Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

“I understand.”

  “Do you?” she asked skeptically. “Turn your chair to face the far wall and place your hands over the silver band at the end of each armrest. I’m going to show you some pictures and find out what you think of them.”

  The room lights dimmed, and the first image appeared on the floor-to-ceiling flatscreen: weathered rust-colored spires casting long shadows on the jagged rivercourse.

  “Grand Canyon. Northern section, I think,” Thackery said.

  “This isn’t a geography test,” she said with annoyance. “The monitors will tell me what I want to know.” Glowing numbers on Neale’s slate told of Thackery’s galvanic skin response and heart rate.

  Five seconds later, the Grand Canyon was replaced by a view of the Lagoon Nebula, and both of Thackery’s readings jumped. They remained high for the next photo, three bare-breasted women walking along a sun-drenched Mediterranean beach, then nosedived when a nude, well-muscled man appeared in their place.

  The images came one after another:

  —a snowfield in the Himalayas.

  —the hilly streets and Victorian homes of San Francisco.

  —two men kissing.

  —the Virgo galaxies.

  —a young couple holding their toddler on the back of a carousel horse.

  —the capital city of the Jouma colony.

  —Jupiter.

  Neale studied Thackery as each new image appeared, while the slate recorded the data from the biosensors. Despite her rebuke, Thackery silently mouthed the identity of many of the images as they appeared, and smiled to himself at the sight of Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park. And he jerked reflexively when the portrait which had once accompanied Andra Thackery’s newsnet columns appeared.

  Then the lights went up, and Thackery shot Neale a questioning look. “What kind of test was that?”

  “I find it useful to know something about the strength of a prospective surveyor’s attachments,” she said idly. “As well as the direction of their sexual proclivities.”

  “Do I get to know how I did?”

  A faint smile appeared on her lips. “No.” She touched an icon on “her slate and the display changed. “You have an odd background, Thackery. Six years in the GS track, and two at Georgetown—they don’t let too many get away. Then three at Tsiolkovsky.”

  “I’ve worked hard to develop my tech skills.”

  “Don’t apologize. I like people with odd backgrounds. The candidates I’ve seen so far could have come out of a cookie cutter. Study linguistics?”

  “Eight years. That’s a core subject.”

  “Anything practical in it?”

  “I can tell what era you grew up in by the way you refuse to use token honorifics, or to let me call you Commander when I’m not under your command. Most people probably just think you’re rude.”

  She laughed. “You like that kind of reading between the lines, Mister Thackery?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve some skill in sociodynamics, according to this Gordon Stowell.”

  “He would know.” Neale laid the slate aside. “Thackery, you probably recognize that Survey is making this up as it goes along. We’re improvising the rules those that come after will treat as revealed truth. But right now, a Commander enjoys a lot of autonomy in structuring her crew. A ship’s a small place when you’ve been out for three, five, ten years. It gets smaller with every craze. I need to feel good about the people I take aboard.”

  “I understand.”

  “I doubt you’d have even made first call for Tamm. You’re just not very experienced. On face qualifications only, there’s no way to justify making you even a sysawk.”

  “I realize that,” Thackery said, his face showing disappointment. “I appreciate your—”

  “I’m not finished. All that notwithstanding, you seem like a right type. How would you feel about becoming a member of Descartes’s contact team?”

  Thackery gaped.

  “Every surveyor needs at least two specialities. I see you serving as linguist on hits and resource geologist on misses,” she went on. “I’m guessing that with your background, eventually you might have something to contribute to the overall direction of contact strategy as well. Does that mesh with what you saw yourself doing?”

  “Nothing could please me more,” Thackery said quietly.

  She smiled faintly. “That’s what your attachment test suggested. All right. I’ll initiate the transfer proceedings right away. Go straight from here to the Survey Medical offices for your pre-assignment screening. It’s pretty damn thorough, so don’t make any other plans for today.”

  “Could what they find keep me here?”

  “Yes,” she said bluntly. “Your general flight physical didn’t take into account your genetic endowment. We have to.” She paused and marshaled her thoughts. “If you clear, I’ll okay a pass downwell and a five-day leave so that you can get your affairs straightened out. Report back on the eighth for orientation. If Tamm can get his people settled, we’ll be outbound within sixty days. That’s all. You can go.” She waited until he had stood and taken a step toward the door, then added, “Oh, one more thing. This Andra—chances are she’ll be dead before we come out of our first craze. That all right with you?”

  Thackery started, then drew a deep breath. “To be honest, we could hardly be more separated than we are now.”

  “Dead is a very special kind of separated. So is taking a berth on a Survey ship. You’re going to get hit with both, and it’ll be worse if you leave with the relationship still screwed up. While you’re downwell, get it taken care of. Whatever kind of problem you’re having, resolve it.”

  “I’ve done about everything I can to make peace,” Thackery said, gesturing helplessly. “We have a kind of a precarious understanding. One of the rules is we don’t see each other very often. One of the other rules is that when we do, we don’t talk about what I’m doing.”

  “You’re going to have to talk about it. Don’t just drift away. Kiss her good-bye or tell her to go to hell. But one way or another, leave it here. Don’t bring it along. Clear?”

