Enigma by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Page B

story becomes the experience.”
    “I don’t understand—”
    Sebright nodded. “I didn’t really expect you to. Listen, Thackery. Don’t do this again. You’ll see enough of me once we’re aboard Descartes . But until we have a ship, we’re not a crew, and my only responsibility is to myself.”
    “So you won’t hold a briefing for the team?”
    “They can read the Op Recs, too,” he said. “Any more questions, since I’m up?” A hint of a sardonic smile touched his lips.
    “Just one. Why did you bother to sign on again?”
    Sebright was immune to the venom. “No. Try Dunn. He’s only been back two months. He may still want to talk about it.” He laid back and poked Yolanda playfully with a finger.
    “Anything to eat around here?” he asked her, and Thackery took that moment to move toward the door.
    “Sneaking out, Thackery?” Sebright called after him. “For future reference—you’d be smart not to push in where you haven’t been invited. You can’t afford to alienate people on a little ship.”
    His picture of Sebright savaged beyond repair, a benumbed Thackery made the climb to C deck and the library. Having absorbed most of his values from Government Service, he felt personally betrayed. Information was a free good, freely available, freely exchanged—the Ninth Article. To have a Contact treated as a personal possession was unthinkable, as unthinkable as a Contact Leader who refused to lead, who chose to spend eight weeks in a drug-induced black-out—
    The Op Recs. Maybe the answers are there—if there are any answers for a man like that—
    The story of the Muschynka was not new to Thackery. Hundreds of anthropologists had fallen over themselves in their eagerness to sift through the contact records and publish their findings. There was even a standing request before the Flight Office for a follow-up mission, since the Muschynka represented a form of human society no longer available for study on Earth: a polytheistic, communal-living patriarchy employing slash-and-burn agriculture.
    But if there was any explanation in the voluminous contact report for Sebright’s attitudes, it was beyond Thackery to see it. There was plenty of data on the Muschynka’s dependence on lightning for fire, on their movable longhouses, on their death beliefs and funereal customs. But there were no answers in the records for the questions he would have asked Sebright: How did it go? What was it like to be there? How did you know what to do?
    Any wisdom that had been gained in the course of the Contact had been stripped of its anecdotal elements and made part of the general Contact protocol. Any narrative power in the account had been erased by the third-person-impersonal voice. The feeling of the moment had been reduced to dry history and cold science.
    Is that what they tried to do to you, Sebright? he wondered. Did you come back because you wanted to dream again?
    That thought replaced most of Thackery’s accumulated resentment with a troubling premonitory vision. Is that what I’m doing? Chasing a piece of the past?
    Thackery pushed the thought away. There had to be better reasons. Sebright’s was the quest of the addict for a remembered high, he decided—one so exquisite that it made normal life unbearable. But Dove’s crew had sustained themselves through an abstinence enforced by unfriendly Chance. There had to be better reasons, and the Dove vets had to know them—or those now aboard Tycho would not have chosen to accept their new assignments.
    Late to be wondering why you’re here. You know why you’re here , he answered himself. You just don’t know what will sustain you now that you are .
    A day later, Thackery found Thomas Dunn in Tycho ’s wardroom, conducting a training session on the AVLO drive for Baldwin, Behnke, and four of the awks. The silver-haired senior tech was soft-spoken, but he clearly knew both his subject and how to communicate it. Thackery listened with interest from the