Текст книги "Explorer"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“The nearest chair is comfortable,” Bren said, sitting down at his desk, and opening up his computer. “Tapes, tapes, tapes.”

“Cenedi doesn’t have to know,” the young rascal suggested. “I want the war ones.”

“Oh, but Cenedi is extremely good at finding out, aiji-meni, and I am Bren-nandi , and dare I say that the young aiji’s latest statement held an unfortunate two?”

“Bren-nandi.” Cajeiri was occasionally experimenting in the adult language. “And it was not two, Bren-nandi.”

“Mode of offer, young aiji, was the implied infelicity of two, since though I trust you were speaking regarding my action, you nevertheless omitted my courtesy.” He could be quite coldly didactic when his fingers were on his keyboard. But one didn’t dwell on an aiji’s failures. He called a list of film titles to his display. “Ha.”

And sifted them for classics as Cajeiri leaned forward, looking… as if Cajeiri could even read the list.

“Ahh,” Bren said as enigmatically as possible.

“Where?” Cajeiri asked sharply, and immediately, under threat of no tapes, remembered the courtesy form: “What does one find in this list, nandi?”

Another sort through the list. Children’s classics. One owed the aiji a proper response for his newly-discovered courtesy. “The very best of stories, aiji-meni.” He considered Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee —no, problematic in approach to authority. And one had no wish to see Cajeiri discover practical jokes or paintbrushes. Robin Hood … no, not good: not only defying authority, but promoting theft.

“Ha.” The Three Musketeers . Satisfying to most atevi principles: the support of an aiji’s wife by loyal security personnel, the downfall of base conspirators.

The education of a young man with more ideas than experience.

He copied it and gave the lad the disk. “Your player will handle this, aiji-meni. One believes the piece is even in color. One is advised to set the switch to second position.”

“Thank you, Bren-nandi!”

“A pleasure, young aiji.” God, he’d forgotten the story himself. And remembered it, once his mind was on it. The whole notion of youthful derring-do came like a transfusion. Oxygen to the blood.

Dared he even think age came on with a little stiffening of the backbone, a little too much propriety, a few too many situations that numbed the nerves?

“Perhaps it would suit the young aiji for me to examine that racing car, after all,” he said. “After breakfast, that is, which the young aiji might still attend.”

Cajeiri happily changed his mind.

And handed the car to him under the table, in a hiatus of service. He had a look at the wheels. And in lieu of a consultation of Gin’s engineers, he proposed an after-breakfast investigation of available possibilities, which ended up providing bits of plastic tubing to stand the wobbly wheels off from the sides.

Which was how, in this transit between places in the depths of space, the dowager’s security happened to find the lord of the heavens down on his knees at one end of the corridor with the future aiji similarly posed down by the galley.

And that was how the dowager’s security ended up, with Banichi and Jago, designing a remote-controlled car whose wheels did not wobble. One understood there were secret bets with Gin’s staff. And a proposed race date.

The staff’s new passion became Alexandre Dumas, books and tapes alike, even the dowager requesting a copy, via written message. Bren began reading the works himself, amid the growing tendrils of Sandra Johnson’s plants, which now formed a green and white curtain from their hanging baskets, and writing daily to his brother.

Banichi and Jago have a chess match going , was one entry. The staff is laying bets .

And at the resolution: Jago is trying not to be pleased with herself; Banichi is trying not to notice. They’ve started another game .

I think there was a car race. And I don’t think we won. I haven’t heard a thing, but Banichi is building a small remote control device of his own, and bets on that are secret, but not that secret.

Jase turned up at one lunch, Jase’s midnight snack, and for an hour they sat and discussed nothing in particular—the merits of cork fishing and the currents off Mospheira’s south shore—whether or not Crescent Island development had ever taken off and whether a small yacht dared try the southern sea.

No, the log records had not surfaced, Sabin was growing peevish, and he had found no key to the information.

Damn.

had lunch with Jase. We talked about Beaufort Bay. We’ll have to talk about the exact plans when I get home. That’s how crazy we’ve become.

