Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Descending toward the hive, Thackery heard the commotion coming up the climbway before he saw the gathering. There were five or six awks and techs crowded around the open door to his cabin, peering inside as best they could.

  “What happened?” he demanded, shouldering his way between two of the spectators.

  Guerrieri, standing closest to the doorway on the right, looked back and saw who had asked. “It’s McShane. The craze got him.”

  “He was screaming something about the hull splitting open,” another offered.

  Thackery bulled his way to the doorway and surveyed the room. McShane was stretched out motionless on Thackery’s bed, with Pemberton crouching beside him monitoring vitals and Dunn looking on. McShane’s own mattress was leaning crookedly against the far wall, as though the vertical zipweld had started to open and McShane had used the mattress to try to seal off the leak.

  “Oh, Dan,” he said feelingly. Dunn looked up. “Ah, Thackery. Did he give you any warning on this?” Thackery took a step into the cabin. “No. I didn’t know he was having trouble.” The half-lie came easily, too easily.

  Dunn nodded acceptingly. “Sometimes it’s like that,” he said softly. “Sometimes they’re clever enough to save all the madness for their private moments, even though they’re not clever enough to see where that leads. Do you want him moved upstairs. Pembe?”

  The medtech stood. “Yes. He’s stable now, but we’ll want to watch him. He’ll be on antianx and antidep right in to A-Cyg.”

  “Where he’ll stay,” Thackery said involuntarily. “Afraid so,” Dunn said, grunting as he gathered up McShane in a fireman’s carry. Thackery stepped aside to let Dunn pass with his burden. “It’s not fair. He was working so freezin’ hard.”

  “It happens,” Dunn said from the doorway. “Wanting to do well’s not enough. Some don’t have what it takes.”

  “First warning,” the Tycho gravigator announced sonorously. “Thirty minutes to transition. Com officers, prepare for reacquisition of signals. Repeating, first warning, end of craze.”

  “That’s a freezin’ shame. He didn’t miss by much,” one of the onlookers said, shaking her head as she turned away.

  “Coming?” asked Guerrieri from the corridor.

  With a sudden violent motion, Thackery reached out and slammed the cabin door shut, sealing out the curious who had not already scattered. When he turned back to face the disarray, the sight of it resonated with his own internal disharmony. He drew a series of long, trembly breaths, then gave in and sat down where he’d been standing, letting the tears of frustration and disillusionment run quietly down his cheeks.

  This is not how it was supposed to be—not at all—

  A FRIENDLY FACE IN A DISTANT PLACE

  (from Merritt Thackery’s

  JIADUR’S WAKE)

  … Search the stars for planets. Search the planets for life. So simple in concept, so incredible in execution.

  Even today, there are few in or out of the Service who can grasp the dimensions of the project. The AVLO drive has salved our battered imaginations, just as trans-Pacific shuttles make the voyage of the Kon-Tiki inconceivable.

  But consider: the Local Group, those stars clustered within twenty-five light-years of the sun, consists of some two hundred glowing motes. Extend your view to the hundred light-year radius of the Expanded Local Group and your gaze now takes in more than fourteen thousand stars scattered through a volume of four million cubic light-years.

  Mercifully, many of the stars are found in groups of two or three or even more. Some are barren, and, if they are close enough to a first-class observatory, that absence of planets can be detected and that system bypassed.

  But even with the AVLO drive, even excluding the close binaries and trinaries, excluding the unstable giants and the fiery short-lived O-spectrum dwarfs, excluding all but the MK-G spectral classes thought most favorable for habitable planets, a survey of the Expanded Local Group still called for a thousand-year plan.

  The broad outline of the strategy was shaped by the geometers of the Strategic Planning Office. With a stroke of their lightpens, they partitioned the sphere of space centered on Earth’s Sun into eight equal sectors, four north of the celestial equator and four south of it. Onto that playing field came the survey ships, built by the Procurement Office, equipped by the Research Office, staffed by the Flight Office, first one ship for each octant, then three, with plans for five and finally eight if the millenium-long plan stood up.

