Enigma (4 page)

… The radio beacon from Mu Cassiopeia stirred a somnolent Earth into a social and technological metamorphosis, a metamorphosis symbolized by Tilak Charan’s
Pride of Earth
. Considering the technological, logistical, and sociological obstacles, the successful construction of
Pride
ranks as the high-water mark of Devaraja Rashuri’s reign.

But
Pride
was the product of an infant technology. Its voyage was one of risk and hubris. Its mission meant an encounter with an alien society of unknowable inclination. Because
Pride
never returned nor reported, it was widely assumed that it had failed to survive. But no one could say which of the factors was to blame.

As a result, the USS began to build the only survey ships explicitly authorized by the World Council. What turned out to be a follow-up mission was conceived as a pioneering one, and so the ships were collectively named The Pathfinders. Their individual names remembered the aerial vanguards of Odin and Noah: S2 Hugin, S3 Munin, and S4 Dove.(The honorary designation SI was assigned “posthumously” to
Pride of Earth
herself.)

Where
Pride of Earth
had been a fragile lifeboat, the Pathfinders were comparative dreadnoughts. Three years after
Jiadur
reached Earth, they set off for the Mu Cass system. There they “discovered” Journa, its inhabitants, and one lone survivor from
Pride of Earth
—a meeting thereafter commemorated on both worlds in the annual Reunion Day festivities.

But that meeting was also the beginning of the Service’s colony problem. The Journans claimed to be children of Earth, a claim that proved as irrefutable as it was inexplicable. How could a space-going technological culture have flourished on Earth ten or a hundred thousand years ago and then vanished without a trace? What twisting of history could allow for such a dissonant fact?

There were no answers on Journa.

Absent appropriate instructions, the Pathfinders separated and began a roundabout return to Earth. Their self-set purpose was to define the parameters of the problem by searching for other possible remnants of the First Colonization. If there were none, then perhaps some relatively painless revisionism might suffice—

Then
Hugin
, under the command of Kellen Brighamton, found a neoprimitive human community on a planet orbiting the white dwarf component of 40 Eridani. When Brighamton’s report on the Muschynka reached Earth, it became clear that a more ambitious effort to locate and explain the worlds of man was called for. The shipyards went to work, turning out five new survey ships of the Argo series. USS strategists went to work, drawing up a plan to visit each star system within twenty-five light-years of Earth.

Phase I proceeded largely as planned. The inbound Pathfinders and outbound Argonauts recorded visits to more than 130 star systems over a span of a century and a half. And Commander Yabovsky of
Castor
earned permanent fame when his crew discovered an extinct human colony on a cold world orbiting a dim star in the constellation Virgo.

But despite these labors, the colony problem remained impervious to solution. So even as the aging Pathfinders and their Van Winkled crews neared Earth, Survey brass were planning for them not rest but a role in an even more ambitious Phase II…

No announcement was made, but everyone on
Dove
nevertheless knew when it was time for the ship to come of out the craze. Those pulling duty away from the bridge listened in on the shipnet, while the others drifted by ones and twos into the contact lab, edrec compartment, or onto the bridge itself.

Among those who came to the bridge was SC Glen Harrod, commander of the
Dove
. But he made no move to displace bridge captain Alizana Neale from the pedestal, choosing instead to stand in the back with the talkative, almost childishly giddy techs and awks.

Dove
had come out of craze eighteen times before, and there was no technical reason why the nineteenth should prove any more eventful than the others. “Craze” was a fanciful description of what the D-series Avidsen-Lopez drive did to the local fabric of space. Only a few Service researchers claimed to fully understand the “why” of the AVLO power plant. It was commonly known that it was a gravity gradient drive (dubbed the pushmi-pullyu because of the twin bow and stern field projectors). It was also commonly known that to go beyond that casual description, it was necessary to deal with Driscoll’s abstruse grand unified field theorem.

The drive’s effect, however, was easy to describe. The ship, accelerated beyond the speed of. light, and the rest of the universe disappeared. No chronometers ran backward, no one’s gray hair turned black again, no theatrical pyrotechnics punctuated the transitions past c, but when you got to your destination the numbers always added up so that you were there sooner than Einstein said you should have been. A fifteen light-year craze in a Pathfinder-class ship extracted barely a month from the crew’s biological calendar. When such a ship crazed, nothing in the Universe could catch it—not even the electromagnetic radiation on which all sensing and communication depended.

That fact contributed to the secondary meaning of the term “craze.” To some surveyors, referred to unsympathetically as “the phobes,” the blank screens and dead air meant an enforced isolation in a universe that ended at the ship’s hull. Craze fear had elements of cabin fever, Gansel’s syndrome, and prisoner’s psychosis. Unmoderated by drugs, victims of mild cases suffered from anxiety, poor concentration, and irritability: those more seriously afflicted experienced sexual dysfunction, insomnia, and panic.

The one blessing was that few were affected. There were no acute phobes aboard
Dove
, and only two milder cases. In that,
Dove
was fortunate—according to one dispatch they had received, the Argonaut
Heracles
was limping along with nearly half its crew impaired.

