Enigma (8 page)
There was one message remaining in the queue, and for one brief moment of wish-fulfilling weakness Thackery allowed himself to hope it might be from Langston—from his father. Even now, as little as it would be, it would mean so much—
But there were to be no tidy endings. The final message was a routine congratulatory from the current dean of Tsiolkovsky Institute, a man whose name meant nothing to Thackery and whose words were formal and meaningless.
Thackery retreated to his bed as a wounded animal goes to his lair. There was almost deliberate cruelty in the way Andra had told him, for it was already too late for him to use the knowledge. There was no way to reach out to Langston, no way to heal the trauma.
Descartes
had crazed, and the wall had gone up. When it came down again, Langston would be dead.
And so would Andra.
He saw with renewed clarity how selfish she was, even at the last. She had given him what he had demanded, but only after waiting long enough to render it valueless. For all her apologies, her message did more to free her conscience than it did to restore what had been stolen from him.
Damn you, Andra! Better you hadn’t told me at all than to tell me now, in this way. You’ve made leaving harder, not easier. And instead of redeeming yourself, you’ve given me another reason to hate you—
Except that she was dead, and he was beginning a new life.
In his mind’s eye, he would still her voice and freeze her form, and he would bury her. With a will, perhaps he could forget her.
That way, he would not have to find a way to forgive her. Because he did not see how that would be possible.
JIADUR’S WAKE)
… For some reason, the Flight Office was eager to see that there was Survey experience aboard every outbound ship. Older surveyors saw it as a sign of creeping conservatism, since the all-novice crews of the Pathfinder and Argo ships had managed to cope with what they encountered.
Nevertheless, the Flight Office worked hard to see that, at minimum, the commander, exec, and contact leader on each new ship were veterans. That was a deceptively ambitious goal. To place three vets on each new Pioneer-class ship and keep even that number for each refitted Pathfinder-class ship, nearly half of each returning crew had to be coaxed into going out again.
But asking a vet to sign a second contract, even a limited-term, three-year mission contract, meant asking them to give up the country-club atmosphere of the resynchronization center at Benamira, New Zealand. It meant asking them to pass up figuring out how to spend the enormous fortune which resulted from sixteen years’ salary invested (even at the Council-imposed ceiling of 3 percent) for more than a century.
There were only two kinds of veterans to whom returning to space was the more attractive alternative: those happy few who had found their identities there, and those unhappy few who had lost their souls…
Hysteresis
Contact Leader Mark Sebright sat on the edge of the lab workstation, crossed his arms over his chest, and surveyed the expectant faces of his surveyors. The team was studying him just as intently, for they had seen little of him since he came aboard.
The last name added to the
Descartes
roster, Sebright was the long-awaited and often despaired-of replacement for Jaiswal (who, according to rumor, had left the Service entirely and gone back to teaching at Hzui-Tyu). And he promised to be a more than adequate stand-in: Sebright was not only a Pathfinder, but a veteran of
Hugin
, the ship which had discovered the Muschynka colony in Eridanus.
Sebright’s assignment was finalized a bare five days before departure, the minimum required to pass him through the gnotobiotic tortures, and two days after the team had transferred to
Tycho
. Thackery had caught only a glimpse of Sebright since then, as the vet had spent most of his time huddled with Neale, Rogen, and Dunn. What little Thackery had seen encouraged him. The rangy, tangle-haired Sebright comported himself confidently and casually. Where Neale seemed to be constantly on edge, Sebright had the worldly-wise eyes and demeanor of someone for whom life holds no more surprises.
“Morning,” Sebright said, his inspection complete. “This won’t take long.”
There were several skeptical smiles, for that was a promise Graeff had made often and never kept.
“I’ve been over your records,” he continued. “You’re a damn sight more educated than we were. Half of you have quals in specialties that didn’t exist until we found out the Service needed them.
“Unfortunately for you, the Com doesn’t agree with me. She says we don’t know enough. She wants to solve it by sending everybody up for another qual test when we reach A-Cyg. That’ll be worth a few more Coullars in the pay account, so I suppose there’s some of you who won’t kick too hard,” he said with a shrug. “But the way I see it, it’s not that we don’t know what to do—”
Eagan, sitting at Thackery’s elbow, whispered, “He should have seen us in Queen Maud Land.”