God, Toby, I want to get home. I want to get home – and it comes to me that it’s not just the chance of waking up somewhere we didn’t ever mean to go that scares me spitless. It’s that I want to get home , I, me, the me that’s going to have a home when I get back. I changed when I went to the mainland, but not so that I didn’t recognize home. I changed when I began to live on the mainland, but not so that I didn’t dream of trips to the north shore. I changed when I went to live in space, and the situation was always hot, and getting back to the island meant running a gauntlet of press and politics that just wouldn’t let me alone. It’s so strange out here – not that we’ve seen anything or done anything but sit in our cabins for a year and read Dumas and race toy cars – but it’s still strange; and it can only get stranger, and I think so much of home. I’m a little desperate today. I wish I had answers I don’t have .

But I can’t govern the changes that have already happened.

I can’t govern what happens to me on the way. I never could. And every change has been away, not toward, and every change makes the circle of those who’ve been through this with me smaller, not larger, until at this moment I think I’m becoming a sort of black hole, and I’m going to pull everything I know into a pinpoint so none of us can get out, and then I’ll stop existing at all in this universe. I’m terrified of never getting home, that you’ll never get this letter.

A few people still on earth matter. You. Tabini. And if you are still speaking to me, and if I can get there, I’d like to take about a month sitting on the beach and telling you all the things most people on Mospheira wouldn’t at all want to hear about. I don’t know if you’re curious or if you’re just that patient, but for either reason, I think you’d listen and nod in the right places, even for this. I love you, brother. I miss you. And one part of me wishes you were here and the sane part says thank God you’re not. Thank God something I remember is still there.

By the fact I’m now panicking, you can guess this is the scary part of our trip coming up. This is where I need every scrap of courage I’ve got, and I wish I had more information of substance. I think about Banichi and Jago, and if they or the staff ever doubt our success in this crazy venture, they don’t let me know it. The dowager – she won’t spook, no matter what. Meanwhile I’m thinking this is the scariest thing I’ve ever contemplated, and there’s a six– or seven-year-old kid down there playing with a toy car and thinking it’s all fairly normal for a kid to be racing cars in a starship corridor. He’s not afraid. He doesn’t imagine the trouble we could be in… or he does, but at his age everything’s an adventure. Being alone in the dark scares him. The thought of dropping into deserted space just doesn’t faze him. I’m not sure anything scares Banichi and Jago but the thought of losing me somewhere out here. So is any fear real? Do we become self-focused cowards by measures as we get older? Or am I the only one on this deck who really knows the odds ?

Jase is likely as scared as I am. Ginny hasn’t got nerves. I don’t know what drives her. She’s just busy seeing to her staff, and that’s what she does. But my staff sees to me, not the other way around, and I suppose that leaves me time enough to think, way more thinking about the consequences of various things than I find comfortable.

The beach and the sound of the waves can take all that away. I’d say, the deck of the boat, but right now, considering just stringing thoughts together is like swimming in syrup, sitting very still on a planet’s solid skin sounds good to me.

On a certain day he’d had entirely enough.

He left his computer, left his notes, gathered Banichi and Jago without warning, and headed for the lift.

“ Is there an emergency, Bren-ji?” Banichi asked.

“A conference,” he said, and neither Banichi nor Jago asked further questions.

Nor did they evidence any surprise whatsoever that he ordered the lift to the bridge and strode out and past working operations on the consoles, down that screened aisle. He was bound, since Sabin’s bodyguards, Collins and the rest, were sitting watch down in the executive corridor, for executive offices.

The guards got up from benches—not quite hands on weapons, but close.

“I’m here to see the senior captain,” Bren said in Mosphei’. “ Now .”

Jenrette happened to be part of that group of five. But the seniormost of Sabin’s guards, Collins, was a man who’d been Sabin’s for decades before Jenrette came into the picture. The lot of them might have had orders of one kind about crew coming up here—but they likely had special orders about care and coddling of their alien passengers, too, and those separate trains had suddenly intersected, headed for collision.

“I’m not going back down,” Bren said plainly, standing a little out of hearing of techs on the bridge behind him. “She won’t want an incident, I can assure you.”

Collins looked at him, looked at Banichi and Jago, a solid dark wall behind him.

And they were indeed about to have an incident: he was set, however muzzily, on course, and stood his ground.

“Captain,” Collins said to the empty air. “Mr. Cameron’s up here saying it’s urgent business.”

Whatever the answer was, Collins opened the door.

“Kindly wait here, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly to Banichi and Jago, facing Sabin at her desk, Sabin—who leaned back in her chair to have a look at the intrusion into her day’s problems. “Senior captain, good day.”

