Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Thackery’s comments consciously echoed those in a paper Neale had written after the end of the Dove mission, and she studied his face a long moment before responding. “I believe the First Colonization was their response to the glaciation. It’s possible the Firsts had an incomplete knowledge of planetary climatology, and thought that when the ice started to return it meant, in essence, the end of the world. They couldn’t have known or even had reason to hope that the ice would only advance as far south as Kiev and the Spanish-French border.”

  “They must have had an excellent understanding of the basic nature of the Galaxy, though.”

  “Oh, obviously, of course. They must have had their Anaxagoras, their Copernicus, their LaPlace. They must have known that the planets were other worlds, and must have believed that the stars were other suns.”

  “Has any linguistic analysis been done comparing the early Mideastern languages with the colonial languages?”

  “Yes, not very fruitfully. Have you been considering that avenue of research?”

  “If I had access to the proper materials, I’d certainly want to go over what has been done and see what’s left to be done.” Thackery made that commitment knowing full well that the ship’s library did not contain facsimiles of the ancient documents he would need.

  “I doubt anything conclusive could come out of it, or it would have been pursued elsewhere.”

  “Most likely,” Thackery agreed quickly. “Now, the way I understand it, one of the hard questions has been why the colonists weren’t able to maintain the level of technology that brought them there.”

  “That’s right. On Earth we can blame a combination of the ice, the cultural stress imposed by the colonization effort, and a society-wide fatalism that came out of their misunderstanding of the situation. Out of the four colonies, only Journa was even close to being capable of space travel, and it was only the spur of contact with the Founders—us—that brought that out of them.”

  “And even that was accomplished in primitive fashion, with a nuclear-pulse slowship and no computer technology.”

  She nodded. “But their hydromechanical switching and logic systems still represent the highest level of technology found on the colonies.”

  Thackery shook his head as though bemoaning a regrettable twist of fate. “And no records or remnants of the FC starships have been found.”

  “Well, of course, for a while, we thought Jiadur was one, left in orbit and then pressed back into service for the Reunion. But the Journans apparently built it themselves.”

  “Is there any chance they were following an FC design?”

  She crossed her arms across her chest, which to Thackery was a telling bit of body language; he had noted that there was no information in the Journan contact record about Jiadur’s designers. “That’s a question that probably hadn’t been looked into as carefully as it might have been,” she said carefully. “But we know a lot about how they built it, and it’s pretty obvious that it was something fully within the reach of the contemporaneous Journan culture.”

  “Let me be sure I understand. Even though the Mannheim hypothesis holds together analytically, there’s no hard evidence to support it.”

  “No, there isn’t. Which is why the door is still open, at least a crack, for alternatives. Which is what you said we were going to talk about.”

  “How seriously is the possibility of a second-species intervention taken?”

  “It’s called the Daniken hypothesis, which if you understand the reference is one of the problems.” She sighed. “It would be taken very seriously, I suppose, if anyone could nominate a second species that might be responsible. You know what the Service has found. The Galaxy is not exactly fecund. There’s a lot of worlds that could support at least some life, but very few of them actually do, and little above the complexity level of a sea sponge. Even the colony worlds tend to have a fairly simple native ecology.”

  “But the theory doesn’t require fecundity. It would only take one other species reaching the level we have, but ten or fifty thousand years sooner. And second-species intervention eliminates a lot of the difficulties,” Thackery said with manufactured earnestness. “It would explain why the colonists ‘lost’ their high technology, because it would mean they probably never had it. I would explain Earth ‘forgetting’ an earlier technological age, because it would never have had one. It would eliminate the problem of accounting for the choice of colony stars and worlds in human terms.”

  “And this magic is worked through an even more farfetched series of postulates than the Mannheim hypothesis requires,” she said sharply. “Every serious student of colony theory considers this ‘alternative’ at some time or another—because it’s easy. What questions it doesn’t answer it makes unanswerable, because it transfers both the problems of means and motive to an unknown and unknowable alien intelligence. The Daniken hypothesis is wishful thinking. I would not waste any more time on it.”

  The answer was no less than Thackery expected—in fact, he privately agreed with it. “I appreciate your frankness, Commander,” he said smoothly, rising. “And I’ll follow your advice and concentrate on the question of proof for the Mannheim hypothesis.”

  She nodded approvingly. “That’s the only profitable course. Not that you’ve shown me any reason to think you’re capable of making a contribution. There was nothing new in anything you had to say. But at least you’ve moved beyond the ignorant mental meanderings you displayed the last time.” She glanced at her watch. “Your time is up, Thackery. You’re excused.”

  Despite her words, it was an effort to keep the grin of self-satisfaction off his face as he left. It was an effort to keep from dancing a celebratory jig down the corridor. For he knew without any question that he had achieved his purpose. He was a long way from a complete redemption, and even farther from achieving the status he hoped eventually to reach, but he was on the way.

