Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  The minor thunderclap that accompanied Thackery’s appearance on the Cape May Point beach had been swallowed up by the white noise of the modest breakers churning the water just offshore. Moreover, the beach was crowded enough that relatively few noted that, in the infinitesimal crack between one moment and the next, the population of the beach increased by one. Nor did Thackery’s nudity create any stir, for a healthy minority of the vacationers shared his condition—though he was by far the palest of the lot.

  Only a few lying close enough to be dusted with the blast of sand which came as Thackery’s materializing body threw back the blanket of air, and a few more who happened to be looking in the right direction at that instant, noticed anything out of the ordinary. Yet even those who saw did not quite believe, and turned to those around them in a fruitless quest for confirmation. Very quickly, they concluded that they had seen nothing at all.

  But witnesses were not critical to Thackery’s purpose, and he made for the stairs leading to the street as oblivious to those around him as they were to him. His mind was filled with thoughts of credit—netlink—transportation. He did not see the beach police angling across the sand to intercept him. “No beach pass today, mister?” said one, catching him by the arm.

  “Beach pass?” Thackery suddenly became aware that everyone was wearing a plastic wristband, most of them green, a minority red. “No. I’m afraid not. But I’m leaving—”

  The second officer had withdrawn a wallet-sized case from a pocket and flipped it open, unveiling a keyless comlink complete with tiny screen. “It’s pretty clear you’re not carrying your cards, either,” he said. “Your Citizen Registry Number, please.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it. I can give you my Service commission number—”

  The first officer squinted at Thackery. “You a starvet?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “It figures,” said the other. “Four times out of five when you find somebody walking in circles, it’s a starvet. How long you been back?”

  About five minutes, Thackery thought. “Not long.”

  “I think you’d better come with us.”

  Thackery nodded agreeably. “That might be the simplest way, after all.”

  Thackery would have preferred to make the call himself, but the district supervisor of the Atlantica Peace Force had other ideas. Instead, Thackery provided the supervisor with the necessary numbers and names, and received in return a plain brown detainee’s wrap.

  Several minutes later, the supervisor returned to the holding room. “They’re going to send somebody. You can wait in the lobby.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And, Commander Thackery—next time you decide to take one of these little excursions, make sure you’ve taken the trouble to learn the local laws, all right?”

  “I will,” Thackery promised.

  Nearly two hours later, a two-seat air skiff bearing the Service’s emblem set down on the Peace Force’s flight pad. From the excitement the sleek little vehicle engendered among the staff, including the clerk who came to fetch him from the waiting room, Thackery knew that he was getting special treatment.

  Inside, the skiff was quiet and comfortable, and seemed capable of largely flying itself. The only thing the young awk did after keying in a destination was to make a brief report.

  “Ellit Donabaw reporting. I’ve picked up Commander Thackery and we’re en route to the Wesley Space Center. Estimate arrival in one hour.” Switching off, he setded back in his seat and cast a glance sideways at Thackery. “This is a pretty silly place to be caught, don’t you think?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They were talking about you around the office before they sent me out. I heard you were on contract to Munin.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Commander of the Munin.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They’re going to hit you hard, then—AWOL, dereliction of command—you’ll be looking at a fitness review the minute we reach Unity.”

  “Don’t be dim.”

  “I’m not kidding. You should have been smarter.”

  “Can you access Flight Office files with that?”

  “Yes—”

  “Why don’t you find out where Munin is?”

  Donabaw narrowed his gaze questioningly, then turned to the comlink. “Way the hell out in Lynx,” he said presently. “So?”

  “So how am I supposed to have accomplished this dereliction?”

  “On her last call here—”

  “Munin is a survey ship, not a goddamn packet. She doesn’t come to Earth.” That stumped the runner. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not supposed to. I suggest you get on your little box there and alert the Director that I’m on my way to see him. Time enough’s slipped by already. I don’t want to have to wait while he digs the sleep out of his eyes.”

  “You mean the Director? Of the Service?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you’re dreaming. The Director doesn’t drop everything to see any old person who asks for an appointment.”

  “I’m not ‘any old person,’ ” Thackery said. “I’m Com mander of a survey ship. There are only twenty-five of us. The Director will see me.”

  “Uh—sir, I don’t even know if she’s on station at the moment.”

  “Then you’d better find out, hadn’t you? Because if the Director’s not at Unity, we’re sure as hell not going there.” He crossed his arms over his chest, snuggled back into the comfortable seat, and directed his attention outside, at the surface of the ocean flashing by beneath the skiff.

  “I can’t say I ever thought to see you again,” said Alizana Neale, placing her folded hands in her lap. Apparently she had been on station for some time, for the gap in their ages had widened. She had let her hair go to gray, and there were soft but definite lines in her face, but her eyes were as steely as ever. “And I’m a little confused about why I am. When did Munin put in?”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “That was my understanding. So how are you here?”

  Thackery smiled. “There are two parts to the answer. The easy part goes: by way of the Cape May Shore Patrol, the Atlantica Peace Force, Wesley Space Center, and the shuttle Ticonderoga. The hard part I’d like to leave until I’ve had a chance to tell you why I’m here.”

