Текст книги "Explorer"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Or for itself, these days? The Pilots’ Guild hadn’t actually consisted of pilots for centuries. Supposedly they’d gone stationside at Reunion, and let the ship’s captains go their way, under their authority in name, if not in fact.

Jase touched a button. Sound came up, the ordinary hoarse whisper of a man’s exerted breathing. “ Almost there, sir ,” a voice said.

“They know where they’re going,” Jase said. “They never ask. They’re about to pass a working airlock. They know in advance certain of the lifts are going to work. There’s no mystery about this, not to them. They’re representing Ramirez and they’re going in to meet with the station authority.”

“And that is Jenrette we’re hearing. The one with the helmet cam.”

“Affirmative.”

Sabin’s man now. Sabin’s sympathy for a man decades in Ramirez’ service, a man too senior to be on a despised junior captain’s staff?

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 announcements that we were going in. I remember the solemn announcement that we were going back to Alpha to find out if the rest of the colonists we’d scattered out here had survived—with the implication things were going to change and we were going to patch everything and find a friendly port and then prepare against the possibility of alien invasion at Alpha. Right along with crew, I got behind that promise. I was young. I’d had a peculiar course of study, and I understood I was going to be useful in that approach. I had a notion that was the reason I existed at all; and all during that voyage I bore down on my studies: French and Latin and Chinese and history, a lot of history. Yolanda and I were all impressed, because Ramirez was so incredibly wise as to have had us going down that path in the first place. Wise… bullshit. I’m thirty years old. I’m relatively sure I am. Tell me: why was he so incredibly ahead of the game?”

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 planned it. I don’t know why he planned it, and I don’t know what was the triggering event, but at some point, clearly, my existence was going to be useful to him. Twenty-some years later, the aliens show up. And did that change my purpose—or satisfy it?”

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 planned, his genetic code extracted from the frozen genetic legacy of dead heroes—the first crew, the legendary Taylor’s crew, who’d saved the ship from sure destruction in a radiation hell—if there was a god-among-mortals, Jase was born with that cachet. He’d had done everything possible since to duck the job, but he was born disconnected from modern ship families and he was born of a dead hero… maybe of Taylor himself, the legendary Navigator. Point one.

Point two: being disconnected from modern families, he was naturally up for grabs. Ramirez had appropriated him, no other word for it—appropriated him and dictated his life, not quite father, never that available. No emotional attachment—nothing close, at least, except a boy’s human need to attach to something.

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 planning, that was. Up to that point, the crew had thought all they had to do was tuck in at Alpha and build defenses in a very remote chance of unfriendly visitors turning up on their track. They hadn’t thought their remote cousins and occasionally closer relatives had been left alive. They’d mourned their dead and gone on and adjusted to a new reality.

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.

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, chagrinned. “What does add up? What do you think the truth is?”

“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 running hard, getting out of that place and going back to report to Reunion. Via an indirect route. That was the idea.” Jase was quiet a moment. On the desk, the tape played on, four men walking through corridors mostly dark, but not as ruined as one might think. “Talk was, in the lower corridors, the ship had acted hostile. But no one knew details. And when we got to Reunion, again—something definitely wasn’t right. Information didn’t come down to the corridors when it should. We were confined to quarters. That part’s normal on an exit. You know. But we moved closer, still without information. And linked up with the station. And took on fuel. And during that process we were shown the view outside, the station damage, while Ramirez broke the news we’d seen aliens and now they’d hit the station and killed everybody. And he said all we could do was go back to Alpha colony, where we thought there might be support we needed, and resources… oh, give or take a couple of hundred years of neglect. So we went. Ramirez called me and Yolanda in privately during the voyage, and he talked to us about how people changed into nations and accents turned into languages in a couple of centuries. Yolanda and I being the only ones who’d studied any other language and who really knew on an operational level—on a mindset level—how that sort of thing worked, we were critical to what was coming. And wasn’t it marvelous and lucky we existed? We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t ask him, ‘So how did you know in advance you’d need us?’ That was our best chance to ask why we existed, and we were so overwhelmed with finally having a practical purpose we didn’t ask that question. Didn’t even ask each other, until I guess, between us; the time for questions passed. And after that—I don’t know: maybe I was scared of the answer. Maybe I was just too focused on the future to question the past.”

