Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “It’s a long way from a DC-3 to an orbital shuttle—but it’s a straight line. Earth only has knowledge of one kind of technological society. That makes it hard to judge the limits and capabilities of other kinds.”

  “A ship this size couldn’t carry enough fuel to go from planet to planet, much less star to star. It couldn’t even carry consumables for the six or eight people who could fit in it.”

  “It wouldn’t have to, any more than the Munin’s gig has to. Not if the 241 was a parasite lander attached to a much larger starship.”

  Guerrieri just looked down at his feet and kept shaking his head.

  “The point is, we don’t know what’s possible, because we’ve never thought like this.”

  “And the crew—or should we call them passengers?”

  “Call them colonists,” she said. “They could have been dropped off in small groups as the mother ship flashed through each system at five or eight or ten percent of c.”

  Guerrieri pulled himself to his feet. “Let’s walk,” he said, and started down the street.

  They went several blocks before Guerrieri spoke again. “I’ll say this, you’ve certainly managed to break out of the straightjacket of conventional FC theory.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said, answering his wry flattery with false gratitude. “You’ve also connected a very few facts with a great deal of speculation.”

  “I know. But that’s the way I’ve been trained to think—to see what isn’t there from what is.”

  “True enough. I’m just not used to hearing it on this scale.”

  “I’m not used to doing it on this scale.”

  “I suppose not. So you’re not claiming to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx—”

  “No, of course not. I’m saying it bears looking into—especially since conventional theory has been at a dead end for two hundred years.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me on that,” Guerrieri said. He took the next few steps more slowly, then stopped. “Do you know what happens if you’re right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a lot of questions to answer. But you may also have answered a lot of questions. Why the FC civilization disappeared. Why the colonies don’t reflect their founding technology. Why their populations are still relatively small. Why some colonies are on less-than-desirable worlds. Even why they forgot their origins. And you’ve done it all without resort to the D’shanna.”

  “You sound more amenable to the idea than you did a little while ago.”

  “I sound that way because I feel that way. But, Amelia—I’m not the one you have to convince. And I don’t much want to have to be the one to tell him.”

  “You won’t be.”

  “I never knew exactly how it was we were supposed to find the D’shanna. But this I know how to check. There are things we can do to either prove or disprove your scenario. We have something tangible to look for.”

  “That’s what I hope to make Thack see.”

  Guerrieri nodded thoughtfully. “What if he won’t listen?”

  “Is that what you expect?”

  “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  “I think he’ll listen,” Koi said without conviction.

  “I hope so. But if he won’t?”

  Eyes downcast, she did not answer immediately. “I’ll have to think about that,” she said, and turned away toward what passed for home.

  Jankowski, Thackery, and Mueller returned from Werno in late afternoon. Though burning to unburden herself, Koi waited until after the evening meal, when the team returned en masse to their quarters.

  “I found out some things today that I think we need to deal with, as a group and in terms of our objectives on this tour.” she said, pulling the fabric wall over the entry arch to provide a privacy that was more illusory than real. “Is this a good time, or should we schedule a team meeting for sometime tomorrow?”

  Thackery stretched out on one of the foldaways. “Now is fine with me. Anyone else have any firm plans? Derrel, you didn’t plan any erotic assignations for tonight, did you?”

  “No,” Guerrieri answered with a crooked grin.

  “Go ahead, then, Amy. The floor is yours.”

  It took Koi the better part of an hour to lay out the facts, the inferences, and the speculations for Thackery and Mueller. Guerrieri concentrated on watching Thackery, his expression, his body language, the little eyebrow flicks and absent-minded finger play that might provide the cues to his thoughts. He was less concerned about Mueller: after the first few minutes, she had pulled a netlink onto her lap and from that point on divided her attention between the display’s images and Koi’s words.

  When Koi finished, there was silence as everyone looked to Thackery for his response. Staring down at the middle of the floor, and thereby avoiding their eyes, he swung himself up to a sitting position, and then shook his right arm and grimaced.

  “Damn thing fell asleep,” he said. The uneasy laughter emphasized the tension rather than dissipating it. Thackery grinned ruefully and looked to Mueller. “Barbrice, you’ve been busy there. Any thoughts?”

  “While I was listening I skimmed the 241 archives. The artifacts are definitely anomalous.” She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I can’t comment on the rest.”

  “Derrel? Are you up on this? You have an opinion?”

  Guerrieri pursed his lips and thought a moment. “About all I can say with confidence is that we wouldn’t have done it this way. But then, we didn’t do it.”

  Thackery turned to Koi. “I guess we know what you think.”

  “We’ve discovered some very exciting evidence that could lead to a final solution of the colony problem,” Koi said. “On the other hand, we’ve found nothing to support the notion that the D’shanna have been here or had anything to do with the loss of this colony.”

  “Tell me, why didn’t the permanent staff pick up on this?”

  “I can answer that,” Mueller said. “The technoanalysts finished their work here more than a decade ago, before the 241 dig took place. The staff now is composed almost exclusively of ethnologists.”

  “Besides which. Dr. Essinger’s handling of the find shows he knew there was something different about it,” Koi added.