“—It’s that what we know how to do doesn’t need doing yet,” Sebright continued. “I suspect she’s a lot more worried about idle time on the leg out than she is about your quals. If it were up to me, I’d say enjoy it while it lasts. It’ll probably be the last vacation you have until you die or transfer out.
“You wouldn’t know it from your simulations, but once we hit our first system, we’ll be working harder than anyone on board. And when we leave the first system, we’ll be running three shifts during the craze just to analyze the data we collected. Unfortunately, we’ll reach the second system before we’re done with the first—and the backlog will build from there.”
He paused and scratched his chin. “So I can’t tell you what freezin’ good passing another technical will do you. But Neale expects it. I’ll leave it up to you to see that you’re ready. Pick a new area or try to move up to the next level in your current ratings, I don’t care which. And you can sync yourself to whatever shift you choose.”
“Do you want to approve our study plans?” asked Tyszka.
Sebright shook his head. “I don’t even want to know that you have one. Hell, you’re not students or trainees. You’re professionals. That little trinket you’re all wearing proves it, right? So start living up to it these next few weeks.” He stood up and tucked his hands into the thigh pockets of his old-fashioned jumpsuit. “That’s all.”
As the meeting broke up, Muir planted her gamine body in front of Thackery.
“What do you think?” demanded the exobiologist. “I think I like him, Donna,” Thackery said, watching Se-bright out the door. “Did you hear? He intended all along to bump someone from either
Tycho
or
Descartes
.”
“So?”
“He didn’t tell them until the last minute because he wanted to avoid the ‘nuisance’ of preflight training.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“From someone in the Flight Office.” A cross look took over her face. “They should have let Raji stay on. It wasn’t his fault we screwed up down south.”
“Sure it was. He was Contact Leader,” Thackery said, standing. “Look, Sebright is the only one aboard, command crew included, who’s actually been involved in a successful Contact. We’re going to learn a lot from him.”
“I don’t think so,” Muir said, shaking her head.
“You come to conclusions too fast,” Thackery retorted as he edged past her. “You’ll have to watch that. It’s a bad habit for a surveyor.”
The rush of good feeling stayed with Thackery, and at mid-rats he pursued the topic with Collins. “We’ve done really well, you know?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“To have five vets in our crew.”
“I thought there were four.”
“The Com, the exec, Graeff, Dunn, Sebright.”
“Oh—I forgot about Dunn. He’s that quiet one, isn’t he, who’s always in a little crowd of awks.”
“He
is
senior tech. Anyway, we are lucky, aren’t we? There’s only three on
Tycho
.”
“I suppose,” she said, nibbling the edge of a pastry. “I wonder sometimes what they’re doing here.”
“The
Dove
reups are easy to understand,” Thackery said defensively. “They have something to prove.”
“Because they didn’t find a colony? Maybe there aren’t any more.” She sighed. “No, I shouldn’t say that, it’ll jinx us. But they’ve seen—well, look at it this way. When they step out on their patio at night and look up, there are eighteen flickery points of light that to them are real places. They can point and say, ‘I’ve been there. That’s a place that I know.’ ” She shook her head. “That must be the most wonderful feeling in the world. I don’t know what else they could want.”
Thackery smiled. “Maybe the best feeling isn’t remembering, but being there.”
“Then why don’t they all go back? Oh, I don’t know. Did you hear about Sebright?”
“Stalling the Flight Office? Yeah, that’s made the rounds.”
“No, this is something I heard from Jessie. I guess Sebright doesn’t have full Contact Leader quals.”
“No?”
“No, you know they’re supposed to be qualified in all six survey specialties, like the Com is on operations specialties. But he’s only passed resource geology and technoanalysis. Kind of makes you wonder how far down they had to dig to get him.”
Thackery shook his head. “There’re face quals and real quals. Raji had face quals, and we saw how that worked out. Sebright’s going to be good for us. Besides, I figure the reason he doesn’t want to be bothered with our study plans is because he’s going to be busy with his own.”
“Maybe. He just better not try to tell me how to do my job until he knows at least as much as I do.” She looked at her watch, then wiped her lips on her napkin. “Speaking of which, I’ve got some work to do with Donna,” she said, pushing back from the table.
She took two steps, then stopped and came back to where Thackery sat. “Look, you’re not one of those ones who’s going to think that because we had a conversation, I want to change cabins, are you?”
