I hated to admit how valid his points were, so I said nothing. He gave me a lot to think about, though, and I spent a long time after rolling his ideas through my head.
"I can't blame you for your attitude, Jake. And I don't mean to sound angry. I'm telling you how it is from their point of view, our point of view, and how it should be from your point of view. You're human. Like it or not, we are your tribe. And the way to help the rest of your tribe move forward isn't to reject them. It isn't to cast them aside without even giving them a fair chance. Are they silly? Yes. Are the selfish? Well why not? They don't know anyone else, so how can they consider them? Be fair, star traveler. Be fair to the ones that don't hold a tenth of the knowledge that you do.
"Reginald called you an aristocrat. That's how you'll be seen, and it's not exactly a good thing. It carries with it an onus you have not yet begun to understand. Your family name has power. You have wealth you obviously can't even comprehend. You are rich enough to buy an entire city. Some day, you'll know how much that alone sets you apart from the teeming masses. But most importantly, you've got the knowledge. You hold the key, the answers, the future. You want them to stop being selfish? Then it's going to be up to you to tell them of other worlds, other races, other people who are just as beautiful and valid as they are. They can't change until they know there's a reason to. You hold more responsibility to that race, to your race, than any one of them born on the actual planet. If that doesn't define a homeworld, then I don't know what does."
It was a heated speech, the only time I've seen Christophe drop the polished act and just say exactly what he felt. I don't know if he meant it to, but it made me feel like a worm. Not even the pretty purple ones, either. The slime muckers that filled the sulfur riverbeds of v-2445. Ugly, nasty, and above all else, the lowest of the low.
Ralph cleared his throat. "It's a big job and he's doing the best..."
Christophe held up a hand. "Let's call it an evening. I need to consider the wormhole discussions from earlier. I'd be interested in a counterpoint argument with you, Ralph. I am a sucker for this type of science and with so few people on Utopia willing to trust me..." He let the words trail off, the unspoken part clear.
"Absolutely. It's good to stretch my brain again. Contrary to what it might look like on the cameras, I do know a little more than how to eat chips and watch tv!"
Christophe gave the expected laugh. Ralph tugged on my arm and I stood. Charles appeared to guide us back to our quarters. I couldn't leave it like that. We were almost to the door and I just couldn't leave it like that.
"I don't hate Earth," I said quickly. "I just...I don't understand."
Christophe gave a nod of concession. "Just think it over. We're tiny little pink blobs of ridiculous vulnerability who are desperately ignorant of the scope of the universe around us. Give us a chance."
After I went to my room that night, I lay there digesting the evening and all we had discussed. Christophe's words played over and over in my head and I picked them apart. He wanted me to be more human, to naturally think like a human, to want to save humanity if circumstances made that necessary. I could not imagine that would ever happen. Though I felt badly for thinking less of the capabilities of the Ehkin and Qitani, I couldn't logically see how humanity did not already have major advantages.
Dad won the argument against Mother's desire to dissect one of the "homospacians" because we were big, bad humans, and they were tiny and helpless. I laid on my floor that night and thought about that. Big bad humans. That's how I always thought of us. We had the ships to take us to worlds. We had the knowledge that countless tribes did not. Didn't we?
Maybe Dad was wrong. We didn't land on v-2445 without them knowing. They knew the moment we entered their solar system. We had metal. They had something far more valuable. They greeted us calmly, where we were terrified. Invaders? I always thought, but maybe not. Maybe we were welcome guests. We certainly had little say with the Qitani. They pulled us to them. And yet, all talk on our ship was centered around us being more advanced. Who made the fah'ti that was the key to getting us back to our own galaxy, our solar system, eventually to Earth? Because it wasn't Mother.
Truth be told, it was why the Condor was still going through wormholes and hadn't returned. The original mission was to spend ten years, by ship calendar, and then return with all the knowledge. We could map wormholes, so in theory, if you just backtrack...
As they found out, wormholes don't work like that. There's a tide to them, like a sea, that we never understood until the Qitani explained it. They had a world of knowledge about wormholes. And they had, like us, made jumps and explored. Through trial and error, they unlocked the secret of the tides and, most importantly, how to work with them to get not only to the place you wanted, but the time you wanted as well.
Time. What a funny thing it's always been to understand. I knew Ralph was very worried with Christophe's conversation about medical anomalies in me. I got it, sort of. While I couldn't teach a class on wormholes and their potential long term effect, you can't live in between the geeks and the squeaks and not pick up a thing or two. Somehow a wormhole can send you somewhere. It can also send you sometime. Every time we jumped, Dad would crack jokes about looking younger, feeling sprier. Or tell Mother how much she aged, to my amusement. Or ask Ralph, who's one Earth year older, if he needed a cane. Age jokes. And he'd do that because we honestly could have been in any time, on any timeline in any history ever. Or future. Or...it's a confusing theory and until the fah'ti, we had no way of keeping track.
The idea was always talked about that I was no real age, that I couldn't be since my age was only relative to the one constant in my life, the ship. In ship years, I was sixteen. What was that in Earth time? Or Laak'sa? For that matter, would time catch up to me? In Earth time, Ralph was gone more than eighty years. Would it catch up to him? Or me? Could I really have an age at all?
In my opinion, of course I had an age. I was sixteen. Period. It didn't matter to me if I was on the can or on the Earth. Time had passed, I had grown, and what was left was a sixteen year old person. I highly doubted time would catch up with Ralph. I could not accept the idea that he would step on the Earth and age eighty years all at once. Not only was that a horrifying thought, but a medical impossibility. Besides, the only people who really harped on that possibility during the long, boring stretches of inactivity on the Condor were the ones that just wanted to see Mother's vein pop out of her forehead.
Clearly the members of the Condor were not the only ones who liked to volley the mysteries of time back and forth. StarTech was looking to me and Ralph to answer the questions of the effects of jumping from one time to another. I understood why Ralph was worried about my data, but after listening to Christophe drone on and on, I resolved not to be.
I also understood why the fah'ti needed cracking. A fah'ti controls not only the destination, but the timeline of arrival. Without it, wormhole travel would be nothing more than random trial and error. Let's say that by some miracle I was able to jump into a wormhole and the current was just so to allow me to come out in the Laak'sa solar system. Without a fah'ti, maybe I'd arrive a million years ago, when the Qitani were still in the trees. Maybe I'd land a million years in the future, when they've got houses up in orbit. Maybe I'd hit there after the supernova and find nothing but dust. Who knows? Without a fah'ti, no one. That's the brilliance of the machine.