“Mr. Cameron.” No invitation, not a cue or a clue. Sabin folded her hands on her spare middle. The door shut behind him, securing their privacy.

“The record we mentioned, senior captain.”

“Record.”

“You want my help…”

“I don’t recall requesting your help, Mr. Cameron. I do recall your request. I’ve reviewed it. Hell if I’m giving you our log to play with. Go find other amusement.”

“I want the record, captain. I’m sure it doesn’t take you eleven months to find a log entry. I’m sure you had it that same shift we discussed it. I take it you view your survival as a matter of some importance. I want the record.”

A lively, analytical regard. A pursing of the lips. One thing about long-time crew—they adapted to the mental conditions of folded space, did it far better than planet-dwellers. Sabin’s thought processes at the moment might far out-class his. “You do.”

A little caution might be in order. “Politely put, please , captain.”

“You want it.” Sabin moved her chair so suddenly assassination-honed reflexes twitched. Inwardly. He didn’t budge as she opened a cabinet. And took out a tape. And held it up to his view. “You think this holds answers.”

“If you know what you were looking for, with your accustomed ability, yes, I hope it does.”

She flipped it to a landing on the desk. Making him reach to pick it up, a petty move. He wasn’t inclined to object to that.

“Good luck,” she said.

“More than this,” he said, and pocketed the tape. “More than this record, captain, what’s your estimation of the facts?”

Momentary silence. And cold irony. “Forty years and someone finally asks the question.”

“I’m asking, captain. You’ve had, all along, a very keen sense of the risks involved in contact. If we’d had you in charge of the original contact with the atevi, we might not have fought a war. Let me guess—you’ve tried to figure this without my input. You wanted your own uncontaminated assessment, uncolored by my opinions. You have some opinion of your own. What do you think?”

Cold, cold stare. “I want your uncontaminated assessment, Mr. Cameron. Enough is there. Beginning to end. You figure it. You tell me. Five days likely to system entry. You’ve worked miracles, so they tell me. You figure this one.”

“You weren’t going to give me this.”

“I lead a full, busy life,” Sabin said. Then, less provocatively: “I was still asking myself whether I was going to give it to you, to Jase—or not at all.”

“Copy to him. I won’t consult him until I’ve see this.”

“Done.” Sabin shifted the chair and punched one button. “Good luck , Mr. Cameron. Go do your job. And don’t do this again.”

“Only to mutual advantage, captain. Even you need a backup.”

He walked out. He gathered up Banichi and Jago and walked back the way he had come, to the lift, and they rode it down.

“Was it a success, nandi?” Banichi asked him.

“One waits to see, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, and felt of the tape in his pocket to be sure it was there, that his muzzy, half-dreaming brain hadn’t dreamed this gift.

Folded space wasn’t a place to try any complex analysis. Sabin, having a keen brain, being used to these conditions, surely, even so, observed a certain caution about critical decisions. Maybe that was why she made this one belatedly, to hand him the record.

And the ship went, and space bent.

Five days out, Sabin said, five muddled days left, in which, without his going up there and confronting the issue, she might have laid it on Jase’s desk, and might not.

Now he took himself back to his computer, and back to software, Jase’s gift, that could unravel the ship’s image-output or plain-print files.

It wasn’t image. It was text, a sparse, scattershot text that Ramirez had recorded—in Ramirez’s unskilled, demonstrably flawed notion of what to record.

There was a small file of personal notes—that, to a casual scan, revealed nothing but coordinates and dates and a handful of cryptic symbols.

Bren’s heart sank. What might the man have left out, that might be absolutely critical? What was the second record? A notation of where they’d been? What sites the ship had looked at, at vantages far removed from station?

Granted there was something Ramirez hadn’t wanted the Guild to know, the record was disappointingly… useless. Useless without Ramirez’s living brain to explain the memories, the intentions, the actions he associated with those cryptic references.

But there was also the minute-by-minute telemetry report, the autolog, another kind of text, mostly numerical, and huge. That was there. Thank God. Thank Sabin for including it. It was a fair record, best impartial record they seemed to have of those encounters, right down to the chaff of information from the air quality units, reams of it.

