Resurgence

CHAPTER SIXTEEN And then there were none

First the Have-It-All flew away. The ship vanished into the nearby Bose node, taking with it—to who-knew-where—Louis Nenda, Atvar H’sial and their slaves, along with survival specialist Sinara Bellstock. Next to leave were Hans Rebka and Darya Lang, flying off to Iceworld with Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner. Finally, E.C. Tally departed.

The Pride of Orion—what was left of it, after giving birth to the Savior and the Tally-ho—felt like a dead ship.

At first Torran Veck and Teri Dahl avoided each other’s company. Both felt like failures, the specialists that no one had a use for. Neither wanted the company of still another failure. But finally, with the arrival of Tally’s message, they had to talk to each other.

“What does he mean, I have discovered a planetoid to which some intelligent agent may have made modifications?” Teri Dahl was lightly built, with long, slim limbs, dark-brown hair, and a coffee complexion. Her constant irritation was being mistaken for a child. She was sitting cross-legged on the bunk in Torran Veck’s cabin. “If that embodied computer were a human, he’d be a moron. Tally couldn’t have been more vague if he tried.”

“It’s ridiculous.” Torran Veck occupied—and overflowed—the only chair. “Graves received that message hours ago, and since then there hasn’t been another word. Suppose Tally is in trouble? We know the exact location of his ship, and you and I are trained survival specialists. Why aren’t we heading out there. Why are we sitting doing nothing?”

“Why are we here at all, when Ben Blesh and Sinara Bellstock and Lara Quistner are away on assignments?” Teri glanced at the cabin eye, confirming that it was turned off. It was, but even so she lowered her voice. “When we were in our final stages of training, did you have an affair with one of the instructors?”

“What if I did?” If Torran Veck was startled by the sudden change of subject, he did not let it show. “It wasn’t forbidden, and I wasn’t the only one. I certainly didn’t get favored treatment on any of the tests—Mandy was probably harder on me than anyone else.”

“I believe you. I’m not suggesting you had an easy time. But I’ll tell you one thing. If I’d had something going with an instructor, after our training was all done there were certain questions I couldn’t have resisted asking Mandy.”

“Like?”

“Like how well I had done, compared with others. That wouldn’t be giving me an advantage. It would just be pillow talk.”

“Mm.” Torran Veck had a big, fleshy nose. He tended to pinch the bridge between finger and thumb when he was thinking. He held it now. “What gave us away? We agreed there would be no signs of public affection and no favoritism. Otherwise we’d both have been in trouble.”

“You overdid it. Both of you. In the classes, Mandy was hard on you when there was no reason. And you never looked directly at her.”

“Mm.”

“Well? Did you? Ask questions, I mean, about how you had done?”

“Maybe.”

“And perhaps how other people had done?”

“So what if I did? Teri, where are you taking this?”

“I didn’t have Mandy’s ear, but all during training I couldn’t help comparing the members of our group. I watched you perform, and Lara, and everyone else. I bet you did the same.”

“Of course I did.”

“But you had Mandy to confirm your gut reactions. I didn’t. I’ll tell you what I think, and I’d like your comment. All right?”

“Maybe.”

“There were two stand-out trainees in our group. Their names were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl. You and me. We were easily the best of the bunch, and there was hardly a whisker separating our final scores.”

Torran stopped holding the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure you didn’t have inside information?”

“Not a scrap. But I use my eyes and ears, same as you do. Comments?”

“Some of these are Mandy’s, not mine—though I agree with you and her, we were both top of the class, kick-ass compared with the others. Ben’s smart, but he has these feelings of inadequacy. That makes him want to do wild things, just to prove he can. He gets scared, but he’ll try to be a hero even if it kills him. If Ben gets into trouble it will be because he thinks that when you are in charge it’s a weakness to say you don’t understand or don’t know. Lara is smart, too—hell, we all are. But her personality has a built-in contradiction. She doesn’t really want to run things. So she takes orders—but then she resents being given them. She will get into trouble trying to prove that she makes command decisions as well as anyone, when in fact she doesn’t.”

He paused, until Teri asked, “That leaves Sinara. What about her?”