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

“My innermost guess,” Jase said, “my middle-of-the-watch-and-can’t-sleep guess used to be that he’d had us born because there always was some secret plan to go back to Alpha, some scheme either the Guild had cooked up, or something he meant to do secretly in a breach with the Guild. I was sure he intended for us somehow to figure those cross-cultural differences he foresaw. Ramirez studied history. He knew about cultures outside ship-culture. He created paidhiin without ever having seen one. Without ever knowing atevi had gotten in charge of the situation back at Alpha—he was prepared.”

“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.”

“Never?”

“We lost the signposts. The stellar signposts that should have been a clear marker for us. If you can’t see the noisiest stars in space, either something’s between you and them, or you’re way far from where you thought you were, so far lost that finding old Earth’s not even possible. No, it’s never been possible, beyond the original accident.”

“That’s not what the ship told my ancestors.”

“The great search. Along with a lot of other myths. But without an elaborate arrangement of fuel depots and far more ships, by what the navigators say, it wasn’t ever going to happen, and somehow the Guild never got around to building other ships or arranging any fueling stations. Whatever their reason, we can’t reach a point of vantage without traveling a lot farther than may be prudent, counting everything that’s happened, and we don’t know what direction to start looking. Take it from me, that never was really the reason we left Alpha. I think you know that by now.”

“I know the ship’s current story.”

Jase was silent a beat or two. “Fair enough.”

“The ship wanted to take the colony out of Alpha, set up in deeper space, and the colonists—my ancestors—wouldn’t go for it. Is that still true?”

“The Guild was for setting up further out in space. Building a place that would be just human, and just spacefaring. We weren’t supposed to live on a planet. Weren’t supposed to contaminate ourselves with what wasn’t human.”

“Small choice atevi ever got about being contaminated.”

“The Guild. The Guild’s decisions. The Guild split over Alpha. The faction that prevailed didn’t want your ancestors going down to the nice green, inhabited planet. No. And once it happened, even the solar system was too close for comfort. They were diametrically opposed to atevi contact—not so much to protect the atevi culture, though that was a consideration; but to protect our own.”

“From us.”

“Us. Which us ? We were so few. The universe is so big. It’s an article of faith that original Earth exists somewhere—but from the Guild viewpoint, we’re the sole true custodians of the Archive, the guardians of human culture. Your ancestors wanted to dive into an alien gravity well and give it all up.”

“That’s not all there was in the decision.”

“You know I agree with you. But Guild leadership was obsessed with establishing a secure base where only human ideas had currency.”

“It was a human idea to go down to the planet.”

“But not a solely human idea that came back. In that they were right, weren’t they?”

“Does it matter?”

“To them it matters. It’s still going to matter. When they couldn’t control Alpha, they took the ship and left.”

“To preserve their purity .”

“And as soon as Guild leadership found a likely spot, they built again, not near a planet, this time, not near any attractive, living world where people could escape by a low-tech dive to a living world, oh, no, not twice. They built Reunion out where everyone would be under their orders, always, totally, dependent on them and their orders. And the Guild leaders got off the ship. And established their rule over Reunion. And then—then I’m guessing here—I think after they’d built up their population a while, after they’d educated the population the way they wanted, they might try to terraform a moderately liveable planet, and keep it only human. I think the Guild couldn’t find Earth. So they were going to create Earth.“

Mindboggling. “You’re kidding.”

“Give them some credit. They weren’t going to do it to the atevi planet. Give them that much virtue, that they were looking for somewhere they could claim for themselves,”

“You keep saying they, they, they .” Aboard ship, the term was we . Crew. Family. And it hadn’t been we at very critical points. “The ship, I take it, held a different view in the proceedings.”

