Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  That weakness became painfully apparent during the mock field exercise in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. From the moment Tycho moved into the appropriate polar orbit, the exercise was marked by indecision and error. Thanks to the snow and ice, Eagan misread the spectroscopic data and underestimated the resource base. Muir missed the rock lichens which were the test zone’s primary life form. Tyszka found but initially misinterpreted the artifacts placed there by the Service. Jaiswal allowed the team to return without seeing to proper decontamination precautions.

  Though they were surely not all his fault, the misadventures cost Jaiswal his position. When Tycho returned them to Unity, Thackery and the other surveyors moved into the station’s D wing to begin preflight gnotobiotic conditioning. Jaiswal did not. The stiff-necked answer to their queries was that he had been reassigned. Whether it was voluntary or involuntary was not open for discussion.

  No immediate replacement was forthcoming. There was talk that the Service was desperately courting the vets in search of an experienced Contactor for the Descartes. In the meantime, the team members concerned themselves with reclaiming their personal possessions from the decon crew and determining if the objects had survived the irradiation and other processing.

  Bayn Graeff, the dark-complected, husky-voiced Dove vet who had signed on as Descartes’ bridge captain, then took charge of the team. She shepherded them through meetings with the investors who would handle their compensation accounts, the fitness experts who laid out their diet and exercise programs, the psychologists who retested them for craze fear, and the gnotobiologists who rearranged—for the worse—their inner environment.

  As far as Thackery was concerned, gnotobiology was a synonym for misery. The necessity was inarguable: Since the colonists were full human stock, any successful contact brought with it the risk of crossinfection. It was not merely a matter of seeing that they were free of active or latent pathogens. Even the 1200-odd grams of ubiquitous human microflora—primarily intestinal bacteria, but including significant colonies on the skin, and in the mouth, lungs, eyes, vagina, and nose—had to be eliminated. The ship and the crew had to be made, insofar as was possible, germ-free.

  That meant not only numerous injections of broad-spectrum antibiotics, but a complete blood replacement for anyone carrying active viral particles, be they from past infections or from past immunizations. At the same time, the doctors flushed each crewmember’s intestinal tract with a diet of antibiotic-laced food, then provided each with microflora capsules to reestablish the benign, symbiotic anaerobes. The resulting five days of diarrhea left a permanent stain on Thackery’s romantic conception of being an interstellar traveler.

  What made matters worse was that all the misery only eliminated half the risk: the chance of the Contactors infecting the colonists. The chance of the colonists infecting the Contactors was still very real, and though there were steps that could be taken should the occasion arise, Thackery knew the Contactors would remain vulnerable. But that was a risk the Service found acceptable, and as he prepared to leave Unity for Tycho, Thackery knew he would have to find a way to view it in the same light.

  His arms full, Thackery pressed the door release with his elbow and shouldered his way into his cabin. At a glance, he saw that the compartment was more roomy than the one he had occupied on Babbage. Though cramped and lacking some amenities—most notably privacy—it would certainly do for a month. Coming downship from the aft portal, Thackery had caught a glimpse of one of the relatively luxurious cabins in the Survey section, and expected that the same awaited them in Descartes.

  Three metres away and seemingly oblivious to Thackery’s presence, a red-haired awk stood facing the far wall, beyond which lay the consumables storage section of Tycho’s gig bay. The man’s fingers were tracing the almost invisible zipweld between two plates of structural composite.

  “Hey,” Thackery called, tossing his haversack on the nearest bunk. The awk looked back over his shoulder. “Hi. Do you know anything about materials science?”

  Good to meet you, too, roomie. “No.”

  “Oh.” He tucked his hands in the belly pockets of his jacket and turned to face Thackery. “I was just wondering how strong this is.”

  “Couldn’t tell you.” Thackery settled on the bed and opened the neck of his bag. “I’ve seen you during training but I don’t know your name.”

  “McShane. Daniel McShane. You’re Thackery. I asked.” He smiled a nervous smile. “I guess you’ve never been out, either.”

