Enigma (6 page)

“It wasn’t your place to give permission.”

“Don’t you think you made that clear? Doing what you did told me exactly what you thought of me and of our relationship.”

“What I did had nothing to do with you.”

“Exactly. It should have.”

“I made the decision I had to to keep peace with myself. I’m doing what I want to do.”

She stood and crossed the room to where a drug dispenser sat on the oak dry sink. “I see,” she said, fumbling for an ampule. “You prefer hauling rocks to serving on the World Council of Commissioners.”

“You’re the only one who ever thought that was a real possibility. I never did.”

Her head whipped around and she glowered at him with eyes that were fast becoming red and puffy. “You should have. Merritt, I knew those people. I saw them every day, with their public face on and in the back rooms. I knew what it takes, and I made sure that you had it. You were better than most of them, Merritt, and you should be on your way to sitting where they’re sitting. With your gifts—.” Frustration silenced her.

Thackery looked away. How wrenchingly difficult to be that close to the decision-makers and have no say in the decisions, he realized for the first time. The translator at the summit meeting—the stenographer at a great trial. If you have any ego at all, you would have to want to contribute your thoughts, but you’re locked out because of your station.

“I’m sorry, Andra,” he said finally. “I’m sorry that it wasn’t possible to make us both happy. We’ve never talked about it, and we should have, a long time ago. But there’s something more important for us to deal with.”

Her face showed puzzlement. “What?”

“I want to know who my father was.”

She turned her back on him, hiding her expression. “I never hid that from you. You’ve known since you were ten. You were an alternate conception child—I was inseminated at the Human Fertility Institute on Broad Street. Beyond that all I know is that the genes were male, healthy, and compatible.”

Thackery rested his chin on his folded hands and shook his head almost imperceptibly. “No, you weren’t,” he said softly. “You had your prenatal testing done there. But you were already pregnant.”

Her back stiffened. “Their records aren’t open to you.”

“No, they aren’t,” he agreed. “But they’re open to the Service, when the Service is researching a candidate. I’m not an AC. Since I’m male I can’t be a partho. And we’re too close a match for me to be adopted. I’m part you and part someone else. I have a right to know.”

Hugging herself as if chilled, she turned back to him. “The Service can have your genes analyzed. They can learn everything they need to from a skin scraping.”

“Which is what they did. But there are some things I need to know that a scraping can’t answer.”

“No,” she said, her eyes wet but her head high and chin firm. “You have no right to that part of my life. Why should it matter? And why should it matter now?”

“It matters now because I know now—because I could have had a father, not just a geneparent. You kept that from me. You kept
him
from me.”

“He never belonged to you,” she said, turning her head away.

“Did he belong to you?”

She retreated to her chair before answering. “The genes you carry are all he gave either of us,” she said softly. “All he could give us.”

“Then this isn’t how you wanted it?”

She chased the wistful expression from her face and met his gaze squarely. “Don’t try to be a mind-reader. You’re no good at it,” she snapped. “I’ll say this much and that’ll be the end of it. If what I told you before wasn’t literally true, it wasn’t a lie, either. There’re times that there’s no difference between a penis and a syringe.”

Inside, Thackery cringed at the crude image. “That may be so, but you wouldn’t know. Andra, you can’t make me back off just by being disagreeable. I kept growing when I went away.”

“I never realized that being ‘grown up’ meant feeling free to call your mother a liar.”

“Only when she is.”

After scorching him with a furious look, she bounced out of the chair and headed for the hallway to her bedroom. Thackery moved quickly and blocked her path.

“We’re running out of time, Andra,” he said gently.

Her angry look gave way to her thoughtful one, and she turned and walked slowly back to her chair. “I see I’ve missed something here. You said the Service was researching a candidate. Surely they didn’t wait all these years to get around to that. But you’ve only just found out. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’d rather tackle one subject at a time—”

“You tell me now or this conversation is finished. Why are they looking into your records now?” It was Thackery’s turn to wear a desperate look. “I don’t want to get the two entangled.”

“They already are,” she said coldly. “Why are they prying into my privacy?”

Thackery looked away. “I’m transferring to Survey. I’m part of the new crew for
Descartes
, which is waiting for us at Cygnus Base.” He raised his head to look at her. “It’s what I wanted all along, and I won’t apologize for it. But I didn’t want to use it as a club to get you to answer my questions.”

“Don’t worry. It wouldn’t have worked,” she said curtly. “So—you’re leaving us. Well, I can’t say as I’ll see the difference. I’d throw a going-away party, but I can’t think of anyone else who’ll miss you, either.”

“Ten years ago that might have hurt,” he said quietly. “But I know you better now.” She waved her hands in an abrupt gesture of dismissal. “You don’t know me at all.”