  It was not enough, however, to simply loose a fleet of survey ships into the Galaxy. For the most part, these great vessels were self-sufficient—had to be, or the entire emprise was unworkable. But ships and crews alike had useful lifetimes. The former could be refitted; the latter required rejuvenation and, eventually, replacement.

  The planners anticipated other needs as well: for communications relay points, for nearby support centers for the colonies, perhaps even for hub points for commerce among the not-yet-Unified Worlds. It was implicit in the name given to the long-ago founding of Journa and its sisters that the Service saw itself the agent of the Second Colonization.

  For all those reasons and more, the Advance Bases were conceived and constructed, one in each octant, frontier outposts which were to become tomorrow’s metropoli. In a Ptolemaic perversion of astrography, each was named, not for the star near which it was located, but for the constellation in which it appeared from Earth: Perseus. Lynx. Bootes. Cygnus. Eridanus. Vela. Lupus. Microscopium.

  But that cleptic confusion was the least of the problems faced by these nascent communities. For, while they were close to those they were expected to serve, they were also very far from Earth and the authority of Unity—far enough that some came to have their own ideas about what they were there for…

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  Cygnus

  Tycho picked up the A-Cyg navigation beacon immediately on coming out of the craze. The beacon consisted of an eight-bar musical theme, the tracking pulse, a timemark, and a voice message:

  “Welcome to Advance Base Cygnus, located just west of Infinity on the Far Edge of Nowhere. Your hosts are the men and women of the ‘we’ll go anywhere we’re told’ Unified Space Service, Survey Branch. Your innkeeper is Wayne ‘don’t bother me with details’ Coulson. Request you transmit crew directory to speed check-in. We monitor standard frequencies A and D.”

  There was laughter on the bridge, but Neale did not join in it. Damned unprofessional, Neale complained to herself. / wonder if the base commander knows what’s being broadcast.

  Tamm seemed amused, however. “Sounds like they’ve been a bit lonesome out here,” he said. “Let’s let them know they’ll have company for dinner.”

  “The ship’s transponder is already putting out our identification signal,” the communications officer noted.

  “Let’s be a little more personal,” Tamm said. “Give them a hi-how-are-you and repeat it until we hear from them live. Navcom, how far out are we?”

  “Ninety-two light-minutes.”

  Tamm nodded. “We should hear from them right about change-of-watch.”

  Still hurtling at high velocity despite the steady gravitational braking of the AVLO field aft, Tycho closed on the commonplace M7 star which was host to Cygnus Base. Well before no-lag communications were established, the telecameras picked up the silhouette of the complex. The station was orbiting just sunward of the fourth of the five small planets comprising the system. At first, only the two huge energy sails were visible. But as the image grew larger and more refined it quickly became apparent that not all was as expected.

  “What the hell have they been up to?” Tamm demanded indignantly. “Let me see the station fax.”

  The comtech turned to his console, and a moment later, an architectural diagram shared the window with the telecamera view.

  “You’ve got the wrong damn document,” Tamm said with annoyance. “No, that’s Cygnus—file number AB21N,” insisted the li
brarian.

  “Scale them the same.”

  “They already are.”

  “What? They must be ahead of schedule. Show me the station development plan.”

  The librarian complied, and Neale walked forward to study the display. “Here,” she said, pointing to one of the more symmetrical shapes. “This section wasn’t supposed to be added for another five years.” She swung her arm to point to an irregular mass which seemed to have grown tumorlike from the central cylinder. “And whatever this is, it isn’t in the development plan at all.”

  She looked back at Tamm, and the commanders exchanged puzzled glances.

  “They were sent out here with a hundred-year plan for expansion of the base,” Tamm said, nonplussed. “What the hell are they doing ignoring it after just five years?”

  “Seems like the discipline problems go all the way to the top,” Neale said critically.

