The Second Star, page 7
One of the few cards that Stella had in her hand was that they had asked for outside input, that they had hustled people like Ichiro and herself, and all the engineering and technical experts they had hauled in to look into the hardware problems, and brought them in—and now presumably they would have to listen to their opinions.
The flip side of that was that she had already taken stands she probably wasn’t supposed to have been allowed to take, voiced opinions she wasn’t supposed to have, and made promises she had no way of living up to on her own authority. All this, and she hadn’t even started on the real problem, the Parada… insanity, although she bristled when anyone else used the term. This hearing was only the barest tip of the iceberg, dealing only with the Juno crew.
They had asked Martin Peck to provide his own report, first, and he had been giving that for the last ten minutes or so. Stella’s mind was so full of her own thoughts and stratagems that she kept having to remind herself to stop and listen. Of all the people on that panel, he was the only one who could potentially take her side, after all.
When she zoned in on his voice again, what he was saying was encouraging.
“…in all conscience, and in possession of both data collected by my own team and then redone almost from scratch by Doctor Ichiro Amari of the research experts team you have gathered, I can only state that there is no further medical reason to hold the crew of the Juno in anything that can be called a quarantine any more. They have been kept strictly separated from the Parada people and no direct interaction has taken place between the two crews at all. There is no real way of knowing, of course, the exact timeline of how long it might have taken for the Parada crew to have reached the stage we currently find them in—but we cannot, legally and ethically, imprison the crew of the second starship for what would for all practical purposes be the rest of their natural lives waiting to see if anything untoward did happen to them in the aftermath of their own journey out into the reaches of our galaxy. I have in my possession copies of Dr. Amari’s reports, which you all also have in your folders, and also a copy of Dr. Froud’s report. She has suggested that keeping these three people—whom we should have welcomed home as heroes—in both physical lock-up and a prison of ignorance and disinformation could be the very thing that precipitates, if not the responses we were initially afraid of, then something just as bad. And that would be something that we ourselves would be responsible for, not anything that might have happened to them on a mission on which after all they undertook on our behalf. Perhaps…”
Stella stood up, the scrape of her chair on the floor suddenly extremely loud in that room, silent other than for Martin’s voice. Martin, interrupted, looked over at her, and then nodded sharply, closing a folder that had been open in front of him.
“Perhaps Dr. Froud can give her own report in person, at that,” he said, and Stella could read what seemed to be a measure of relief as he abdicated further responsibility.
“Well?” said the Premier, her voice a deep dark alto.
“I wrote it up and you have it and you know what I think,” Stella said, having to clear her throat twice before she found a strong enough voice to speak. She leaned on the table in front of her, hard, both for support and to literally stop her hands from shaking. “But if you need me to stand here and tell you again, in plain language, I can do that. Yes, when I was first brought in and I first learned about the whole situation my very first instinct was that the two crews were not and would never be equivalent, which was the first mistake that was made here. They were separated immediately, and they were kept apart—there would be no ‘cross contamination’ of any sort, you decided, even though the Juno crew wanted, needed, to see the people they had rescued at such cost, to meet them, to speak to them. Initially at least you had no reason—from what I could gather—to ensure that this did not happen, but you made the decision to keep the two crews apart. And completely ignorant of what had happened to the other ship’s people. The Juno crew, at least, thought about that a lot. It has affected them.”
“They’ve been under study for some time,” General Camacho snapped. “You’ve had, what, days? And you can come to sweeping conclusions already?”
“You brought me here as someone who could,” Stella snapped back. “Your extended period of observation—and with all due respect, General, that wasn’t as extended as all that in any event—was initially done by people who did not have the training or the experience you needed. You had a basic medical and psychological team, to be sure, and no specialists—but these people have been telling you for a while that, to the best of their ability to judge, the Juno crew were clean. But because you never told the Juno crew the truth—about anything—their ‘quarantine’ became a convenient excuse for you to hold on to them—because you didn’t know what else to do with them. You have to realize that the moment the fact of the Juno’s crew’s actual return percolates to the public you will have an uproar on your hands—they will want these people, they will want to own them, to celebrate them, to reach out and touch in whatever way they can the people who have gone out to the distant stars and have come back to tell the tale. Your problem right now is that you have lied to them, about a lot, and now you have to make it a condition of their release that they have to lie for you—or at the very least be prevented from speaking out at all for a very long time and perhaps forever about the thing that they have done, and the miracle they have accomplished. Because I haven’t even begun to work on the Parada situation—there may be a lifetime of work in that, but you cannot justify sentencing the crewmen of the Juno to a life sentence of solitary confinement, simply because they are who they are, they were where they were, and they did what they did. They did their duty, ma’am, gentlemen, as they saw it, to the fullest extent that they were able. And now you owe them their freedom, and as much of the truth as you can provide. You owe them that much.”