  “That’s no surprise. You’ve always preferred drama to straight answers. Well, go ahead, then,” she said, settling back.

  Thackery took a moment to collect his thoughts. “When you allowed me to have Munin, you hinted that you had become frustrated with the colony problem—as I did, and as everyone before us had,” he began. “But it wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t make the puzzle come together. We knew that some of the pieces were missing. But we had no way of knowing that it was the most important ones.

  “I have those pieces now. I know what happened.”

  In simple sentences which had sweeping power, Thackery proceeded to tell the story of the beginning—but not its end—of the First Colonization. He spoke of cities on the ice, of tiny ships and their crews, of a will for life so strong and a meliorism so great that those who possessed them dared to vault to the stars.

  “In all, they sent out eighty-two ships before their time ended. Just seventeen of those ships founded colonies—the rest perished. Even so, they did more with less than I ever dreamed they could.”

  “You are something of a master of that yourself,” Neale said dryly, “considering what you are able to do without proof.”

  “If you mean physical evidence, you can start with the 241 artifact on 7 Herculis. I’m sure we’ll find more like it quickly, now that we know what we’re looking for. Very possibly there are discoveries to be made among the archeological reports that have already been filed. And there are four more colonies. I’ll provide the Flight Office with the information they’ll need.”

  “How is it that you’ve come to be so blessed with knowledge?—Let m
e say in advance that I regard your answer with some dread.”

  Thackery smiled faintly. “I made contact with a D’shanna.”

  “Ah. Like your friend the Drull, who tried to tell you that the Universe is closed?”

  “As it happens, it is.” Neale sighed. “I would have thought that in all this time, you could have taken the trouble to check your claims against the facts. The Universe is open, expanding. There’s not enough mass to stop it.”

  “No. The Universe is closed. The Greatcycle will have an ending—just as the Sennifi told us. The missing mass-energy is in the spindle, in the energy-matrix inhabited by the D’shanna.

  “How does the AVLO drive make phantom matter? The energy required for the feat flows to us from the spindle. What magic ties the Kleine transmitters together? The shortcut which allows us to call across the light-years leads through the spindle. It has to be considered the other half of reality. The spindle exists. I know. I was there.”

  “Invited, I presume.”

  “Yes. Not by the D’shanna collectively. By a singular individual I call Gabriel. He is—or was—an extraordinary representative of his kind. Alone among them, he took note of us, and realized what we were. Gabriel has watched us, worried over us, and been our friend.

  “And we badly needed a friend. I haven’t yet said why the Forefathers ended their period of colonization. It came because we’re not alone in the Galaxy. One of the Weichsel iceships stumbled into the space another species regarded as its own—the Mizar-Alcor multiple system, in Ursa Major. The Weichsel vessel was destroyed. Then these—I name them for what they did—these Sterilizers followed its trajectory back to Earth, and coldly and efficiently eradicated all human life here. Nor were we the only victims. We’ve known for a long time of mass extinctions of megafauna at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. Now we know why.”

  Thackery labored to make Neale see the images which were still so clear to him, to make her feel the horror. “Strange, isn’t it? For twenty thousand years we’ve been pointing out the Big Dipper to our children without realizing what happened there. Those stars signify above all our greatest humiliation, and the beginning of the blackest chapter in our history.”

  There was a catch in Thackery’s voice as he spoke those last words, and he paused. When he continued, it was in a softer voice. “When the Sterilizers struck at us, Gabriel was consumed by a moral dilemma. He could not stop the attack—just because I’ve named him for an angel does not mean he has the powers imputed to one. But he did have the capacity to intervene. He thought on it a long time, and in time decided that there was a wrongness in what had happened to us.

  “Mind you, that was as much a revelation to him as was our existence. From what I saw of them and gleaned from Gabriel, the D’shanna do not have a particularly elevated moral sense even as regards each other. But Gabriel rose above that denominator. It was Gabriel who reseeded Earth, giving us back our home world.”

  “But the colonies were never touched?”

  “The Sterilizers destroyed us as casually and reflexively as you might swat a fly. It did not occur to them to see if the fly had left any eggs.”

  “And now the eggs are hatching.”

  “Yes. As the colonies grew and flourished, Gabriel tried to protect us from ourselves. It was he who stopped the Sennifi and the Wenlock and the other advanced colonies from regaining space travel. But he wasn’t here when he could have stopped us.”

  “And now he can’t, is that what you’re saying?”

  “His final gift was the knowledge of what will happen if we don’t cancel Phase III, if the ships aren’t recalled.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Alizana, we have fifteen hundred stars and five hundred thousand cubic light-years of space. That’s enough for us, isn’t it? Worlds enough? We’ve been in such a hurry these last five hundred years, always pushing on to the next star. It’s time to go back to some of those worlds. It’s time for us to rest.”

  Neale shook her head slowly. “I will give you credit, Thackery. The story has grown in the telling. I am impressed. Or perhaps ‘entertained’ might be a better word.” She spread her hands palm-up in a gesture of resignation. “But how can I believe you? How can you expect me to?”

