Explorer

For Jenrette, with, maybe, a whole raft of executive secrets on his conscience, a much more comfortable assignment, that with Sabin.

“Presumably,” Jase said, “Sabin’s thoroughly debriefed him by now, even the things he wouldn’t want to say. So I assume she knows as much out of Jenrette as her imagination prompts her to ask and his sense of the situation lets him answer. Presumably, once we raised the possibility this tape existed, Sabin immediately reviewed it and questioned Jenrette. What else she may have gotten out of Jenrette, I wish I did know.”

“She’s going to know I came up here. She’s going to ask why.”

“True.” Jase picked up a disk from off his desk and gave it to him, tape being in most instances a figure of speech on this ship. “This is a copy. Your copy. Consider—I was aboard when we docked at Reunion. I was belowdecks being lied to like all the rest. I remember how it was. I remember the a

Thirty years. A human who lived among atevi, to whom numbers were as basic as breathing, twitched to numbers. He immediately dived after that lure, wondering. Attentive. But answerless.

“What have you found out?” he asked Jase.

“I don’t know what I’ve found out. I wanted you to come up here in human territory, where I’m not thinking like atevi. Where it’s a lot easier for me to remember what happened, because, dammit, I should have been asking questions. Thirty years old. That’s question number one. Ramirez had me born out of Taylor’s Legacy, and picked me a mother who’s now found it convenient not to have been on this voyage, for reasons I can fairly well understand are personal preference, or maybe a desire to live to an old age. Or maybe to avoid questions I’d ask when we got closer to our destination, who knows? Maybe it was Sabin’s order. I know Ramirez had me studying French and Latin and Chinese, he said, since humans might have drifted apart from us over the last several centuries. So I was created to contact Mospheirans, before Ramirez had any idea Mospheirans existed… because he was a student of history and he did know that a few centuries of separation can make vocabulary and meanings drift, and we might not understand each other. Isn’t that brilliant? That’s what he told me when we headed back to Alpha.”

“It’s factually true—at least about linguistic drift. But I don’t buy the prescience.”

“Nor do I. And maybe I was created to contact humans—maybe to contact atevi, too, because Ramirez did, of course, know there was a native species. Contacting them had been at issue before Phoenix left Alpha two hundred years ago. Bet that humans were likely to go down to the planet and learn their language and change fairly radically. All true. I was born for all those reasons, let’s suppose, twenty years before aliens showed up and hit Reunion Station. But that’s assuming what later be came useful was useful twenty years earlier, isn’t it? Why? Why do you suppose Ramirez was thinking about going back to Alpha for the first time in two hundred years? Guild orders? Guild orders that didn’t have any foreknowledge that there was going to be any alien attack?”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t. I don’t know what’s behind any of this. I’d like to know why Ramirez really wanted me born.”

There was a lot of pain behind Jase’s quiet statement. The part about remembering human things better up here in human territory—Bren well understood that. The curiosity about his own birth—a man without natural parentage could well ask. Jase was born out of genetic deepfreeze, the Legacy, the stored genetic material of the original crew. Of no living father, and maybe not even of the woman he called mother. That was one personally disturbing matter.

But the intersection of Jase’s birth with Guild intent and Ramirez’s intent, coupled with an education suiting him for nothing practical in ordinary terms: those were scary, scary questions.

“I’ve always thought it was a reasonable precaution, your peculiar education,” Bren said, “if Ramirez always meant to come back to us.”

“Always meant to come back,” Jase echoed him. “So figure: I’m thirty years old, give or take the games travel does with time. My years are mostly on this ship, so hell with figuring planetary terms: I think my answer is on this ship, the same way my life has been on this ship, and I know when Ramirez ordered me born. But then I’m up against another wall. I don’t know how long he pla

For any human born why was I conceived was an interesting question, to which the answer might be as simple and human and serendipitous as we didn’t plan on it . But for Jase, Jase being definitely pla

Point two: being disco

Ramirez created Jase to mediate with the colonists the ship had left at Alpha? And with the possibility of atevi involvement? Brilliant thinking. Except this tape, this lie, and the fact he hadn’t trusted his own heir with the truth of survivors abandoned at Reunion until he was on his deathbed.

Magnificent pla

Then they’d heard what Ramirez said on his deathbed. The crew, when it heard the station was still alive, had downright mutinied and demanded to go back; atevi allies had thought about it and decided to back that request, for fear of aliens tracking humans from Reunion to their own world. And Mospheirans had insisted on joining the mission, to get human records cleared from Reunion for exactly the same reasons. A remarkable three-way alliance had leapt into action on what they thought was a rescue mission—or at best a critical mop-up of dangerous loose ends of information left behind. Find out the situation, shut down anything still left, and get out, destroying any record that could lead an alien enemy back to the atevi homeworld.