“No,” Thackery said uncertainly.
“Fine. Because Donna and I are perfectly happy rooming, all right? You can pass that word around if the subject comes up.”
“Sure.”
Her seat had barely begun to cool when Tyszka came up behind Thackery and slipped into it.
“You getting anywhere with her?” he asked earnestly, resting his folded hands on the table before him.
“Not trying to. I haven’t even been thinking in those terms,” Thackery answered honestly.
“You’d better start,” Tyszka said, clucking. “The numbers aren’t good to start with, and some of us are going to be left out.” He stood and surveyed the nearly empty wardroom, then clucked again. “Maybe Donna’s up in the library. I’ll see you when the war’s over, okay?”
Thackery chuckled. “Right.”
Tycho
’s contact team and trying to make the best use of the time on the linguacomp that had been granted them.
“This is your specialty, not mine,” Eagan said dubiously as he regarded the machine’s 318-character keyboard. “Why doesn’t it have voice input?”
“It does,” Thackery said, unfolding the operator’s seat from its storage space against the wainscoat and settling in front of the terminal. “It can monitor any shipnet channel, and do character scans off any medium. This keyboard’s not for input. It’s for processing.”
“I thought all we had to do is tell it the text we want and let it go to work.”
Thackery laughed mockingly. “Don’t we wish. The L-comp is smart. It’s not clairvoyant. Say we feed it a sample of a language it’s never seen before. What can it do with it?”
Eagan scratched his cheek. “I’ll let that be rhetorical.”
“If the sample is too small, it can’t do anything. A lesson from cryptography—sufficiently small sequences are undecodable. But even if your sample is unlimited, there’s a limit to the L-comp’s abilities. Here,” he said, pointing to the screen. “Here’s the first cut on a Journan text sample.”
The complex display was arranged in groups of three lines: The first showed phonetic Journan, the second a standard English translation, and the third a series of two-digit numbers.
“Try reading the English lines and you’ll see this is no universal translator. If it was, they wouldn’t be still trying to figure out how to talk to whales,” Thackery observed.
“The numbers under each word are the confidence probabilities?”
“Yes. Now, I can highlight the object-words, the action-words”—he touched a key, and the display now resembled a tree proof—“or forget the words entirely and look at the proposed syntax.”
“Most of the percentages are between thirty and seventy,” Eagan noted, then wrinkled his nose. “But the L-comp knows Journan.”
“I hid that part of the knowledge base from the inference processor so I could show you what we might be facing. We’re here to operate the L-comp, but we’re also here to make the decisions the L-comp can’t.”
“Or there’s no Contact.”
“Or there’s no Contact,” Thackery agreed. “What are you fluent in, again?”
“English, Russian, and Latin.”
“That’s right. The science languages. All right, here’s the program. We’ll rehearse by trying to Contact each other. I’ll take a language you don’t know, compose a 1000-word practice message in it, and then set up the sign-on so that language and any first cousins are hidden from the processor when you’re working. When you’ve got it translated, compose a standard Contact message in that language. I’ll let you know how you did.”
“And I’ll do the same for you.”
“Right—all the way into A-Cyg, as much as they’ll let us use this thing. Now, watch. I’m going to show you how to set a knowledge base restriction.”
Later, resting in his room, Thackery reflected on the task he had taken on. The machine’s limits were even more severe than he had acknowledged to Eagan. If the language did not parallel a significant number of Earth dialects—for instance, the Romance family—the confidence level for individual words rarely went above 60 percent.
A purely oral language posed its own daunting difficulties. How did you break the flow of sound into words? Were variations in pronunciation mere dialects, or meaning units in themselves? Even with a linguacomp to create the graphemes and search for repetitions and correlations, there was much guesswork and gruntwork involved.
Eagan would learn of those problems, too, when he could face them without concluding that the task was impossible.
For there was no room to think of the task as impossible. Should
Descartes
prove a lucky ship and carry its crew to a First Colonization world, it would be up to Thackery and Eagan to lay the groundwork for the Contact. Unless they and the linguacomp could come up with a satisfactory decoding of the natives’ language, there would be no Contact landing. The team would be limited to whatever could be learned from orbit and from landings outside the inhabited areas—something that had never happened before.