One could arrange . And filter. So he filtered. He filtered for hours, going through every internal system’s chatter, dumping the chaff and lining up the log record for the sparse useful facts, all with a brain packed about with cotton wool and unaccustomed to the kinds of data he was trying to sift. He wouldn’t attempt to organize a social dinner in his current state—and here he was put to figuring out an alien contact gone wrong, and figuring what in the data had still changed when Ramirez gave a no-output order.

Fact: Phoenix had spent a decade founding a space station to supply her and spent most of the next couple hundred years poking about in various neighborhoods likely to have supply– supply that came to the ship most conveniently when it came in space—planetoids, not deep planetary gravity wells that the huge and fragile ship had no means to plumb. That fact, he had heard from Jase over a number of years.

No gravity wells—being so fragile: so the choices a Mospheiran or an ateva would logically think of first were excluded. Phoenix had arrived at the atevi world not only with no landing craft, but, embarrassing as it was, and admitted much later, the ship had no atmosphere-qualified pilots who could land on a planet and get off again—well, except by brute force and massive lift, something that didn’t rely on air and weather—and which they couldn’t soft-land in the first place. He wasn’t, himself, qualified to pronounce on the feasibility of just lighting a powerful rocket and aiming it straight up, but such a craft had no ready reusability, nothing to enable mining and agriculture on a regular basis, so, from the ship’s point of view, relying on anything in a gravity well was a damned inconvenient way to run a space program.

Not to mention the fact that ship-folk floating in orbit didn’t in the least know what to do with crops outside a hydroponics tank, and weren’t inclined to fall down a gravity well to find out, either.

So scratch landing as an option, and as a basic intent of Ramirez’s illicit explorations. Mospheirans had landed on a no-return basis—and taken two hundred years getting back into space again. No, definitely Phoenix had been interested primarily in space-based resources. Asteroids. Comets. Floating real estate. They’d mine, occasionally, gather, occasionally… that was the way they’d lived.

The ship had had mining craft once upon a time. Which the ship hadn’t had when it showed up at Alpha. They’d lost their resources of that sort. Or maybe the ship usually had them and just hadn’t carried the extra mass on the voyage in question. It was a lot of mass.

And where would they have left them? At a remote star, when they’d pulled up stakes in a hurry?

At Reunion, when they’d come in and found a station in ruins?

Would they have left them as station relief, an aid to rebuilding? Or had they just not been carrying them?

Thoughts slid willfully sideways, into lunacy. Into human behavior that hadn’t, no, been wise at all. They were not figuring out right behavior, even rational behavior, in tracing the history of station and ship decisions. They were second-guessing a senior captain who’d done some peculiar things wrong, including arriving in atevi space with no way to refuel.

Damn, damn, damn .

Question for Sabin—exactly how much mining the ship had been doing in Ramirez’ tenure as senior captain? Did the ship have mining ’bots ?

If not, where did you leave them – and when? And why ?

Risking stranded themselves? Risking exactly what Phoenix had run into in the disaster that had stranded them? Was it at all sensible, not to have had that capability, when they’d learned their historical lessons?

Something didn’t add up. Or something added up to mining craft either not loaded for the mission, or deployed and not recovered, or left to aid Reunion in a critical situation.

The Guild held refueling as a weapon, hadn’t Jase said?

So was it a Guild decision to keep all possible refueling operations under its own hand?

Worrisome thought.

Had the Guild begun to be suspicious of Ramirez’s intentions, his activities when he was out and about? Or suspicious of the ship’s independence, from the time they built Reunion Station, centuries ago? They should have foreseen the ship would develop different interests. If they were wise.

Four times damn. He called Jase.

“Jase. You have a record you’re working on? Did she give it to you?”

“ Affirmative .”

“No queries into your line of thought—but did the ship ever have mining craft? And where did they go?”

“ Weren’t loaded ,” Jase answered. There was a long pause. “ Never were. Guild monopoly .”

“Fuel at Gamma, possibly?”

“ Ported out there. Occasionally there was. Such as there was. If there still is any, I have no knowlege. If the aliens haven’t hit it, too, by now. ”

“But fuel exists—in its raw state—at Gamma. One could mine.”

“ If we got into that kind of situation. Yes. That’s the option. What are you thinking ?”

“No comment yet,” Bren said. He didn’t want to prejudice Jase’s thinking, or change its direction. But he was muzzy-headed with folded space. With things that didn’t make sense. With fears, that got down to station’s power play, holding that mining machinery to itself. It hadn’t trusted Ramirez, dared one think? “Ramirez’s personal notebook. Without useful comment from Sabin. Does it make any sense to you?”