She took a deep breath and then hurried on, afraid she would be interrupted, cut down. “You said I had a very short time to make my decisions and diagnoses here—and yes, under ordinary circumstances I would have had a much longer, much deeper, much more intense relationship with any patient under my care. But I cannot justify taking a year to slowly and painfully make my mind up that yes, you can let them go. I am standing on my training, my knowledge, my experience, and my instinct here—I have spoken to each of these men, and it is my professional opinion that there is literally nothing wrong with them, nothing that you can use to justify keeping them locked away any further, and nothing that a dose of truth and freedom will not cure. There may have to be conditions for such freedom, that is for you to decide, not me. But the day you brought me here I took a stand for that truth, and I still believe that they deserve that. And that’s why I promised I would go and speak to the Juno crew, all of them, in the aftermath of this commission’s meeting. I strongly suspect that an existence that is too much longer endured under the present circumstances would break these men faster than any extraterrestrial shenanigans you are still afraid of.”
“But the Parada situation…” General Niarchos began, and Stella lifted a hand to stop him.
“Leave the Parada problem out of this for now,” she said. “We’re talking about releasing Hugh de Mornay, Tyrone Kidman and Joseph White Elk to continue their existences as free men, and as heroes of Earth, no matter how much of the true story ever gets out there. I mean, they aren’t the only people who know that the Parada has returned, are they? There are already more of us than that—the team you assembled, myself, my colleagues in this room, the others whom you sent to investigate the ship itself, the team that already dealt with the crews before any of us came on board, even people who were in the shipyards up there where even now the Parada still sits as far as I know or someone who happened to be on duty when the first communications from Juno filtered through when the ships returned to our system. All the people you can find who know about the fact that this happened… you can keep it a secret for a little while. But sooner or later some story will come tumbling out. Are you seriously considering holding the Juno crew captive until such time as an unpreventable leak from somewhere else trickles out from some hole you forgot to stopper?” She paused, looking at each of them in turn.
“All of us signed NDAs—but did absolutely everybody? Did you catch everyone in your net? Every comm operator? Every mechanic? Every engineer? Every janitor? Every pilot? Every orderly? And think about that—right now there are medical orderlies out there who know more than the Juno crew actually does. How do you justify that? You trust the orderlies more than you trust three men you yourselves hand-picked to take humanity into the stars?”
Stella was breathless and shaking when she collapsed back into her chair. She literally had to clench her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering. She had never in her entire life faced down even one such august personage, never mind four who now sat staring at her impassively. And if it had been about herself, alone, she probably could have never done it at all. But now, here, she spoke for those three men to whom she had spoken so briefly and yet each of whom had touched her in a profound way. It was a simple as that—they were owed a debt, those three, and if she was the one who was in a position to call it in then that was the way it had to be.
“You were magnificent,” Philip Carter said in a low voice as he leaned to whisper into her ear. “Remind me never to get you mad at me.”
Stella uttered a sound that might have been a whimper.
Philip touched her shoulder gently, and then rose to his feet.
“I can’t weigh in on any scientific evidence,” he said, facing the panel. “Perhaps one of you knows why I was added to this team at all—perhaps one of you is a person of sufficient faith to take the opportunity to ensure that the spiritual aspect of the situation was covered. And yes, I do realize that our time with all of the people we are supposed to assess and investigate as part of the task you have appointed us to has been limited so far. But I think you will find that we have all used what time we have had to the limit. I haven’t had much sleep in the last week; I know that my two colleagues here haven’t either. We don’t take any of this lightly, and we certainly have no wish to make a difficult situation even harder. But what I can tell you about the Juno men, with whom I have also talked, is that while none of them are persons whose faith precisely matches up to my own I have found all these men to be, if you will permit me to use the word in this context, very special souls. All three of them have that sliver of pure nobility of spirit that could easily make a man eligible for sainthood, in a manner of speaking—but I do have to remind you that some saints got there through martyrdom. And you may not want to have your names become known, in the fullness of time, as the people who visited martyrdom on the crew of the Juno. History will have its say, in the end.”
As he sat down, Stella surged to her feet again.
“Yes,” she said, “think of history, if you won’t think of the people. Everything that you have done so far has already changed the history books—because we aren’t releasing the Parada six, or allowing information on their return to get out, if and when that does come out it’s already a very different story from what really happened. And all that is irreversible—we’re hip-deep in that big muddy, what is done is done, and we can’t turn back the clock and make different decisions. But you have already layered so much secrecy on this that every tiny inconsistency in the story is going to have the conspiracy theorists working overtime to get to ‘the truth’. And the truth will come out, eventually.”
