Mahesh Pillai was a drive engineer and explorer of the United Nations of Earth, the son of the drive's inventor Vinak Pillai and the captain of the survey ship Grissom from 2300 to 2318. He charted more stars than the other three captains of the Voyager class together. His ship found the Mardak Vol capsule at Yildun in 2307, surveyed almost all of what became the Saolea and Binami sectors, and on 21 September 2317 made humanity's first contact with the Voor at Cirban.
Pillai's reasoning, set out in his first report and adopted by the Office of Settlement as policy, was that the federation did not know what was out there and that the only defence against not knowing was a chart. He called it the buffer.
Early life
Pillai was born on Europa in 2266, the son of Vinak Pillai, then a doctoral student at the Magellan observatory. He trained as a drive engineer and wound the coils of the Anant Two, the test vehicle that made the first Pillai jump on 14 August 2289. He applied to Exploration Command, his mother said, so that he could stop hearing about them.
Exploration Command
Exploration Command's four Voyager-class ships were each given to one captain. Pranav Moorthi of the Lief Ericson was a Hellas-born Navy officer, Pavel Petrenko of the Asimov a Consortium astrophysicist, and Tian Shen of the Gagarin a Navy pilot whose file read, in Rear Admiral Ekholm's hand, "brilliant, unsafe, take him anyway". Pillai of the Grissom was an engineer, and the most methodical of the four. The four ships left Europa between 1 and 20 January 2300. The Grissom took Brink, Yildun and the long arc south into Saolea and the region the charts would come to call the Ciriban Gulf.
The Grissom's survey
The Grissom went to Brink in 2304 and to Yildun in 2306. Pillai's survey doctrine numbered every body larger than a hundred metres, and on the Grissom's second pass through Yildun, on 14 December 2307, it numbered a capsule of 40 metres in a long orbit 30 astronomical units from the star. The capsule had been in its orbit for about 100,000 years, and its pilot was still in the chair. Its pictures were published at Sol on 3 February 2308, and humanity knew for the first time that it was not alone.
Pillai's buffer reasoning took the Grissom along the arc into Saolea and the Gulf. He surveyed Saolea in 2308, Stiridon, Ajam, Izar and Ijax between 2308 and 2316, and Cirban, at the Gulf's far edge, in 2315. The Office claimed the systems as fast as the couriers brought his reports. The Saolea and Binami sectors, on the era's charts, are the Grissom's alone. The companies read his reports as fast as the Office did, and the richness of Theia and of Bounty, which Pillai found, was bought by the companies under concessions.
First contact
The Grissom was at Cirban's edge on 21 September 2317, charging for the jump home after two years' survey of the Gulf's far side, when at 0322 its sensors recorded a flash 60 astronomical units away. The ship's computer logged it as a Pillai arrival. Pillai, who was the ship's drive engineer as well as its captain, said within a minute that it was not: the spectrum was wrong. He had the ship's charge held, its torch cold and its transmitters silent, and watched.
Over nine days a ship of 1,200 metres fell into Cirban at 0.3 g and surveyed the system by the Grissom's own method. On the tenth day it turned toward the Grissom, and Pillai understood that it had been watching him as he had watched it. On 1 October, at 20 million kilometres, it stopped and began to transmit the prime numbers. The Grissom's science officer, Dr Wanjiru Kamau, answered. The other ship gave its people's name as Voor on 12 October and on 14 October invited the Grissom to Haedus. The Grissom jumped for Haedus on 20 October 2317, on Pillai's decision and against no one's advice, because the whole crew wanted to go. It spent November and December in orbit above Indata Mog as the Voor's guests, and met the federation's mission to the Confederacy at Haedus on 9 April 2318.
Later life
The Grissom came home to Europa in the summer of 2318, eighteen years after she left. Pillai was given command of Exploration Command's survey school at West Rhine in 2319, and wrote its survey doctrine, which the Navy's stealth pickets used to count the Legion's anchorages from 2326. He advised the Navy's General Staff on War Plan Purple in 2320, on the edge of the Gulf he had charted. He retired in 2331 and lived on Europa. He died there in 2347, aged eighty-one, six years after the war that his chart of the Gulf had helped the federation win.
Legacy
Pillai's buffer reasoning became the Office of Settlement's policy, and the federation met the Voor in space it had already measured. The Navy's survey ships have carried his doctrine of numbering every body above a hundred metres since 2319, and the Grissom has been preserved since 2350 at the Museum of the Expansion.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.1 "The Pillai Hyperdrive and the Manifest Pledge"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.3 "In the Shadow of Ancients: Mardak Vol Monuments"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"