Pawn's Gambit: And Other Stratagems

by Timothy Zahn

  The first forty-five minutes went smoothly enough, both Dan and the spectators quickly growing more or less accustomed to the emotional roller coaster ride we were on. Dan made decisions on seventeen fetuses during that time, and while he was clearly not having fun up there, I could tell from his face that he was holding up reasonably well against the pressure.

  The eighteenth subject changed all that.

  Dan stood by her for nearly five minutes, his face rigid with concentration and something else. Finally, leaving her card untouched on the gurney, he stepped over to the table. “There’s something wrong,” he said, his voice low but audible from where I was sitting. “I can’t find any life at all in there. I think the fetus must be dead. I … please don’t release the moth—the woman’s name. It’s going to be hard enough on her as it is.”

  Jordan tapped Cottingham’s arm and muttered something. The reporter grimaced slightly, but gamely shuffled out the proper envelope and opened it. His frown vanished as he read the contents and he smiled wryly. “Number twenty-eight. Linda Smith; not pregnant. Control.”

  There was a collective sigh of released tension. An unreadable expression flickered across Dan’s face as he glanced at Jordan and Halladay. Then, clamping his jaw tightly, he walked back to the gurneys. To others in the room he may have simply looked determined—but I knew better. He was flustered, and flustered badly. He’d counseled several women in the past who’d given birth to stillborn children, and dropping the memory of that trauma into the middle of an already emotional experience must have been like a kick in the head. The fact that he obviously hadn’t even considered the possibility of a control was clear evidence of his overwrought state. I wondered briefly if he would call for a break, but I already knew that he wouldn’t permit himself that luxury. He had fought hard these past few weeks to portray himself as a calm, dispassionate scientist who could make the Lifeline Experiment a genuinely impartial search for truth, and he would turn his stomach into a massive ulcer before he would undermine that effort with even a suggestion of weakness.

  From that point on, Dan’s face was a granite mask, and for the next forty minutes I sat helplessly by, grinding my fingernails into my palms.

  The silence in the room as Dan handed Cottingham the last card was so complete that I could clearly hear the ticking of Jordan’s antique wristwatch. Picking up the first of his envelopes, Cottingham opened it. “Number twenty-three,” he read into the microphone, enunciating his words carefully. “Alice Grant; nine months pregnant.” Reaching to the line of cards in front of him, he turned the corresponding one over. “Human,” he read. Card and envelope went to one side, and as he opened the second envelope I shifted my attention to Dan. He had stepped back among the gurneys and was watching Cottingham, his expression calm but with a strange, brittle quality to it that sent a sudden shiver up my back. “Number one. Vicki Thuma; eight and a half months pregnant,” Cottingham read. Pause. “Human.”

  One by one he worked his way down the stack, finishing with the third-trimester mothers and starting on those in their second three months … and as each card he picked up identified the child as fully human, the silence began to give way to a buzz of unsure conversation. Cottingham read on; and as he reached the first-trimester women the buzz took on edges of both triumphant and angry disbelief. No one, I sensed, had really expected the result that was unfolding.

  He reached the last envelope, and as he tore it open the room suddenly became quiet again. “Number fourteen. Barbara Remington: five weeks pregnant.” His hand was trembling just slightly as he turned over the final card. “Human. Human,” he repeated, as if not quite believing it.

  “That’s impossible!” Eve Unger’s clear voice cut through the silence, a fraction of a second before the whole room exploded into pandemonium. “A fetus’s brain has hardly started development at five weeks,” she shouted over the din. “It’s a fraud—Staley’s been bought by the Family Alliance!”

  Dan didn’t reply, though anything he said would have been inaudible anyway through the accusations, claims, and counterclaims filling the air like opposing mortar barrages. He just stood there, looking up at the NIFE representative, his expression still calm. He knew what he’d seen and would not be moved from his testimony. And yet, as I look back on his face now, I can see the faintest hint of the uneasiness—the knowledge that what she said made sense—that I now know must have haunted the last fifteen years of his life.

  Of the aftermath there is little that isn’t common knowledge. Though the Lifeline Experiment carried no legal weight whatsoever, it was very clearly the rallying point for the final successful drive that established the Fetal Rights Amendment in the Constitution. But the bitter struggle that surrounded the issue made it a Pyrrhic victory at best, threatening at times to tear the country apart as had no issue since the Vietnam War. It was too much for Dan to bear at close range, and for eight years after the experiment he remained outside the country, living in self-imposed seclusion in Australia. I think that the only thing that got him through that period was the knowledge that he had seen humanity in those tiny bits of new life, and that whatever the cost he had done the right thing. Eventually things settled down, the pro-abortion forces gradually losing strength as grudging acceptance of the new law grew, until they became the vocal but powerless minority of the present day. And I wish with all my heart the controversy could be left alone to continue its slow death.

  But it can’t.