She saw one of the Generals stirring, and rushed on before anyone could interrupt her. “And it isn’t like it’s the first time that this has happened—we have plenty of precedent. We may all be dead by then, and people might look like they’ve forgotten all about it, but it took us a hundred and eighty years to find out who really shot President Kennedy, it took us almost as long to get to the bottom of the dirty bomb that took out Denver, we still don’t know which of any number of theories about the death of the last Dalai Lama is anywhere near the truth, and after two hundred years people are still wondering about the Parada and what really happened to her. You’re just feeding that particular beast with too heavy-handed a secrecy fiat. Tell what story you will about the Parada, to give us time to properly figure out what is to be done with her crew. But the Juno people have done nothing wrong, they deserve to know the truth even if you then tell them that they may never speak of it again or reference in public the astonishing thing that they have done, and they deserve to be released. We all know—and they probably do too—that the ‘quarantine’ may have been a necessary thing in the beginning but has been changing steadily into just a euphemism for something quite different.”
She drew a deep breath, and actually delivered an ultimatum to power. “We are here to do what you asked us to do,” she said. “We are doing what we can to get that done. But if you aren’t prepared to listen to our recommendations when we reach an opinion, you may as well end all of this right now. Unless you are going to hold all of us in an open-ended ‘quarantine’ situation for the rest of our lives because you are afraid of what we now know, let us do our work or send us home. I, for one, miss my cat.”
“Just exactly what do you propose we do?” General Niarchos asked. “I mean, we can all see that they’re holding it together right now, in here, but this is a strictly controlled environment—can you guarantee that they are not going to fall apart as soon as they leave here?”
“Of course not!” Stella said, rousing. “How am I supposed to prove a negative? How can I make a categorical statement—at a first encounter, a brief association or even after years of therapy—that any given person won’t develop some more or less marginal psychological aberration the moment they leave my presence? How could I possibly be certain enough that any one of you won’t suddenly acquire a strange obsession with butterflies in the next five years, or an aversion to eating pasta, or a phobia about going out when the moon is full? The future isn’t ours to guarantee. All I can tell you is what I think, based on instinct and experience and actual study of the situation we find ourselves in.”
“But that situation is still our responsibility,” the General said. “You have to realize that revealing what happened to the Parada is simply going to throw gasoline on a fire and we will never get a chance to figure out anything because we won’t be allowed to.”
“Yes, and while you’re juggling all of that, the people you’re trying to help fall through the cracks,” Stella responded. “But, General, we aren’t talking about the Parada. Not here, not now, not yet. We’re talking about Juno. The Juno’s crew is being punished for a heroic deed, all while people sit back and figure out how to get a political advantage out of this. I understand there are probably going to be conditions—but you have to tell these people the truth. You have to. You cannot condemn them to permanent isolation from the rest of the human race simply because they are in possession of a piece of information you think might be dangerous. Perhaps, mostly, to the people in charge, at that, who might get held responsible for it all. With all due respect.” She drew another ragged breath. “I said when I first came here that we needed to tell the truth—at the very least, to Hugh de Mornay, Tyrone Kidman, and Joseph White Elk. And I stand ready to do that. In fact, I promised them I would do that.”
“You had no standing to make such a promise,” General Camacho growled.
“You gave me standing,” Stella said. “You hauled me in here, as an authority on the subject. I am telling you what needs to be done. I will do it. But these are three brave men who have lost their freedom for doing the only thing they thought they could possibly do under the circumstances. You cannot possibly blame them for any of what happened after, for things they could have had no knowledge of. The Captain told me that if anyone is to be called upon to pay any kind of price for the decision that he thought it necessary to make, it should be himself, and not the other two men. That is not the act of somebody who is feeling guilty, and it is not in any way an ‘alternate personality’—you knew who he was before you sent him out there, and that you would expect him to make this kind of decision if one became called for. He is still a leader, and he is even willing to sacrifice himself so that the others can go free. You shouldn’t make him do that, it just isn’t fair, and it’s an ill way to reward someone who has brought honor to humanity. These men understood completely the need for a period of isolation after returning from the unknown. But now it is time to end that. Past time. I understand that much is still unknown but they aren’t in a position to help you learn any of it. Tell them the truth. Let them go.”
“You’re going to tell them anyway, aren’t you?” the Premier questioned, the faintest hint of a smile curling her lip upwards.
Stella lifted her chin. “I made a promise to three brave and very sane men—still sane, for now. If at all able, yes, I intend to keep it.”
“You do realize that there may be steps we could easily take to prevent that, if we thought it inadvisable?” The Premier said, and while the smile remained hovering around her mouth her eyes were very serious.
Stella actually had to swallow hard before she could respond.
“I am aware of that,” she said, her voice sounding very thin to her own ear.
“And you are taking the responsibility for that stand?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Stella said. She hoped she sounded more emphatic than she felt.
Dag Nyland leaned in to say something to the Premier in a low voice, and she turned and glanced at the General on her other side; they conferred in low voices while Stella, whose face was flushed with heat and whose hands had gone so icy that she could barely feel the table beneath her fingertips, found herself holding her breath.
