Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Morning brought him a calmer, surer touch and a new determination. He maneuvered Sun Rise in again, and this time with a minimum of miscues brought the Shuttle-era universal docking adapters together with a solid bump. The three-fingered hands interlocked with each other before Sun Rise could rebound, though his ship oscillated and vibrated for several minutes from the impact of the collision.

  It took longer than that for Ulm to work up the courage to remove the barrier in the crawl tube and enter the command station. How many failures might have followed the first one sixteen years ago? How long might the station’s systems have been sitting cold and inert, just so much space junk waiting to be disposed of by a meteoroid collision some thousand or million years hence?

  But the builders of SPS One had built well. Though the air inside the station was fuggy and the primary diagnostic computer refused to function, its backup responded to Ulm’s requests. Within twelve hours, SPS One began a slow drift westward to its new home above the Indian Ocean, powered only by the carefully managed pressure of light on its glass and aluminum sails and carrying in its bowels the progenitor of the Second Space Age.

  “To the first year,” said Aikens, raising his goblet in salute. “California wine served in English crystal by an Indi butler.”

  “The first year,” echoed Driscoll. He drank deeply. “Napa Valley. This is wonderful. Wherever did you get it?”

  “I would guess that the Nissei Maru brought more than crude petroleum back with her from America,” said Rashuri, gesturing at Aikens with the glass. “Your health.”

  “No, no, to yours.” Aikens was at the stage of inebriation where earnestness and open emotionality were considered virtues. “We wouldn’t be where we are now if you hadn’t come to see King William that night in Geneva. There wouldn’t be eight brave lads preparing to live in orbit to maintain our comsats. There wouldn’t be 5 gigawatts of solar power on tap at Sriharikota for our manufacturing needs. There wouldn’t be three thousand of the best young minds attending our schools and working on our problems.

  “By the bloody Bishop’s breeches, there’d be no Pangaean Consortium and not one chance in ten thousand that we’d be ready for the Senders. To you, Devaraja Rashuri. May your name and deeds become known to every last living soul.”

  “Do you wish me to become famous or infamous?” Rashuri asked with a tolerant smile. “Either would meet the terms of your toast.”

  Aikens laughed, a bit too loudly and a bit too long. “Famous—so long as you don’t try to claim all the credit.” He refilled Rashuri’s glass and his own.

  “There have been few laurel wreaths earned up to now,” said Rashuri. “We have gathered up a few of the past’s misplaced tools and built our first rude home. But stronger storms are coming.”

  Aikens wrinkled up his face. “For God’s sake, say what you mean plainly, for once.” Driscoll smothered a chuckle, then let it out when Rashuri laughed himself.

  “All right, my friend. I mean this. Starting is always easy, if you have the will and if you see the opportunities. But there quickly comes a time when opportunity vanishes and will alone is not enough. It will get harder the farther we go. Count on it.”

  And eleven light-years away in the void of space, its position and velocity still unknown to all but its passengers, the Sender ship sped ever closer.

  Chapter 12

  * * *

  Carte Blanche

  The presence of Kurt Weddell made the cabin of the helicopter more crowded, but the five PANCON field reps who shared it seemed otherwise unaffected by his presence. On the one hand that was not surprising, for the field reps had a virtually unblemished reputation for efficiency—if that weren’t true, Weddell would not be with them for this, the installation of the ten thousandth PANCOMNET community earth station.

  But it was still a little surprising, since Weddell was director of the PANCOMNET and therefore by extension their boss. He was from a different era, he realized; in his time subordinates bowed and scraped and curried favor because that was how one got ahead. But these reps, none of them over twenty-four, knew that the Consortium was a meritocracy. They could only get ahead by doing their jobs well.

  Of course, getting ahead did not necessarily mean promotions or even compensation. It meant more interesting work and more autonomy in performing it, a way of making a bigger contribution to the Consortium’s work. The only “promotion” possible was a transfer into Driscoll’s group, but no one knew that option even existed until the knock came on the door.