So neither technology nor psychology could account for the eagerness with which the approaching transition was awaited. What was special about
Dove
’s nineteenth craze was not how it was accomplished or how long it lasted but where it would end. After making visits to eighteen strange suns,
Dove
was finally going home.

“One minute,” the navtech at the gravigation console called out, and nearly all eyes went to the imaging window at the front of the semi-darkened triangular compartment. The comtech hunched over his console, checking out instruments that had sat unused for sixteen days.

“Transition.”

In that moment, a crazy-quilt of radiation—light, radio, microwave, X-ray—began to impinge on the ship’s many eyes as
Dove
regained her senses. Neale looked up expectantly at the window, and when the dazzle cleared, found herself looking at a splendid circular starfield, the distortion a product of their still-tremendous velocity. As
Dove
continued to decelerate, the view would slowly come to resemble the view from the South Dakota pasture which had first captured her curiosity.

I started out trying to find Orion in a winter sky for a teacher whose name I can’t remember. Look at me now
, she thought with a rush of emotion.

“Which one’s the Sun, damnit?” demanded a bearded sysawk standing with the onlookers. Several eagerly, if impatiently, answered him. “There! Right there! Dead on center!”

“That’s the wrong color.”

“We’re still blue-shifted,” Harrod reminded the awk gently.

The navtech poked a spotting circle onto the screen, enclosing the small bluish star and settling the disagreement. “What year is it?” asked someone. “I make it A.R. 195,” said the navtech. “We’ll get confirmation once we start picking up our mail.”

“A.R ?” asked the medtech, his face showing consternation.

“After Reunion,” the comawk standing beside him answered. “They changed the calendar on us while we were gone.”

“That’s 2205 for those of you still thinking in Gregorian calendar dates, like Bristol there,” the navtech added.

That hushed the observers and the bridge crew alike. “A hundred and freezin’ fifty-seven years,” one said finally. “They better cook up some fine kind of reception for us.”

“Speaking of which, we’ve got just eleven days to get this ship ready to hand over to the yard, and there’s a lot to be done,” Harrod said. “I’m sure no one wants to be hung up by scutwork when they could be off on leave, so let’s get to it.”

“Amen to that,” said the bearded sysawk. “The Service’s already taken a bigger piece of my life than I’d planned on offering.”

“Tell ’em, Waite,” cheered one onlooker.

Harrod raised a questioning eyebrow. “Just don’t forget, there’s a whole new generation of ships being built, and they’ll be wanting to put some experience on all of them. Be thinking about it. Even you, Waite.”

Waite laughed derisively. “I’ve got other plans.”

Neale knocked lightly at Harrod’s cabin door. “Glen?”

“Come on in.”

She slid the door aside and stepped over the threshold. “Just wanted to tell you she’s ready for the hand-over—finally.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“It’s been hard to get much work out of them these last three days, with the Earth sitting there in all the screens and getting bigger by the minute.”

“Understandable, though, eh? It’s been a long sixteen years—or hundred and fifty-seven, depending on how you like to count.”

“I’ll count sixteen, if you don’t mind. Have you gotten word on how they’re handling the crew?” Harrod nodded. “Just came in about an hour ago. We’re only the second ship ever to come back—”

“Who beat us in?”

“
Munin
—twelve years ago. Anyway, there’ll be a fair amount of fuss. They’ve been tracking our relatives while we’re gone, and there’ll be somebody to greet each one of us. Except for Waite.” Harrod looked up. “Funny thing, eh?”

“His won’t come?” she asked indignantly.

“He hasn’t any. I’d have thought that if anybody had left a few genes behind it’d have been that rabbit. But he’s got no living relatives, not even a grandniece or nephew. So he’s going to be ‘adopted’—isn’t that considerate of the Flight Office?” His tone carried a burden of sarcasm.

“What comes after? Do they just turn us loose?”

“They’ve got a place set up in New Zealand where we can ‘resynchronize’. Benamira, I think’s the name. From the way they talk about it, I’m not sure whether they’re more afraid of the world shocking us or us shocking the world,” he said wryly. “They’ll want to know in sixty days whether we’re interested in another flight assignment—though it might be a year or two before they actually need us.”

“Any idea what you’re going to do?”

“Oh, this is it for me. I’ve already told them I plan to do a lot of low-tech fishing in a lot of very placid streams. Yourself?”

“I’m going back out, if they treat me right.”

Harrod nodded as though he had expected it. “You’ll probably get a command.”

“That’s what I want.”

Harrod nodded again, started to say something, stopped himself, and then started again. “What we’ve seen—where we’ve been—” He stopped and frowned, searching for the right words. “I guess I don’t understand, Ali. What’s out there except more of the same? I know we didn’t find any colonies ourselves, but—”

“It’s not finding them that matters so much. You should know after all this time. Glen,” Neale answered, one hand on the door. “I want the answer to the colony problem.”

“That bums in you, doesn’t it?”

“You know it does. I want to know what makes a mother forget her children. Why did it take the Journans to tell us there had been a First Colonization? There’s no more important question for us to answer. I don’t know how you can sidestep it.”

