Explorer

Now, one move away from their destination, Jase was saying they’d better rethink Ramirez’s whole path of action? Someone who lived by numbers should have been looking at the equation that was Jase Graham’s life a long, long time back.

“I’m listening,” Bren said, chagri

“Earliest,” Jase said somberly, “earliest I remember, I was supposed to view tapes and learn languages. Yolanda and I,” he amended his account: Yolanda Mercheson, sister in event, but not in genetics. Likewise one of Taylor’s Children, Yolanda had been his partner—his lover, in a match that hadn’t worked out. Now she was back at the atevi station doing what a paidhi did: translate and mediate with atevi authorities, and try to keep the three-way alliance stable. “Understand, I’m not complaining about my abnormal childhood,” Jase said. “But grant I wasn’t stupid. God, no, it wasn’t remotely my heritage to be stupid. I did know I was abnormal, and I did wonder. Most of all I wondered why everybody else studied things you could put a name to on the ship—they were going to be engineers, or techs, or nav, or bio; and they got together by tens and twenties and made ball teams, that sort of thing. I just had Yolanda. And she had me. And we didn’t know what we could call what we did. But we studied what we were supposed to, because the Old Man said so, because our mothers said so. Because the seniors on the ship expected it of us, and they thought we were doing the right thing, even if our peers thought we were strange.”

One couldn’t imagine such a life. He’d had his own oddball passion—to see the rest of the world. To understand the exotic lands of the atevi. But it had been his own passion that had led him to the University and a career in the Foreign Office.

Jase had been assigned an ambition. Issued one, like a uniform. And was ruled from above, by Ramirez’s decisions.

That was, Bren thought, fairly horrific.

“So,” Jase said, “Here I was, doing what was interesting enough, but peculiar—I mean, Yolanda and I could speak Chinese to each other, but no one else, and we hadn’t a clue why. And the next minute of our lives, something went way wrong. The last mission was going as usual: we were at a star, looking around, making notes, taking our usual survey, as if we were going to carry out our mission and find some trace of old Earth—big chance that was, and we all knew it, but it was what we were supposed to do, so we did it. Then, bang. Alarm sounded. Everything was secrecy and we were ordered to quarters, headed home to the station via a point where we had a minor, uninhabited base. That fast. Total change of direction. Total change of plans. I heard senior crew talking about it when I was going to quarters, but no one talked to me. Ramirez certainly didn’t call me personally and explain.

“But you know how it is, now, when the ship moves. You travel and you stop and refigure, and while you’re inertial, you hear all the theories floating the corridors if you just keep your ears open. Ramirez didn’t talk to me. Rarely did. My mother didn’t know any more than anybody else. The same with Yolanda and her contacts. But rumor was, on that voyage, that we’d seen something that wasn’t confined to the planet we were observing. An alien ship. So we were ru

“And you think now?” Bren asked. “What is the truth?”

“My i

“You used to think that. And now?”

“He had us born and set to the course he wanted long before aliens were in the picture. That tends to exclude them as a cause—so far as I know. So maybe he was thinking about Alpha. Second—he shoved me into a captaincy I begged him not to give me and tried to get rid of. And he wouldn’t give it to Yolanda, who wanted to be on this ship. She got left behind on this trip, and I got ripped away from the world I wanted more than anything, to be on a ship I can’t run. Ramirez wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t arbitrarily cruel. But it seemed unfair. And you know—when something’s not damn fair, it does make you mad. And you don’t think straight. You ask why, but you constantly ask the wrong why, and you don’t go back to first questions. And ever since we’d gone back to Alpha and the atevi seemed our only hope, Yolanda and I had forgotten all about the whys we used to ask. We had a job to do. Dealing with outsiders was work Yolanda flat hated, and work I really took to, really took to—and both situations were just as distracting. I was lucky enough to draw the atevi side. Yolanda had humans trying to use her to get at each other. So the two of us grew apart. And then Ramirez had the gall to give me the captaincy, for God’s sake, permanent ship assignment, at the same time he used Yolanda secretly to do translation, bound to the planet, keeping major secrets from me. It wasn’t fair. ”

“And?”

“So on this voyage, maybe I’ve gotten some mental distance, enough to deaden the emotional charge in that situation. I think about Ramirez frozen down there in storage—and I think about what I should have asked him. Questions I wish I’d asked Yolanda, to the point, that she might not have thought to tell me before we left. What she might have assumed I knew.

“And at the same time, I was after this tape. Without the right keys. Denied the right keys, by Ramirez and by Sabin, both. Is that somehow to the good of us all? So in that mood of executive curiosity, and during that search, I’ve dug into everything I could get, things that aren’t a restricted record. Like what files Ramirez got out of the Archive—what books he read. History. Earth’s history. That’s no surprise. Ancient, recent, didn’t matter to him. He studied the world he was trying to find, as if somehow the coordinates were going to occur to him, as if somewhere in the Archive, the actual location might be buried—or some necessary navigational cue. Never was going to happen.”