Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  She took two steps, then stopped and came back to where Thackery sat. “Look, you’re not one of those ones who’s going to think that because we had a conversation, I want to change cabins, are you?”

  “No,” Thackery said uncertainly.

  “Fine. Because Donna and I are perfectly happy rooming, all right? You can pass that word around if the subject comes up.”

  “Sure.”

  Her seat had barely begun to cool when Tyszka came up behind Thackery and slipped into it.

  “You getting anywhere with her?” he asked earnestly, resting his folded hands on the table before him.

  “Not trying to. I haven’t even been thinking in those terms,” Thackery answered honestly.

  “You’d better start,” Tyszka said, clucking. “The numbers aren’t good to start with, and some of us are going to be left out.” He stood and surveyed the nearly empty wardroom, then clucked again. “Maybe Donna’s up in the library. I’ll see you when the war’s over, okay?”

  Thackery chuckled. “Right.”

  Thackery spent the afternoon with Eagan upship in the survey laboratory, being glowered at as interlopers by members of Tycho’s contact team and trying to make the best use of the time on the linguacomp that had been granted them.

  “This is your specialty, not mine,” Eagan said dubiously as he regarded the machine’s 318-character keyboard. “Why doesn’t it have voice input?”

  “It does,” Thackery said, unfolding the operator’s seat from its storage space against the wainscoat and settling in front of the terminal. “It can monitor any shipnet channel, and do character scans off any medium. This keyboard’s not for input. It’s for processing.”

  “I thought all we had to do is tell it the text we want and let it go to work.”

  Thackery laughed mockingly. “Don’t we wish. The L-comp is smart. It’s not clairvoyant. Say we feed it a sample of a language it’s never seen before. What can it do with it?”

  Eagan scratched his cheek. “I’ll let that be rhetorical.”

  “If the sample is too small, it can’t do anything. A lesson from cryptography—sufficiently small sequences are undecodable. But even if your sample is unlimited, there’s a limit to the L-comp’s abilities. Here,” he said, pointing to the screen. “Here’s the first cut on a Journan text sample.”

  The complex display was arranged in groups of three lines: The first showed phonetic Journan, the second a standard English translation, and the third a series of two-digit numbers.

  “Try reading the English lines and you’ll see this is no universal translator. If it was, they wouldn’t be still trying to figure out how to talk to whales,” Thackery observed.

  “The numbers under each word are the confidence probabilities?”

  “Yes. Now, I can highlight the object-words, the action-words”—he touched a key, and the display now resembled a tree proof—“or forget the words entirely and look at the proposed syntax.”

  “Most of the percentages are between thirty and seventy,” Eagan noted, then wrinkled his nose. “But the L-comp knows Journan.”

  “I hid that part of the knowledge base from the inference processor so I could show you what we might be facing. We’re here to operate the L-comp, but we’re also here to make the decisions the L-comp can’t.”

  “Or there’s no Contact.”

  “Or there’s no Contact,” Thackery agreed. “What are you fluent in, again?”

  “English, Russian, and Latin.”

  “That’s right. The science languages. All right, here’s the program. We’ll rehearse by trying to Contact each other. I’ll take a language you don’t know, compose a 1000-word practice message in it, and then set up the sign-on so that language and any first cousins are hidden from the processor when you’re working. When you’ve got it translated, compose a standard Contact message in that language. I’ll let you know how you did.”

  “And I’ll do the same for you.”

  “Right—all the way into A-Cyg, as much as they’ll let us use this thing. Now, watch. I’m going to show you how to set a knowledge base restriction.”

  Later, resting in his room, Thackery reflected on the task he had taken on. The machine’s limits were even more severe than he had acknowledged to Eagan. If the language did not parallel a significant number of Earth dialects—for instance, the Romance family—the confidence level for individual words rarely went above 60 percent.

  A purely oral language posed its own daunting difficulties. How did you break the flow of sound into words? Were variations in pronunciation mere dialects, or meaning units in themselves? Even with a linguacomp to create the graphemes and search for repetitions and correlations, there was much guesswork and gruntwork involved.

  Eagan would learn of those problems, too, when he could face them without concluding that the task was impossible.

  For there was no room to think of the task as impossible. Should Descartes prove a lucky ship and carry its crew to a First Colonization world, it would be up to Thackery and Eagan to lay the groundwork for the Contact. Unless they and the linguacomp could come up with a satisfactory decoding of the natives’ language, there would be no Contact landing. The team would be limited to whatever could be learned from orbit and from landings outside the inhabited areas—something that had never happened before.

  Three months ago, he had accepted the responsibility without truly understanding its dimensions. Now he silently vowed to himself to do everything necessary to see that he was equal to the challenge. He wanted Sebright to have confidence in him. He wanted Neale to have confidence in him.

  But before others could, he would have to have confidence in himself.

  There were two disadvantages to sharing a cabin with McShane. One was that his bunk and desk seemed to autonomously generate clutter. The other was that he seemed constitutionally incapable of falling asleep without holding a protracted conversation first.