“Mandy has a soft spot for Sinara.”

“So do you.”

“A little. I have a soft spot for you, too, but not enough to distort my judgment of either of you. Sinara ought never to have become a survival specialist. She has mood swings. Sometimes she’s all dreamy and romantic, sometimes she’s a practicing nymphomaniac.”

“You would know, I suppose.”

“Don’t go by rumors. Anyway, Sinara isn’t exactly what you would call a responsible person. If Ben is looking to be a hero, Sinara is looking to find one. Mandy believes Sinara only went into this business because her family wanted her to—father’s dying wish and all that. He was in the same line of work, killed in the Castlemaine disaster. But Sinara shouldn’t be looking after other people. She needs somebody to look after her.”

“Now she’s off with Louis Nenda and his crew of alien thugs. Heaven help her. I can’t see him taking care of anybody but himself.”

“Look on the bright side. Maybe this is what she needs to sort her out. But I don’t think you asked if you could come to my cabin so we could sympathize with Sinara or anyone else. Where are you going with all this?”

“I’m going to see Julian Graves. But I wanted to talk to you first.” Teri uncrossed her legs and stood up from the bunk in one easy movement. “I think you ought to come with me. You’ve confirmed what I have been thinking, now let’s find out what Graves has in his head. He must have been given a detailed report on each of us before the Pride of Orion ever left Upside Miranda Port. I want to ask him: Why has he left his best two survival team members—no time for false modesty, Arabella Lund as good as told us that herself—to sit here staring at our belly buttons, while others who are less qualified are taking the risks?”

Teri had felt and sounded totally confident when she talked to Torran Veck. She could feel that assurance draining away when their knock on the door of Graves’s cabin was answered with a quiet, “Enter.”

The councilor managed to be a formidable presence without even trying. It wasn’t his size—Torran topped him by half a head. And it wasn’t his manner, which was unfailingly polite and courteous. Maybe it was the knowledge that the misty blue eyes of Julian Graves had looked on multiple cases of genocide. The brain within the bulging cranium had been forced to make lose-lose decisions that condemned whole species in order to spare others. Every one of those choices was graven in the deep furrows on face and forehead.

There was no sign of that traumatic past in the warm smile that greeted Teri and Torran, or in the friendly, “What can I do for you?”

Teri’s self-confidence dropped another notch. It was Torran who finally said, “Can we put it the other way round? Everyone else is busy, working to find a way to reach the Marglotta home world. Teri and I have been sitting around for days, totally useless. What can we do for you, or for anybody?”

“To begin with, you can sit down.” Graves waved them to seats. His cabin on the Pride of Orion was bigger than anyone else’s, but so crowded with consoles and displays there was hardly room for its table and six chairs. Teri slid in easily enough, but Torran had to squeeze through and fitted the space between table and wall like a cork in a bottle.

Graves went on, “I have been well aware of your lack of activity, and I expected your arrival before this. Let me congratulate you on the patience that you have shown. However, it was impossible for me to meet usefully with you until certain other activities were complete. When you learn what those activities imply, perhaps you will decide that your enforced idleness was not so bad after all.”

He placed himself so that he faced Teri and Torran directly across the table. “You have borne with me for a long time. I ask you to bear with me a little longer, for what may initially seem to be a tedious explanation of the obvious. My aim will fairly soon become clear; but first, a simple fact: there are at least thirty sentient species scattered around our own Orion Arm. In my role as Ethical Councilor, I have encountered and been obliged to deal with more than half of those. An equal number of intelligent species probably exist here in the Sagittarius Arm, although the only one with which I have direct experience is the Chism Polyphemes. The species vary widely in their physiology, their reproductive habits, their life styles, and their notions of morality. What they do not vary in—what is common to every one of them—is the underlying logic of their thought processes. When it comes to the way that we think, even the most alien species follows the same patterns as we do. Are you with me so far?”

Teri said, “We all think the same. Except—” She paused, unsure of herself.