“The ship is the ship. The Pilots’ Guild went ashore and became something aside from the ship’s executive. The Guild began to run station business. It became station business. It had done that from way back at Alpha. So, yes, there was a schism between the ship’s executive and the Guild—at least—there was an increasing division of interests.”

“And we , meaning the ship, weren’t as interested in Reunion?”

“We had relations on Reunion. We refueled there. They mined fuel for us. It was all interconnected. You know there’s an emotional connection. But no, we weren’t Reunion. We were Phoenix . We’d never stopped being Phoenix . And we never trusted the way the station was run. We just couldn’t do anything about it.”

That was the universe as he’d speculated it existed. Populations achieved self-interest, and wider interests cooled. Only the ship had stayed footloose, traveling. Capable of change. And ominously so, of meddling in new things.

“So,” Bren said, “the ship created Reunion, and used it, and thought of it as home away from home. And the ship never came back to Alpha. But still reserved that notion for itself.”

“Reunion we knew was safe. We were loyal to Reunion.”

“Was Ramirez?”

Jase might not have anticipated that question. He blinked. He keyed. The image on the screen froze.

“Good question,” Jase said. “Useful question.”

“Was Ramirez loyal?”

“He created us. Me and Yolanda.”

Back to that same pathway. “And you were—what?”

“I think,” Jase said slowly, “and this is a difficult thought—I have this niggling suspicion, sometimes, that, the same way I suspect the Guild had its notion of defining humanity, Ramirez meant me and Yolanda to out-human the rest of the Guild—filtering the human Archive through our perceptions. Being able to challenge their concepts. We were learning Latin and Chinese. The ship was still working for the Guild, cataloging planets, investigating likely ones, ones that met their criteria. Purely scientific, they said. Increasing the human database. For what? For what logical purpose were we going about, that had the station devoting so much energy to our energy needs? But not for us to ask, I suppose. There was always fuel. We’d dock, we’d go. We’d explore and refuel. That routine was my whole world. You don’t question the world—not until the plumbing fails, isn’t that what you said once?”

“And now?”

“Now that the plumbing’s really failed? I don’t believe pure scientific curiosity had anything to do with it. I’m sure the Guild sent us where we went, or they wouldn’t have gone on refueling us. Maybe they simply wanted to have us gone as long as possible, to keep our influence out of the station. Maybe they wanted the unification, the symbol, of us as the focus of community effort, the pressure valve. The reason for sacrifice. And they could control us. Fueling was always the sword over our heads. And while all that was going on, I’m sure we were gathering information that would eventually be useful, investigating other solar systems, and fuel sources. But Ramirez—I have this tenuous theory—didn’t ever mention his two linguists to the Guild, not that I ever was aware. And I wonder—did he mean to create what he was looking for? He knew about diversity , which wasn’t quite the Guild’s insistence of everyone walking in step. He didn’t know the lost languages, but he knew he couldn’t create a new Earth on a ship where everybody is cousins and brothers and sisters, and living the same lives doing the same jobs. He couldn’t do it on a space station Guild’s running. But he could do it if he ever found a place he could get supply that the Guild didn’t control, and he could establish an orbiting base that wouldn’t hold fueling as a sword over his head. He had the genetic storage. He had the Archive. Fantastic as it is on a human level—I think he was hoping to find a place where he could build another station and ultimately set down an unregulated colony.”

“A green planet.”

“Another green planet. One without a population. I think, in that, Ramirez and the Guild were after the same thing.”

“Not to have a population, if it could support humans?”