“It’s all coordinates. Bearings. I think he could have been watching something come and go. The points given don’t match up with past destinations that I know about. We didn’t ever go to these points. He only wrote them down, outside the log. There’s absolutely nothing else I can get out of the notes.”

Scary implications. Spying on the aliens. Wonderful. Visitations that frequent, and station not aware of them? “Want to come down for lunch? I swear social only. No contamination.”

“ Can’t ,” Jase said. “ Wish I could. Sabin’s set me an administrative job. Have to. You take care down there, Bren .”

“No question.”

Conversation ended disappointingly, a conversation kept entirely in ship-speak, nothing to worry Sabin or make her question what the former paidhiin had been up to—nothing to make Sabin doubt them at a critical moment yet to come—the way the Guild might have doubted Ramirez. Everything was too fragile. Everything depended on Sabin’s judgement of them. And Jase hadn’t risked her opinion by coming down to consult.

Their lives all depended on that brittle thread of Sabin’s judgement. And the solution to Ramirez’s actions relied on brains that couldn’t work at maximum efficiency. So, just to help out, Sabin had loaded Jase with something extra to do. Maybe necessary, maybe not. He was annoyed. Frustrated. But he didn’t want to push Sabin further, not yet.

Conclude one thing for a fact. Ramirez hadn’t had mining capability on the critical run into trouble. He wasn’t likely to get it from a station that didn’t trust him. And he hadn’t been after material gain at that star—not immediately. Information. Data. Scouting things out. Maybe for future mining, if he could beg, borrow or steal a craft. Maybe not. But by what Jase said, he’d been nosing about where he was, possibly watching some sort of activity—without, he thought, getting involved, without going to those destinations.

Wasn’t ready yet. Was still collecting data. Still training Taylor’s Children to be his go-betweens, his eyes and ears for another world.

But the list in the notes, if it was observation of alien craft—was that observation a notation kept aside even from the auto-log? Difficult, one would think.

Log recorded the last arrival at star 2095 on chart, G4, small planets. A great deal of data on all the planets. But the second, temperate planet… temperate planet… had atmosphere. Liquid water. Abundant water. Moderate vulcanism. A single, modest moon—old enough, perhaps, to have swept up all its competitors. A human’s natural interest turned to that world—ignorant as his interest might be.

Resources useless to the Guild, again, at the inaccessible bottom of a gravity well. Guild interest might well be piqued by the data, far more abundant, on the debris in the outer system. Ices. Iron. Nickle. A radiation-hot fourth planet gravitationally locked with an overlarge satellite and surrounded by an unstable ring—that was no place a sensible operation would like to conduct business. That world’s well held a rich debris cloud; but from the Guild’s point of view, not because of that hellish place, but because of that inconveniently attractive number two planet, the whole solar system was less attractive to them—a temptation all of history indicated the Guild wanted to avoid like the plague. Both a rich hell to mine, and a quasi-paradise sitting within potential rebels’ reach.

The Guild had had that situation once, at Alpha. And colonists and workers there had staged a rebellion that worked only because the green world allowed a soft landing. Consequently that gravity well wouldn’t give up a single craft, not for centuries—placing all local resources offlimits for a Guild that had forgotten atmospheric flight—so the Guild could whistle for obedience: no one had had to listen, and finally the station had folded, oh, for a couple of centuries.

Interesting, that beautiful green world. Decided temptation, as a Mospheiran saw matters. Temptation for an atevi ruler. Temptation for anybody interested in population growth—

Even for a Guild captain who should be doing his Guild-bound duty and avoiding another planet-based colonization?

A captain with questionable loyalty to the Guild—a captain legally obliged to convey his log back to close Guild scrutiny… and who might not want to tell them everything.

So said captain heaped up piles of data on the hellish fourth planet. Stayed there weeks, observing that fourth planet. From a distance. Which argued to a suspicious son of rebels that the fourth planet wasn’t all Ramirez was observing and might not be the focus of Ramirez’s real interest.

But if there had been notes on his intentions, they weren’t in the log. And they weren’t in the little file.

No evidence of any foreign occupancy around that green world… no evidence that Ramirez chose to record. That was all the soft tissue of memory, attached to those simple numbers in the little file. And all of that was gone, evaporated, when Ramirez died.

