Gregory Benford: In the Ocean of Night

“Security be damned,” Nikka said.

“… and I know I have your full support in my task of keeping all sides balanced in any dispute. I gather Mr. Sanges here does not feel this information is more than highly preliminary and should not be spread around. I believe if I were to ask them, the other teams would feel much the same way. I must say I can see their arguments quite clearly and I think they are valid.”

Nigel’s hand trembled as he leaned forward, intent on Valiera’s words. He thought he saw some slight shift in the man’s face, an odd tightening around the mouth.

“I believe that, as your Coordinator, I must turn down this proposal. To be sure, I can and will take the matter under advisement in future—”

“Ah yes, well, I see,” Nigel said. He silenced Nikka with a glance and smiled in an airy, resigned way that lifted the tension in the room. He crooked a finger at Nikka and sighed.

“We’re sorry about that, but we of course bow to your decision.” He stood up suddenly, the thrust almost lifting him clear of the floor. “We’d best be getting on, Nikka,” he said woodenly. Very calmly he took her arm and they left. Nigel nodded good-bye at the two men and closed the door.

Outside he leaned against the corridor wall. “An education in cynicism, this, isn’t it?”

“They’re a bunch of damned lunatics, ” Nikka said fiercely. “They’re not scientists at all, they’re—”

“Indeed. It’s quite clear now that Valiera is a New Son.”

Nikka stopped, startled. “Do you think so? It would certainly explain a lot.”

“Such as the numerous delays we’ve had. I’ve noticed the other teams haven’t had the lost tapes, the air failures, the high tension arcs. It would make a great deal of sense if our Mr. Valiera and Mr. Sanges were in bed together.”

“I must say though,” Nikka said, “you took it very well. I expected you to blow up all over them.”

“ Well? I’m glad my little bit of play-acting went over successfully. We’re going to move now, that’s why I didn’t want to show them I was concerned. Go ahead, why don’t you, and start suiting up in the lock.”

Nikka looked puzzled. “For what? I thought we weren’t going to continue the shift.”

“We’re not. But I had an inkling that something like this might happen; that’s why I pushed so hard for the direct link to Alphonsus. I want to transmit all this stuff”— he held out the package of papers he carried under his arm—“and be sure Alphonsus retransmits to Earth immediately. If we go through them I don’t think Valiera can stop it.”

Nigel stood at the narrow port and watched her cross the plain toward the imposing ruin. It was bordered now by entwined tire trails and jumbles of equipment. In the distance a party of doll-sized figures worked at a boring site. The lunar sunset made a giant from Nikka’s shadow. The white glaring ball was pinned to the horizon. Here, he thought, the winds always slept. Nothing stirred except by the hand of man. A gas molecule, escaping from a blowoff valve, would travel some ten thousand kilometers before meeting a fellow molecule from the same puff of gas. On Earth, the distance between collisions was smaller than the eye could see. A strange place, with different scales of time and length. The footprints Nikka made would, if left, survive for half a million years, until the fine spray of particles from the solar wind blurred them. Against such an immensity the dispute with Sanges and Valiera seemed trivial.

But of course, it wasn’t really, he told himself. He and Nikka had barely shown a tip of the iceberg, talking to those two. The evidence for some attempt at communication, at manipulation, was pretty clear. But he’d omitted the bits about the novas in Aquila, the computer civilizations—elements that might, in time, converge.

So he and Nikka had conspired this one-shot gesture, this fist-shaking runaround of Valiera’s sly network. They would be able to get through a cache of information before Sanges and Valiera caught on, and perhaps that would spring open a few minds back Earthside, air out the politics of how the Marginis wreck was being handled.

Perhaps, perhaps…

Nigel sighed. He should feel the zest of conflict now, he knew, but it eluded him. From Icarus to Snark to Marginis, he’d been after something he could not define, an element he felt only as a pressing inner tension. It had made him an outsider in NASA. It had become a transparent but steady barrier between him and almost everyone else; he could not understand them, fathom their motives, and they clearly didn’t comprehend Nigel Walmsley at all. There had been moments, of course, with Alexandria, and lately with Ichino and Nikka, moments when he broke through to the edge of what he was, lost the encasing armor Nigel Walmsley had built up over these years, slipped free to a high vantage point. And straightway came down, of course, for the moments passed as a flicker, and the realization of them came after the event itself. For that was the nature of them; they were not states of analysis, but new seas of awareness. Seas, with tides of their own.

“Nigel,” the wall speaker rasped. Nikka.

“Right,” he said when he’d flipped on his console transmission switch. “Let’s give them that stuff right off.”

“Do…do you really think this is…”

“Come on. No cold feet, now.”

“I don’t like political infighting.”

“And I don’t fancy being tedious, my dear, but…” “All right, all right.”

Nigel punched through to Alphonsus. Elsewhere in the building, in Communications, this would register. If Sanges was at his bright-eyed best, he’d probably be monitoring through Communications, or—worse—have already put a watch on this line. So it came down to a simple matter of time. If they could get enough raw data through to Kardensky’s group, and the contacts Nigel had cultivated there, a bit of boat-rocking would result. If not, this stunt would probably earn him and Nikka a swift boot in the pants and one-way orders shipping them Earthside.

“Here it comes,” Nikka said.

In the gloomy bay the man-made electronics glowed with a reassuring yellow and orange. Nikka shifted uneasily. The shadowed bulk of machinery around her stood silent, brooding, ominous. She told herself that her reaction was stupid. There was no reason to be jumpy. She had worked at the alien computer interface many times and this was no different.

She shook herself mentally and set to work. The transmission rig could read either electronic input from the alien bank or could scan the faxes already made. She and Nigel had planned to send both. She took a shelf of pages and photographs and stacked them neatly in the rig’s feeder. They had, she knew, probably only a few minutes before someone in Communications would be ordered to cut the transmission. So they had to be fast. Nikka set up the board for simultaneous sending of both faxes and data directly from the alien computer memory. This done, she pressed the final command to start the signal.

Nigel had been silent as she did this. She tapped the signal into his console. He could watch it as it went, freeze the process if anything was fouling up.

“Here it comes,” she said.

There was a grunt of effort behind her.

“What do you think you’re—”

She whirled around. Sanges was struggling up from the plastiform rim of the tunnel.

“Routine business,” she said, her voice thin.

“No, it’s not, ” Sanges growled. He got his feet clear of the tunnel and stood upright. In the dim light he seemed larger than Nikka had remembered.

“You and him—I thought you might—”

“Look, I’m just sending Alphonsus some of the old material.” Nikka kept her voice casual.