Graves smiled. “My dear, I see that you are not only with my argument, you are ahead of it. As you say, except. Except that we find ourselves in a situation for which the laws of logic do not appear to apply. Before we embarked on this journey we were provided—you might say, spoon-fed—a set of Bose transition coordinates to carry us across the Gulf. Our end point was to be the Marglotta home world. We crossed the Gulf successfully. But rather than finding the Marglotta, instead we find this.” He waved an arm. “This, a barren system where the central star suffered some unnatural fate, where there is no sign of life, and where one planet is impossibly cold. The general answer was to blame the perfidious Polypheme. As a habitual liar, it had deliberately directed us to this system in order to keep secret the whereabouts of our real destination. Everyone agreed, we should not be here. Everyone was eager to be on their way immediately, to find and proceed to Marglot.

“You may argue that I could have said no. I could have insisted that we do additional analysis. I am, after all, the official leader of this expedition. But as you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is treated by others. On this expedition there are individuals with far more experience than I of unknown territories and hidden danger. Unlike you, they lack respect for authority. Had I attempted to propose analysis rather than action, I would have faced open rebellion. Uncomfortable as I was with my own decision, I therefore permitted them to go. I would, however, remain here. I did not reject the need for action. I merely postponed it, until I could prove a conjecture. And I would keep with me the most competent members of the survival team.”

Torran nodded and smiled. Teri did not smile, and she felt embarrassed. She wondered why the councilor was taking such care to lavish compliments. He wanted something from them, but what could it be?

Graves went on, “Let me tell you my difficulty, and see how you react. I have been puzzled since the moment we arrived here by three observations which are either facts, or at least strong conjectures. First, everyone has emphasized that the Chism Polypheme was dead when it arrived at Miranda. Polyphemes enjoy enormously long life spans. Surely this means that the Polypheme never expected to die in transit. It thought that it would bring the Marglotta to Miranda, and return with them—and us—to the Sag Arm. Second, the death of the Marglotta on the Polypheme’s ship was also not anticipated. They, too, must have expected to reach us and tell us of their problems. They hoped we would go with them to their home world of Marglot. So the fact that Polyphemes are traditional liars is not relevant, unless the Marglotta are also liars. Not one persistently lying species, but two? As I told Professor Lang on another subject, I do not like to concatenate implausibilities. And now for my third observation: there were many Marglotta on the ship—eighteen of them. There was a single Chism Polypheme, and the Polyphemes are justly famous as navigators. If you agree with all this, what conclusions would you draw?”

Teri and Torran turned to glance at each other. He gave a little wave of his index finger. You first.

She grimaced. Thanks a lot. Let me be wrong. And to Julian Graves, “It was the Marglotta’s idea to come to the Orion Arm. They were in charge, and the Polypheme was just a hired hand.”

“Precisely. Which means?”

Teri nudged Torran’s leg under the table. Your turn.

He grunted, and said, “There would be no point at all in the Polypheme trying to keep the final destination secret. The Marglotta would have been right there to answer our questions.”

“And therefore?”

“We didn’t blunder into this system by accident. It was intended that our ship would arrive, just where we did—and it must be possible to reach Marglot through a Bose transition point located right here.”

“Exactly. Which leaves a single question, but one with huge potential consequences: we can reenter the same node by which we came here. It is sitting a few minutes away. But what transition sequence from here might take us to Marglotta?”

Teri and Torran glanced across at one of the displays, where a faint circle of opalescence indicated the presence of the nearby Bose node.

The theory that explained the Bose network in terms of multi-connected spacetimes was so complex that very few people understood it. The practical use was another matter. It was often said that any fool with a suitably equipped ship could enter a Bose node; but that only an absolute fool would try it, without first being in possession of the eighty-four digits that specified the connection between an entry node and the desired exit point. Used correctly, the Bose network had a zero failure rate. Used incorrectly, by specifying an invalid digit stream, one of two things would happen. If you were lucky and you made an error in the entry point digits, the string would be rejected and you would pop back into normal space exactly where you had entered the node. If you were unlucky and you made an error in the exit point digits, you might know your fate but no one else would. Ships which were discovered by retrospective analysis to have used an invalid exit digit set were never heard from again.