Three months ago, he had accepted the responsibility without truly understanding its dimensions. Now he silently vowed to himself to do everything necessary to see that he was equal to the challenge. He wanted Sebright to have confidence in him. He wanted Neale to have confidence in him.
But before others could, he would have to have confidence in himself.
There were two disadvantages to sharing a cabin with McShane. One was that his bunk and desk seemed to autonomously generate clutter. The other was that he seemed constitutionally incapable of falling asleep without holding a protracted conversation first.
So far the topics had ranged from the contents of the
Tycho
’s entertainment banks (McShane holding forth on the merits of both the inclusions and exclusions) to the mysteries of the AVLO drive (McShane finding it very significant that no one could make him understand how it worked). His favorite time to begin seemed to be just as Thackery was about to fall asleep.
The fifth night out, the question that came out of the dark was: “Did you ever wonder why they named our ship after Descartes?”
Thackery let a portion of his groan become audible, then a portion of his impatience taint his tone as he answered. “No. He was a key figure in the scientific revolution, and an outstanding mathematician.”
“But he was also the one who said that the world around you only existed because you believed in it, and that if you stopped believing in it, it would disappear.”
Thackery laid his head back on the pillow and squeezed his eyes closed. “I’m not sure that’s a fair summation of his ideas about reality.”
“That’s what one of my instructors said,” McShane said defensively.
There followed a long silence that encouraged Thackery to think he had successfully shut McShane off. It was not to be.
“I wonder whose dream this is. I’ve tried to make it disappear but it doesn’t.” Thackery could not be sure McShane was joking but chose to take it that way. “Neale’s, I think.”
“Maybe.” Another long pause. “I haven’t seen her much. Do you know her well?”
“No.” Thackery hesitated.
If he’s determined not to let me sleep, then at least we can talk about what I want to talk about
. “Do you see Sebright? I mean ever?”
“The Contact Leader? No.”
“I was asking Michael today whether Sebright had said anything to him about a briefing on the Muschynka contact. He said he hadn’t seen Sebright for three days.”
“He’s probably sync’d to the C or D watch schedule.”
Thackery missed the impatience in McShane’s voice. “No, because I left a message for Derrel—he’s on that cycle—and he said he hasn’t seen Sebright either.”
“So, Sebright’s a recluse. So what?”
“He’s supposed to be here to give us the benefit of his experience,” Thackery insisted. “We’re five days out and I can’t even find anyone who’s met with him. He doesn’t respond to pages, he doesn’t answer messages, and he’s never in his cabin.”
“Look, I’ve got problems of my own,” McShane said irritably. “If you’ve got a real grievance, go see Neale. If you just want to complain, find some of your own people to listen.”
“McShane, you’re a selfish son-of-a-bitch,” Thackery said tiredly.
McShane jumped up from his bunk. “Damnit, I’m the one with responsibilities on this craze. You don’t have to stand watches. You don’t have Rogen and Graeff breathing down your neck looking for an excuse to replace you. You’re on a freezin’ vacation.”
“Whoa, easy,” Thackery said, snapping on the light. McShane shivered oddly, hung his head, and stood a moment with arms akimbo.
“Sorry,” he said at last. “If your problems aren’t my fault, I guess mine aren’t yours, either.” He sighed expressively and settled back on the bed. “He’s got a single, doesn’t he? Break his damn door down and wait for him. He’s got to show up there sometime.”
Thackery laughed tiredly. “Unless he’s moved in with some little awk from
Tycho
.” He turned out the light and turned on his side. “Who knows,” he said to his pillow, “maybe that’s what I ought to be concentrating on, too.”
For two days, Thackery shifted Sebright to the back of his mind. In that time, he made a token (and profitless) attempt at courting Jessica Baldwin, got off to an encouraging start on his studies for the exobiology qual, and solved the first test message Eagan had composed for him.
But on one of his many trips from the passenger hive upship to the
Tycho
library, he cast a glance as always from the climb-way down the corridor onto which Sebright’s door opened—and saw a woman he did not know push that door open and disappear inside.
For a moment Thackery was torn by ambivalent impulses. Then impatience won out over propriety, and he stepped off the climbway and stalked down the short corridor.
But there was no answer to the page button, no answer to his insistent knock. “Concom Sebright,” he called out, listening for sounds beyond the closure. “This is Merritt Thackery. Can I talk to you?”