  They stared together at the bright image of A-Cyg. The neat symmetry of the original design was badly marred by the new additions. “Not our problem, I guess,” Tamm said, standing and stretching. “We’re not staying.”

  “Where’s Descartes?” Neale asked suddenly.

  The ship was nowhere in sight. The station’s single dockport was empty.

  “Give us a wider field,” Tamm ordered, and the image of Cygnus Base shrank. Almost immediately, Neale loosed a noisy sigh of relief. Powered down and empty, Descartes trailed several kilometres behind Cygnus in the same orbit.

  “Looks like you won’t be staying, either,” Tamm said with a wink. “What’d you think they’d done with it?”

  “Considering what we’ve seen already, I was afraid to guess.”

  On docking, Tamm and Neale were whisked through an ebullient throng to the administrative level and the opulent office of Wayne Coulson. The corpulent base director bounded out of his chair to greet them, shaking hands vigorously and ushering them into the room.

  “I’ve just been told before you got here—you’re keeping your crews on board?” Coulson asked, the disappointment keen in his voice.

  “At least until we’ve worked out the arrangements with you,” Neale said.

  “Oh, heavens, there’s no need for special arrangements. We’re all set up for you. Please, call over there and give them liberty,” he urged earnestly. “We’ve been planning for this for most of the last year. My people are very eager to meet with your crew. You’re three weeks overdue, did you realize?”

  “Tycho’s a brand-new ship. We stayed around to have some little problems fixed—can’t expect it to come out of the yard perfect,” Tamm said, smiling. “Never stopped to think that we’d be missed at this end,” he gestured. “Use this netlink?”

  “Of course—it was probably wrong of us to pin so much on the schedule. It’s been five years for us but thirty-two back on Earth. The program could have been delayed, even canceled. We had to wonder.”

  “Everything’s still go. There’ll be more following us,” Tamm assured him, then turned to the netlink. “Kislak, I’m authorizing liberty for the second, third, and fourth watches. We’ll continue to stand one-in-four until further notice. Make sure everyone understands that.”

  “Yes, sir. Does this order include the hive?”

  Tamm looked to Neale, who shook her head emphatically and turned away. Tamm shrugged. “No. Not the passengers. Just our crew.”

  “Is there some problem, Commander Neale?” Coulson asked, his eyes narrowed by concern.

  “Commander Neale doesn’t approve of the discipline here,” Tamm said, then moved toward the bar to avoid Neale’s baleful glance.

  “Is he right, Commander?” Coulson said, a puzzled expression wrinkling his round face.

  “I do have some questions about your priorities,” she said stiffly, settling herself in the least plush of the several chairs. “We spent sixteen years on Dove without this sort of breakdown, and you’ve been here barely five.”

  “What breakdown is that?” She waved a hand in the air. “Your hailing message—your abandonment of the development plan—”

  Coulson likewise took a seat. “We haven’t abandoned the development plan—not yet, anyway. We’ve adapted it. If you’d had time to analyze what we’ve done, you’d see that our modifications won’t prevent us from building what was prescribed. That’s not to say we may not yet get tired of waiting for structural components from Earth and do it our own way.”

  “You have no authority to make that decision.”

  Coulson spread his hands expressively. “This is home, Commander. We have the right to make it livable. We have the right to make it ours. I would guess that your sixteen years on Dove were busy ones. But once we had the cylinder sealed and the energy panels erected, there hasn’t been a whole lot of urgency to what we have to do.”

  “Unless you feel like you’re doing for yourself, rather than for some distant authority,” Tamm said between sips of his liqueur.

  “Exactly,” pounced Coulson. “And that requires a certain latitude on less important matters. Commander Neale, I assure you we came to this out of necessity. The first three years we went by the book. At the end of that time, most of us were ten kilos overweight and averaging one fight a week. Every work team was anywhere from a month to half a year behind schedule, and I was turning into an autocratic son-of-a-bitch because of it. We even had two suicides and a half-baked mutiny—that’s why we moved Descartes off-station. Frankly, for a while I had doubts about our community surviving until you got here.”