  “I’ve been to the Belt.”

  “I meant gone through a craze.”

  “No. That I haven’t done.” He laughed. “You can’t get near those vees in a tug.”

  “I guess not.” McShane rubbed his neck. “There’s storage under the bed for your gear, and that’s about all. No drop-downs or hideaways back here.”

  “Tourist class.”

  “Temporary.” He laughed nervously again. “That’s something, isn’t it, going into deep-space in a temporary structure?”

  “We’re still inside Tycho.”

  “In the bowels of the beast. Sure. Sure. Look, if you haven’t been out, maybe you should know. Anybody who comes down with craze fear will be put off at Cygnus.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Oh, yeah. They’ll be watching us real closely on this leg.”

  “Good to know. Are you worried about it?”

  “No, no. Except that it means we’re not in yet. There’s one more hurdle to get over.”

  By the time Tycho Brahe was ready to leave, Alizana Neale’s list of grievances against the Service in general and Lin Tamm in particular had grown too long for recitation.

  It was bad enough that Tamm, junior to her on Dove in rank if not in experience, had been gifted with the brand-new Tycho, while she had been assigned to Descartes. Though operationally identical to Tycho, Descartes’ oversized and inelegant cargo blister marked it for the one-time freighter and transport it had been.

  Like all its sister ships in the Pioneers series, Descartes’ first job had been to ferry the components of an Advance Base to a spot decreed by Service planners: In this case, twenty-five light-years in the general direction of the distant supergiant Deneb. With the construction crew transformed into the A-Cyg staff, Descartes waited there like a white elephant for a survey crew to take her further. Neale’s crew.

  But the Tycho had been designed for just one purpose. It was a better Dove, not an unwieldy hybrid. Its L-series drive made it 5 percent faster than the Descartes; in Neale’s eyes, its newness made it 100 percent more desirable. It should have been mine, she thought almost daily. But they gave me the hand-me-down.

  When she expressed that complaint privately to a sympathetic rating in the Flight Office, she learned of a second affront to add to her list. Her appointment had come by the narrowest of margins, 3-2; her opponents would have given the position to Keene Rogen, her exec.

  “They’re both recidivist sexists,” her source confided. “Everybody knows they didn’t want to give it to a woman, but they we’re careful to build up Rogen instead of tearing you down. Otherwise they’d have been reprimanded for sure. So they gave you Descartes as a compromise.”

  The idea that “everyone knew” but no one did anything kept Neale simmering for several days. No better received was hearing the way Tamm described her and her crew during his appearance on an interview show broadcast net-wide.

  “I understand Tycho’s first task, though, will be to serve as kind of a space taxi,” the interviewer had ventured.

  “That’s right,” Tamm had responded. “We’ll have thirty passengers to ferry out to Advance Base Cygnus, at the fringe of explored space. We’ll drop them off, then continue on to begin our prime function of surveying planetary systems.”

  We’ll be right on your heels in Descartes, damnit, she thought furiously. Don’t make it sound like you’re going to scout the whole freezin’ octant by yourself.

  “But isn’t
the prime function finding more First Colonization civilizations?” the interviewer demanded.

  “Not really. There are so many systems, and we have so little basis for saying this one or that one might have a colony, that we really have to think of surveying as the number one task,” Tamm began his answer, and the subject of the second crew never came up again.

  Even while the show’s closing credits were still appearing, Neale was on the phone to Alvarez, the supervisor of ship construction.

  “I want a mock bridge for my crew,” she demanded. “Something we can use for training simulations en route, and slaved to Tycho’s bridge for current status displays. We’ll give up the exercise space.”

  Alvarez had started to shake his head almost immediately. “That’s not enough room for one, and there’s not enough time now if it was.”

  “I don’t want to hear why it can’t be done.”

  “Not hearing them won’t change the facts, Commander Neale,” Alvarez said, bristling. “You’ll have full shipnet access down there, but there’s just not enough time to rig something as complex as a training mockup.”

