I know that. But we have more going for us than the D’shanna, don’t we?”

  “We do—but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a problem for me.”

  Thackery sighed. “Amy, I’ve never really been sick before. I didn’t like it. What if I’d inhaled the Del-5 cells, or ingested them? What if that alkyl had had a chance to work on my digestive tract, or my lungs, instead of my hands? I’d be dead now. I had a good reason to think about how I was spending my life. And I decided that the next chance I have, I’m going to take some time for myself.”

  “But the D’shanna—”

  “Let someone else find them,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “Let someone else worry over it. I’ve done my part, and more. It’s time I was a little selfish. It’s time I stopped taking silly risks, like the Del-5 landing.”

  “How was that a silly risk?”

  “I had no good reason to be involved. I didn’t contribute anything unique, or do anything that others couldn’t have done.”

  “So what, then? Are you going to stop making landings because of what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him with surprise. “You’re afraid.”

  “I’m afraid of losing you. I haven’t had that much happiness, Amy. You can’t blame me for wanting to hold onto what I have.”

  “If you had died, you wouldn’t feel the loss—I would. Only the living grieve and regret. The dead are spared the necessity. Look, Thack—you’ll lose a lot more by living afraid than you would by dying.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like me.” She patted the medpump strapped to her bicep. “I’m not out here filling my veins with drugs every time we craze so that you can have a convenient playmate. If my being here for you has made you so comfortable that this is the result, then I’m not doing right by either of us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She laid down with her back to him and pulled the sheet up over her shoulder. “I’ll move my things out as soon as I talk to Barbrice about moving in,” she said, naming the surveyor who had been enjoying a single cabin.

  “Dammit, Amy, I love you! I don’t understand what you’re angry about!”

  “I’m not angry, Thack. I’m disappointed. Love isn’t something that you drop out of life to enjoy.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean—”

  She rolled over to face him. “Yes, you did. And it isn’t the way I want to live, or to see you live. I love you, too, Thack. I just can’t do it the way you want me to.”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

  “If you did, I wouldn’t need to.”

  Thackery knew there was no point in arguing. Koi was not negotiating to gain concessions, or asking to be dissuaded, or inviting Thackery to plead. That was not her way. She had made a decision, and anything he might have said had already been taken into account.

  Chapter 13

  * * *

  Recall

  As Koi slept, as Thackery lay in the darkness and listened to her breathing, as Munin sped onward through the AVLO night, far away in the Lynx octant the Pathfinder Dove was dying.

  The trouble began in a field coil, one of forty arrayed in a ring around the Dove’s drive halo and linked by dozens of thick cables to the fore and aft field radiators and to the deck grids which provided the ship’s gravity. The coils were where the flux built up, each an instant later than one neighbor and an instant earlier than the next. That rigid sequential pattern smoothly induced the multiplier effect—forty coils behaving as though they were fully energized, even though only a single coil was at any given instant. It was from that illusory energy that the illusory mass of the drive’s phantom gravity well proceeded.

  Each coil was a complex structure of insulated wire as fine as hair and fast-response capacitors as massive as logs, linked by a microprocessor controlled bank-switching system which assured that, picosecond to picosecond, the accumulated charge was in balance. Unless electrons could be considered exceptions, there were no moving parts in the entire 200-kg mass of each coil.

  But that did not mean that there was no wear. The AVLO-D coils, unlike those powering later survey ships, were not chilled by exposure to space to superconducting temperatures, and so the fine niobium-zirconium filaments were subject to Joule heating each time the drive was used. Of course, the alloy had been chosen with that in mind, and no detectable damage resulted from the subatomic stress.

  But that did not mean that there was no damage. With each flux cycle, random microscopic hot spots were created at the sites of tiny metallurgical imperfections. Over time, the imperfections grew to flaws, and the flaws to actual breaks. Even that had been foreseen, for the bank-switching system simply readjusted the coil’s output to a slightly lower level, the central controller brought the other coils down accordingly, and the drive continued to operate, albeit at a fractionally lower efficiency.

  What the engineers who built the drive did not anticipate (and could not have been expected to) was how long the Pathfinder Dove would remain operational and how often its drives would be called on to hasten it to one or another new destination. In carrying out the fault-test modeling to twenty-five craze cycles, they were confident that they were providing at least a twenty-cycle margin of safety.

  But that margin had been reached and substantially surpassed long ago. Two major overhauls, five tear-down inspections, and three hundred eighty-one years after it was first placed in service, thirty-eight of the forty original coils were still in place. When Commander Dylanna Lapedes, the first Journan to achieve command rank, pronounced the survey of 61 Canum Venaticorum complete, it was those coils which responded to the gravigator’s call and started Dove smoothly on its way.

  And less than an hour later, as Do
ve reached a velocity of some 100,000 kilometres per second, it was coil Twenty-Eight, built in a Copenhagen assembly plant and installed on-orbit by the grandson of a New York street merchant, that failed.

  It failed suddenly and spectacularly, with blue-white gigawatt arcs dancing inside the cylindrical housing, leaping from one subassembly to another. Within seconds, the superheated gases generated by burning insulation and vaporized wire filament exploded outward, and the starboard half of Dove’s drive halo became an inferno. The skin of the ship bulged, then split open in a great tattered rent. An instant later, the conflagration was out, deprived both of spark and oxidizer by its own violence.

  The pressure vessel which comprised the climbway and the adjacent living spaces had not been broached, and though everyone was shaken, no one aboard Dove had been killed. There was still light, and air, and food, and those systems not dependent on the drive still functioned. But Dove herself was mortally wounded, and the velocity at which she was moving condemned her crew to death.

  For without the protective bow wave of the AVLO drive, the smallest bit of space flotsam would strike Dove like a bomb, turning the energy of Dove’s own motion against it. Neither the gig nor the lifepods, their hulls and propulsion systems equal only to the modest demands of in-system flight, offered any hope of escape. And the cometary cloud belonging to 61 Canum Venaticorum lay but a few minutes ahead. Under the AVLO drive, the cloud was a triviality, a tissue of microscopic dust and infinitesimal ice crystals. With the drive destroyed, the cloud was an impassable mine field.

  There was enough time only for a brief final dispatch, transmitted by the tortoise of radio rather than by the rabbit of the drive-dependent Kleine, and for a few hapless tears and desperate prayers.

  For a long minute it seemed that luck had favored Dove. Then a kernel of icy dust no larger than a pinhead intersected Dove’s trajectory. The energy of the collision sheared off half the forward radiator and shattered the bridge deck. Dove began to slowly tumble end for end, its atmosphere and crew spilling out through its wounds. Then, disemboweled and beheaded, the aging Pathfinder finally died.