"Do you believe that?" Danny asked with an odd intentness. "The end justifies the means?"
"Sometimes. It depends, obviously. How important is the end? How nasty are the means?"
Iron Horse sat hunched over his untouched drink, his elbows almost reaching both corners of his side of the table. "Sandoz," he asked after a little while, "is there anything that would persuade you to go back with us to Rakhat?"
Emilio snorted, and picked up his glass, taking a sip. "I honestly don’t think I could get drunk enough for that to seem like a good idea," he murmured, "but I suppose we could give it a try."
"Giuliani and the Pope both believe it’s God’s will that you go back," Danny persisted. "D. W. Yarbrough said that you were once wedded to God—"
"Nietzsche, of course, would argue that I am a widower," Emilio said crisply, cutting him off. "I consider that I am divorced. The separation was not amicable."
"Sandoz," Danny said carefully, "even Jesus thought that God had forsaken Him."
Emilio leaned back in his chair and stared now with the stony contempt of a boxer about to level an inadequate opponent. "You don’t want to try that with me," he advised, but Iron Horse would not drop his gaze. Sandoz shrugged: I gave fair warning. "It was all over for Jesus in three hours," he said softly, and Danny blinked. "I’m done with God, Danny. I want no more part of Him. If hell is the absence of God, then I shall be content in hell."
"My brother Walter’s daughter drowned," Danny said, reaching for the glass of rum and putting it at arm’s length. "Four years old. About six months after the funeral, Walt filed for divorce. It wasn’t my sister-in-law’s fault, but Walt needed someone to blame. He spent the next ten years trying to drink himself to death, and finally managed it. Rolled his car one night." Having made his point, he said, with no little compassion, "You must be very lonely."
"I was," Sandoz said. "Not anymore."
"Change your mind," Danny implored, leaning forward. "Please. Come with us."
Incredulous, Emilio gasped a laugh. "Danny, I’m getting married in twenty-five days!" He glanced at a clock. "And thirteen hours. And eleven minutes. But who’s counting, right?" His smile faded as he looked at Iron Horse; it was strangely affecting to see that big and unemotional man on the verge of tears. "Why is it so important to you?" Emilio asked. "Are you afraid? Danny, you and the others have so much more to go on than we had! Yes, you’ll make mistakes, but at least they won’t be the same ones we made." Iron Horse looked away, his eyes glittering. "Danny," Emilio ventured, "is there something else…?"
"Yes. No—. I don’t know," Danny said finally. "I–I need to think about this…. But—. Just don’t trust any of the Giulianis, Sandoz."
Confused, Emilio frowned. Danny seemed to think he was revealing some great secret, but everybody knew that the Father General’s family was Camorra. At a loss, and looking for a way out, Emilio could only change the subject. "Listen, John was asking me about some Ruanja syntax—I put together some notes for him this evening, but I know I was working on something similar just before—before the massacre. I told Giuliani to dump everything we sent back to my system, but I can’t find that file. Is there any chance that some of my stuff is stored separately?"
Danny seemed distracted, but dragged himself back to what Sandoz was saying. "It was at the end of the transmissions?"
"Yes. The last thing I relayed to the ship."
Danny shrugged. "Might still be in the queue waiting to be sent."
"What? Still on the ship? Why wouldn’t it have been transmitted?"
"The data went out in packets. The onboard computers were programmed to store your reports and send them in groups. If the Rakhati suns or Sol were positioned badly, the system would just queue everything until the transmissions could get through without being degraded by stellar interference."
"News to me. I thought everything went out as we logged it," Sandoz said, surprised. He’d paid almost no attention to technical considerations like that. "So it just sat in memory for over a year, until the Magellan party sent me back? Would there have been that much time between packets?"
"Maybe. I don’t know too much about the celestial mechanics involved myself. There were four stars the system had to work around. Wait—the people from the Magellan boarded the Stella Maris, didn’t they? Maybe when they were accessing the ship’s records, they disabled the transmission code." The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed. "The last packet is probably still sitting in memory. I can pull it out for you if you want."
"It can wait until morning."
"No. You’ve got me curious now," Danny said, glad of something concrete to do. "It should only take a few minutes. I don’t know why no one checked earlier."
Together, the two men moved to the wall of photonics and Iron Horse worked his way into the Stella Maris library storage system. "Sure enough, ace," he said minutes later. "Look. It’s still coded and compressed." He reset the system to expand the data and they waited.
"Wow. There’s a lot of it," Sandoz remarked, watching the screen. "Some more stuff by Marc. Joseba will be pleased. Yes! There’s mine. I knew I’d done that work already." He stood silently a while longer, looking over Danny’s shoulder. "There’s something for you," Sandoz said as a new file scrolled by. "Sofia was working on trade networks…" His voice trailed off. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Go back! Can you stop it?"
"No. It’s going to decompress all of it…. There. It’s done," Iron Horse said.
Sandoz had spun away, breathing hard. "Not for the Society. Not for the Church," he whispered. "No. No. No. I saw her dead."
Danny twisted in his chair. "What are you talking about, ace?"
"Get out of the way," Sandoz said abruptly.
Danny vacated the desk chair and Sandoz sat down in front of the display. He seemed to settle himself, as though to take a blow, and then carefully spoke the ID and date stamp again, bringing up the last set of files held in the queue, which were logged, impossibly, months after his own final transmission, now some eighteen years in the past on Rakhat.
"Sandoz, what? What did you see? I don’t understand—" Frightened by the other man’s pallor, Danny leaned over Sandoz’s shoulder and looked at the file on the display. "Oh, my God," he said blankly.
During the past months, as he had studied the mission reports and the scientific papers sent back by the Stella Maris party, Daniel Iron Horse had sometimes, with a strange feeling of unfocused guilt, called up images of the artificial-intelligence analyst Sofia Mendes: digitized and radio-transmitted watercolors painted by Father Marc Robichaux, the naturalist on the first mission. The earliest of these was done on Rakhat, during Sofia’s wedding to the astronomer Jimmy Quinn; others were painted later, as pregnancy softened the classical lines of her face. When Danny had first seen these portraits, he thought that Robichaux must have idealized her, for Sofia Mendes was as beautiful as a Byzantine Annunciation in the last painting, done only days before her death in the Kashan massacre. But when, for comparison, Danny had pulled up one of the few archived photos of Sofia, he could only acknowledge the scientific accuracy of Robichaux’s draftsmanship. Brains and beauty and guts, everyone agreed. An extraordinary woman…
"Oh, my God," Daniel Iron Horse repeated, staring at the screen.
"Not even for her," Sandoz whispered, trembling. "I won’t go back."
16
Trucha Sai
2047, Earth-Relative
"SUPAARI, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE ASKING?" SAID SOFIA. "I can’t promise that anyone will ever bring you home—"