  Old habits of thought the hard, Weddell thought. Rashuri knew what he was doing when he ordered me to recruit young. Still, it had only been a bit over three years. The change of outlook was not yet permanent, even if it was pleasant.

  The helicopter bored westward, following the general path of the Amazon but not its sinuous switchbacks. They flew low over the city of Manaus, at the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers. That was showmanship; the white helicopter with the stylized brown and blue Earth on the side of the fuselage was, as it was intended to be, distinctive. The same thinking had produced the field reps’ white jumpsuits with the same Earth logo on breastpocket and sleeve.

  Van Hecht, the team supervisor, made his way back to where Weddell sat peering out the window at the rain forest below. “’Bout another hundred klicks,” he said, perching on the edge of a crate. “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  Weddell nodded. “What’s the name of this place again?”

  “Caapiranga. Five hundred sixteen villagers mustering a combined third-grade education,” said Van Hecht with a grin.

  “Don’t belittle them because they haven’t any diplomas. I’m not sure how well you’d do in their school—living off the river and surviving in the jungle,” said Weddell.

  Van Hecht was unfazed by the rebuke. “I’d be smart enough to figure out this is no fit place for folks to live, and be out quick.”

  “You’re just an unrepentant European, aren’t you?” Van Hecht patted Weddell on the shoulder as he came to his feet. “That I am.”

  As Van Hecht promised, twenty minutes later the helicopter was hovering over Caapiranga. There was no clearing large enough to land in, but the team had been prepared for that—the three units which made up the ground station were already rigged with slings for the winch. As the pilot tried to keep his vehicle’s downwash from buffeting the huts, two of the field reps let themselves down a climbing rope and lightly dropped to the ground.

  With the cabin door open, the prop noise was deafening. “I want to go down,” Weddell shouted to Van Hecht, gesturing with one hand. Van Hecht held up a pair of gloves, and Weddell nodded. A few moments later, he was letting himself down the rope.

  On touching ground, he had to scurry to get out of the way, for the first of the earth station components was already being winched down. Shielding his eyes against the dust, he scanned for the advance rep and found her standing amid a group of curious adults, gesturing animatedly and shouting explanations in what sounded like Portuguese.

  “I’m Kurt Weddell,” he called, walking toward her.

  She disengaged herself from the group and came to meet him. “Carol Bonilla. Didn’t expect to see you here, sir,” the shouted. This is number ten thousand,” he Shouted back. “Something a little special. How do the villagers fed?”

  “It took a lot of explaining to get them to understand that we’re not the Brazilian army, bat I think they finally got it straight. Of course, there’s no way to Finally property what that thing’s far,” she answered, pointing to the third and last station component being lowered from the helicopter. “That’ll go like it always does, by how good our progamming is.”

  “It’s good and getting better all the time,” Weddell said pridefally. He could speak in a normal voice at last, since the helicopter was moving off toward the north to await the call to pick up the team.

  As it left, several children who had been hiding emerged from the huts or the forest and rejoined the adults. Br
aver or more curious children now clustered around the field team, plucking at their clothing and peering with puzzlement at the device they were rapidly assembling.

  The pop of one of the two-metre-long, self-propelled spider bolts firing itself down into the ground first startled, then delighted the onlookers. There were three more pops as the team anchored the other corners of the base unit, winch contained the power pack and microprocessors. Atop the base unit went the oversized video display, which in turn was shaded by the one square metre solar array. Van Hecht powered up the unit, then stood back to watch as the diagnostics package did its job.

  “Receiving all sixteen video feeds and all forty language tracks,” he announced “It’s showtime.”

  At Bonilla’s urging, most of the eighty-odd villagers present moved closer to the earth station, on which a series of colorful starburst patterns was being displayed. Van Hecht came and stood by Weddell at the back of the gathering and offered him a small calculator-sized transmitter with a single rotating switch.

  “Do the honors?”

