I was one of the last into the mess at the evening meal on threeday. I’d been in bay two inspecting shuttle one, checking things out, trying to get a better feel for it. Powered up the internal systems and ran through the checklists. Some say you can do that sort of thing with a simulator. You can’t. Not the same. Feel’s important.
Only table with much space and anyone I wanted to talk to held Lerrys, Morgan, and Tepper. Soon as I sat down beside Morgan, Liam Fitzhugh and Alyendra Kho-rana took the last two seats. Fitzhugh sat next to me, Khorana between him and Tepper.
Rather would have had Khorana next to me. Fitzhugh was always spouting something. Not exactly loud, but firm.
I turned to Morgan. “What ever happened to all that debris? The stuff that piled up against the shields? I was thinking about our return. There was enough there to strain shields if we hit it at any high-sublight velocity.”
“The captain decided to push it out of the way and leave it behind,” Morgan said. “She accelerated, pulsed the shields, and changed headings twice. It’s still somewhere around the second Gate, but shoved far enough away so that we won’t run into it coming back.”
“Debris? In space?” asked Khorana.
“The debris from the destruction of the Sunni ship…”
As Morgan explained, I looked toward the captain’s table, where some of the physical scientists had been invited, probably to explain their specialties and what they hoped to find to the Special Deputy Minister. I recognized the faces, but couldn’t put names to all of them. Ferward was there, along with Koch. He was an organic chemist.
“… while space is big, and it’s unlikely that we’d actually run back into that debris,” Morgan was finishing up, “it certainly doesn’t hurt to be cautious and shove it out of the return corridor to the Gate.”
“Such residues wouldn’t include anything explosive, would they?” asked Fitzhugh.
“There might be a torp predetonator, or something like that There wouldn’t be anything else explosive in and of itself. It we hit a lot of mass at high sublight, it could wreak havoc on the shields, and that could be as bad as a torp.”
“My understanding was that shields were deployed in a curved array designed to divert such masses from actual physical impact with the vessel…”
“They’ll divert a few tonnes,” Morgan replied with a laugh. “They won’t divert large metallic asteroids or other ships of significant mass. Or planets or suns.”
Morgan was oversimplifying. The shields would also throw the Magellan out of the way of such large masses. Doing that would make a mess out of the insides of the ship, and anyone who wasn’t restrained. That was why all sorts of detectors were focused ahead of the Magellan. Ships still got lost. I didn’t want to hear any more about what I already knew. I turned to Fitzhugh. “You’re a historian, aren’t you?”
“After a fashion. My expertise lies in historical trends. That includes studying nodal points to determine which factors are causal and which are merely correlative, analyzing seemingly unrelated aspects of a culture’s history to ascertain whether they are part of the trendlines, symptomatic, or merely noise surrounding the signal, so to speak.”
“If… if we find something alien, do you think you’ll be able to make sense of things?”
Fitzhugh paused. “That’s a good question, Lieutenant Chang. I doubt that, if we do find remnants of an alien civilization, there will be cultural referents that will be meaningful, or even intelligible. In fact”—he laughed nervously—”I’ve pondered the rationale for my inclusion in this expedition. Not that I’d give up the opportunity willingly, you understand.”
Had to admit I liked his honesty. Wished he’d give up using the largest possible words, though. “Do you think we’ll find anything worthwhile?”
“To discover remnants of any intelligent life that is nonhuman would be of immense value, if only to disabuse the anthropic principle and those who have used humanity’s apparent uniqueness as a rationale for theistically rationalized tyranny and ignorance.”
“Surely, you don’t consider the Covenanters and the Sunnis as theistically tyrannized?” That was Tepper, sardonic smile after her words.
“No, Major Tepper, perhaps my clarity was lacking. They tyrannize their own people, and would do their best to tyrannize others, rationalizing their actions on the basis of ancient theistic beliefs that state such a deity gave humanity dominance over the universe, but only so long as men, and I use that gendered term advisedly, placed that deity above all and followed the deity’s commandments and those of the deity’s prophets.”
“I don’t think you’ll be on their list of the saved, Professor,” suggested Morgan.
“Nor would I wish to be, not under the conditions they specify for such salvation.”
Had to admit that Fitzhugh’s attitude—under all the words—was more to my liking than a lot of the civilian experts I’d heard. Not that I’d ever see him outside the mess or talk to him once the expedition was over. Still… there was something about him. Talked like a professor, but nothing else was professor-like. He was as big as a Marine, no fat, either. He moved quickly, and his eyes flicked from point to point, like a cat’s. Maybe like his mind did, too.
Didn’t think anyone else saw that, either. They just heard all the big words.
29
Barna
I wasn’t about to ask the three shuttle pilots to sit for a portrait. Instead, I managed to sneak some im-ager shots of them in the officers’ mess, and once in the ship corridors. There was plenty of time to work on that composition, because the farscreens just showed dark patches with faint hazy white globs. I could only get them magnified to barely recognizable images of galaxies. I hadn’t seen much of Elysen for days, not since after the second Gate translation. She and the other astronomers and astrophysicists were already buried in some project.
I just kept working on what I could. I’d created a replica of the Magellan itself, based on the closescreen images I could get and upon the material in the ship’s system, and I’d finished a portrait of Elysen that both she and I liked.
On fourday, just before lunch, she appeared at the door to my studio work space. “Could I persuade a hardworking artist to accompany me?”
“You could.” I rose. I wished I were clever with words, but I never had been. “You’ve been busy.”
“Very busy. It’s been a great amount of work for not much of a result. Not so far, at least.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you about it after I get something to eat It won’t take long.”
“To eat?”
“To tell you.”
We walked down the passageway toward the lifts.
“How many of you are working on this?”
“Just four. Another astronomer, an astrophysicist, a physicist, and me. Cleon and I are limited in what we can add. He’s the physicist and does the calculations. I comment and ask inane questions.”
I couldn’t imagine Elysen asking inane questions.
When we reached the mess, she pointed to a table in the corner, where an older major sat with some of the scientists. I knew their faces, but not their names. “Let’s sit over there. Kaitlin Henjsen can be very interesting, even if she is a close friend of my grandniece.”
Her grandniece? I didn’t know what to say about that, or about her grandmece’s choice of friends. “Which one is she?”
“She’s the thin blonde. She’s an archeological technologist.”