“Bren, my friend, what educated ship-folk know about planetary biology fits in a lifesupport tank. I know I don’t know as much as I should. But let me tell you, I do know the British monarchs and the Alexandrine Empire. I know Darwin and Eberly and Teiler. Yolanda knows German history and Bantu. I’m really keen on the Shang Dynasty. Hell, we’re diversity incorporated. We’re culture in a plastic pack. I suspect going back to Alpha wasn’t Ramirez’s real plan. He had every opportunity to do that. No. I think Ramirez’s ideas were pure Guild—humans only. Ramirez wanted the Guild’s plan—but he didn’t want current Guild leadership in charge of it. He intended to run his version of it. And poking around in various solar systems, looking for life-supporting planets to drop us on, I think he got more than he bargained for.”

“Angry aliens.”

“Their planet, is my guess. At least something they owned and cared about. They’d probably been watching us for a while. They showed hostile and we made a feint off to another destination, But when we got home, home had already been hit. So they knew damned well what they were hitting. They knew us, knew where we’d come from, and we didn’t know them—not even know which of various systems had been the trigger for the attack. But I think, whoever hit us, they very well knew the neighborhood we’ve only been parked in for a couple of hundred years.”

“Seems very likely,” Bren said. “Based on all you say.”

“So back to our question—why do I exist? Hell if I know. But Ramirez was up to something that blew up on him and took out the Guild’s home base, whether it was his idea or the Guild’s. It was a thorough catastrophe. What bothers me in all of this is where Sabin fits. And what kind of politics went on between her and Captain Ogun, when he stayed behind at Alpha and sent her to manage a rescue neither of them thinks is likely? You’d think she’d at least give up her antagonism toward me. But she won’t—as if she thinks I’m still following Ramirez’s agenda.”

“Might you be?”

“Not that I know.”

“What could you do against her?”

“I don’t know. Until I know what I was for—I don’t know what she thinks I might do.”

“Not that many choices, are there?”

“There still may be choices. Like—who’s running this ship on the way back to Alpha… if anyone’s alive.”

Guild getting in charge of the ship was a very, very grim scenario. Not one they’d actively considered, in the bright lights of Alpha Station and the full steam ahead of their own planning. But a year later, out in the vast dark of the universe and closer and closer to Reunion, it did prompt a sober reflection—on people, on old loyalties, on their prospects.

If they got there and there was no fuel, they had that covered—in Gin and her robots. If they got there and found a still-potent Guild in charge—and Sabin much too sympathetic toward them—

“They’d want the ship, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh, damned right, they’d want it,” Jase said.

“You think Sabin seriously might lean their way? Give up her own authority? I don’t read her that way.”

“Or if she became part of theirs,” Jase said, and drew a breath. “At the start of this voyage I had some doubts about her. But this last year, this voyage—I don’t know what she thinks.”

A last year of being de facto senior captain. Of working with Ramirez’s unwanted appointee.

Of having a section of her ship in atevi and Mospheiran control, an arrangement not to her liking. If the Guild didn’t like “contamination,” what did Sabin think?

“Have you seen any shift in her opinions?”

“I can’t read her. I do think whatever went on between Ramirez and the Guild, she’s on a completely different agenda. And keeping me out of the log—that’s said something, too, hasn’t it? She never was on Ramirez’s side. Always the contrary vote, always outvoted. And Ogun put her in charge here. Why, Bren? Why in hell did he do that?”

“Admittedly putting her where she didn’t have to deal with an entire nation of atevi and diverse politics on the planet. Aboard a ship that’s dead set on its mission—a crew that’s going to be pretty hard to argue with if it gets this tape in hand, among other points. You talk about the Guild possibly taking over. But that’s not the way the crew feels about past decisions, if I have it right.”

“A two-edged sword. If Ramirez was against the Guild, if blame for this goes against him , I was born part of it. And that’s the critical detail I don’t know. I don’t know when it could blow up and I don’t know what’s going to be the issue.”

“You’ve got the tape. You could release it. You could take your position from that.”

“And that could blow wider than I intend. Stranded is a hot enough word with Mospheirans, but let me tell you, abandoning survivors at Reunion—that nearly fried the interface. And things don’t make sense. The way the lie was constructed, right from the start of the ship coming into Reunion, how do you read that? I can’t answer it.”