  “Yes—Commander?” he said tentatively.

  “Ah, you’re learning. Tell them to send the next one in.”

  By mutual consent, they had not seen each other in four years. The last time had been during the long leave between his reassignment from the transfer freighter Ripon Falls to the Babbage. They had gone to a sculling race on the upper Schulkyll, then had dinner downtown. Since then, Babbage and inertia had kept them apart, save for their infrequent, often impersonal letters.

  So he had not been there when she received the Council’s Commendation of Merit for Journalism, or when she was retired by the Net the next year at age fifty-eight. He was not there when her hip was broken in a street accident, or when she gave up her colonial row home in New Market for a place in a 28-story glass-faced microcommunity overlooking Fairmont Park.

  He sat outside that structure’s entrance in his rented car and thought for a long time before he made any move to go inside. Neither the building nor the neighborhood carried any feelings of home. Pity. He would have welcomed a rush of sentiment to thaw the ice inside him.

  She let him in wordlessly. The apartment might have been a hostel for all the individuality it displayed.

  “Hello, Andra,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  She eyed his jumpsuit coldly, then closed the door behind him. It was the first time he had worn Service garb in her presence, a deliberate breach of the rules. “Do you want a real answer or a polite one?”

  “We could at least start out polite.”

  “Then I’m fine.” She settled in a chair in the far corner and rested folded hands on crossed legs. “So what brings you down?”

  Thackery sat on one end of the overstuffed russet-colored couch before answering. “I’ve come here to have a conversation we’ve both been avoiding for a long time.”

  “Is wearing that uniform here part of you
r strategy for making peace?”

  “It’s not a uniform—”

  “Excuse me, ‘standard issue shipboard garb, male’—”

  “This is part of what I am.”

  “In case you’d forgotten, I’m not on good terms with that part of you.”

  “That’s not where our problem comes from,” he said, shaking his head.

  “No? You and I both worked hard to give you an opportunity to be someone special, and you threw it over without as much as a word of warning. You didn’t ask my advice, my opinion, or my permission. I suppose you’d like me to forget that.”

  “It wasn’t your place to give permission.”

  “Don’t you think you made that clear? Doing what you did told me exactly what you thought of me and of our relationship.”

  “What I did had nothing to do with you.”

  “Exactly. It should have.”

  “I made the decision I had to to keep peace with myself. I’m doing what I want to do.”

  She stood and crossed the room to where a drug dispenser sat on the oak dry sink. “I see,” she said, fumbling for an ampule. “You prefer hauling rocks to serving on the World Council of Commissioners.”

  “You’re the only one who ever thought that was a real possibility. I never did.”

  Her head whipped around and she glowered at him with eyes that were fast becoming red and puffy. “You should have. Merritt, I knew those people. I saw them every day, with their public face on and in the back rooms. I knew what it takes, and I made sure that you had it. You were better than most of them, Merritt, and you should be on your way to sitting where they’re sitting. With your gifts—.” Frustration silenced her.

  Thackery looked away. How wrenchingly difficult to be that close to the decision-makers and have no say in the decisions, he realized for the first time. The translator at the summit meeting—the stenographer at a great trial. If you have any ego at all, you would have to want to contribute your thoughts, but you’re locked out because of your station.

  “I’m sorry, Andra,” he said finally. “I’m sorry that it wasn’t possible to make us both happy. We’ve never talked about it, and we should have, a long time ago. But there’s something more important for us to deal with.”

  Her face showed puzzlement. “What?”

  “I want to know who my father was.”

  She turned her back on him, hiding her expression. “I never hid that from you. You’ve known since you were ten. You were an alternate conception child—I was inseminated at the Human Fertility Institute on Broad Street. Beyond that all I know is that the genes were male, healthy, and compatible.”

  Thackery rested his chin on his folded hands and shook his head almost imperceptibly. “No, you weren’t,” he said softly. “You had your prenatal testing done there. But you were already pregnant.”

  Her back stiffened. “Their records aren’t open to you.”

  “No, they aren’t,” he agreed. “But they’re open to the Service, when the Service is researching a candidate. I’m not an AC. Since I’m male I can’t be a partho. And we’re too close a match for me to be adopted. I’m part you and part someone else. I have a right to know.”

  Hugging herself as if chilled, she turned back to him. “The Service can have your genes analyzed. They can learn everything they need to from a skin scraping.”

  “Which is what they did. But there are some things I need to know that a scraping can’t answer.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes wet but her head high and chin firm. “You have no right to that part of my life. Why should it matter? And why should it matter now?”

  “It matters now because I know now—because I could have had a father, not just a geneparent. You kept that from me. You kept him from me.”

  “He never belonged to you,” she said, turning her head away.

  “Did he belong to you?”

  She retreated to her chair before answering. “The genes you carry are all he gave either of us,” she said softly. “All he could give us.”

  “Then this isn’t how you wanted it?”

