Emprise (23 page)

He spent much of his time in Germany, which provided a chance to bring his textbook German closer to reality and to appreciate the hours he had spent learning it. But encountering French, Flemish, Dutch, German, and Danish in one twenty-day, seven-hundred-kilometre stretch showed him graphically how language can be a barrier as well as a bridge.

En route from Italy to Barcelona and Madrid to try his textbook Spanish, he stopped for a night in an empty barn with two other transients. They woke to find anything they had not been wearing stolen. Charan was hit the hardest: thanks to his carelessness, his knapsack contained not only his extra clothing but his remaining funds. That was how he came to be job-hunting in Marseilles, and shortly thereafter part of the crew of a steel-hulled cargo barkentine working the Mediterranean.

Though fond of sailing since introduced to it at the age of eight, he had thought to stay on only for a single run to Algiers and back. But he stayed on for a trip to Palma in the Isles Baleares, and then another to Tunis. In all he stayed four months, toughening and trimming his frame, and gaining glimpses of Oran, Bastia, and several other Mediterranean ports to which they brought cargoes.

More importantly, he had time to think—about whether what he had been doing was worth going back to, and when the answer proved to be no, whether what he was doing now was any better. The latter question took rather longer to answer. His job on the
Medea
was the first he had had with any relevance to the real world. He felt useful, needed. The question he had to answer was whether “any” relevance was enough relevance.

For a while, it was.

But he also thought about the “friends” he had made while freelancing across Europe—people who would look on what he was doing as a horrible fate. He had had a long and intimate contact with the subculture of the listless, homeless, and purposeless. It grew on him slowly but came with crushing force when it did that he not only did not like them, he did not want to be like them.

One week later, he left the
Medea
in Ajaccio harbor, walked to the PANCOMNET station, and sent a nine-word message to Moraji by electronic mail:

In Ajaccio without a paddle. Come get me. Charan
.

When there was no reply in the first ten minutes, Charan stretched out on a couch in the lobby to wait for one. Within an hour, three Pangaean Security Office agents arrived and took him in tow. They escorted him to a white four-seat helicopter bearing the Consortium seal and bundled him into one of the back seats, with one of the agents taking the other passenger seat.

At the Rome airport, he and the agent transferred to a small white jet. Nine hours later, most of which Charan spent sleeping, he was in New Delhi.

It was after midnight, and he did not expect to see his father until the next day. But instead of being taken home, he was taken to the nearly deserted Consortium headquarters and his father’s office.

“Ah, Charan. Come in. You look well,” said Rashuri. “A bit taller and a bit tauter, I would say.” Charan sat down stiffly. “Why didn’t anyone come after me?”

“I sent you to England for an education. There are kinds of learning that you can’t get inside a classroom.”

“You wanted me to skip out?”

“I would have been disappointed if you had not. It would have meant that you did not have the qualities you will need.”

“But didn’t you care? Didn’t you wonder?”

Rashuri smiled slightly. “I always care. If I did not, I would have left you here blithely wasting your time and talents. Your performance at Tsiolkovsky confirmed my higher estimation of you. And you have come back a young man where you left a child.”

“I might not have come back at all.”

“I do not think there was ever a risk of that,” Rashuri said carefully. Charan stared. “What does that mean?”

“Only that I have growing confidence in you.” Charan shook his head. “If I thought there was some way you could have stage-managed the last seven months—”

“We made efforts to know where you were, at least in general terms and often exactly. But beyond that—”

“I made my own decisions and went where I wanted.”

“Yes. And I am taking the fact that you are back as a sign that you are ready now to accept the plan I have for you. Or would you prefer a knapsack and a ticket to Ajaccio?”

Lowering his eyes, Charan said, “No, sir. I’m ready to get back to work.”

“I am very glad to hear that. Because you still have a great deal to do.”

“I’d appreciate knowing what it is I’m qualified to do.”

“Nothing, yet. But do not worry. Your calling does not exist yet. By the time it does, you will be ready.” Nodding, Charan eyed the chess table on the far side of the room.