  Thackery scratched the crown of his head, then clapped his hands together once and interlaced his fingers one at a time. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I can’t go along with that.”

  On hearing that, Koi hooked her hands behind her neck and bowed her head, missing a sideways glance of sympathy from Guerrieri.

  “I’m absolutely delighted by what you’ve found out about the 241 artifacts,” Thackery went on. “I have no doubt that the plaz material could be used structurally in a winged vehicle, be it aircraft or spacecraft. And whether the plaz is Ice-X or some other metastable polymorph doesn’t really matter in that context. The fact is, you’ve made a very plausible connection between Wenlock technology and a set of anomalous artifacts. But the rest of what you say is positively Byzantine. I don’t really know why you went to the trouble.”

  That brought Koi’s head up and a cross expression to her face. “The Service spent a lot of time and money training me to think synthetically. That’s what interpolation is all about.”

  “And you’re good at it, no doubt about that. Amy. But you’re a long way out on a very skinny limb here. On the other hand, you have convinced me of two things—that the D’shanna were here, just as we expected them to have been. And that it’s pointless for us to stay on 7 Herculis any longer. They were here, but it’s been six thousand years, and the trail is too cold to be of any use to us. But we now know where to look for them—on a world rich in refractory metals. We know their signature—tantalum.”

  “You think the 241 artifact was a D’shanna ship?” Koi asked, making no effort to mask her incredulity.

  “Absolutely,” Thackery said, coming to his feet. “Just think what a powerful motivator the decades of unending volcanis
m, the destruction of the other cities, would have been, what a spur to space. Escape, escape—that’s what the Wenlock had to be thinking, how can we escape? That’s when the D’shanna came. That’s when they showed them how to make plaz and to put this protective dome overhead. The earthquake finished off the Wenlock, all right. But it was the D’shanna who made sure they were still here when it hit.”

  Koi said nothing, but her expression spoke volumes about her disagreement. But Thackery seemed not to see it. “Have you talked to any of the Annex staff about this?” he asked. Koi looked at Guerrieri, who shook his head. “No,” she said.

  “Don’t.”

  “We have to at least alert Dr. Essinger to what he has here,” Koi protested.

  “Why? He’s been sitting on this for eight years. If he hasn’t the wit to figure it out for himself—well, let him wonder why we left so quickly. We owe him nothing.”

  “So where to, then?” asked Guerrieri. “16 Herculis, to look for another iceship?”

  “No,” Thackery said, shaking his head. “Now that we know for certain that the D’shanna are bound by conventional technical limits, we know we have a real chance of finding them. We know they couldn’t have swept through the Local Group and killed off all the colonies in a few dozen or a few hundred years. I’ve thought all along that we’re catching up with them. Now I’m wondering if we already did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dove. Where was Dove when she was destroyed?”

  It was Mueller who answered. “In Ursa Major, headed for Talitha.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going. And when we get there, don’t be surprised if we find both a colony and the iceships of the D’shanna.”

  A short time later, with Mueller poring over the 241 archives in detail and Thackery the astrography file on the Ursa Major moving cluster, Koi slipped away. Guerrieri followed her to a darkened second-floor terrace which looked out onto the moonlit ruins of Wenlock.

  “Well?”

  “Do you want to say you told me so?” she asked irritably. “Then do it and be done.”

  “You didn’t press him.” Koi scowled. “You weren’t much help, either.”

  “My advice to him has to be more conservative than my brainstorming with you.”

  “I suppose,” she said wearily. “This is just the first round. If I’m right, there’ll come a time when I can prove it and he can accept it. I can wait until then. I’m asking you to wait, too.”

  “He sounded like Neale used to—the secrecy, the singlemindedness.”

  “He isn’t like that.”

  “Do you think so? Do you really think so?”

  She looked at him with an uncharacteristic look of helplessness in her eyes. “I have to.”

  Guerrieri’s mouth was a thin line. “I wish I could,” he said, then hesitated before continuing. “When I thought he was right about the D’shanna, I admired his dedication. Now that I think he’s wrong, I’m beginning to wonder if the right word isn’t obsession.”

  Then he saw what his words had done to her, and remembered that for her, matters of human as well as cosmic scale were in the balance. He could not take back the words, but he could hold her, and he did—and wondered for the first time if there were any way the flight of Munin could end well for all aboard her.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  In a Dying Place

  Three days out from 7 Herculis, the first defection took place. The occasion was a pre-entry briefing on Munin’s destination star, the setting the C deck wardroom. The audience included not only Thackery and the strategy team, but Shinault and Joel Nunn, the ship’s astrographer, as well.

  Nunn stood in the midst of the astroprojection, the stars like a halo of fireflies around him, as he spoke to the darkened room which hid his audience. “The Ursa Major Moving Cluster is the nearest star cluster to Sol, only slightly more than half the distance to the Hyades. The nearest members are some sixty-five light-years from Sol, and the cluster is scattered over an elliptical volume of space some thirty light-years long and eighteen light-years wide.”