  Weddell took the unit and twisted the switch. The starbursts faded to black. A yellow pinpoint appeared as the first tympani beats from Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” sounded from the speakers. The pinpoint grew to become a yellow sun, which grew larger and larger until sunspots were visible on its face and prominences on its limb. The Caapirangans were puzzled passengers on an imaginary spacecraft, which swooped past the sun, skimmed over a small rocky planet and a larger cloud-masked one, and drew near to a mottled-blue orb.

  The image of the slowly spinning earth grew until it filled the screen, and the “ship” matched speeds with the continent of South America, tracking with it through a night and again into daylight. Then it began a spectacular descent toward the north central forests and the gleaming ribbon of the Amazon. The zoom continued until the view comprised the roofs and paths of a small forest village: Caapiranga. The final shot showed the Caapirangans themselves, provided by a camera mounted just above the screen. As was usually the case, the villagers recognized their friends and kin better than they recognized themselves. But the level of excitement was gratifyingly high, and their chatter nearly bested the brilliant brass as the “Fanfare” ended.

  “I remember when we poured concrete footings and traveled by truck and boat to do these,” Van Hecht said. “We were happy then if we completed one installation a week, anywhere. Now there’re ten field teams averaging five a week each. If we keep this up, we’ll have everybody on the planet wired into the net in five years.”

  “That would be something,” Weddell said. “That really would be something.”

  Few eyes failed to notice Tai Chen’s yacht White Swan as it cruised slowly through the strait at the southern tip of Sriharikota Island and into Pulicat Lake. There the White Swan dropped anchor, within sight of the administrative complex for the Consortium’s Southern Launch Center, and within sight of the scorched ruin that was Pad A.

  Three days earlier, the attempted launch of Earth Rise 3 had ended as futilely as had the launch of Sun Rise A almost three years earlier. But this failure was a darker stain on the fabric of the Consortium, for aboard the doomed vehicle had been Orbital Pilot Riki Valeriana and her engineer Anthony Matranga.

  When the second-stage engines ignited a full minute early, breaking the back of the rocket and sending its fragments tumbling, the spacecraft’s launch-abort system had worked. But to the honor of more than eighty thousand spectators at Sriharikota, the escape tower had been unable to carry the craft’s crew clear of the rapidly expanding fireball. By a bitter irony, they survived the fire itself. But the heat disabled the capsule’s parasail recovery system, and both astronauts were killed on impact with the waters of the Bay of Bengal.

  Thankfully, the event was not carried live on the NET, mitigating the impact on the wider Consortium community. But for the eighty thousand and the Science Service, it was an immeasurable disaster.

  Earth Rise 3 had been the first manned launch of the new four-stage, heavy-lift cargo vehicle adapted from the Ariane IV by a Consortium engineering team. Two previous unmanned launches from Shuang-ch’eng-tzu had been encouragingly successful. This was to have been not only the first operational mission, but the beginning of the transfer of resupply operations for the eighteen-man Orbital Operations Cento’ from Shuang-ch’eng-tzu to the upgraded facilities at Sriharikota.

  Now both the Earth Rise program and the shift south were on indefinite hold, and Rashuri had been compelled to leave New Delhi and come to Sriharikota for the investigation. To Rashuri, the sight of the graceful white yacht anchored in the lake was confirmation of his suspicions that Tai Chen had finally decided to call in her debts. He was even impelled to toy with the thought that the failure of Earth Rise 3 had been no accident.

  So it was with complete impassivity that, an hour after the White Swan’s arrival, Rashuri received Gu Quigfen and absorbed the message that Tai Chen wished him to come aboard for a private meeting that evening. He sent Quigfen away with his acceptance, then called in his resource coordinator.

  “Where would we stand if China pulled out?”

  The man knitted his brows and frowned profoundly. “Very bad. Very bad. They have been our major supply of hard currencies and provide about one-fifth of all our strategic minerals.”

  “Could we survive?”