“Care to play?” asked Rashuri, following his glance.

“I’ve been looking forward to it.”

The game lasted more than an hour, unusual in the history of their competition. When it was over, Rashuri was the victor as usual.

“You seem to have rid your play of fatal blunders,” he said in dispatching his son to bed. “But you still make too many weak moves. You do not want victory enough. You wish only to avoid being defeated. Rid yourself of that outlook and you may yet become a player to reckon with.”

Within two weeks, Charan found himself part of the first class of pilots training for the Earth Rise orbital program: ten men and five women culled from the various Consortium schools and divisions. Charan knew two of them from Tsiolkovsky, both top students: a statuesque astrophysicist named Riki Valeriana, and Anthony Matranga, a round-faced systems engineer.

Of the others, there were three pilots, one an orbital pilot down from the OOC to keep up with the new technology. The rest were technical specialists of one sort or another. Since they also had to be healthy, that meant that they were young, considering recent history. The oldest in the class was a twenty-seven-year-old New Zealander. At eighteen, Charan was within two months of being the youngest.

He sat with the others and listened as Kevin Ulm, Pangaea’s first astronaut and now director of personnel for orbital operations, welcomed them to the training program.

“I do myself and the others now manning the Operations Center no disservice in admitting that we were amateurs, pretenders. In my case especially, my fame is far out of proportion, to my contribution,” said Ulm. “But you, you are to be the first of the professionals. You come to us professionally prepared, and the Consortium is building for you a professional tool: the Earth Rise system. Within a matter of months the booster and LEO spacecraft will be ready and soon after that, the orbital transfer tug, with which we will build an Assembly Station in high earth orbit. Within ten years, we hope to have a planetary transfer tug, so that we can mine the resources of the moon and eventually the asteroids.

“Space was always the only way to escape a zero-sum resource game. You will have the chance to prove that to the world—if you stick it (Hit and earn (me of these,” he said, tapping the blue metal ellipse on his collar—the insignia of the orbital pilot.

Within six weeks, Matranga transferred, with the blessing of the coordinators, to the parallel orbital engineer training program. Another classmate left the program completely, at the coordinators’ request. But Charan stayed on, finding that his scattershot education had better prepared him for the role than the specialized work of the others. He had the physics for navigation and orbital mechanics, the engineering for systems maintenance and payload support—Charan decided that this was the future Rashuri had been planning for him, and that it was not disagreeable.

But the loss of Riki and Anthony in the first manned Earth Rise test chilled his enthusiasm. He had thought himself the logical choice to fly that test flight, had angled for it with the administration, and had been cross and withdrawn for a week when Riki was chosen over him. The horrifying fireball shook his confidence, and the widespread and generally well-accepted rumor theorizing that the Chinese had sabotaged the flight because they wanted to keep control of launch operations did not fully restore it. And he was unable to mourn the dead without thinking at the same time that it was better to be a mourner than mourned, and hating himself for thinking that.

In time, Charan quashed both his fears and his guilt, and when he was told that he would pilot the next test of Earth Rise, he accepted the news with equanimity. In the months that he waited for his ride, several of his classmates beat him into space atop Long March vehicles launched from Shuang-ch’eng-tzu. But he earned his blue ellipse all the same, riding in front of a cargo pack that included components of the first orbital tug.

Over the next eighteen months, Charan split his time between the Earth-OOC supply run and the OOC-Assembly Station tugs. Of the two, he preferred the latter. The last ten minutes of countdown and the ten minutes of powered flight that followed never failed to bring back the images of Riki’s doomed flight.

Piloting a tug was a more soothing experience. The delta vee was low, the acceleration smooth and quiet, and he enjoyed seeing Gauntlet and the various comsat platforms take shape with each successive visit to Assembly Station.

He would have asked for full-time assignment on orbit, especially after taking up with a winsome German environmental engineer at Assembly, except such things were Not Done. Flight assignments were in the hands of Ulm and the orbital-operations schedulers and not to be questioned by ordinary mortals.

