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

“Good.” Falon seized Edward’s elbow and steered him back up into the starlight. The air was clean and tasted good. “But how can you be sure this is his tomb? No name is engraved on it.”

“Nevertheless, it is marked quite clearly. Look behind you.” He pointed at the partly-assembled statue. “Look at the shield.”

A burst of wind pulled at his garment.

Edward held the lantern close. In its flickering light, Falon saw only the curious sword. On the vault, and on the shield.

“It was his device,” Edward said.

Falon pressed his fingers against it. “How can you be so certain? There are many who use weapon devices.”

“This is not a weapon, Falon. It was a symbol sometimes employed by an obscure religious cult. For many centuries, in fact, it was a mark of shame. It was even said to have magic properties.”

“ Not a sword,” said Falon.

Edward nodded. “No. They called it a cross.”

I received a Christmas card last week from Ed Bender. The illustration was a rendering of the celebrated Christmas Eve telecast from Callisto: a lander stands serenely on a rubble-strewn plain, spilling warm yellow light through its windows. Needle peaks rise behind it, and the rim of a crater curves across the foreground. An enormous belted crescent dominates the sky.

In one window, someone has hung a wreath.

It is a moment preserved, a tableau literally created by Cathie Perth, extracted from her prop bag. Somewhere here, locked away among insurance papers and the deed to the house, is the tape of the original telecast, but I’ve never played it. In fact, I’ve seen it only once, on the night of the transmission. But I know the words, Cathie’s words, read by Victor Landolfi in his rich baritone, blending the timeless values of the season with the spectral snows of another world. They appear in schoolbooks now, and on marble.

Inside the card, in large, block defiant letters, Bender had printed “SEPTEMBER!” It is a word with which he hopes to conquer a world. Sometimes, at night, when the snow sparkles under the cold stars (the way it did on Callisto), I think about him, and his quest. And I am very afraid.

I can almost see Cathie’s footprints on the frozen surface. It was a good time, and I wish there were a way to step into the picture, to toast the holidays once more with Victor Landolfi, to hold onto Cathie Perth (and never let go!) and somehow to save us all. It was the end of innocence, a final meeting place for old friends.

We made the Christmas tape over a period of about five days. Cathie took literally hours of visuals, but Callisto is a place of rock and ice and deadening sameness: there is little to soften the effect of cosmic indifference. Which is why all those shots of towering peaks and tumbled boulders were taken at long range, and in half-light. Things not quite seen, she said, are always charming.

Her biggest problem had been persuading Landolfi to do the voice-over. Victor was tall, lean, ascetic. He was equipped with laser eyes and a huge black mustache. His world was built solely of subatomic particles, and driven by electromagnetics. Those who did not share his passionsexcited his contempt; which meant that he understood the utility of Cathie’s public relations function at the same time that he deplored the necessity. To participate was to compromise one’s integrity. His sense of delicacy, however, prevented his expressing that view to Cathie; he begged off rather on the press of time, winked apologetically, and stroked his mustache. “Sawyer will read it for you,” he said, waving me impatiently into the conversation.

Cathie sneered, and stared irritably out a window (it was the one with the wreath) at Jupiter, heavy in the fragile sky. We knew, by then, that it had a definable surface, that the big planet was a world sea of liquid hydrogen, wrapped around a rocky core. “It must be frustrating,” she said, “to know we’ll never see it.” Her tone was casual, almost frivolous, but Landolfi was not easily baited.

“Do you really think,” he asked, with the patience of a superior being (Landolfi had no illusions about his capabilities), “that these little pieces of theater will make any difference? Yes, Catherine, of course it’s frustrating. Especially when one realizes that we have the technology to put vehicles down there….”

“And scoop out some hydrogen,” Cathie added.

He shugged. “It may happen someday.”

“Victor, it never will if we don’t sell the Program. This is the last shot. These ships are old, and nobody’s going to build new ones. Unless things change radically at home.”

Landolfi closed his eyes. I knew what he was thinking: Cathie Perth was an outsider, an ex-television journalist who had probably slept her way on board. She played bridge, knew the film library by heart, read John Donne (for style, she said), and showed no interest whatever in the scientific accomplishments of the mission. We’d made far-reaching discoveries in the fields of plate tectonics, planetary climatology, and a dozen other disciplines. We’d narrowed the creation date down inside a range of a few million years. And we finally understood how it had happened! But Cathie’s televised reports had de-emphasized the implications, and virtually ignored the mechanics, of these findings. Instead, while a global audience watched, Marjorie Aubuchon peered inspirationally out of a cargo lock at Ganymede (much in the fashion that Cortez must have looked at the Pacific on that first bright morning), her shoulder flag patch resplendent in the sunlight. And while the camera moved in for a close-up (her features were illuminated by a lamp Cathie had placed for the occasion in her helmet), Herman Selma solemnly intoned Cathie’s comments on breaking the umbilical.

That was her style: brooding alien vistas reduced to human terms. In one of her best-known sequences, there had been no narration whatever: two spacesuited figures, obviously male and female, stood together in the shadow of the monumental Cadmus Ice Fracture on Europa, beneath three moons.

“Cathie,” Landolfi said, with his eyes still shut, “I don’t wish to be offensive: but do you really care? For the Program, that is? When we get home, you will write a book, you will be famous, you will be at the top of your profession. Are you really concerned with where the Program will be in twenty years?”

It was a fair question. Cathie’d made no secret of her hopes for a Pulitzer. And she stood to get it, no matter what happened after this mission. Moreover, although she’d tried to conceal her opinions, we’d been together a long time by then, almost three years, and we could hardly misunderstand the dark view she took of people who voluntarily imprisoned themselves for substantial portions of their lives to go ‘rock-collecting.’

“No,” she said, “I’m not, because there won’t be a Program in twenty years.” She looked around at each of us, weighing the effect of her words. Bender, a blond giant with a reddish beard, allowed a smile of lazy tolerance to soften his granite features. “We’re in the same class as the pyramids,” she continued, in a tone that was unemotional and irritatingly condescending. “We’re a hell of an expensive operation, and for what? Do you think the taxpayers give a good goddamn about the weather on Jupiter? There’s nothing out here but gas and boulders. Playthings for eggheads!”

I sat and thought about it while she smiled sweetly, and Victor smoldered. I had not heard the solar system ever before described in quite those terms; I’d heard people call it vast , awesome , magnificent , serene , stuff like that. But never boring .