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  “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 became 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, t
he 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 som
e 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.