  “Then I want access to the real bridge.”

  “There I can’t help you. That’ll be up to Commander Tamm.”

  It wasn’t until the next day that she tracked down Tamm, only to find she needn’t have bothered.

  “Look, Ali, I can’t see the sense to disrupting my crew’s routine as well as yours,” Tamm told her. “After all, it’s not crucial that you be ready to jump in Descartes and roar off the instant we reach A-Cyg. You can stay there a week, two weeks, a month for orientation if you want to. There’s really no rush.”

  You’re enjoying this, she thought, studying his face. You like having the upper hand. The discovery puzzled her, since she could think of no residual friction traceable to their time on Dove.

  “The fact that there are no deadlines doesn’t justify wasted time,” she retorted.

  “Oh, of course not. But I’m sure you can find some way to see that your people’s first craze isn’t wasted,” he said superciliously. “It’s only fifty-three days to Cygnus.”

  When at last Tycho was ready to leave, Neale and Rogen were the only members of the Descartes’ crew invited forward to view the departure from the Tycho bridge. Neale suspected that, were it not for the fact that bridge video was being made available to Worldnet by the Service, even that small courtesy would have gone by the board. Any sense of commonality among Dove alumni had apparently faded quickly.

  Tycho was given an escort comprised of five ships, including a World Council yacht bearing John Langston. Langston was the best known of the several retired Councilors still living, having held a seat in that body for an unprecedented and generally distinguished nineteen years. From him came the traditional “Cleared for departure” signal.

  Angling up out of the ecliptic and leaving the escort behind, Tycho also received a spectacular salute by means of a kilometre-wide ring of starshell mines. When detonated, the charges formed a perfectly symmetrical yellow halo through which the departing ship passed. It was the first time Neale had seen fireworks in space, and though the Tycho’s own monitors failed to capture the effect, the view relayed from Unity reminded her of the opening of a space-warp from early video fiction. She wondered if the parallel were intentional.

  “Are we combining our outcrossing ceremony with Tycho’s?” Rogen asked.

  “We’re not welcome to,” Neale answered curtly. “Don’t you know? The Net wants their ceremony to cap the coverage of Tycho’s departure.” She sighed. “That’s all right. I wouldn’t want it that formal anyway, with the Council anthem and the Service fanfare and all the rest.”

  Rogen took a moment to digest that news. “We’ll be leaving the heliosphere pretty quick. We should probably go get ready for our own, then,” he suggested as the comtech poked a view of fast-diminishing Earth onto the bridge window. Unity was already invisibly small.

  “In a minute,” Neale said wistfully and gestured toward the screen. “I kept trying to find a way to prepare the new crew for that sight, and never did. As little good as came out of coming back, I still think it’s harder to face the second time than it was the first. Because this time we know we’ll never see it again.”

  When Neale finally left Tycho’s bridge she went directly to her cabin, delegating the outcrossing preparations to Rogen. Half an hour later, shortly after the announcement came over the shipnet that Tycho had passed beyond the heliosphere, Rogen came by for her. He carried a book-sized leatherette case under one arm.

  “The lesser colors are assembling in the library for the pinning. So whenever you’re ready—,” Rogen said deferentially.

  Neale lay aside the slate on which she had been reading a translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest. “Let me see.”

  Holding the case in front of him, Rogen tipped it and opened the lid so that Neale could see its contents: twenty-five Service deep-space theater insignia, twenty-five gleaming black elliptical jewels.

  “Never saw so many of them in one place before,” she said, taking the case. “Damnit, I hate this. Giving them out like candy to kids. They’ve done nothing to earn them, but you put one on them and they’ll think they’re as good as you or Sebright or Waite or any of the vets. It cheapens the insignia.”

  “It’s just not going to be such an exclusive club anymore,” Rogen commiserated.

  “You know, I’ll bet I could still tell you the original complement of all three Pathfinders,” she went on. “We knew everyone who wore the black ellipse. Now I need to use the library just to remember the commanders of all the ships. I’ve never even met most of them.”

