“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.”