  “So what happened?” Tamm asked, enjoying Neale’s discomfiture.

  Coulson smiled. “We had a town meeting and took a good hard look at ourselves. The end result was that we reclaimed control over our own lives. We’ll do things because they need doing or because we want to, but never just because the Service said so. We apply that same principle locally. You can call me Director if you prefer, but the truth is that I’m more like an elected city manager. I represent these peoples’ interests. I don’t tell them what their interests are supposed to be.”

  “That’s insubordination,” Neale said sharply.

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” was Coulson’s casual reply. “But we’re too far away to allow ourselves to be dependent on Earth. I believe the hundred-year growth plan was nothing less than an attempt to lock us into a structural technology which would keep us looking to Unity at least that long. We choose not to be so bound. That planet down there has accessible hydrocarbons, which we’re tapping to process our own construction material.”

  “Is that what you used for that addition?”

  “Yes. You should make a point of seeing it. We’re very pleased with how it turned out—”

  “What is it?” Neale demanded. “A playroom.”

  “A playroom!”

  “For the children—and the adults. Everything from soccer to gymnastics to hide-and-go-seek—”

  Tamm interjected, “You’re having children already?”

  “Yes—another modification of the plan. It’s the best way I know to make a place feel like home,” Coulson said simply. “There’ve been six born already, and that many more are on the way. We’ve got fifty-four people here now. But we’ve already built the base up to where it could handle over a hundred.”

  “Plenty of guest rooms,” Tamm said, chuckling.

  “You may laugh, but that image has been useful to us,” Coulson said soberly. “We try to be happy with ourselves, but the simple truth is that this community is too small and our memories of Earth are too strong. We need to believe that others are coming—not just visitors, but emigrés. I look forward to when they start calling me the landlord instead of the innkeeper.”

  There was a long silence when Coulson finished, a silence broken at last by Tamm.

  “Listen, Wayne,” he began tentatively, “I don’t know how this fits in with what you’ve told us, but those cargo blisters on Tycho are full, half of it yours and half of it ours. And I was expecting your people to yank the tempor
ary compartments out of our hold and generally help get the Tycho in mission configuration.”

  Coulson nodded. “We’ll do that for you, just as we got Descartes ready before we moved her out. As to making use of those modules in the hold, as you’ve seen we’re hardly hurting for lebensraum. But we are eager to see the rest of what you’ve brought us. How soon do you think we could arrange to duplicate your technical and edrec libraries? We’ve got some catching up to do.”

  “I’ll have my librarian get together with your people immediately and work out the transfer.” Tamm finished his drink and set it aside. “Very nice synthesis, this,” he said, gesturing at the empty glass. “How long do you think it’ll take your people to strip the hold?”

  Coulson pursed his lips and considered. “I’d say a good week’s work at least.”

  Tamm frowned. “I was hoping you could get us out faster than that. If it would help, I have some people with construction experience—waldoid and teleoperator—that I’ll make available—”

  “Commander Tamm,” Coulson began, smiling benignly. “We understand how eager you are to begin your mission. And we won’t make your stay here any longer than it has to be, even though we might be tempted. There’s not much out here to do except work, eat, and have fun, and we’re good at all of them. Give us a week and let us show you what we can do.”

  Tamm laughed easily. “All right, Wayne. I think we understand each other.”

  “What about my crew?” Neale demanded. “We need to get aboard Descartes.”

  Coulson shrugged apologetically. “I can’t do anything for you until we’re finished with Tycho. We only have the one dock, after all.”

  “Then take us out to Descartes, if you can’t bring her in here.”

  “You’re not at Unity, Commander. We don’t have sixteen-seat peoplemovers and interorbit ferries. I don’t even have a long-range backpack available to put your senior tech aboard. We disabled them all after the mutiny.”