Explorer

“If it won’t interfere with your tea break.”

“I’ll manage, captain. I don’t want to push the body-space issue with them. Just a mostly conversational distance. This is ours to set.”

“We’re not a dock runabout, Mr. Cameron. We don’t jitter about with any ease. And we don’t pick the interval, now. They’re enroute to us .”

“Yes, ma’am. But we signal when we’d like to. With luck, they’ll do the same.”

Sabin just stared at him. Then: “Takehold in forty-five minutes, Mr. Cameron, given they don’t fire or accelerate. Go have your tea.”

He had outraged Sabin. He hoped not to do the same for the crew. He gathered his bodyguard and walked back to the executive corridor, straightening his coat and cuffs, asking himself did he need a new shirt run up—the brain was, oddly, going into court-mode, and Shejidan’s instincts rose up, ridiculous as some of them might be. He became nand’ paidhi again. He worried about his wardrobe. And with it, the signals they might be sending. It wasn’t just a tea break. It was a way of life.

He rapped gently at the dowager’s door, and discovered the dowager, in the most comfortable chair, held court with a fruit drink in hand, and Cajeiri sat on a mattress beside Gin Kroger. They’d taken the cabin apart and put it back together in a more felicitous configuration, Ilisidi sitting centermost, Cenedi and his men occupying the corner, standing.

Bren bowed. “Aiji-ma. We have now issued a set of signals which the foreign ship is mirroring. The current course will bring us to conversational distance and the ship will manuever briefly and slow down, although the possibility of violent evasion exists. Please be prepared for quick action. In the meanwhile, I shall retire to my cabin to think.”

“Pish,” Ilisidi said with a careless wave of her hand. “This is a mattress. That is a wall. We do as we can, nandi.”

“One observes so, aiji-ma.” He made a little bow. “I have secured Sabin-aiji’s cooperation and seen felicitous numbers on the bridge. One hopes for a little time, yet, aiiji-ma. Do take care.”

“If you need help up there—” Gin. Dr. Gin Kroger, who understood machines. In Shejidan that move intervening in the dowager’s conversation would have had hands reaching for sidearms, and Cajeiri looked up, mouth open.

Ilisidi simply waved an indulgent hand. “ Tea , one believes the paidhi-aiji requested.”

Oh, someone understood more ship-speak than they routinely admitted. Someone closely monitoring his doings on the bridge. Nothing was news to the dowager.

“Go refresh yourself, nand’ paidhi. Tea will arrive here, at your convenience.”

“One is honored.” He bowed, turned and went to his own makeshift cabin, more fortunate than Jase, more fortunate than Sabin, whose code was endurance and who never understood the loyalty of her crew.

His staff’s solution to impending disaster was to set their lords at a problem, which meant assuring themselves their lords had their wits about them—and meant that the lords had ultimately to make a return on the investment and perform a miracle. He’d thought of having time to himself—but now he did draw an easier breath, it seemed to him that a little space in familiar context was what he did need.

He returned in due course, paid his quiet courtesies. And with the dowager, with Gin, Cajeiri advised to non-participance and silence—he sipped a cup of tea, how gotten, whether it was part of the picnic supplies, he neither knew nor cared. It was enough to be here, with Banichi, with Jago close at hand. With all the strong, quiet surety of their Guild, very different than the human one that opposed them.

“So,” Ilisidi said, “have we thought of an answer to this conundrum?”

“Several things have become clear, aiji-ma—that while this ship was absent, the aliens returned. That Ramirez may have earned his Guild’s distrust and disapproval in seeking out contact with foreigners. Third—that the stationmaster refuses to take Sabin-aiji’s orders.”

Why was he going through the list of new information? The job involved only the foreign ship.

But did it?

Something bothered him, beyond the obvious detail of goings-on in their absence, Ramirez’s subterfuges, the Guild’s historic autocracy. He wasn’t sure what nagged at him.

But the dowager listened, waiting for him to put it all together. And he—

He sipped his tea and looked from the dowager to Gin, the third leg of the homeworld tripod, met a sober, on-party-ma

Why should it?

His job was the ship out there. The ship now moving toward and them toward it.

And what was he going to say, that he could say? Hail them in ship-speak as if they were supposed to understand? Continue with the blink-code?

Sitting out here six years meant observation or a stubborn ship’s captain.

Or damage.

“One learns, aiji-ma, that the ship has sat quietly out here, they claim for six years, doing nothing. Station thinks it may be robotic.” He rendered that in Mosphei’, for Gin, who looked as if he’d posed her a personal question. “With control at some remove off in the dark peripheries of the solar system. Which is a very large place.”

“So,” Ilisidi said. “And what shall we do if it is robotic?”

He translated that for Gin, too.

“Or it might be stuck, without fuel,” was Gin’s instant assessment. “If it’s a robot, either the other side lost track of it and it’s out of instructions, or they know it’s here and it’s doing a job. If it is a robot. Personally, I wouldn’t wholly trust a robot to avoid a war. I think they’d be outright stupid to leave diplomacy to a machine, and to leave a weapon sitting out here ready to explode isn’t the way a smart government would carry on, is it? We could be some very powerful non-participant.”

Another translation.

And a thought. It might be sitting there waiting, as robots did so well, for input. And they could well be that input, couldn’t they?

Or if it might be doing a job—what job, beyond observing? Communicating?

Gin was right. Robots weren’t outstanding at avoiding hostilities or at finessing interspecies communication.

He sipped his tea, thinking, it came here, hit the station, and it parked. Odd behavior. Behavior that, however alien, didn’t seem to have a constructive outcome—unless there was some piece of information missing.

“Ramirez arrived,” he said slowly. “And left.” Translation. “Perhaps it waits for the ship.” Translation. “And here we are.” Translation. Grim, cold thought.

“These are not reasonable people,” Ilisidi said, “to fire on persons who have not fired on them.”

“Would a wise and civilized entity fire without more provocation than that? One hardly knows, aiji-ma. Within the possibilities of truly alien behavior—it might.” Translation.

Another sip of tea.

One fired—if.

If one’s culture was to fire on strangers.

If fired upon. That was a big if.

Sip of tea. Very basic thought. One fired to stop an attack. Or what one construed as an attack.

Then one ran for one’s life. If fear was the guiding principle.

Primary mistake to make any third species behave like humans or atevi. But a third point, a third species, could close a geometric figure, make an enclosure, bend lines back to intersect everyone’s positions, over and over and over. Three points could close a circle. Two points might be part of that circle—but one had to guess where the third might land.

Primary mistake to expect them to behave the same. Primary mistake to think there was no logic—that their behavior didn’t make sense within their culture. Give them the same set of circumstances and they’d always do the same thing. Chaos and chaotic response didn’t get a species out of the swamp and into a space program. There was logic in the behavior. That there was any willingness to signal at all was a fair indication that they expected response in kind.