  She chased the wistful expression from her face and met his gaze squarely. “Don’t try to be a mind-reader. You’re no good at it,” she snapped. “I’ll say this much and that’ll be the end of it. If what I told you before wasn’t literally true, it wasn’t a lie, either. There’re times that there’s no difference between a penis and a syringe.”

  Inside, Thackery cringed at the crude image. “That may be so, but you wouldn’t know. Andra, you can’t make me back off just by being disagreeable. I kept growing when I went away.”

  “I never realized that being ‘grown up’ meant feeling free to call your mother a liar.”

  “Only when she is.”

  After scorching him with a furious look, she bounced out of the chair and headed for the hallway to her bedroom. Thackery moved quickly and blocked her path.

  “We’re running out of time, Andra,” he said gently.

  Her angry look gave way to her thoughtful one, and she turned and walked slowly back to her chair. “I see I’ve missed something here. You said the Service was researching a candidate. Surely they didn’t wait all these years to get around to that. But you’ve only just found out. What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I’d rather tackle one subject at a time—”

  “You tell me now or this conversation is finished. Why are they looking into your records now?” It was Thackery’s turn to wear a desperate look. “I don’t want to get the two entangled.”

  “They already are,” she said coldly. “Why are they prying into my privacy?”

  Thackery looked away. “I’m transferring to Survey. I’m part of the new crew for Descartes, which is waiting for us at Cygnus Base.” He raised his head to look at her. “It’s what I wanted all along, and I won’t apologize for it. But I didn’t want to use it as a club to get you to answer my questions.”

  “Don’t worry. It wouldn’t have worked,” she said curtly. “So—you’re leaving us. Well, I can’t say as I’ll see the difference. I’d throw a going-away party, but I can’t think of anyone else who’ll miss you, either.”

  “Ten years ago that might have hurt,” he said quietly. “But I know you better now.” She waved her hands in an abrupt gesture of dismissal. “You don’t know me at all.”

  “I’ve had occasion to wish that were true.”

  “And now it will be. Well, go, then, and stop pretending what I think or how I feel matters. I’ll be fine without you. Is that what you want to hear? Go! You’re absolved.”

  The urge to lash back was almost irresistible. Angry answers filled his head: You made the choice to be alone, and you will be. Stay here in your room and wallow in your bitterness. Your life is over. I’m going to see places and things no one has ever seen before. Maybe my father would have known how to be proud of me and happy for me. You’ve forgotten how to love anything you can’t control.

  But he squashed those thoughts, saying only in a calm, quiet voice, “My mistake, Andra. When I made my choice, I put myself first. I understand now that I learned how to do that from you.” Then he fled the apartment without looking back.

  Not until he was safely in the lift did he realize why he had settled for a parting snipe instead of a full counterattack. It was not the fear of hurting her that had checked him, but rather the fear of discovering she could not be hurt.

  THE BLACK ELLIPSE

  (from Merritt Thackery’s

  JIADUR’S WAKE)

  … In the beginning, it was the rarest gem in the Universe.

  It was the rarest because it was a synthetic creation, the product of man’s laboratory rather than nature’s. It was the rarest because only the Service knew how to make one, and because only the chosen few who held billets aboard the survey ships were permitted to wear one.

  The black ellipse was, in fact, the only insignia worn aboard those ships, for a variety of reasons. A survey ship was too small and the mi
ssions too long for in-flight promotions, so it behooved the Service to de-emphasize rank. The black ellipse served as a reminder that its wearers were part of a team of equals, not a military hierarchy. The absence of glittery status symbols was thought to remove unnecessary formality and encourage the crew to relate on personal as well as professional levels.

  Or so said the director of the Survey Branch.

  But despite that ennobling symbolism, life on a Survey ship was usually dominated by an authoritarian command structure and awkward personal chemistry. And what the black ellipse really stood for depended a great deal on whom you asked…

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Outcrossing

  On his return to Unity, Thackery, the other five surveyors, and Contact Leader Rajesh Jaiswal were plunged into a ten-day basic orientation to the Class II survey ship. No more than that was needed, since it was only in the direst emergency that surveyors would pull operations duty. Thackery was not sure how much help they would be even then. Few surveyors had even minimum quals in any of the operations technicals: AVLO drive, gravigation, communications, ship’s ecology, and library and electronic systems.

  The team then moved from Unity to Tycho for a six-week hands-on familiarization with the extensive array of surveyor’s equipment. During this time Jaiswal, an Asian biologist, proved himself likable despite his high expectations and swift, sharp-tongued rebukes. Thackery also got on well with Gregg Eagan, a slender African a year or two Thackery’s junior. They spent a good deal of time together, since Eagan was Thackery’s “inverse”—the prime resource geologist, and the backup linguist.

  Thackery saw less of the other four surveyors, but still enough to have largely good feelings about them. Two were Europeans: Derrel Guerrieri, the astrophysicist, and Jael Collins, the interpolator. Michael Tyszka, the technoanalyst and gig pilot, hailed from the West Coast of North America. Donna Muir, the exobiologist, called South America home.

  The one glaring weakness in the Contact Team was the absolute lack of experience. Not one of them was a Phase I vet. Collins and Jaiswal were even Service outsiders, with no prior Orbital or System experience.