There was no answer, no sound at all. Frustrated, Thackery smacked the door release with a balled fist and began to turn away. But the door, which had been locked every time he had been there before, slid open.
Sebright was lying prone in the narrow single cabin, his ankles strapped in a microgravity exercise cradle and one hand gripping the crossbar. Beads of perspiration stood out on his cheeks and forehead, and the longish hair was matted. But his eyes were closed, as though he were sleeping. An instant later, Thackery saw why: The fingertips of Sebright’s right hand were in the grasp of a small black box lying on the bed next to him.
Thackery took in all that in the moment before the woman rose up from the chair beside Sebright and rushed toward Thackery, protectively blocking the view with her body.
“Out,” she demanded.
“He’s on a tranq machine,” Thackery said, disbelieving.
“I’m only going to ask one more time. Then I’ll remove you myself,” she said fiercely. “He’s on a tranq machine!” Thackery repeated, this time indignant.
“That’s none of your damn business.”
“He’s my supervisor and an officer of this ship,” Thackery said, his voice rising. “I’ve got as much right here as anyone, and more right than you.”
Glowering at him with piercing black eyes, she reached behind him and closed the door. “Thackery—look,” she said in a more modulated tone. “He told me he was going to do this and he asked me to look after him. I give him nutrient shots and sponge baths and make sure the exerciser doesn’t hurt him. I read his messages and answer the ones that need answering. If he’s needed somewhere, I come in and wake him up.”
Thackery cast about for a plausible explanation to the inexplicable sight on the bed. “Is he a phobe?” he asked, almost hopefully.
“No. He just—prefers to absent out sometimes. He—doesn’t tolerate boredom well. It’s not my place to talk about it.” His eyes narrowed by suspicion, Thackery asked, “Why are you doing this?”
She smiled tolerantly. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m his four-gen grandniece. I met him when
Munin
came in twelve years ago—I was his greeter. Look, I’ve told you more than I needed to. Now will you go, so I can take care of him?”
“I want to talk to him,” Thackery said stubbornly.
“Why? To see if I’m telling the truth?”
“No. About the team. About Survey business.”
“It can wait.”
“Damnit, no!” Thackery exploded. “He’s got responsibilities. This isn’t just for me. There are six green surveyors that he ought to be working with. Wake him up.”
“No.”
“Why? Will it hurt him?”
“No. But he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“You’re not in his chain of authority. He’ll have to tell me himself.”
She crossed her arms and shook her head stubbornly. “He’ll do his job when it’s time to do it.”
“Part of his job started a week ago.” Thackery paused and looked down at Sebright, then continued in a voice that was quietly threatening. “If he’s getting messages, then there are people who don’t know about this. Like Neale, maybe?”
“People know.”
“Some would have to. But not Neale, right? If you don’t wake him up, she’s going to.”
Her eyes spat angry sparks, but she moved to Sebright’s side all the same. A touch on the tranq box controls, and the metal bands opened to release the vet’s fingers. A few moments later, stirred by an influx of amphetamine molecules in his blood, Sebright opened his eyes.
“Morning, Yolanda. What’s happening?”
Scowling, she jerked a thumb in Thackery’s direction.
“Concom,” Thackery said, taking a step forward.
The older man pulled himself up to a sitting position. “Thackery, isn’t it? The linguist.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s up, Thackery?”
“I’d like to talk to you about Muschynka.”
Sebright looked from Thackery to his grandniece, then back again. “Read about it in the Op Recs,” he said gruffly. “I’ve answered those questions too many times already.”
“But—”
“Sure, you only asked once. But a thousand other people have asked once, too.” Resting his folded arms on the crossbar and his chin on his arms, he looked up at Thackery. “You know how when you try to tell someone about a dream, you’re really trying to tell them about an experience, but you end up telling a story?”
Thackery nodded uncertainly.
“Every time I tell about Muschynka, I lose a little bit more of the experience. Pretty soon all I’ll have left is the story. The story becomes the experience.”
“I don’t understand—”
Sebright nodded. “I didn’t really expect you to. Listen, Thackery. Don’t do this again. You’ll see enough of me once we’re aboard
Descartes
. But until we
have
a ship, we’re not a crew, and my only responsibility is to myself.”
“So you won’t hold a briefing for the team?”
“They can read the Op Recs, too,” he said. “Any more questions, since I’m up?” A hint of a sardonic smile touched his lips.