That fact did not begin to bother him until his father’s announcement of the Senders’ message and the starship that would go to meet them. He suddenly began to wonder if Rashuri were finished with him after all. It was with some relief, then, that he learned he was one of five OP’s tabbed to train on the Shuttles being transferred from Dixie. One assignment seemed to rule out the other. There would be no deep space voyages for him, and he was glad. He would be content to watch the video relays from bed with Greta.

The Shuttle II was a sweet ship. The hard work during liftoff was handled by the crew of the winged booster, the hard work during reentry by the ship’s own computers. The orbiter had a dozen times the volume of Earth Rise and five times the payload capacity. It wasn’t nearly as nimble as a tug, but made up for that with its rock-steady attitude and almost regal bearing. In the year after the Shuttles became operational, Charan flew twenty-two Shuttle missions, commanding a four-man crew and finding that he was good at it. He was patient, thorough, unflappable, and even-handed. And, he discovered, he was happy.

It was not to last. The attack on his father was the cusp point. News of it interrupted a visit by Greta to his quarters in the OOC (which because it did not spin was more highly regarded than Assembly Station for such activities). He was annoyed to discover that Greta thought highly of his father. He was also disturbed to hear through the grapevine that a tug was being modified to carry the AVLO-B and a special passenger compartment. That made two new special ships which would need pilots—and Rashuri had promised Charan fame in a calling that would be newly created.

It was no coincidence, Charan was certain, that he was pilot of the Shuttle which carried Rashuri into orbit. His confidence of that redoubled when he was relieved of his Shuttle command and made pilot of the tug which carried Rashuri on to Assembly. There he met face to face with Rashuri for the first time in three years.

“How much more, Father? How much longer? When will I be able to say I am finished with your life and get on with my own?”

“It has all been your life, every minute of it,” said Rashuri, raising his hands as in supplication. “In truth, I have seen and been with you too little.”

“But you’ve controlled everything that’s happened.”

“I have sought honor for my son and pointed him in that direction, nothing more.”

“By arranging opportunities I didn’t deserve? By pushing me on stage every time a major scene is to be played?”

“You give yourself too little credit and myself too much. A father can send his son to the best schools, but he can’t do the learning for him. He can arrange an interesting job, but he can’t make him a success in it.”

“There’s been more to it than that. You told me yourself—that I would be remembered longer than you will.”

“I still believe that.”

“But not for the things I’ve done so far.”

“No.”

“Let me see if I can guess what lies ahead, then. You will see that I’m picked for Star Rise—”

“I will not need to intervene. They cannot help but pick you. In all this world there is no one more perfectly qualified to command that mission.”

“You’ve seen to that, have you.”

“No—you have.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be the son of the Chairman of the Pan gaean Consortium, though, does it.”

“They would choose you even if you continued your fictional life as Tilak Charan.”

“That
is
my name,” Charan said tersely. “So this is what you wanted for me.“ ‘To represent this planet at such a moment will be the highest honor our species has ever bestowed.”

“There’s just one little detail you overlooked. What if I refuse?”

Rashuri drew back in surprise.

“I’ve spent the last eight years being where everyone else wanted to be and I didn’t,” Charan went on. “Don’t you realize? Since you announced Star Rise the whole pilot corps has been wondering how many and who. Not just wondering but wanting, and a lot of them are becoming fanatical about it. That’s one qualification I don’t have—desire.”

Rashuri shook his head sadly. “You say that only because you think yourself not worthy—a failing you have long had and I have not done enough to expunge.” He reached out and touched Charan’s hand. “Since the day I knew that there would be one, I have wanted a place on this starship for my son. It is a gift I wanted for a special son—a deserving son. In you live both the humanities and the sciences, both the sense of duty and the spirit of leadership, both the meaning of the present and the memory of the past. You will represent us well.”

“I don’t want to go,” Charan insisted. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”