“I’ve had occasion to wish that were true.”

“And now it will be. Well, go, then, and stop pretending what I think or how I feel matters. I’ll be fine without you. Is that what you want to hear? Go! You’re absolved.”

The urge to lash back was almost irresistible. Angry answers filled his head:
You made the choice to be alone, and you will be. Stay here in your room and wallow in your bitterness. Your life is over. I’m going to see places and things no one has ever seen before. Maybe my father would have known how to be proud of me and happy for me. You’ve forgotten how to love anything you can’t control
.

But he squashed those thoughts, saying only in a calm, quiet voice, “My mistake, Andra. When I made my choice, I put myself first. I understand now that I learned how to do that from you.” Then he fled the apartment without looking back.

Not until he was safely in the lift did he realize why he had settled for a parting snipe instead of a full counterattack. It was not the fear of hurting her that had checked him, but rather the fear of discovering she could not be hurt.

… In the beginning, it was the rarest gem in the Universe.

It was the rarest because it was a synthetic creation, the product of man’s laboratory rather than nature’s. It was the rarest because only the Service knew how to make one, and because only the chosen few who held billets aboard the survey ships were permitted to wear one.

The black ellipse was, in fact, the only insignia worn aboard those ships, for a variety of reasons. A survey ship was too small and the missions too long for in-flight promotions, so it behooved the Service to de-emphasize rank. The black ellipse served as a reminder that its wearers were part of a team of equals, not a military hierarchy. The absence of glittery status symbols was thought to remove unnecessary formality and encourage the crew to relate on personal as well as professional levels.

Or so said the director of the Survey Branch.

But despite that ennobling symbolism, life on a Survey ship was usually dominated by an authoritarian command structure and awkward personal chemistry. And what the black ellipse really stood for depended a great deal on whom you asked…

On his return to Unity, Thackery, the other five surveyors, and Contact Leader Rajesh Jaiswal were plunged into a ten-day basic orientation to the Class II survey ship. No more than that was needed, since it was only in the direst emergency that surveyors would pull operations duty. Thackery was not sure how much help they would be even then. Few surveyors had even minimum quals in any of the operations technicals: AVLO drive, gravigation, communications, ship’s ecology, and library and electronic systems.

The team then moved from Unity to
Tycho
for a six-week hands-on familiarization with the extensive array of surveyor’s equipment. During this time Jaiswal, an Asian biologist, proved himself likable despite his high expectations and swift, sharp-tongued rebukes. Thackery also got on well with Gregg Eagan, a slender African a year or two Thackery’s junior. They spent a good deal of time together, since Eagan was Thackery’s “inverse”—the prime resource geologist, and the backup linguist.

Thackery saw less of the other four surveyors, but still enough to have largely good feelings about them. Two were Europeans: Derrel Guerrieri, the astrophysicist, and Jael Collins, the interpolator. Michael Tyszka, the technoanalyst and gig pilot, hailed from the West Coast of North America. Donna Muir, the exobiologist, called South America home.

The one glaring weakness in the Contact Team was the absolute lack of experience. Not one of them was a Phase I vet. Collins and Jaiswal were even Service outsiders, with no prior Orbital or System experience.

That weakness became painfully apparent during the mock field exercise in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica. From the moment
Tycho
moved into the appropriate polar orbit, the exercise was marked by indecision and error. Thanks to the snow and ice, Eagan misread the spectroscopic data and underestimated the resource base. Muir missed the rock lichens which were the test zone’s primary life form. Tyszka found but initially misinterpreted the artifacts placed there by the Service. Jaiswal allowed the team to return without seeing to proper decontamination precautions.

Though they were surely not all his fault, the misadventures cost Jaiswal his position. When
Tycho
returned them to Unity, Thackery and the other surveyors moved into the station’s D wing to begin preflight gnotobiotic conditioning. Jaiswal did not. The stiff-necked answer to their queries was that he had been reassigned. Whether it was voluntary or involuntary was not open for discussion.

No immediate replacement was forthcoming. There was talk that the Service was desperately courting the vets in search of an experienced Contactor for the
Descartes
. In the meantime, the team members concerned themselves with reclaiming their personal possessions from the decon crew and determining if the objects had survived the irradiation and other processing.

Bayn Graeff, the dark-complected, husky-voiced
Dove
vet who had signed on as
Descartes
’ bridge captain, then took charge of the team. She shepherded them through meetings with the investors who would handle their compensation accounts, the fitness experts who laid out their diet and exercise programs, the psychologists who retested them for craze fear, and the gnotobiologists who rearranged—for the worse—their inner environment.

