“It’s beautiful, Chendor.” Elysen stood in the studio doorway.
I thought I’d closed the door, but perhaps I had not. “It needs work.”
“It’s still beautiful. It’s haunting.”
That was the idea, but I wasn’t satisfied. The silver of the towers held a shade too much blue. The darkness beyond the rounded dome of the tower on the right wasn’t ominous enough. It didn’t press in with the hunger that I’d felt when I’d looked at the blackness beyond the lights that Nuovyl and I had used.
“The painting doesn’t do it justice.” Not yet anyway. “You’d understand if you’d gone down and seen the towers.”
“I’m better off not going down. Twenty percent higher gravity would be too much of a strain for any length of time.”
“I wish you could have seen the towers.” And I did.
“That’s why you’re here.” She smiled, warmly. “So that everyone everywhere can see them as you saw and felt them.”
“That makes it my interpretation.”
“Who better to make it?”
“I’m not sure I want that kind of responsibility. What people think of the Danannians—they’re not really from Danann, are they? So why do we call them that?”
“All human cultures are cultures of names. All too often we think we know something once we give it a name. That’s why what you’re doing is so important.”
That didn’t make the sudden weight on my shoulders any lighter.
“Are you going to include pictures of the pilots?” she asked.
I could tell the question wasn’t casual. “You think I should.”
“It’s another aspect of contrast.”
I understood what she hadn’t said. The more effective I was at portraying the aiienness of Danann, the more necessary the touches of human faces and human artifacts would be, in order to convey that Danann was real—and not just a series of representations from my imagination. Creating that balance might be harder than representing Danann accurately.
43
Chang
Barely made it to the mess for the evening meal on threeday evening before the captain did. Had to take the first seat I could find and ended up beside Major Singh. He was the navigator. On the other side was Lieutenant Tuala, the one needleboat pilot I’d really never met, just seen infrequently in the ready room, the mess, or on the ramps or lifts.
“Are you in navigation as well?”
Tuala nodded, almost shyly. “Assistant navigator.”
“Most of the time,” Singh added. “Except when he’s getting an adrenaline fix in one of the needles.”
“I’m just a backup pilot,” Tuala added. “Qualified, but I don’t see much time in the cockpit, except for fams or routine runs.”
Almost suggested that he might now, but realized nothing had changed. The Magellan had one less pilot, but one less needle.
“Better for you,” Singh pointed out. “Mortality of needle pilots in combat is thirty percent.”
Noted that Singh didn’t wear wings. Most navigators were pilots or former pilots. “Were you ever a pilot?”
“Fifteen years was enough.” He chuckled. “I could have kept the wings if I’d spent another five as a needle pilot or a command pilot, but I couldn’t handle multiple links and didn’t want to risk another five years when the politicians were talking about a limited border action against the Covenanters. Limited border actions are hard on needle pilots.” He looked past me at Tuala. “Keep telling the young fellow that, but he likes those wings.”
“The extra pay isn’t bad, either,” Tuala quipped.
“Youth…” Singh shook his head. “It’s a miracle any of them survive it.”
Didn’t know whether to be complimented or insulted by the assumption that I wasn’t “youth.”
Major Singh took several sips of the coffee, then set the mug down. “I always hope, but D.S.S. coffee tastes the same in every ship.”
“Better than the stuff on a lot of orbit stations,” I pointed out.
“I had hoped it might be different here, but the cooks are still D.S.S.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I was the engineer on the Tours. The exec, she came from the Dauntless.”
Didn’t know either. Wasn’t surprising with so many D.S.S. ships. “The Dauntless?”
“She’s one of the older dreadnoughts. Commander Lilekalani was the exec there. Thought she would have gotten her own command, or at least become an exec on a new dreadnought Same’s true of Captain Spier. Pulled her from command of Courageous.”
“They probably wanted experience.”
“That was my thought Commander Morgan, he doesn’t fit that, though. He was the exec on the Bruce years back, then went to D.S.S. headquarters, some say logistics, others say he spent time on the planning staff. I even heard rumors about intelligence. I thought he’d retired.”
“Logistics or planning… maybe he was in on the planning of the expedition,” I suggested. Intelligence made as much sense as the others. Maybe more, but I wasn’t about to say so.
“So D.S.S. stuck him here to make sure everything went the way it was supposed to?” Singh looked at the coffee mug. Didn’t pick it up. “That could be. He caught every detail when he was number two on the Bruce.”
“He catches them now,” Tuala said, almost under his breath.
“You expected something else?” asked Singh.
Half the table grinned. So did I.
44
Fitzhugh
The first day on Danann, Nuovyl and I went though seven towers, one of each of the general configurations used in the megaplex. In an area of over a quarter million square kays, there were only seven basic structures, although the necessarily sketchy surveys suggested that each tower differed slightly from every other one of the same type.
The second day, I dragged myself out of the bunk and stood there, stretching sore and tight muscles—not so sore as they could have been without the workouts.
“It doesn’t get any easier.” Dashiell Grant-Wong grinned at me from the adjoining bunk. He was an electrical engineer, but I’d never encountered one with three separate doctorates who understood every aspect of electronic flows beginning with weak and strong atomic forces.
“How long have you been down here?” “From the beginning, with two breaks up on the ship.” “Have you discovered anything of interest?” “It’s what I haven’t discovered that’s interesting.” Because I was experiencing a headache, I merely looked at him.
“There’s no discrete framework or infrastructure for power or energy transmission. The towers would require more energy than could be supplied by solar energy, and that’s assuming that the anomalous composites provided one hundred percent efficiency of conversion. They’re also atmospherically permeable under certain conditions. Those conditions suggest an atmosphere with twenty percent more oxygen than Tellurian norm.”
With an effort less than supreme, but more than normal, I stretched another set of protesting muscles. “So we have towers constructed out of a material we cannot analyze or replicate powered by electricity or other energy flows we cannot trace—”
“We’re getting good analyses.” Grant-Wong’s mouth twisted into a grimacing smile. “We just can’t figure out how they created what we’ve analyzed. Then, it also could be that the TOE is wrong.”
“TOE?”
“Theory of Everything.”