  He knew that not because of his confidence that Neale’s next personal dispatch would include a speculative commentary on the origin of the design of Jiadur. He knew it not because she had implicitly included him in her comment about “every serious student of contact theory.”

  Rather, he knew it because his ten-minute consultation had taken the better part of an hour to complete, and it was not until the end of it that Neale had noticed or cared. For the moment, that was all the confirmation he required. The rest would come in time, as it always had.

  PROTOCOLS

  (from Merritt Thackery’s

  JIADUR’S WAKE)

  … Easily overlooked in evaluating the wisdom of the Service administrators is the qualitative difference between the Phase I and Phase II searches.

  The crews of the Pathfinders, and in particular their commanders, were expected to show initiative and exercise judgment. They carried a burden of trust which freed them to focus on results rather than procedures. They responded to that challenge with courage, integrity, and responsibility far exceeding any narrow definition of duty.

  By contrast, the crews of the Pioneers were expected merely to follow the Protocols. There were Flight Protocols limiting the discretion of the commanders, Operations Protocols governing the work of the crew, and Survey Protocols dictating the priorities of the surveyors. If the need ever presented itself, there were voluminous Contact Protocols as well.

  The Protocols were meant to be the accumulated wisdom of the Service, stronger than recommendations, less rigid than regulations. It was always understood in the Planning Office that the Protocols could not be inflexibly applied, that they represented the past and would not always pertain to the present. The acknowledged risk was that a crew might remember to follow the Protocols and forget to think, might substitute the judgment of the dead and the distant for their own.

  But the veterans of the black ellipse perceived something else entirely. The Protocols represented a loss of faith, a presumption of incompetence, a failure-oriented psychology. There were few of Command rank who did not
realize that the standards against which they would be judged had been changed, and that “I followed the Protocols” would be a stronger defense than “I did what I thought best at the time.”

  So it turned out, with bitter irony, that the rules which were intended to prevent mistakes instead guaranteed them

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Gnivi

  Though Thackery could cope with catching his sleep four or five hours at a time, that did not make him any more accepting of being awoken in the middle of such a session. But there was no ignoring a shipnet priority page—if the piercing tone did not rouse him, the annoyed occupants of the adjacent cabins would.

  “Here,” he said, standing on unsteady legs in the darkness. “This is Jael. Better come on up,” she said. “I think this might be the one.”

  “I’ll need a shower if I’m going to keep my eyes open,” he said. “I’ll be there in a little bit.”

  Thackery knew immediately what Collins’ call meant: that the planet they were now orbiting might be the kind of docile B-type world to which Sebright had sent half the contact team some two months and three crazes ago. Since then his promise of more such landings had languished unfulfilled as they looked down on a seemingly unending series of hostile worlds.

  Even based on the inbound scans Thackery saw before the change-of-watch, 605 Cepheus-5 was clearly bland-faced and lifeless. But it was also benign, with a climate not far removed from that of the ice-free valleys of Antarctica. When Thackery had turned over the geoscience console to Eagan and left the contact lab, the orbital studies had just begun. Collins’ call told him all he needed to know about how they were progressing.

  The pitch of excitement in the contact lab and the eagerness with which Thackery was greeted provided confirmation. “This is the one, Thack,” Collins said with proselytizing fervor. “It’s our turn.”

  “It looks good. It looks real good,” Tyszka said. “Tell him, Gregg.”

  “You’d better brush up on your piloting, then,” Thackery jibed, moving to look over Eagan’s shoulder. “I don’t want any landings on the bounce. What about it, Gregg?”

  “Everything I’ve seen says that minimum E-suits would do,” Eagan offered, leaning back in his chair. “There’s a few nasty spots along the equatorial fracture zone, but nobody says you have to go there.”

  “I wish Sebright would get down here,” Collins fussed.

  “When’s he due?”

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “How long till we need to make a go/stay decision?”

  “An hour. We’re only programmed for three orbits.”

  “Well—he’ll probably be down,” Thackery said, turning out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Look, he’s got to be awake by now,” Collins insisted. “I think I should call him and get the okay to start preparations.”

  “Maybe it’d be better to go on up there in person,” Eagan suggested.

  “No,” Thackery said firmly. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “You’re putting too fine a point on it, the way I remember,” Tyszka said dryly.

  “He’ll be down,” Thackery said with more hope than confidence. “He saw how this planet was shaping up before he went off-shift.”

  But too soon, the third orbit was completed, and the expected call came down from the flight deck:

  “Contact lab, are you clear?”

  Thackery glanced around the room. “Who’s today’s watch supervisor?”

  “I am,” said Eagan. “Look, I can’t help you. I can give the clear, but I can’t authorize a landing. And the fact is, all the studies are finished. But if I tell them that, Neale’ll take us out of orbit.”

  Collins and Thackery exchanged glances. “If I go get Se-bright, will you wait?” Collins asked Eagan. “If you don’t take too long.” He tapped into the shipnet.

  “Hold a little while, will you, Navcom? We’re going over the checklist.”

  “Be quick about it. The Boss is itching to move on.”