As far as Thackery was concerned, gnotobiology was a synonym for misery. The necessity was inarguable: Since the colonists were full human stock, any successful contact brought with it the risk of crossinfection. It was not merely a matter of seeing that they were free of active or latent pathogens. Even the 1200-odd grams of ubiquitous human microflora—primarily intestinal bacteria, but including significant colonies on the skin, and in the mouth, lungs, eyes, vagina, and nose—had to be eliminated. The ship and the crew had to be made, insofar as was possible, germ-free.

That meant not only numerous injections of broad-spectrum antibiotics, but a complete blood replacement for anyone carrying active viral particles, be they from past infections or from past immunizations. At the same time, the doctors flushed each crewmember’s intestinal tract with a diet of antibiotic-laced food, then provided each with microflora capsules to reestablish the benign, symbiotic anaerobes. The resulting five days of diarrhea left a permanent stain on Thackery’s romantic conception of being an interstellar traveler.

What made matters worse was that all the misery only eliminated half the risk: the chance of the Contactors infecting the colonists. The chance of the colonists infecting the Contactors was still very real, and though there were steps that could be taken should the occasion arise, Thackery knew the Contactors would remain vulnerable. But that was a risk the Service found acceptable, and as he prepared to leave Unity for
Tycho
, Thackery knew he would have to find a way to view it in the same light.

His arms full, Thackery pressed the door release with his elbow and shouldered his way into his cabin. At a glance, he saw that the compartment was more roomy than the one he had occupied on
Babbage
. Though cramped and lacking some amenities—most notably privacy—it would certainly do for a month. Coming downship from the aft portal, Thackery had caught a glimpse of one of the relatively luxurious cabins in the Survey section, and expected that the same awaited them in
Descartes
.

Three metres away and seemingly oblivious to Thackery’s presence, a red-haired awk stood facing the far wall, beyond which lay the consumables storage section of
Tycho
’s gig bay. The man’s fingers were tracing the almost invisible zipweld between two plates of structural composite.

“Hey,” Thackery called, tossing his haversack on the nearest bunk. The awk looked back over his shoulder. “Hi. Do you know anything about materials science?”

Good to meet you, too, roomie
. “No.”

“Oh.” He tucked his hands in the belly pockets of his jacket and turned to face Thackery. “I was just wondering how strong this is.”

“Couldn’t tell you.” Thackery settled on the bed and opened the neck of his bag. “I’ve seen you during training but I don’t know your name.”

“McShane. Daniel McShane. You’re Thackery. I asked.” He smiled a nervous smile. “I guess you’ve never been out, either.”

“I’ve been to the Belt.”

“I meant gone through a craze.”

“No. That I haven’t done.” He laughed. “You can’t get near those vees in a tug.”

“I guess not.” McShane rubbed his neck. “There’s storage under the bed for your gear, and that’s about all. No drop-downs or hideaways back here.”

“Tourist class.”

“Temporary.” He laughed nervously again. “That’s something, isn’t it, going into deep-space in a temporary structure?”

“We’re still inside
Tycho
.”

“In the bowels of the beast. Sure. Sure. Look, if you haven’t been out, maybe you should know. Anybody who comes down with craze fear will be put off at Cygnus.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“Oh, yeah. They’ll be watching us real closely on this leg.”

“Good to know. Are you worried about it?”

“No, no. Except that it means we’re not in yet. There’s one more hurdle to get over.”

By the time
Tycho Brahe
was ready to leave, Alizana Neale’s list of grievances against the Service in general and Lin Tamm in particular had grown too long for recitation.

It was bad enough that Tamm, junior to her on
Dove
in rank if not in experience, had been gifted with the brand-new
Tycho
, while she had been assigned to
Descartes
. Though operationally identical to
Tycho, Descartes
’ oversized and inelegant cargo blister marked it for the one-time freighter and transport it had been.

Like all its sister ships in the Pioneers series,
Descartes
’ first job had been to ferry the components of an Advance Base to a spot decreed by Service planners: In this case, twenty-five light-years in the general direction of the distant supergiant Deneb. With the construction crew transformed into the A-Cyg staff,
Descartes
waited there like a white elephant for a survey crew to take her further. Neale’s crew.

But the
Tycho
had been designed for just one purpose. It was a better
Dove
, not an unwieldy hybrid. Its L-series drive made it 5 percent faster than the
Descartes;
in Neale’s eyes, its newness made it 100 percent more desirable.
It should have been mine
, she thought almost daily.
But they gave me the hand-me-down
.

When she expressed that complaint privately to a sympathetic rating in the Flight Office, she learned of a second affront to add to her list. Her appointment had come by the narrowest of margins, 3-2; her opponents would have given the position to Keene Rogen, her exec.

