“Give them some 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.
“Good question,” Jase said. “Useful question.”
“Was Ramirez loyal?”
“He created us. Me and Yolanda.”
Back to that same pathway. “And you were—what?”
“I think,” Jase said slowly, “and this is a difficult thought—I have this niggling suspicion, sometimes, that, the same way I suspect the Guild had its notion of defining humanity, Ramirez meant me and Yolanda to out-human the rest of the Guild—filtering the human Archive through our perceptions. Being able to challenge their concepts. We were learning Latin and Chinese. The ship was still working for the Guild, cataloging planets, investigating likely ones, ones that met their criteria. Purely scientific, they said. Increasing the human database. For what? For what logical purpose were we going about, that had the station devoting so much energy to our energy needs? But not for us to ask, I suppose. There was always fuel. We’d dock, we’d go. We’d explore and refuel. That routine was my whole world. You don’t question the world—not until the plumbing fails, isn’t that what you said once?”
“And now?”
“Now that the plumbing’s really failed? I don’t believe pure scientific curiosity had anything to do with it. I’m sure the Guild sent us where we went, or they wouldn’t have gone on refueling us. Maybe they simply wanted to have us gone as long as possible, to keep our influence out of the station. Maybe they wanted the unification, the symbol, of us as the focus of community effort, the pressure valve. The reason for sacrifice. And they could control us. Fueling was always the sword over our heads. And while all that was going on, I’m sure we were gathering information that would eventually be useful, investigating other solar systems, and fuel sources. But Ramirez—I have this tenuous theory—didn’t ever mention his two linguists to the Guild, not that I ever was aware. And I wonder—did he mean to create what he was looking for? He knew about diversity , which wasn’t quite the Guild’s insistence of everyone walking in step. He didn’t know the lost languages, but he knew he couldn’t create a new Earth on a ship where everybody is cousins and brothers and sisters, and living the same lives doing the same jobs. He couldn’t do it on a space station Guild’s running. But he could do it if he ever found a place he could get supply that the Guild didn’t control, and he could establish an orbiting base that wouldn’t hold fueling as a sword over his head. He had the genetic storage. He had the Archive. Fantastic as it is on a human level—I think he was hoping to find a place where he could build another station and ultimately set down an unregulated colony.”
“A green planet.”
“Another green planet. One without a population. I think, in that, Ramirez and the Guild were after the same thing.”
“Not to have a population, if it could support humans?”
“Bren, my friend, what educated ship-folk know about planetary biology fits in a lifesupport tank. I know I don’t know as much as I should. But let me tell you, I do know the British monarchs and the Alexandrine Empire. I know Darwin and Eberly and Teiler. Yolanda knows German history and Bantu. I’m really keen on the Shang Dynasty. Hell, we’re diversity incorporated. We’re culture in a plastic pack. I suspect going back to Alpha wasn’t Ramirez’s real plan. He had every opportunity to do that. No. I think Ramirez’s ideas were pure Guild—humans only. Ramirez wanted the Guild’s plan—but he didn’t want current Guild leadership in charge of it. He intended to run his version of it. And poking around in various solar systems, looking for life-supporting planets to drop us on, I think he got more than he bargained for.”
“Angry aliens.”
“Their planet, is my guess. At least something they owned and cared about. They’d probably been watching us for a while. They showed hostile and we made a feint off to another destination, But when we got home, home had already been hit. So they knew damned well what they were hitting. They knew us, knew where we’d come from, and we didn’t know them—not even know which of various systems had been the trigger for the attack. But I think, whoever hit us, they very well knew the neighborhood we’ve only been parked in for a couple of hundred years.”
“Seems very likely,” Bren said. “Based on all you say.”
“So back to our question—why do I exist? Hell if I know. But Ramirez was up to something that blew up on him and took out the Guild’s home base, whether it was his idea or the Guild’s. It was a thorough catastrophe. What bothers me in all of this is where Sabin fits. And what kind of politics went on between her and Captain Ogun, when he stayed behind at Alpha and sent her to manage a rescue neither of them thinks is likely? You’d think she’d at least give up her antagonism toward me. But she won’t—as if she thinks I’m still following Ramirez’s agenda.”
“Might you be?”
“Not that I know.”
“What could you do against her?”
“I don’t know. Until I know what I was for—I don’t know what she thinks I might do.”
“Not that many choices, are there?”
“There still may be choices. Like—who’s running this ship on the way back to Alpha… if anyone’s alive.”