  “There’re a lot of new faces everywhere,” Rogen agreed. “They tell me Homal had twenty-seven lessers when he took out Galileo.”

  Neale shook her head in disgust. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

  There was much happy talk and some braggadocio among the twenty-five crew waiting in the crowded library. Thackery did not take part in either, content to listen and defend the corner of the workstation he had staked out as a seat. He had too many conflicting feelings to freely enjoy the anticipation of his pinning.

  For one thing, he had heard that the outcrossing was to be televised. But it was obvious now that that was not true—which meant that he was already gone as far as Andra and any Georgetown alumni who might remember him were concerned. Not that Andra would have been likely to watch, but, still, the ceremony’s importance had been diminished.

  At the same time, he remained proud of what he had accomplished. He had set a goal for himself, what seemed an outrageous goal at the time, and—more easily than he had thought possible—he had achieved it. True, that pleasure in his accomplishment remained internal, somewhat tainted for lack of anyone who could revel in the feeling and reflect it back to him. His crewmates were unsuited to that role, having matched his success on the strength of, in most cases, even more experience and expertise.

  It’s like going from the top rung of one ladder to the bottom rung of the next. The people you left behind are impressed only to the extent that they want to be where you are—and the people that you’ve joined aren’t impressed at all.

  He came to his feet with the others when Neale and Rogen appeared. All talking ceased, and all turned to face the officers. That was all Neale and Rogen expected; the Service’s heritage lay with the merit-oriented Pangaean Consortium, not the militaristic International Police.

  “Since the days of Charan Rashuri, commander of Pride of Earth, it has been the ship commander’s obligation to recognize a moment of transition for those among his crew new to the Survey branch,” Neale began.

  “I have no doubt that some among you have invested the outcrossing with far more meaning than it deserves. It is an occasion for the exchange of theater insignia. You give up the blue Orbital or yellow System ellipse you now wear. You receive the black Intersystem ellipse. But the difference in color is meaningless in itself.”r />
  Then why do you vets call us lessers? Thackery wondered, fingering his own System insignia absently.

  “Contrary to what many of you believe, this is not a promotion. The Service does not honor you by doing this. All we do here today is to mark the beginning of an opportunity for honor—honor you will have to bring to yourself in the months and years ahead. You wear the black ellipse, but you have not yet earned it.”

  A tech to Thackery’s right nudged him and whispered, “Trying to scare us with the tough bitch routine, huh?” Thackery ignored the comment.

  “In the last two months, I have even heard some of you use the term ‘cadet’. You mislead yourself if you think of your role here in those terms. There are no ‘cadets’ in the Survey Branch, and even if there were, there would be none in the crew of Descartes. A cadet is expected to make mistakes and learn from them. You are expected not to make mistakes. Remember that, always.”

  She handed the case to Rogen, opened it, and took out the first insignia.

  “Technician Jessica Baldwin,” she called out.

  When Thackery’s turn came, he came forward suffused with pride despite Neale’s deflating remarks. She made the exchange smoothly and wordlessly, deftly removing the yellow, handing it to Rogen in exchange for a black, and pinning the new jewelry in place. Then the moment was over. But as he turned away he was conscious of the new weight on his collar all the same.

  I didn’t see it happening this way, he thought as he walked back. Not full of down-talk, not as part of a human assembly-line, not in a crowded temporary compartment in the hold of someone else’s ship. But damnit, I’m here. We’re on our way. And this is what / wanted, no matter how it comes packaged.

  As Neale was pinning the next-to-last tech a shipnet comtech broke in to announce: “First warning. Craze in thirty minutes.”

  Neale waved the last auxiliary forward and called out instructions as she pinned him. “First command watch, forward to the Tycho bridge. Second watch, monitor from here. In both cases, I want the navtechs and comtechs to prepare an annotated log and critique of Tycho’s watch procedures. Everyone else out of here, they need room to breathe. Questions?”