“An impossible problem.” Julian Graves was closely watching the expression on the others’ faces. “We know where we are, which gives us the input coordinates for a Bose transition. We could follow the method used by Louis Nenda and the Have-It-All, pick some other Bose node, generate the entire digit string, make the jump, and hope we arrive where we want to be. With the screening process they propose, that certainly won’t be the Marglot system. But it might be a place where someone can tell them how to reach that system. Fairly simple, probably fairly safe, but at best an indirect approach. However, I don’t want just any exit node. I want the digit string of the correct exit node—in the Marglot system.”

Teri said, “Which means we must know the exact string of forty-two numbers. I don’t like those odds.”

“Nor do I. I asked—or, to be more specific, Steven, who is better at this kind of thing than I am, asked—how much those odds might be improved using other information. We cannot achieve certainty, that would be too much to ask for, but can we reduce the risk to an acceptable level?”

Torran Veck raised his eyebrows, which Teri took to mean, Are you out of your mind?

But no one spoke, until Julian Graves continued. “What do we know? Well, we have the exact sequences for a couple of thousand Bose nodes in our own Orion Arm, plus everything for the Bose nodes defined in the Sag Arm and held within the data bank of the Polypheme’s ship. If Bose digit strings were random, that would not be any use at all. We would be ruling out only a few thousand numbers, and leaving endless trillions of trillions of possible but incorrect sequences. It does not take the computational powers of Steven or E.C. Tally to recognize that avenue leads nowhere. At the same time, I remained convinced that we were all missing something. The clue as to what that might be came when I was pondering the way that the Chism Polypheme at Miranda Port died. We know that a Polypheme will normally live for many thousands of years—we don’t know quite how many—before it succumbs to natural causes. That’s why it was so surprising to encounter a dead one. But turn that logic around. A Polypheme will live for ages, but it can be killed, like anything else, by violence or by accident. We often emphasize that Polyphemes don’t tell the truth, but maybe we should emphasize even more that they do not take risks. Think how averse to danger you would be if your normal life expectancy extended over many thousands of years. That tells us something else. No Polypheme would ever expose itself to the totally avoidable risk of attempting a Bose transition with an invalid digit string. And that has another implication.”

Torran said softly, “The Polypheme had all the sequences to bring us here. He must also have possessed the correct sequence to return to the final Marglot destination.”

“Exactly so. He would not have risked remembering it. Nor would he store the sequence in an open file. The number string must have been stored somewhere in the ship’s data banks, in a hidden place from which the Polypheme could recall it when it was needed.”

“But the data banks—” Teri paused. “They don’t have just millions or billions of numbers, they have many trillions of them. Everything from artifact catalogs to navigational data to engineering data. I’m sure they also contain all the standard encyclopedias for many worlds and many species.”

“Quite true. An impossible job, right, to find the forty-two digit sequence that we need? Impossible to us, that is—but not impossible to E.C. Tally. It’s a natural for him. Remember, he already downloaded everything in the Polypheme ship’s data banks into his own memory.

“I asked him to do four things. First, to take the known digit sequences of every known Bose node, and derive from them as many characteristic string properties and statistics as he could. Second, to sort out from the data banks of the Polypheme ship every discrete and identifiable forty-two-digit sequence—I knew there would be trillions of them. Third, to test every one of those sequences to see if they possessed the statistical properties derived from known Bose node sequences. And finally, to provide a ranked list of matches in order of their goodness of fit, together with some numerical measure of confidence in the result.”

Teri muttered, almost to herself, “An absolutely monstrous job.”

“Agreed. It is monstrous, even Steven admitted that it would be quite beyond him. But it’s meat and drink to an embodied computer like Tally. He ate it up. I had no idea how long it might take him, days or weeks or months. But he was finished in a few hours. Do you want to see the results?”

The councilor did not wait for an answer. A long table of figures appeared on the wall display behind him. While Torran and Teri studied it, he went on, “As you can see, we have no certainties, no hundred percent fit.”

“But isn’t that wrong?” Torran Veck was scowling at the screen. “If the number one choice really does represent a Bose node, shouldn’t it be on the list?”

“I don’t think so. The Chism Polypheme didn’t want his private navigation secrets revealed to anybody who tapped his ship’s data banks. He deliberately excluded the Bose coordinates of the final destination from his ‘official’ list of nodes.”