  I enclose the following excerpt from Dan’s papers with a feeling of dread, remembering the agony of the past two decades as few others remember it and knowing that my action is likely to rekindle the fires again. But above all other things Dan prized his reputation for honesty, and it is solely because of this that I quote here the last entry from his private journal, made just two days before the car accident that took his life. I believe that, given the time, he would have come to the same conclusion.

  October 18, 2009: I have been sitting here since the sky first began to show the colors of sunset, wondering how to write this. The stars now shine brightly where I watched the sun go down, and I am no nearer to finding a way to ease the shock of what my seven-year study has shown me … to finding a less brutal way to confess what I have unwittingly done to all the people who trusted me.

  There can be no further doubt as to what I have done. Linda Grant, whose mother was nine months pregnant at the experiment, shows virtually none of the traits I myself showed as a teenager; at the other end of the scale Tom Remington, whose mother was only five weeks along, is so like me it is agonizing to watch him. Only today I learned that, while he has my passionate love of basketball, he does not intend to try out for the school team, despite his skill and height. There is no reason why he would not do well at the game … except that I was a mere five foot six at his age and convinced I could never play. All the rest of them fall somewhere between these two extremes, their individual degrees of mimicry directly correlated with their ages at the experiment … and for what I’ve done to these children alone I owe a debt I’ll never be able to repay. What I’ve done to the country and the millions of women whose lives my naïveté had changed—I can’t even comprehend the enormity of my crime.

  My crime. The word is harsh, unforgiving. But I can’t justify it as anything else. In my foolish arrogance I assumed the universe was simple, that its secrets were absolute and could be had for the asking. Worse yet, I assumed it would bend its own rules just for my convenience.

  The experimenter influences his experiment. How long has that truth been known? Close to a hundred years, I’m sure, at least since the earliest beginnings of quantum mechanics. Such a simple thing … and yet neither I nor any of those I worked with ever even bothered to consider what it might mean to us.

  The Lifeline Experiment was doomed from the very beginning. Young minds, their development barely started—how could they fail to be overwhelmed as I touched them with wha
t must have been the delicacy of an elephant? That flicker of humanness I saw in each fetus—how much of that was innate and how much merely my own imposed reflection? I’ll never know. No one ever will. My very presence obliterated the line I was trying to find.

  And in the meantime I have helped to force what is essentially an arbitrary decision on the country. What should I do with this knowledge? Do I keep it to myself and allow the lie to continue, or do I speak out and risk tearing the society apart once again?

  I wish I knew the answer.

  Cascade Point

  In retrospect, I suppose I should have realized my number had come up on the universe’s list right from the very start, right from the moment it became clear that I was going to be stuck with the job of welcoming the Aura Dancer’s latest batch of passengers aboard. Still, I suppose it’s just as well it was me and not Tobbar who let Rik Bradley and his psychiatrist onto my ship. There are some things that a captain should have no one to blame for but himself, and this was definitely in that category.

  Right away I suppose that generates a lot of false impressions. A star liner captain, resplendent in white and gold, smiling toothily at elegantly dressed men and women as the ramp carries them through the polished entry portal—forget all of that. A tramp starmer isn’t polished anywhere it doesn’t absolutely have to be, the captain is lucky if he’s got a clean jumpsuit—let alone some pseudo-military Christmas tree frippery—and the passengers we get are the steerage of the star-traveling community. And look it.

  Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against passengers aboard my ship. As a matter of fact, putting extra cabins in the Dancer had been my idea to start with, and they’d all too often made the difference between profit and loss in our always marginal business. But one of the reasons I had gone into space in the first place was to avoid having to make small talk with strangers, and I would rather solo through four cascade points in a row than spend those agonizing minutes at the entry portal. In this case, though, I had no choice. Tobbar, our master of drivel—and thus the man unofficially in charge of civilian small talk—was up to his elbows in grease and balky hydraulics; and my second choice, Alana Keal, had finally gotten through to an equally balky tower controller who wanted to bump us ten ships back in the lift pattern. Which left exactly one person—me—because there was no one else I’d trust with giving a good first impression of my ship to paying customers. And so I was the one standing on the ramp when Bradley and his eleven fellow passengers hoved into sight.

  They ranged from semiscruffy to respectable-but-not-rich—about par for the Dancer—but even in such a diverse group Bradley stood out like a red light on the status board. He was reasonably good-looking, reasonably average in height and build; but there was something in the way he walked that immediately caught my attention. Sort of a cross between nervous fear and something I couldn’t help but identify as swagger. The mix was so good that it was several seconds before it occurred to me how mutually contradictory the two impressions were, and the realization left me feeling more uncomfortable than I already did.

  Bradley was eighth in line, with the result that my first seven greetings were carried out without a lot of attention from my conscious mind—which I’m sure only helped. Even standing still, I quickly discovered, Bradley’s strangeness made itself apparent, both in his posture and also in his face and eyes. Especially his eyes.

  Finally it was his turn at the head of the line. “Good morning, sir,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m Captain Pall Durriken. Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you.” His voice was bravely uncertain, the sort my mother used to describe as mousy. His eyes flicked the length of the Dancer, darted once into the portal, and returned to my face. “How often do ships like this crash?” he asked.

