Inheritor

There werealso people in charge of Deana: Deana who did not have the intelligence or the authority she dreamed she had. She was not a random and stupid threat until she was in the field dealing with atevi. They, the theywho controlled her, didn’t know how bad her handling of the translation interface was, which was their major flaw. If there wereatevi experts able to know how bad she was, there wouldn’t bean intercultural problem. They liked her because what she told them would work was shaped exactly to fall into their plans, and that was their blind spot and her reason for getting the post.

But they had to be restraining her from her wilder notions, or God knew what would happen.

And somebodycould keep Hanks on the island. George Barrulin could, if he could get through to him.

But the paidhi-aiji was out of phone numbers that would mean anything, and he couldn’tget through to George. They fired everybody in the whole Foreign Office. God!

“Bren,” Jase said.

He opened his eyes a slit. And saw Jase sitting opposite him, elbows on knees, cup in both hands, with a downcast look.

“Bren,” Jase said in human language. “I want you to understand something.”

He had to listen. Jase’s voice had that tone. He sat up, tucked a foot across his knee, and tried to look as if his brain were working.

“The business about my father,” Jase said. “I don’t have one. Fact is—fact is, he isdead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Politeness was automatic. Understanding what Jase was getting at wasn’t.

“No,” Jase said. “He diedhundreds of years ago.”

A glimmering of understanding didcome, then. “Taylor’s Children. Is thatwhat you mean?”

The ship had had its heroes—those everyoneowed their lives to: the original crew and the construction pilots, the ones who’d mined and fueled the ship in the radiation hell they’d first had to survive, had left their personal legacy in cold storage, all they knew they’d send into their ship’s uncertain future.

And such individuals, drawn from that cold-storage legacy, had notbeen the lowest members of the Pilots’ Guild, when the modern crew let them be born.

When—rarely—they’d let them be born.

He was sitting in an ordinary chair in an ordinary lounge in a tolerably exotic facility, but the man he’d been dealing with was notordinary, as he understood history.

The man he’d almost called a friend—brought a bit of the cold of space with him into this little nook.

What the ship had sent them in Jase wasn’t the lowest, most expendable crew member. It was one of the elite, one who wouldn’t be seduced by any planetary—or personal—loyalties.

The people of the Landing, Mospheirans, hadn’t been outstandingly fond of the breed. The privileges of that elite was one of the issues that had led to the Landing. And now the ship sent one down to the planet?

“I must say,” Bren said mildly, “I’m surprised. I take it you do have a mother.”

“One I’m very fond of. One I want to get back to.”

“One can understand how much you want to get back. One can understand very well.”

Jase looked at him a little curiously, and didn’t ask. But maybe, he said to himself, Jase didn’t know there’d been a rift between the ship’s crew and the colonists. Maybe that was one of the informational dropouts over time—things like weather, and currents, and sunrise.

“What I want to tell you,” Jase said, “is that I amtelling you the truth. I’m not keeping secrets from you. And I’ll tell you all of it. But I want your help.”

“For what?”

A slight move of Jase’s eyes, a gesture to the side, to the communications center, he supposed. “To talk to the ship. To warn them what’s going on and to tell them to send someone else down here, if something happens.”

“ Isthat what you’d tell them? I’d think it would be ‘Get the hell out of here. They’re crazy down here.’ ”

Jase shook his head. “That’s not my conclusion. I don’t know what’s on the other side of the water. Yolanda said at first she was all right. She was having a lot less problems than I was. But things starting going bad. I’ve heard other codewords, that just meant worry. When she gave me this one—I was scared. You weren’t there. And then things started blowing up. I don’t think it’s coincidence she called me about the time your government started making trouble over here.”

Your government. Mospheira. It was a hell of a thing, that statement, he’d had to parse that to know whichgovernment Jase meant.

“Telling you the family crisis story was supposed to get you to get Yolanda over for a sympathy visit. And it went wrong. It just went wrong. The ship knows there’s something wrong on her side of the water. But if I don’t call soon they’ll think there’s something wrong on this side, too.”

“What would they do about it?”

“They’d attempt to deal with it, most probably attempt to deal with atevi in the notion some of them do understand Mosphei’ and maybe I’d made a mistake.”

He was considering that possibility. “Let’s try some critical truth. Is the ship armed?”

“It has weapons. It doesn’t have atmospheric craft.”

“Coercion occupies absolutely no place in their pla

“No. If they get involved in this situation, it’s possible they can withhold information from one side or the other and get cooperation. It’s my recommendation that they cooperate with the atevi and withhold all help from Mospheira.”

“You know,” Bren said, on a breath that made his voice sail higher and more casual than he wished. “You know,” he said more soberly, “I think that’s a reasonable position, but I haven’t had a lot of luck persuading human governments about it, and we’ve livedon this planet a couple of centuries.”

“You want the truth?”

“I think it would be a really good idea, Jase.”

“If Yolanda goes—” Emotion clouded Jase’s face and ruffled the calm in his voice. “If she doesn’t make it, it’s important to me. But not to the ultimate outcome of this business. Neither of us is that important to the outcome unless we can do our work. They give us a lot, that’s what they say. But they ask a lot of us.”

“You’re not a computer tech who’s studied languages and taught kids.”

“I know computers. We had two engineering texts in the library, one French, one German. They didn’t teach me a lot about planets. But I learned how languages work. That’s the truth, Bren.”

“You in love with Yolanda?”

“I suppose so. Yes. I am.”

“But disregarding all this, say we lost you, what would your ship do?”

“Right now, they’d go on pretending everything was fine, and see if you built the spacecraft.”

“And then?”

“If atevi got up there, my captains would negotiate. They’d have done what they want. They’d negotiate with atevi. They’d probably keep on giving them tech. As much as they wanted.”

He had a very, very bad feeling that he wasn’t understanding everything, and that Jase wanted his full attention for the next item.

“Why?” he asked.

“They want the atevi in space.”

“Why?”

“Because—” Jase’s voice was faint. “Because we’re not alone. We’re not the only ones in space. And they’re not friendly. And we’re not sure, but they could come here.”

He sat, having heard that. Having heard it, he didn’t want to believe it.

“You said,” he recalled, “there was another station out there, at the other end of—wherever you’ve been.”

“There was one. It’s gone. We don’t know who the aliens are. We don’t know what they want. We tried to contact them. We had a few passes, months apart. Just a streak on one tape. And some transmissions. We tried sca