  “We would have to stretch out all the timetables by at least one-third. Borderline programs would have to be suspended.”

  “And if the rest of the Eastern bloc went, too?”

  “Then I would let a contract for several hundred ‘For Sale or Rent’ signs. We would not be a viable organization for long.”

  “Couldn’t the associate members make up for the loss?”

  “Could they? Yes, for the most part. Would they? I doubt it. There are some stirrings in the Pangaean Assembly that make me very uncomfortable. You should talk with our observer there.”

  Rashuri nodded his agreement and called in Jawaharlal Moraji. “If Tai Chen were removed, is there anyone friendly to us who could replace her?”

  “I would say not. She has been very careful to prevent the rise of strong opponents. Even so, she is identified so closely with the Consortium that, in rejecting her, they would reject us as well. The removing is easily done, of course. But I could not guarantee that anything except turmoil would follow,” Moraji said apologetically.

  Neither man’s appraisal surprised Rashuri. As he had long expected, he would have to face Tai Chen—on ground she had carefully staked out, and on terms she had cunningly contrived.

  A generous amount of space aboard the White Swan had been given over to the drawing room, and a generous amount of Chinese lucre had been given over to furnishing it. The style was mostly Western. Except for a Ming dynasty porcelain vase (carefully wired to stay upright in rough seas) and a few other Eastern accents, the yacht might have belonged to any successful European businessman.

  Tai Chen appeared in a surprisingly feminine ankle-length black silk wrap, embroidered with small golden flowers and dragons. Rashuri doubted it had come from anywhere in China. It was more like a French designer’s idea of a Hong Kong call girl’s working clothes, except that there was nothing in Tai Chen’s manner to reinforce that servile imagery. She was, as always, a touch imperious, supremely confident of her equality, and direct to a fault.

  One surprise: Though a number of servants shuttled in and out of the room with decanters and serving plates, no interpreter attended her. Tai Chen was speaking English. Though she claimed to have studied it because of its role as de facto official language of the Consortium, Rashuri wondered if she had not been fluent all along. There would be advantages—the side comment or inflection otherwise not heard, the built-in time delay with which to better frame replies.

  The quality of the dinner matched the surroundings in which it was served. Rashuri did not doubt that his somewhat finicky tastes had been researched, since the offerings avoided the
several foods which revulsed him and included an excellent kaju murgh. All through the meal he waited for Tai Chen to present her demands. But she passed up several opportunities to do so and continued to treat Rashuri’s visit as a simple social occasion.

  Of course, they talked of Consortium business, but only of matters of no controversy—the birth control program in China (“Every child a wanted child”), the campaign against the African tsetse and its promise of creating more good ranchland than in the American Great Plains, the plans for a Human Services division to focus on providing housing and upgrading medical care in member nations.

  It was not until later, taking drinks on deck under a canopy of ebony night and fierce white stars, that he knew he had not misread her.

  “You have been asking yourself all evening, is there nothing more to her invitation than this, a few hours with no telephones ringing and no messengers bringing,” she said. “You are perceptive enough to know that it is not. I am troubled by the progress of the starship project.”

  Rashuri could not help but answer honestly. “As am I.”

  “There is not yet a proper stardrive nor any hope of one. The proposed date of launch is postponed almost monthly, and I begin to wonder if there will ever be a launch at all. Dr. Driscoll awaits a breakthrough and can offer no predictions when it might occur. He may still be awaiting when the Sender ship completes its first orbit of the Earth.”

  Rashuri nodded unhappily. “The lack of progress concerns every member of the Inner Circle. The envoy ship is the heart of what we do. It is the one task that must be completed. The other work we do amounts to little more than straightening our tie and brushing the lint from our jacket. But what can be done?”

  “We can begin to prepare for the possibility that we will not be able to meet them in deep space.. We can prepare to protect ourselves here,” said Tai Chen. “Don’t you agree that that must become our new first priority?”

  “If I knew how it could be done, perhaps I would.”