Harrod smiled a tired smile. “My instinct for self-preservation. Peace of mind.” He offered a hand and she clasped it, not as a handshake but as a hug. “You did a good job for me. I wish you the best. Command, without doubt. A colony, at least. Maybe even an answer to your question. You’ll have all three, if wanting matters.”

“It does,” she assured him. “It does.”

The broadcast of the welcoming ceremonies reached BT-09
Babbage
midway between Ceres and home. The asteroid tug, its three-man crew, and its metal-rich, million-tonne catch were falling sunward in a graceful month-long spiral that would end at the Cluster B processing center trailing a half-million klicks behind Earth in solar orbit.

—I think I see them now, Gregory.

—Yes, Madia, here they come, the two-hundred-year-old space travelers, back home at last after visiting eighteen other star systems.

—That’s right, Gregory. It’s important that our viewers realize that even though
Dove
did not discover any colonies, her crew is bringing back with them geophysical data on eighty-one different worlds, including samples from the twenty they actually set foot on.

—And of course they were part of the historic Pathfinder mission to the Jouma colony, which started everything.

—You’re right about that, Gregory. You know, the Unified Space Service tells us that
Dove
has rolled up more than 500 trillion miles since leaving Earth in A.R. 38.

—That’s just amazing, Nadia. They’re twenty very brave men and women, that’s for certain.

“I say they’re twenty crazy men and women,” systech Brian Hduna said with a yawn, looking up from the small screen set into the console before him. “What do you say, Thack? Lot of fuss over nothing?”

Merritt Thackery was seated before an identical display at the opposite end of Babbage’s command console. “Hardly,” he said quietly without looking up.

“Hell, what we do on this run counts for more than their whole mission. We’re bringing in iron, chromium, nickel—a quarter-million tonnes of it. Think there’ll be a band playing when we dock? Hell, no,” Hduna grumped.

—Each of the voyagers will be greeted by a member of his own family, Gregory.

—Gone but not forgotten, that’s the best way to describe it. We’re going to identify them for you as they come out of the shipway. The first out should be Commander Glen Harrod. Here he comes now. SC Glen Harrod, 192-year-old commander of the
Dove
, being greeted by his great-great-greatnephew Tony Harrod.

—And there’s SC Alizana Neale, the bridge captain. She’ll turn 186 tomorrow, I understand. That’s her 85-year-old fourth cousin Randy Stovik waiting there for her.

Hduna made a face. “Can you imagine making it with a 186-year-old woman?”

“Fry out,” Thackery said angrily, his eyes burning into Hduna’s. “You couldn’t have done what they did.”

“You make it sound like they’re better than we are,” Hduna said, squinting at Thackery.

Thackery crossed his arms and looked away, saying nothing.

“If you’re not proud of what you are and where you are, maybe you’d just better retire and wait for Survey to call. Wearing the yellow’s supposed to mean something,” he said, flicking a finger against the yellow ellipse pinned to his collar, the theater insignia for system crews.

Thackery laughed brittlely, “It’s none of your damn business, but I transmitted my application this morning.”

Hduna cocked an eyebrow, then let out a grunting laugh. “Huh. Well, now I know why you spend all your spare time studying. When’d they post the Notice of Opportunity?”

“Last night. Sixty openings over the next three years.”

“Well, well. So you want to wear the black ellipse.”

“Everybody who’s honest with himself does.”

Hduna shook his head. “Not me. Can’t see it. Too much to give up.” Thackery laughed. “What’s to give up? This billet? Where’s the challenge in it? What do we do that couldn’t be done just as well by hundreds of others? You used to do your own assays. Now there’s a whole team of geologists living in the Belt, tagging asteroids faster than we can haul them in. They’re turning the whole Belt into a warehouse, and you into a truck driver. The Council’s busy taking the rough edges off of everything, turning this into a finished world. I know. 1 spent two years being trained to help them.”

Hduna snorted. “Hell, I don’t know what I’m arguing with you about. You won’t even make first call. You ought to know you’ve got to transfer down a grade to get into Survey.”

“That’s not in the quals.”

“That’s the way they do it, all the same. They turn Corns into techs and techs into awks. You’re only a awk with, what, six years’ experience? What are you going to transfer as?”

“If I don’t make it this time, I’ll get other shots. They’ve got a lot of openings to fill, on the new ships and the old ones. I’ll make it,” Thackery said determinedly.

Hduna laughed nastily. “They’re going to have a lot more than sixty openings to get down the list to you.”

There was no room at the inn at the Eddington Yards. All five parallel shipways of the voluminous construction base were filled by hourglass-shaped hulls in various stages of completion.
Dove
stood off a kilometre away like a jilted suitor.

Alizana Neale studied the survey ships from the bubble of the jitney. To her right and back a step, Alvarez, the supervisor of ship construction, waited respectfully for her questions.

“How long before they can get on with refitting
Dove?
”

“We’ll move the
Tycho Brake
out within the week so Commander Tamm can get on with preparing it for departure.”

“That’s the
Tycho
on the far end?”