  So far the topics had ranged from the contents of the Tycho’s entertainment banks (McShane holding forth on the merits of both the inclusions and exclusions) to the mysteries of the AVLO drive (McShane finding it very significant that no one could make him understand how it worked). His favorite time to begin seemed to be just as Thackery was about to fall asleep.

  The fifth night out, the question that came out of the dark was: “Did you ever wonder why they named our ship after Descartes?”

  Thackery let a portion of his groan become audible, then a portion of his impatience taint his tone as he answered. “No. He was a key figure in the scientific revolution, and an outstanding mathematician.”

  “But he was also the one who said that the world around you only existed because you believed in it, and that if you stopped believing in it, it would disappear.”

  Thackery laid his head back on the pillow and squeezed his eyes closed. “I’m not sure that’s a fair summation of his ideas about reality.”

  “That’s what one of my instructors said,” McShane said defensively.

  There followed a long silence that encouraged Thackery to think he had successfully shut McShane off. It was not to be.

  “I wonder whose dream this is. I’ve tried to make it disappear but it doesn’t.” Thackery could not be sure McShane was joking but chose to take it that way. “Neale’s, I think.”

  “Maybe.” Another long pause. “I haven’t seen her much. Do you know her well?”

  “No.” Thackery hesitated. If he’s determined not to let me sleep, then at least we can talk about what I want to talk about. “Do you see Sebright? I mean ever?”

  “The Contact Leader? No.”

  “I was asking Michael today whether Sebright had said anything to him about a briefing on the Muschynka contact. He said he hadn’t seen Sebright for three days.”

  “He’s probably sync’d to the C or D watch schedule.”

  Thackery missed the impatience in McShane’s voice. “No, because I left a message for Derrel—he’s on that cycle—and
he said he hasn’t seen Sebright either.”

  “So, Sebright’s a recluse. So what?”

  “He’s supposed to be here to give us the benefit of his experience,” Thackery insisted. “We’re five days out and I can’t even find anyone who’s met with him. He doesn’t respond to pages, he doesn’t answer messages, and he’s never in his cabin.”

  “Look, I’ve got problems of my own,” McShane said irritably. “If you’ve got a real grievance, go see Neale. If you just want to complain, find some of your own people to listen.”

  “McShane, you’re a selfish son-of-a-bitch,” Thackery said tiredly.

  McShane jumped up from his bunk. “Damnit, I’m the one with responsibilities on this craze. You don’t have to stand watches. You don’t have Rogen and Graeff breathing down your neck looking for an excuse to replace you. You’re on a freezin’ vacation.”

  “Whoa, easy,” Thackery said, snapping on the light. McShane shivered oddly, hung his head, and stood a moment with arms akimbo.

  “Sorry,” he said at last. “If your problems aren’t my fault, I guess mine aren’t yours, either.” He sighed expressively and settled back on the bed. “He’s got a single, doesn’t he? Break his damn door down and wait for him. He’s got to show up there sometime.”

  Thackery laughed tiredly. “Unless he’s moved in with some little awk from Tycho.” He turned out the light and turned on his side. “Who knows,” he said to his pillow, “maybe that’s what I ought to be concentrating on, too.”

  For two days, Thackery shifted Sebright to the back of his mind. In that time, he made a token (and profitless) attempt at courting Jessica Baldwin, got off to an encouraging start on his studies for the exobiology qual, and solved the first test message Eagan had composed for him.

  But on one of his many trips from the passenger hive upship to the Tycho library, he cast a glance as always from the climb-way down the corridor onto which Sebright’s door opened—and saw a woman he did not know push that door open and disappear inside.

  For a moment Thackery was torn by ambivalent impulses. Then impatience won out over propriety, and he stepped off the climbway and stalked down the short corridor.

  But there was no answer to the page button, no answer to his insistent knock. “Concom Sebright,” he called out, listening for sounds beyond the closure. “This is Merritt Thackery. Can I talk to you?”

  There was no answer, no sound at all. Frustrated, Thackery smacked the door release with a balled fist and began to turn away. But the door, which had been locked every time he had been there before, slid open.

  Sebright was lying prone in the narrow single cabin, his ankles strapped in a microgravity exercise cradle and one hand gripping the crossbar. Beads of perspiration stood out on his cheeks and forehead, and the longish hair was matted. But his eyes were closed, as though he were sleeping. An instant later, Thackery saw why: The fingertips of Sebright’s right hand were in the grasp of a small black box lying on the bed next to him.

  Thackery took in all that in the moment before the woman rose up from the chair beside Sebright and rushed toward Thackery, protectively blocking the view with her body.

  “Out,” she demanded.

  “He’s on a tranq machine,” Thackery said, disbelieving.

  “I’m only going to ask one more time. Then I’ll remove you myself,” she said fiercely. “He’s on a tranq machine!” Thackery repeated, this time indignant.

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “He’s my supervisor and an officer of this ship,” Thackery said, his voice rising. “I’ve got as much right here as anyone, and more right than you.”

  Glowering at him with piercing black eyes, she reached behind him and closed the door. “Thackery—look,” she said in a more modulated tone. “He told me he was going to do this and he asked me to look after him. I give him nutrient shots and sponge baths and make sure the exerciser doesn’t hurt him. I read his messages and answer the ones that need answering. If he’s needed somewhere, I come in and wake him up.”