  I hadn’t expected any questions quite so blunt, but the fact that it was outside the realm of small talk made it easy to handle. “Hardly ever,” I told him. “The last published figures showed a death rate of less than one per million passengers. You’re more likely to be hit by a chunk of roof tile off the tower over there.”

  He actually cringed, turning halfway around to look at the tower. I hadn’t dreamed he would take my comment so seriously, but before I could get my mouth working the man behind Bradley clapped a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Rik—nothing’s going to hurt you. Really. This is a good ship, and we’re going to be perfectly safe aboard her.”

  Bradley slowly straightened, and the other man shifted his attention to me. “I’m Dr. Hammerfeld Lanton, Captain,” he said, extending his hand. “This is Rik Bradley. We’re traveling in adjoining cabins.”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding as if I’d already known that. In reality I hadn’t had time to check out the passenger lists and assignments, but I could trust Leeds to have set things up properly. “Are you a doctor of medicine, sir?”

  “In a way,” Lanton said. “I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “Ah,” I said, and managed two or three equally brilliant conversational gems before the two of them moved on. The last three passengers I dispatched with similar polish, and when everyone was inside I sealed the portal and headed for the bridge.

  Alana had finished dickering with the tower and was running the prelift computer check when I arrived. “What’s the verdict?” I asked as I slid into my chair and keyed for helm check.

  “We’ve still got our lift slot,” she said. “That’s conditional on Matope getting the elevon system working within the next half hour, of course.”

  “Idiots,” I muttered. The elevons wouldn’t be needed until we arrived at Taimyr some six weeks from now, and Matope could practically rebuild them from scratch in that amount of time. To insist they be in prime condition before we could lift was unreasonable even for bureaucrats.

  “Oh, there’s no problem—Tobbar reported they were closing things up a few minutes ago. They’ll put it through its paces, it’ll work perfectly, they’ll transmit the readout, and that’ll be that.” She cleared her throat. “Incidentally … are you aware we’ve got a skull-diver and his patient aboard?”

  “Yes; I met—patient?” I interrupted myself as the last part of her sentence registered. “Who?”

  “Name’s Bradley,” she said. “No further data on him, but apparently he and this Lanton character had a fair amount of electronic and medical stuff delivered to their cabins.”

  A small shiver ran up my back as I remembered Bradley’s face. No wonder he’d struck me as strange. “No mention at all of what’s wrong—of why Bradley needs a psychiatrist?”

  “Nothing. But it can’t be anything serious.” The test board bleeped, and Alana paused to peer at the results. Apparently satisfied, she keyed in the next test on the check list. “The Swedish Psychiatric Institute seems to be funding the trip, and they presumably know the regulations about notifying us of potential health risks.”

  “Um.” On the other hand, a small voice whispered in my ear, if there was some problem with Bradley that made him marginal for space certification, they were more likely to get away with slipping him aboard a tramp than on a liner. “Maybe I should give them a call, anyway. Unless you’d like to?”

  I glanced over in time to see her face go stony. “No, thank you,” she said firmly.

  “Right.” I felt ashamed of the comment, not really having meant it the way it had come out. All of us had our own reasons for being where we were; Alana’s was an overdose of third-degree emotional burns. She was the type who’d seemingly been born to nurse broken wings and bruised souls, the type who by necessity kept her own heart in full view of both friends and passersby. Eventually, I gathered, one too many of her mended souls had torn out the emotional IVs she’d set up and flown off without so much as a backward glance, and she had renounced the whole business and run off to space. Ice to Europa, I’d thought once; there were enough broken wings out here for a whole shipload of Florence Nighti
ngales. But what I’d expected to be a short vacation for her had become four years’ worth of armor plate over her emotions, until I wasn’t sure she even knew anymore how to care for people. The last thing in the universe she would be interested in doing would be getting involved in any way with Bradley’s problems. “Is all the cargo aboard now?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Yes, and Wilkinson certifies it’s properly stowed.”

  “Good.” I got to my feet. “I guess I’ll make a quick spot survey of the ship, if you can handle things here.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, not bothering to look up. Nodding anyway, I left.

  I stopped first at the service shafts where Matope and Tobbar were just starting their elevon tests, staying long enough to satisfy myself the resulting data were adequate to please even the tower’s bit-pickers. Then it was to each of the cargo holds to double-check Wilkinson’s stowing arrangement, to the passenger area to make sure all their luggage had been properly brought on board, to the computer room to look into a reported malfunction—a false alarm, fortunately—and finally back to the bridge for the lift itself. Somehow, in all the running around, I never got around to calling Sweden. Not, as I found out later, that it would have done me any good.

  We lifted right on schedule, shifting from the launch fields grav booster to ramjet at ten kilometers and kicking in the fusion drive as soon as it was legal to do so. Six hours later we were past Luna’s orbit and ready for the first cascade maneuver.