23

Ensign Haley still wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or insulted. She couldn’t decide if Grottor was using her or not, and she wasn’t altogether sure how much or how little of the truth he was telling her. She also wasn’t sure if she could ask him.

You’re relieved of your duties, he had said to her in the privacy of his cabin. I have a more important task for you. He’d explained to her how she would continue to sit at the same console that she’d sat at before, but he’d arranged for an ensign off the bridge to handle her formal tasks, and then she’d be allowed to do what she was supposed to do.

“And what’s that?” she’d asked.

“Why, draw, of course,” he said. “Doodle and draw. Don’t think about it much. Anything that comes to mind or half to mind, just draw it and then vid it over to me.”

“You want me to spend my time doodling, sir?”

He nodded. “You really don’t have any idea, do you?” he asked.

“Any idea of what, sir?”

“You didn’t recognize what you drew?” he asked.

“No,” she said. And then said, “Well, it looked like the Unitologist symbol.”

“That’s right,” he said. “But it’s much more than that. Can I share something with you?” he asked.

“Umm,” she said, startled. But the hesitancy with which she’d responded had made him clam up again.

“It’s tied to our work on the planet,” he had said. “What you’re doing, Ensign Haley, is important work. It might not seem so, but it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. We need to be careful who takes advantage of it.”

She had laughed. “You must be joking, sir,” she had said.

But apparently he was not, for here she was now, sitting at her console, scribbling with her stylus on her digital pad. She had been doing it for more than a week now, and spinning each doodle over to Grottor as soon as she felt she was ready to move on to a new page.

Grottor’s response had been impassive at first; then, slowly, he had begun to express his disappointment. “No,” he finally said, “that’s not it. That’s not helping at all.”

“Perhaps if you’d tell me what you’d like me to draw,” she said, “then I could be of more help.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If it’s to be of any use to us at all, it just has to come.”

But ever since primary school, she’d been trained to please and she was incredibly frustrated that now, somehow, she couldn’t. She tried to second-guess what Grottor wanted. He’d been initially pleased when she drew some version of the Unitologist symbol, and so she drew it again, and saw for the briefest moment a flicker of excitement when he saw it. But the excitement quickly faded.

“Stop thinking,” he scolded her. “Let it just come.”

Let what just come?

*   *   *

It might have gone on much longer like that, might have gone on just like that until the moment when Grottor, frustrated, gave up on Ensign Haley and returned her to her duties, but Grottor, luckily, was not a man to become easily frustrated, and, also luckily, something happened first.

They were, Grottor would realize when he looked at the data later, at the point in their loop where they were directly above the man-made facilities on Aspera’s surface. They were also, due to sloppy navigation on Ensign Orthor’s part, closer to the surface than they usually were. And finally, instrumentation would reveal, there had been a burst of energy from the planet’s surface. From the Marker.

Suddenly Haley had given a little cry and clutched her head.

“Headache?” he heard Orthor ask. Every time the man spoke, it filled Grottor with irritation. It was partly because he knew the man was a plant from Blackwell, but in addition the man was simply irritating. Even toying with that technician down on the surface, Wandrei, pretending not to remember his name, didn’t help much.

It must have been a bad one. Ensign Haley had her head in her hands for twenty or thirty seconds, and seemed a little dazed after. What was it? he wondered. Simply a migraine? Why had it seemed to come along so suddenly? He watched her for a while. For a few moments she was still and then she picked back up her stylus and continued her task.

“Ensign Haley,” he said.

She raised her head, gave him a tired look. “Yes, sir?” she asked, her tone flat.

“Leave the bridge and take a few moments to gather yourself,” he said.

For a moment, he thought she was going to protest, as she had before, but instead she gave a curt nod, spun what was on her pad over to his vid, and stood up to leave.

She was halfway to the door when he realized what she’d sent him.

“Wait a moment, Haley,” he said.

She stopped and paused on the far side of the bridge, waited while he took a closer look.

A new series of equations. Crystallization counter-sequence, the gray man had called one part of the first set, or something similar if not exactly that. He recognized a few of the equational gestures that he’d seen alongside the first sketch, but he didn’t know enough to be able to judge how important or genuine they were. He would have to send them along, see what the gray man felt they amounted to. The image alongside them didn’t look at all like the Marker but there was a small rough sketch of the Marker lower on the page and he realized that the rectangle he was seeing was a cutaway, a cross section from the Marker.

“Leave the bridge, Ensign Orthor,” he said.

“What?” said Orthor. “I’m not the one with the headache,” he said.

“Sir,” said Grottor, flatly.

“What?” said Orthor.

“It’s: ‘I’m not the one with the headache, sir,’” said Grottor. “Leave. That’s an order.”

Orthor stood, face livid with suppressed anger, but left. “Now the rest of you,” Grottor said. “All of you. Except you, Ensign Haley.”

There was a moment of stunned silence and then the bridge crew started up and cleared up, a dull rumbling going through them. It took them a few moments, but soon he was left alone with Ensign Haley.

There was a long silence, which she finally broke. “What am I supposed to do, sir?” she asked.

“Do your task,” he said.

“My task?”

“Draw,” he said. “I want you to sit in that chair and draw until you can no longer see, and then I want you keep drawing.”

Confused, she sat and began; almost immediately it was clear that something was happening. She quickly entered an almost trancelike state, and what came pouring out was complex and strange: equations and models, plans and structures. He had always known she was special, but he hadn’t realized just how special.

She drew for hours before it began to fade and just became ordinary doodles again. He was not disappointed with the results. And, more importantly, neither was the gray man.