“They’re both recidivist sexists,” her source confided. “Everybody knows they didn’t want to give it to a woman, but they we’re careful to build up Rogen instead of tearing you down. Otherwise they’d have been reprimanded for sure. So they gave you
Descartes
as a compromise.”

The idea that “everyone knew” but no one did anything kept Neale simmering for several days. No better received was hearing the way Tamm described her and her crew during his appearance on an interview show broadcast net-wide.

“I understand
Tycho
’s first task, though, will be to serve as kind of a space taxi,” the interviewer had ventured.

“That’s right,” Tamm had responded. “We’ll have thirty passengers to ferry out to Advance Base Cygnus, at the fringe of explored space. We’ll drop them off, then continue on to begin our prime function of surveying planetary systems.”

We’ll be right on your heels in
Descartes,
damnit
, she thought furiously.
Don’t make it sound like you’re going to scout the whole freezin’ octant by yourself.

“But isn’t the prime function finding more First Colonization civilizations?” the interviewer demanded.

“Not really. There are so many systems, and we have so little basis for saying this one or that one might have a colony, that we really have to think of surveying as the number one task,” Tamm began his answer, and the subject of the second crew never came up again.

Even while the show’s closing credits were still appearing, Neale was on the phone to Alvarez, the supervisor of ship construction.

“I want a mock bridge for my crew,” she demanded. “Something we can use for training simulations en route, and slaved to
Tycho
’s bridge for current status displays. We’ll give up the exercise space.”

Alvarez had started to shake his head almost immediately. “That’s not enough room for one, and there’s not enough time now if it was.”

“I don’t want to hear why it can’t be done.”

“Not hearing them won’t change the facts, Commander Neale,” Alvarez said, bristling. “You’ll have full shipnet access down there, but there’s just not enough time to rig something as complex as a training mockup.”

“Then I want access to the real bridge.”

“There I can’t help you. That’ll be up to Commander Tamm.”

It wasn’t until the next day that she tracked down Tamm, only to find she needn’t have bothered.

“Look, Ali, I can’t see the sense to disrupting my crew’s routine as well as yours,” Tamm told her. “After all, it’s not crucial that you be ready to jump in
Descartes
and roar off the instant we reach A-Cyg. You can stay there a week, two weeks, a month for orientation if you want to. There’s really no rush.”

You’re enjoying this
, she thought, studying his face.
You like having the upper hand
. The discovery puzzled her, since she could think of no residual friction traceable to their time on
Dove
.

“The fact that there are no deadlines doesn’t justify wasted time,” she retorted.

“Oh, of course not. But I’m sure you can find some way to see that your people’s first craze isn’t wasted,” he said superciliously. “It’s only fifty-three days to Cygnus.”

When at last
Tycho
was ready to leave, Neale and Rogen were the only members of the
Descartes
’ crew invited forward to view the departure from the
Tycho
bridge. Neale suspected that, were it not for the fact that bridge video was being made available to Worldnet by the Service, even that small courtesy would have gone by the board. Any sense of commonality among
Dove
alumni had apparently faded quickly.

Tycho
was given an escort comprised of five ships, including a World Council yacht bearing John Langston. Langston was the best known of the several retired Councilors still living, having held a seat in that body for an unprecedented and generally distinguished nineteen years. From him came the traditional “Cleared for departure” signal.

Angling up out of the ecliptic and leaving the escort behind,
Tycho
also received a spectacular salute by means of a kilometre-wide ring of starshell mines. When detonated, the charges formed a perfectly symmetrical yellow halo through which the departing ship passed. It was the first time Neale had seen fireworks in space, and though the
Tycho
’s own monitors failed to capture the effect, the view relayed from Unity reminded her of the opening of a space-warp from early video fiction. She wondered if the parallel were intentional.

“Are we combining our outcrossing ceremony with
Tycho’s
?” Rogen asked.

“We’re not welcome to,” Neale answered curtly. “Don’t you know? The Net wants their ceremony to cap the coverage of
Tycho
’s departure.” She sighed. “That’s all right. I wouldn’t want it that formal anyway, with the Council anthem and the Service fanfare and all the rest.”

Rogen took a moment to digest that news. “We’ll be leaving the heliosphere pretty quick. We should probably go get ready for our own, then,” he suggested as the comtech poked a view of fast-diminishing Earth onto the bridge window. Unity was already invisibly small.

“In a minute,” Neale said wistfully and gestured toward the screen. “I kept trying to find a way to prepare the new crew for that sight, and never did. As little good as came out of coming back, I still think it’s harder to face the second time than it was the first. Because this time we know we’ll never see it again.”