But there were witnesses. Sabin said Ramirez had found something somewhere. Said Ramirez sought alien contact—had wanted to find somebody to deal with, somebody excluding atevi and their own troublesome rebel colony at Alpha. And where was Ramirez to find that, except near such a green planet? And might natives of such a green world, if they had an installation in space, have the supplies Ramirez needed to break free of the Guild?

What foolish thing had Ramirez done?

“Nandi-ji.” Bindanda presented a tray. Tea. And sandwiches. Bren looked at them as alien objects until, a heartbeat or so later, he recalled dismissing Bindanda’s last request for attention. Bindanda was absolutely determined he eat.

“Thank you, Danda-ji.”

“Your bed is also prepared, nandi.”

Was it that time? He wasn’t prepared to consider ordinary routine. Not now. Not given what he still didn’t understand. The sandwiches he was grateful to have. “I shall manage to sleep here, Danda-ji. Please don’t let my schedule disturb staff. See that Banichi and Jago rest. My orders. And you rest, Danda-ji.”

“Yes, nandi.” A bow. The tray stayed. Its contents disappeared bit by bit as Bren worked, considering one piece of non fitting data and the next… in this gift freighted with every blip and hiccup of the ship’s operations in those hours, and on the other hand lacking all human observation that might have informed him on Ramirez’s state of mind, on what he thought he saw, on what he hoped.

What had Ramirez done to contact outsiders? Nothing that involved Jase—or Jase would have known more. Nothing, one surmised, that involved Yolanda, who’d been equally a novice when she’d landed on the atevi world, to try to deal with disaffected humans. Neither of them had had any experience of outsiders—not to mention planets. Ramirez had prepared them for some venture, but they were still junior; and they weren’t well-prepared for planets. And they were, at that time, just very young.

And for that reason he hadn’t asked them. Hadn’t used the tools he himself had prepared. Hadn’t planned the encounter. It had come on him. And he’d simply—

Perceived another ship. That was the first fact in the data log. Another ship. A huge ship.

Another ship—just sitting there. So Ramirez had gone to passive reception, no output. Dead silent.

Then… then Ramirez had recorded one cryptic note: A massive ship has appeared in the orbit of the second planet. We have received a signal. Three flashes, no other content apparent. We are holding position without answering .

Without answering.

Next entry, forty-eight minutes later:

No movement. No signal .

And after two hours:

No movement. No signal. Retreat seems most prudent at this point, in a vector that doesn’t lead home. First vector to Point Gamma, then wait for the wake to fade. After that, home and report .

The log record broke off there.

He didn’t have any record of their arrival at Point Gamma, whatever that was, however useful that record would have been. But Jase had stated they’d gone to that place. Trying to obscure their origin, one guessed.

The segment ended.

No record of further output from the alien before departure. Nothing.

Bren wiped his face. Went through the record multiple times, looking for any chance output that might have generated a misunderstanding.

Running lights had been on. Those stopped when Ramirez ordered no-output. Nothing but cameras and passive reception, gathering signals in, putting none out.

He couldn’t find an active cause prior to that silence. Couldn’t find it.

He realized he’d slept, head down on the desk, neck stiff from hours of bad angle. He rubbed his face and tried to gather up all his threads, found the pieces of last shift’s thought—no wiser than before.

Narani, missing nothing, provided breakfast, offered a dressing-robe instead of his rumpled clothes. “One can think in the shower, nandi. One does suggest so.”

That, Bren thought, might be useful to clear his head; and he tried, but the warm shower only tended to put him to sleep. He came to himself leaning against the wall, and all but fell asleep a second time when Narani was helping him into his bathrobe.

His brain, past experience told him, was vainly trying to assemble diverse parts of a pattern, one that, thanks to missing bits, wasn’t willing to make sense. Conscious thought was timed out while the hindbrain tried its own obscure pattern-making out of the bits and pieces; but it wasn’t getting anywhere, while his waking forebrain came up with images of Jase, younger Jase, sitting in his cabin in those days wondering what was going on.

Those progressed to remembered images of Ramirez himself sitting at his desk, hands together in that deep thinking attitude of his, Ramirez asking himself, in those hours, whether he ought to engage his two translators, whether it was time, yet, to risk contact.