Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

“It’s not possible,” breathed the watch officer.

Her design suggested a simpler age, a more heroic time. Maybe it was the ship itself, maybe it was the tangle of associations we all had with her. I’d seen Marcross’s magnificent rendering of her in the main lobby of the Hall of the People on Rimway, flanked by portraits of Christopher and Tarien Sim, the brothers who had stood almost alone against the Mutes. And every child on every world in the Confederacy knew the simple inscription carved in marble at the base of the central painting: Never Again .

“My God,” said the watch officer, his voice little more than a whisper. “It’s the Corsarius .”

After a while, the ship began to draw away from us; the details blurred and faded.

The Tenandrome was in a high geosynchronous orbit: we were taking our first team on board when the Corsarius began its long descent toward the nightside. But Carmody’s telescopes still held it in the center of the monitors, and I alternated between watching it and scrolling through library accounts of its exploits.

All the vessels in Christopher Sim’s Dellacondan squadron had displayed the black harridan, a ferocious predator much admired on their mountainous world; but only the commander himself had placed the symbol within the crescent moon, “to ensure the enemy can find me.”

The ship plunged down the sky into the twilight, a thing of legend and history and pride. At the end, when all had seemed lost, and only the last few ships of the Dellacondan squadron had stood against the all-conquering invader, her crew had abandoned her. And Christopher Sim had gone down to the bars and dens of lost Abonai, where he’d found the seven nameless men and women who’d ridden with him on that final brilliant sally.

The navigator’s fingers danced across his presspads. He glanced at the Captain. McIras looked at her own panel and nodded. “Axial tilt’s eleven degrees,” she said. “And it’s rolling. It’s been there a long time.”

Images flickered across the command screen, tail sections and communication assemblies and stress factors. “Is it,” I asked, “what it appears to be?”

She shrugged, but there was discomfort in the gesture. “Sim and his ship died off Rigel two centuries ago.”

It was dwindling quickly now, falling through the dusk, plunging toward the terminator. I watched it during those last moments before it lost the sunlight, waiting, wondering perhaps whether it wasn’t some phantasm of the night which, with the morning, would leave no trace of its passing.

It dropped into the planetary shadow.

“I’m still getting a good visual,” said the navigator, surprised. It was indeed still visible, a pale, ghostly luminescence. A chill felt its way up my spine, and I looked around at the crew, startled to see that even on the bridge of a modern starship people can react to the subtle tug ofthe supernatural.

“Where the hell,” asked Carmody, “is the reflection coming from? The moons aren’t in her sky.”

“Running lights,” said McIras. “Its running lights are on.”

McIras stayed on the bridge through her sleep period. I don’t know whether she thought something would move up on us in the dark, but the truth was that everyone was a bit unnerved. They’d assigned one of the pilots’ seats to me as a courtesy, but I dozed in it, and woke cold and stiff in the middle of the night. The Captain poured me a coffee and asked how I felt.

“Okay,” I said. “How are we doing?”

She replied that we were doing fine, that we’d recovered our first four teams, and that the others were on their way.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

She took a long time answering. The computers were running the ship; the bridge was in semidarkness, with only the watch officer actually required to be awake. Several others, who usually would have secured for the night, were asleep at their stations. We were no longer at Condition Two, but the tension was still tangible. The instrument lights caught eyes, and reflected against the sheen of her dark skin. Her breathing was audible; it was part of the pulse of the ship, one with the muted bleeps and whistles of the computers and the occasional creak of metal walls protesting some minor adjustment of velocity or course, and the thousand other sounds which one hears between the stars at night.

“I keep thinking,” she said, “about the legend that he will come back in the Confederacy’s supreme hour of need.” She slid into a seat and lifted her cup to her lips. “It isn’t from Rimway.” She meant the coffee. “I’m sure you can tell. Logistics had a little mixup and we’ve had to make do with what they sent us.”

“Saje,” I asked, “what are you going to do?”

“The wrong thing. Hugh, if I could arrange to have everyone forget what they’ve seen, I’d erase the record, go somewhere else, and never come back. That thing out there, I don’t know what it is, nor how it could be what it seems, but it doesn’t belong in this sky, or any sky. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“You’re stuck with it,” I said.

She stared at its image. It had come round the curve of the planet and was again closing on us. “I was reading his book during the night.”

“Sim’s?” That was of course Man and Olympian , his history of classical Greece.

“Yes. He was something of a radical. He comes down hard for example on Socrates. Thinks the old bastard got just what he deserved.” I had known that, but had never been particularly interested in the details. Before now. “He says the judge and jury were right. That Socrates was in fact undermining the polis with a system of values that, although admirable in themselves, were nevertheless disrupting Athenian life.”

“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” I said.

“That’s what the critics thought, too. Sim blasted them later, in a second book that he didn’t live to finish.” She smiled. “Tarien said somewhere that his brother didn’t object to critics as long as he could have the last word. It’s a pity they never present this side of him in the schools. The Christopher Sim the kids get to see comes off as perfect, preachy,and fearless.” Her brow furrowed. “I wonder what he’d have made of a ghost ship?”

“He’d have boarded. Or, if he couldn’t board, he’d have looked for more information, and found something else to think about in the meantime.”

She walked away, and I called Man and Olympian up out of the library. It was a standard classic that no one really read anymore, except in undergraduate survey classes. My impression of it, derived from a cursory reading thirty years before, was that its reputation was based primarily on the fact that it was the product of a famous man. So I leaned back in the cushions, drew the screen close, and prepared to be lulled back to sleep.

But Sim’s Hellas was too vital a place to allow that: its early pages were filled with Xerxes’ rage (“O Master, remember the Athenians”), Themistocles’ statesmanship, and the valor of the troops who stood at Thermopylae. I was struck, not only by the clarity and force of the book, but also by its compassion. It was not what one would ordinarily expect from a military leader. But then, Sim had not begun as a military leader: he’d been a teacher when the trouble started. And ironically, while he made his reputation as a naval tactician, his brother Tarien, who’d begun the war as a fleet officer, became known eventually as the great statesman of the period.

His views are essentially Olympian: one feels that Christopher Sim speaks for History, and if his perspective is not always quite that of those who have gone before, there is no doubt where the misperceptions lie. His is the supreme judgment.