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

The lander was at ground level, the treads a half-meter above the sand. “Okay,” I said. “George, I want you to keep us right at this altitude.”

“ And—? ”

“We’re going to take out the boats.”

“ Ram them? ” He sounded horrified.

“Can we do it without damaging the lander?”

“ I can’t guarantee that. ”

“Give me the odds.”

“ There are too many variables, Doctor. ”

“The odds, George.”

“ Eighty-eight percent.”

“Eighty-eight percent what? That we come away undamaged?”

“ That we come away relatively undamaged. Still able to make orbit. ”

“Okay. Let’s do it. Start with that one over there.”

“ Sir, I am required to inform you that you will be in violation of the Protocol. ”

“Do it anyway.” A fifth boat launched.

“ I am sorry, Doctor. But to override, you will have to get authority from the director. ”

There was a way to disable the AI, and if I could do that I thought I knew enough about the controls to be able to get the job done manually. “George.”

“ Yes, Doctor. ” The rest of the boats were into the waves.

“How do I disable you?”

“ I’m afraid, under the circumstances, it would be best if that information were withheld. ”

Damn. I studied the control panel. It was an array of switches, illuminated gauges, presspads, levers, warning lamps. There was a retractable yoke that could be used for manual operation. But I saw nothing marked Shut off AI .

“Let me out,” I said finally. “Open up.”

“ Doctor, you sure you won’t hurt yourself? ”

“No, I’ll be fine.”

I climbed through the airlock and stepped down onto the sand. It was hard and crackly underfoot, like the sand on a thousand beaches at home. The ships and boats showed no light. And I no longer heard voices over the roar of the ocean. But I could see them, the ships, and the raiding party. I watched the boats close with the vessels. Saw rope ladders cast over the side.

The Noks scrambled up the lines. They were far more agile than human beings. Then they hauled up the boats. I watched until the last of the raiders were aboard, and the boats had been stowed. There were belches of smoke from the three vessels, and they turned and began to move out of the harbor.

I walked down to the sea, until the tide lapped at my feet.

Help me.

“ Where to, Doctor? ” asked the AI.

“Orbit. Get us to the Sheldrake , George.” I threw my head back in the seat and tried to shut out the images of the victims. “ Very good, sir. ” We lifted off the beach, and began to accelerate. “ I know this has been hard on you. ”

“Just take us home, George.” I wasn’t sure whether I was talking about the Sheldrake . Or Toronto.

Nok was a laboratory for anyone interested in the rise and fall of civilizations. With such a long history, and the cycles of prosperity and collapse, it was possible to draw a wide range of conclusions about the impact of technology, climate, religion, and economics on cultural development. And on the tendency of civilizations to overextend. It was, in fact, the thing they did again and again. And always with the same catastrophic results. Fortunately, no one on Nok had ever discovered how to split the atom, so the land, at least, was still habitable.

Were they more barbaric than humans? I thought about it while the lander passed through a thunderstorm. At the present time, they certainly were. But we had our own bloodsoaked history, didn’t we? I knew of nothing in the Nok archives to rival the Holocaust or the great Communist purges or the African massacres of the twentieth century.

I was still seething when we arrived in orbit. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know what Nok was before I’d come. But actually seeing these creatures murder one another had been something for which I really hadn’t been prepared.

When we caught up with the Sheldrake , McCarver was waiting for me, and I could see he was genuinely worried. “You all right, Art?” he asked. “You look a little bloodshot.”

I was wiped out. I needed a shower and a night’s sleep. And something to calm me down. “Answer a question for me, Paul,” I said.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“We’ve been here how long now?”

“Forty years. Give or take.”

“And we’ve never lifted a finger. About the killing.”

McCarver was a diminutive guy. He was the only male on the mission who had to look up to me. He was thin, not the sort of person you’d expect to find out here. Had I met him socially, I’d have pegged him strictly as a classroom guy, or somebody doing lab research.

But he was the director. McCarver had only to walk into a room to bring everyone to attention. He wasn’t the most brilliant of the researchers on the Nok team. He admitted that himself. But they all respected him. We were in the main deck conference room. McCarver was nodding, as if he’d been bothered by the same issue. “Art,” he said, “I can guess what you went through today. I’ve seen it myself. They’re savages. They have a lot of our capabilities, and sometimes they’ve done pretty well for themselves. But in the current era, they’re savages, and we have to accept that.”

“Why?”

McCarver looked past me, at a distant place. “Because we’re not missionaries. Because we can’t convert an entire global population to the rule of reason. Because even if we could, we probably shouldn’t.”

“Why is that, Paul?” I knew why, of course, but I wanted to force McCarver to say it. Maybe he’d come to understand how bloodless that view was.

“You know as well as I do, Art. If the Noks even find out we’re here, they’ll become dependent on us and they’ll never develop properly.”

“They haven’t developed anyway.”

“It’s not our call, Art.” He managed a smile. “Anybody who got involved down there, we’d have to put on the next flight home.” Our eyes locked. His were dark and intense and bottomless. “Wouldn’t want to do that.”

“I took one of them down,” I said.

“One of who ?”

“The raiders. He was going to kill one of the people at the wedding.”

“They’re not people , Art.” His voice was soft. But there was no give.

“He was trying to kill the bride.”

“Who else knows?”

“Nobody.”

“Keep it that way.”

“Okay.”

“Forget it happened. Technically, it puts you in violation of the rules. Could end your stay here. Maybe your career.”

“It’s happened with other people—.”

“I know. And I understand why it happens. You’re human, Art. You watch some of the things that go on here, and you know you can step in, save one of them. But you’re putting your career on the line. Don’t let it happen again.”

And by the way, since you asked, the bride didn’t survive. “I don’t think I can promise that, Paul.”

McCarver nodded. Okay. That’s your position. “You don’t leave me any choice, Art.” He went over and got some coffee. One for him and one for me. He brought them back and sat down and put cream in his. The whole time he managed to look distressed. And I suppose the truth was he was unhappy. “I’ll have to ask you to stay on board until you’re able to comply with the policy. The last thing we need is a lone gun running around down there. You let me know when you can give me your word, and I’ll take it from there.”

I spent the evening in the archives. During the forty-two years since the Valoire discovered the Noks, hundreds of researchers had been here, and had walked unseen among the natives. They’d studied Nok mores and traditions, political and religious concepts, their literature, their family structure, and they’d begun to construct theories detailing what kind of behaviors were purely cultural, and what kind would be found to be characteristic of any intelligent species. It was a field that, because so few functioning cultures had been found—to date, only three—was still wide open to speculation.