  Thackery cast about for a plausible explanation to the inexplicable sight on the bed. “Is he a phobe?” he asked, almost hopefully.

  “No. He just—prefers to absent out sometimes. He—doesn’t tolerate boredom well. It’s not my place to talk about it.” His eyes narrowed by suspicion, Thackery asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  She smiled tolerantly. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m his four-gen grandniece. I met him when Munin came in twelve years ago—I was his greeter. Look, I’ve told you more than I needed to. Now will you go, so I can take care of him?”

  “I want to talk to him,” Thackery said stubbornly.

  “Why? To see if I’m telling the truth?”

  “No. About the team. About Survey business.”

  “It can wait.”

  “Damnit, no!” Thackery exploded. “He’s got responsibilities. This isn’t just for me. There are six green surveyors that he ought to be working with. Wake him up.”

  “No.”

  “Why? Will it hurt him?”

  “No. But he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “You’re not in his chain of authority. He’ll have to tell me himself.”

  She crossed her arms and shook her head stubbornly. “He’ll do his job when it’s time to do it.”

  “Part of his job started a week ago.” Thackery paused and looked down at Sebright, then continued in a voice that was quietly threatening. “If he’s getting messages, then there are people who don’t know about this. Like Neale, maybe?”

  “People know.”

  “Some would have to. But not Neale, right? If you don’t wake him up, she’s going to.”

  Her eyes spat angry sparks, but she moved to Sebright’s side all the same. A touch on the tranq box controls, and the metal bands opened to release the vet’s fingers. A few moments later, stirred by an influx of amphetamine molecules in his blood, Sebright opened his eyes.

  “Morning, Yolanda. What’s happening?”

  Scowling, she jerked a thumb in Thackery’s direction.

  “Concom,” Thackery said, taking a step forward.

  The older man pulled himself up to a sitting position. “Thackery, isn’t it? The linguist.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What’s up, Thackery?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Muschynka.”

  Sebright looked from Thackery to his grandniece, then back again. “Read about it in the Op Recs,” he said gruffly. “I’ve answered those questions too many times already.”

  “But—”

  “Sure, you only asked once. But a thousand other people have asked once, too.” Resting his folded arms on the crossbar and his chin on his arms, he looked up at Thackery. “You know how when you try to tell someone about a dream, you’re really trying to tell them about an experience, but you end up telling a story?”

  Thackery nodded uncertainly.

  “Every time I tell about Muschynka, I lose a little bit more of the experience. Pretty soon all I’ll have left is the story. The story becomes the experience.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  Sebright nodded. “I didn’t really expect you to. Listen, Thackery. Don’t do this again. You’ll see enough of me once we’re aboard Descartes. But until we have a ship, we’re not a crew, and my only responsibility is to myself.”

  “So you won’t hold a briefing for the team?”

  “They can read the Op Recs, too,” he said. “Any more questions, since I’m up?” A hint of a sardonic smile touched his lips.

  “Just one. Why did you bother to sign on again?”

  Sebright was immune to the venom. “No. Try Dunn. He’s only been back two months. He may still want to talk about it.” He laid back and poked Yolanda playfully with a finger.

  “Anything to eat around here?” he asked her, and Thackery took that moment to move toward the door.

  “Sneaking out, Thackery?” Sebrigh
t called after him. “For future reference—you’d be smart not to push in where you haven’t been invited. You can’t afford to alienate people on a little ship.”

  His picture of Sebright savaged beyond repair, a benumbed Thackery made the climb to C deck and the library. Having absorbed most of his values from Government Service, he felt personally betrayed. Information was a free good, freely available, freely exchanged—the Ninth Article. To have a Contact treated as a personal possession was unthinkable, as unthinkable as a Contact Leader who refused to lead, who chose to spend eight weeks in a drug-induced black-out—

  The Op Recs. Maybe the answers are there—if there are any answers for a man like that—

  The story of the Muschynka was not new to Thackery. Hundreds of anthropologists had fallen over themselves in their eagerness to sift through the contact records and publish their findings. There was even a standing request before the Flight Office for a follow-up mission, since the Muschynka represented a form of human society no longer available for study on Earth: a polytheistic, communal-living patriarchy employing slash-and-burn agriculture.

  But if there was any explanation in the voluminous contact report for Sebright’s attitudes, it was beyond Thackery to see it. There was plenty of data on the Muschynka’s dependence on lightning for fire, on their movable longhouses, on their death beliefs and funereal customs. But there were no answers in the records for the questions he would have asked Sebright: How did it go? What was it like to be there? How did you know what to do?

  Any wisdom that had been gained in the course of the Contact had been stripped of its anecdotal elements and made part of the general Contact protocol. Any narrative power in the account had been erased by the third-person-impersonal voice. The feeling of the moment had been reduced to dry history and cold science.

  Is that what they tried to do to you, Sebright? he wondered. Did you come back because you wanted to dream again?

  That thought replaced most of Thackery’s accumulated resentment with a troubling premonitory vision. Is that what I’m doing? Chasing a piece of the past?