  A touch of the control wand displayed the nineteen members of the cluster in bright green. From where she sat, Koi could see clearly how several members formed most of the Big Dipper: Merak and Phad, Megrez and Alioth, and the triple double Mizar and Alcor. Only Benetnasch, the tip of the Dipper’s handle, and Dubhe, the northernmost of the pointer stars, remained white.

  “The cluster members all share a common proper motion eastward and south toward Sagittarius,” Nunn went on. “Talitha is not considered a member of the Cluster, but it is a member of the larger Ursa Major Stream which occupies a region of space several hundred light-years across, and which includes Sirius and 1 Ophiuchi.” Another touch on the wand, and Talitha brightened as though it had gone nova.

  “Talitha is part of the Ursa Major asterism, marking one of the front feet of the Bear. At a distance of fifty light-years, it lies right on the Phase II boundary, and consequently was the most distant system Dove was scheduled to visit. Like the members of the Cluster, Talitha—or 9 Ursae Majoris, in the Kalmar system—is a main sequence star, spectrum A7, luminosity about 11 Sol. There’s a dwarf binary companion at a distance of about 70 A.U., with a period of more than six hundred years. With that separation, the presence of the companion probably doesn’t rule out a stable planetary system, although the A-Lynx observatory has been unable to establish that one is present.”

  “Thank you, Joel,” Thackery said, sitting forward in his chair. “Does anyone have questions?”

  “Is this trip necessary?” Guerrieri said under his breath. Koi heard and shot him a venomous look, but Thackery seemed not to notice either the comment or the rebuke.

  “That’ll be all, then, Joel. Thank you,” Thackery said, and took the astrographer’s place as the lights came up. “The fact is, none of the Cluster stars have been surveyed, and very few members of the Ursa Major Stream. Yet as one of the most striking constellations as seen from Earth, Ursa Major was certain to have attracted the attention of the FC planners. No colonies have been found among the nearer, unassociated stars—in fact, Ursa Major lies at the center of the largest region of apparently uncolonized space.”

  Thackery touched the control wand, and a standard plot of the northern octants appeared. “Please note that if you draw a line from Journa to Ross 128, and another from 7 Herculis to Liam-Won in Monoceros, the lines cross here, in Ursa Major. These are some of the reasons I expect to find a colony in this region. It may not be orbiting Talitha. Even though I’m optimistic, I want you all to realize that Talitha’s only a starting point for what could be a long search. 5 Ursae Majoris, the brightest cluster member and thereby a likely candidate in its own right, lies seventy light-years out. If we come up empty at Talitha, 5 UMa will be our next stop.”

  “I can’t listen to any more of this,” Guerrieri muttered, this time loudly enough to be heard. He threw down his fax of the briefing agenda, folded his chair back into its bulkhead recess with a clamor, and stalked from the compartment.

  Thackery knit his eyebrows in puzzlement. “What’s the matter with Derrel?”

  “I’ll find out,” Koi volunteered, and hurried away before her offer could be refused.

  She caught up with Guerrieri three decks downship, as he was about to enter his cabin. “What the hell was that display all about?” she demanded, grabbing him by the arm.

  Wordlessly jerking free of her grasp, he turned away and slipped through the doorway. Uninvited, Koi followed and closed the door behind them.

  “Now explain,” she demanded.

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to demand explanations from me.” He sighed weightily. “I wish Thack’d come, instead of sending you.”

  Koi sighed and settled on the edge of the unmade bunk. “You may still get a chance to explain it to him—he didn’t send me,” she said. “I came down here to let you vent gas at me, so maybe you wouldn’t feel the need to d
o it at him.”

  Guerrieri snorted and shook his head. “If that was all I wanted, I could have stayed upship and said my piece there.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Before answering, Guerrieri pulled his dulcimer case from its storage niche and began to undo the latches. “I just cannot sit there smilingly while he goes on and on about the inner thoughts of FC planners and the secrets of Ursa Major,” Guerrieri said. “This trip is a complete waste of time. We should be on our way to one of the colonies, not heading as far as possible away from them.”

  “We agreed we were going to be patient until we had more evidence.”

  “I said nothing of the sort. The only promise I made was to myself, to bite my tongue until it hurt too much to keep doing it. Well, it’s hurting pretty good now. Haven’t you been talking to the rest of the crew?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe they think you’re too close to him, they don’t dare ask. That’s not the case with me. I must have had four or five people already question why we’re going to Talitha. It’s still polite, like they’re curious about something that just hasn’t been explained to them. But it’ll get worse. They know that something’s changed—he’s drawn inside himself, like he doesn’t see us anymore. Don’t tell me you haven’t worried about it yourself.”

  “Aren’t you being a little hard on him—”

  “Did you read his 7 Herculis exit dispatch? There isn’t a word in it about the iceship or the tantalum signature. Who’s going to collect the evidence, with us here and no one else even having had a chance to hear your ideas?”

  “When I talked about waiting for him, I didn’t mean a week. We aren’t facing any deadlines.” Guerrieri stopped in the middle of removing the instrument from its case to stare at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it doesn’t make any difference whether the colony problem is solved two years from now, or a hundred years after I’m dead.”

  “Of course it matters—”

  “Not to me.”

  Guerrieri’s gaze narrowed. “You’re afraid.”