  “Understood. We’ll have an answer for you post haste.”

  Shortly, Sebright appeared at the lab doorway, trailed by Collins. “—like you did for Donna and the others,” she was saying to him.

  “Just hold on,” Sebright said, going to the central netlink and placing a finger on the actuator. “Current. Survey. Summary.” The words brought data to the screen, which Sebright scanned quickly.

  Then he reached for the net switch. “Bridge, this is Sebright. We’re clear.” He turned a hard face to Eagan. “Why couldn’t you decide this?”

  “Just a minute—what about our landing?” Collins demanded.

  “A landing’s not indicated,” Sebright said curtly.

  “But you said—”

  “Read your Protocols. A landing requires anomalous geology, indigenous organisms, or some other Priority l phenomenon. Do you have anything like that? Jael?”

  “No, but—”

  “Mike?”

  The technoanalyst shook his head.

  “Thack?”

  “No.”

  “Then what the hell did you need me for?” Sebright demanded and stalked out, leaving the room in stunned silence. “Well, no field trip, class,” Tyszka ventured finally. “I wonder if Neale didn’t call him down for the last one.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell us so?” Collins demanded.

  Eagan shrugged. “Command loyalty, maybe. What d’you think, Thack?”

  “Probably,” Thackery said slowly. “Vets sticking together.” The disappointment was already fading, the hope having been so recently kindled. “He might have told us sooner. He could have warned us not to expect anything.”

  Eagan tried to offer a hopeful outlook. “We’ll just have to find you a Priority l anomaly, eh? They aren’t that rare.”

  But Collins tossed her head angrily. “That’s all right for you. You’ve got lots of possibilities. But, Thack, I’m surprised at you. The only thing now that will get any of us to the surface is a colony,” she said bitterly. “Want to give me odds of less than six figures on that?”

  No one did.

  Descartes spent the succeeding months wandering within the tenuous remnant of a nebula which had given birth to a small cluster of young T Tauri stars. Since they were barely a half-million years old, the nebula’s children were considered poor prospects for life of their own. But spectrographic studies of the nebular remnant showed it was rich in second-generation elements—oxygen, silicon, iron, and other atoms cooked in the hearts of long-dead stars—which made the stars good candidates to form terrestrial planets.

  So young were the systems that the first Descartes visited, 312 Lacerta, was caught still in the process of planet formation. The stellar nebula had condensed into a flattened disk revolving around the protostar, but the inner edge of the disk was only beginning to be driven outward by the T Tauri wind, the blast of energy pouring out of the newly ignited fusion furnace. It was only the second time that a USS survey ship had come upon a system in that state (though several had been studied telescopically by the Service’s High-Inclination Observatory orbiting the Sun in the cis-Cytherean space).

  “Looks like they set out to build Saturn, but the engineers dropped a decimal point,” was Thackery’s observation. But that image came only from imagination and, later, computer modeling, since in close quarters 312 Lacerta appeared as little more than a vast cloud, lit from within by sporadic electrical discharges and masking their view of half the Galaxy.

  As there were no planets to be evaluated, Thackery spent much of his time at Guerrieri’s elbow, trying to sharpen his understanding of the gestation of planets. His own discipline of resource geology was only interested in geohistory to the extent that it made assays of the crust more accurate. Unfortunately, the seminar was a brief one. Descartes made a single, 22-hour mapping run across the north face of the disk, then continued on.

  At their next stop they found but a single planet and a thin glittery remnant of a ne
bular disk. But the planet was a hundred times the mass of Jupiter, a third the size of its parent star and very nearly a star in its own right. Seen in visible light, the planet’s coral and ochre atmosphere seethed and surged from the heat generated at the core by gravitational collapse. Seen in infrared, the planet literally shone.

  Two crazes later, they reached a system which none of the crew would ever forget. The three inner planets of 298 Lacerta were undergoing a breathtaking bombardment as they swept the remaining nebular debris out of the ecliptic. Even from a safe fifteen million kilometres above the activity, the telecameras showed at least one spectacular strike blossom into a shortlived crimson flower every two or three seconds.

  “Some show,” Muir said, who along with Thackery and several off-shift operations awks was watching the spectacle on the edrec screens.

  “Isn’t it just glorious?” Thackery said. “Typical male comment—it looks like a war. Like a god-damn nuclear war.”

  “No, you’re not looking at it right,” Thackery said earnestly. “It’s a birth—a little bloody, a little stressful, but when it’s all over and they get cleaned up we’ll be looking at brand-new triplets.”

  “Save it,” Muir said tiredly.

  “Don’t you understand? We only ever get to see worlds in middle age, just snapshots that make you think they’ve always been that way. Seeing this, it’s easier to remember that they change, that they have beginnings and ends—that there’re cycles longer than we can see.”

  She looked at him with surprise in her eyes. “I actually think you mean that. When did this happen?”

  He looked back at her and laughed a little self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t really know.”

  “Maybe you pretended you were interested so often that the idea took.”