  Thackery nodded. “I understand that you have to object. I’m grateful to you for hearing me out before you did. We’re back now where we started. You asked how I came to be here. Because I knew that I would need proof, I had Gabriel bring me here, through the spindle. I’m sitting here with you now, but less than eight hours ago I was aboard Munin.” Neale regarded him with an expression that was both affectionate and sad. “Is it that you can’t realize how insane that statement is?” she asked gently. “Or is it that you think that I’m insane enough to believe it?” Thackery smiled knowingly. “If all I had to go on was my word, I don’t think I’d believe me either. But you don’t need to take my word for it. You have a netlink there. Use it. Call Munin. Ask them where I am, when they last saw me. Ask them what happened to their ship’s Commander,” Thackery said, standing as if to leave. “Don’t you want to stay for the finale?” A wistful look came into Thackery’s eyes. “No. You’ll need some time, as I did. And I left some people I cared about back there, under circumstances not of my choosing. I can’t go back the way I came, and I can’t rejoin them. So I think I would rather not hear their voices again. If possible, I would ask that you not tell them that I’m here on Earth. It would just be the cause of unnecessary pain.” Neale nodded. “Where are you going, then?”

  “On the way in from the shuttle I saw a restaurant that claims to serve ‘traditional’ meals—which I presume means food recognizable to people of our vintage,” Thackery said with a weak effort at a grin. “The Archives.”

  “You know it, then. I’m running short about three meals, so I’m going to go back down there and test their authenticity. When you’re ready to see me again, you can find me there.”

  The restaurateurs were not immodest—their bill du fare featured everything from Italian garlic bread running in melted butter to a pot roast containing potatoes which had been grown in soil, not aquaculture tanks. Thackery ordered impulsively and eclectically, as though he had to make up for all his deprivations in one sitting.

  But when the food came, it passed through Thackery’s mouth tastelessly, as though it was just another shipboard platter in which no real pleasure could be taken. The fault was not in the food, but in Thackery. His mind was full of thoughts of Amy. He wondered if what he had said to Neale was really true. Was there no way that they could be reunited? If he were to board a ship and head for Lynx, and she were to turn Munin for home—yes, it was possible. They could be together again.

  But even without having heard from Neale, Thackery knew that that option was not open to him. He would be needed here. There were things he knew that would have to be recorded, decisions to which he would have to contribute. He could not drop this on them and then scamper away. The Service was poised for change, and he would be expected to take part in the transformation. He did not belong to himself—in truth, had not since Jupiter. It was a fact he had both fought and fled, and now, finally, accepted.

  “Commander Thackery?”

  Blinking, Thackery looked up into the face of a young awk. “Yes?”

  “The Director would like you to meet her in Gallery B of the Service Museum.”

  “The Museum?”

  “Yes, sir. In Kellimore Place.”

  Thackery wiped his mouth and pushed himself away from the table. “I’m afraid you’ll have to show me,” he said with an apologetic smile. “The last time I was here, there was no Kellimore Place.”

  The museum was putatively closed, but that was no obstacle for the Director of the Service. Neale was waiting in the entry rotunda, in the star-dome of which hung models depicting the long-ago encounter between Jiadur and Pride of Earth. The awk delivered Thackery there, then silently excused himself.

  “Walk with me this way, will you?” Neale asked,
and they started down the leftmost of the three broad corridors leading out of the rotunda. “I could not reach Munin—”

  Thackery’s face whitened with sudden panic, but Neale placed a comforting hand on his arm. “She’s in the craze, legging from 211 Lynx to A-Cyg. But there was an exit dispatch—in which you figured prominently. There was sight-and-sound of you boarding the wreck of Dove—all time-stamped, of course. And video of what’s left of Dove falling into a star, as well.”

  Calmed by the news, Thackery nodded his approval. “1 asked Gabriel to leave her on a course that would make that happen. I didn’t want them to keep chasing it, or risk someone’s life trying to board her. I wanted them to think I was dead.”

  “You succeeded,” Neale said succinctly. “Do you know why I asked you to meet me here?” A small smile creased Thackery’s cheeks. “You have a display of antiques you want me to be part of?”

  “There’s something I want you to see.”

  They walked until they reached a spot where several life-sized photographs had been melded to the wall in such a way as to make it seem that the people represented were actually standing there, engaged in conversation with each other.

  “Do you know who she was?” Neale asked, stopping in front of the figures and gesturing at the proud, haughty face of an aged Oriental woman.

  “No.”

  “Her name was Tai Chen. Five hundred years ago, she was one of the three most powerful people on Earth. She was instrumental in Devaraja Rashuri’s struggle to build and launch Pride of Earth. But unlike Rashuri, she believed the aliens were a threat—that Pride should be not an envoy ship but a warship. She was overruled—no, better to say outmaneuvered. It was the residue of that xenophobia that saw to the arming of the Pathfinders.”

  “Is this why you asked me here? For a history lesson?” Thackery asked, bristling. “Or are you comparing me with her?”