“Seventy-two percent probability.” Teri had scanned the whole list. “That’s the best fit. It’s not very good. And the next one is way down, at only eight percent odds.”

“Is the glass half full, or is it half empty? Seventy-two percent doesn’t sound too great, I agree. But it’s so enormously better than eight percent, what are the chances that one match so good would pop up at random?”

Torran said, “You tell us.”

“I’ll tell you what Steven says. It’s only one in a thousand that the digit string you are looking at isn’t a genuine Bose sequence. But that doesn’t mean most of you will survive if you try it and it’s wrong. It’s all, or it’s nothing. And I’m certainly not going to try to persuade you to take the risk. I’d be quite happy if you would agree to stay here, with the Pride of Orion, and serve to coordinate whatever anyone else learns.”

Teri asked, “While you do what?”

“While I grow another ship, and make a Bose transition with it.”

“Forget that.” Torran tried to stand up, but there was not enough space at the table to permit it. “We were trained as survival team members. You just told us that we were the best of the group. Arabella Lund as much as said the same thing. If you go, we go. What are your qualifications in survival training?”

“Very limited. I could say that I have survived a large number of dangerous situations, but most of those could have been pure luck. However, that is irrelevant. Do you—both of you—wish to make the Bose transition with me?”

In unison, “We do.” Torran added, “Damn right we do. If you like we’ll go without you—we were trained in survival techniques. But no way are you going without us.”

“Then there are numerous preparations to be made. A new ship must be grown. Since the Pride of Orion will be without a crew, it must be left in a suitable condition to receive and relay all messages arriving from others. I must also send word of our proposed actions to Professor Lang’s group, and to E.C. Tally. If you will excuse me . . . ”

Graves hurried out. Torran Veck, pushing hard, moved the table far enough for him to move from behind it and stand up. He said, “A bit eager to leave us, don’t you think? You know what that means?”

“I have a good idea.”

“Graves had all his information days ago, before E.C. Tally left. He has been sitting on it, waiting.”

“Right.” Teri, penned in by Torran, was at last free to move from her seat. “Waiting until we went stir crazy and came looking for him. He knew that by now we would be so keen to see action, we would go along with whatever he suggested.”

“So we were manipulated.” Torran shook his head. “By a master. He’s damn good at it. Maybe that’s what it takes to be an Ethical Councilor—patience and cunning. I hope there’s more to it than that.”

“We could always back out.” They stared at each other, until Teri laughed. “No way, right? Better death than terminal boredom. But we have only seventy-two percent odds in our favor. That means there’s a twenty-eight percent chance that we’ll make a Bose jump, and end up God-knows-where, or nowhere at all. What then?”

“Then?” Torran draped his massive arm over Teri’s shoulder. “Why, then we find out how good as survival specialists we really are. Come on, Teri. If we’re going to kill ourselves, I’d rather get it over with sooner than later.”

The No Regrets, created from the shrinking body of the Pride of Orion and newly named by Teri Dahl, stood at the very edge of the Bose node. Torran Veck was checking the final matching of entry velocity.

“As good as it gets,” he said. “If the exit sequence is wrong, a few millimeters a second won’t make any difference at all. We’ll be in limbo. Whenever you are ready.”

Julian Graves was at an observation window. He was staring not at the nearby pearly radiance of the Bose node, but far off to where Iceworld, invisible to all sensors, orbited its dark primary.

“I wish we could have had word from Professor Lang before we left,” he said. “We have received nothing—not even their signal beacon.”

“Whenever you are ready.”

“I heard you.” Graves sighed. “Go ahead. After three days of silence, another minute is unlikely to make a difference. And the Pride of Orion will continue to wait for signals, from us or the others, for as long as needed.”

Torran Veck guided the No Regrets forward into the Bose node. Behind them, the parent ship began its lonely vigil. The power supply was enough to allow it to monitor events for a million years. Even so, Julian Graves was wrong when he said that the ship would wait for their signals for as long as needed. Neither Graves nor the ship’s computer knew it, but all members of the Pride of Orion’s crew, human and alien, had departed this stellar system and would never return.