Nightfall_at_Algemron

What else have I got? If I go back to Concord space, they'll just sling me in jail. I have no new evidence to bring to my trial, even though I now know for sure what Ricel and his buddies were up to—a lot of it, anyway. They're just going to chuck me in a cell if I go back. What else is left but to go out and go away, if you can't go back? So I'm going out to see if I can find what the stone says is out there, and whatever it was living inside that little edanwe back on Danwell. If people are going to start leaving now—Enda might have to—then I understand that you might feel you need to as well. So you go right ahead. Helm's got business of his own. Maybe he'll take off, too."
She stared at him. Then she suddenly took a few steps forward and put her face quite close to his.
"You just listen to me," she said, even more quietly. "You are such a stubborn cuss. You just don't know how to let anyone tell you they're worried about you, do you? Goddamned Marines, all thick skin and thick heads. I don't know how you ever got a medal for being shot, because I can't imagine how anything ever got through that hide of yours. It's like Helm's armor—confused armor, though, because it bounces the friendly stuff off as well as the enemy slugs. I don't know what Enda's problem is. You'll have to sort that out with her, but as for me and Grawl, do you think we care about being all the way out here, wherever we are? That's not the issue. It's your big echoing empty head that's the issue, Gabriel! We've seen that there are plenty of people after your butt. You seriously think we'd leave you here to cope with them by yourself? We may not have been together long, but you plainly don't know us real well if you think so. We just want to make sure that you're genuinely running this show, whatever it is, that your admittedly tiny mind is more or less in one piece, though I imagine that just finding it must have been a real piece of work for the Marine psychs, and even Delde Sota must have to get out a magnifier."
She glared at him.
Gabriel opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he said, "I really am running this show, and I'm sure I'll be able to tell if it stops being that way. Satisfied? But why should my telling you that resolve anything? There's been no change in the situation between when I first told you so five minutes ago and now, when you've spent most of the five minutes belittling my mental capacity, except that now I know you think I'm an idiot."
The opinion was certainly mutual, which made him grin suddenly and then try to get rid of the grin with only partial success. What helped the grin loosen and fall off, finally, was the flash of thought. Maybe I was wrong. Something has changed after all.
Gabriel's only problem was that he couldn't tell whether that was her thought or his.
Angela looked at him with some annoyance. "And a weird one," she said. She paused, as if looking for something to add to this, and then brushed past him and made for the head.
Gabriel made his way back down to the dining area. Everyone was talking animatedly about a picture of an Alitarin drexen on the display, and Helm was making some unlikely suggestions about how it might have sex. It was all entirely too casual for Gabriel, who was not fooled. The rumble of mind-noise got considerably louder as he came in, though as usual he could catch no whiff of content. He sat down and poured himself a glass of wine and joined the conversation.
Much later, when he and Enda were making their way back to Sunshine to prepare for the next jump, Gabriel said, "Well?"
Enda gave him a large, blue-eyed, innocent look.
"You must have heard it," he said.
They slipped in through the airlock, and it shut behind them. Enda touched the control to start the tube retracting. "A fairly quiet fight as such things go," she said. "Surely very low on the tiff scale."
Gabriel had to laugh a little, even though he was still feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. "It would have been nice if it had resolved anything, but you guys knew what it was about."
"We knew."
"And?"
"We are with you, Gabriel," Enda said. "All of us. It is business as usual." He really wanted to believe her. He sighed and went to bed.
Their next starfall turned out exactly like the last one: empty space, no worlds, no moonlets, nothing but the usual amount of dust. Gabriel let Enda make the routine contacts with the other ships and let her arrange dinner, but he didn't attend. He just couldn't face the others.
During that quiet time he sat in his cabin with the stone in his hands, trying to wring some kind of concrete results out of it, some definite kind of directional information about what he was hunting. or any information at all.
It was rather like trying to wring blood out of, well, out of a stone. There were no results, though Gabriel sat and listened with all his might. He queried the stone in words and images and generally hammered on it with his mind like someone using a sledgehammer on a pebble. The pebble resisted him with the nonchalance of an object on which entirely the wrong tactics were being used.
He sighed. Maybe they're right, he thought. Maybe I am crazy. This kind of travel's crazy enough, anyway.
Gabriel had a vague memory of reading about some ancient explorer on Earth who sailed west to find land that was supposed to be in the east, the idea being revolutionary at the time because his people had lost (in one of those cultural hiccups that happen sometimes) the information that the world was round. He had sailed to the very edge of his exploration envelope—well beyond it, in fact, so that his crew was apparently thinking seriously of throwing him overboard—when land finally appeared. The situation had exercised its own ironies, of course. The man had not reached the place to which he had originally been heading, but someplace else entirely, and the journey that had been planned to make him rich and famous instead wound up bankrupting him. The phrase, "Sail on! And on!" kept recurring in Gabriel's memory. Now he knew how the poor guy had felt.
He went back to his labors with the stone. An hour went by, then two, and still nothing happened. Finally he just lay back, let out a long exasperated breath, and then shouted silently into that maddening interior silence.
COME ON! he yelled inside his head. Can't you give me something more concrete than Just this vague "thataway" feeling? Don't you believe in star maps? You may have belonged to some species umpty-thousand years old, incredibly ancient and advanced and all that crap, but you must have had maps!
Nothing.
Then came a slow sense of something looking at him from a great depth of time.
The hair stood up all over Gabriel. It was that silent presence that sometimes spoke in the back of his mind, but he had never had a contact quite like this before. Rather than the stone demanding his attention, he had summoned it. It was answering. slowly, patiently, as if he had awakened it hours earlier than expected, and it was restraining itself from what otherwise could have been a very intemperate response.
An image of stars drifting in huge currents washed past his point of view like sand in water—thousands of years' worth of movement in a few seconds, endless eddies and currents of motion, tumbling the stars and their systems among one another, out again, and onward through this arm of the galaxy. The movement was slow and graceful, but Gabriel knew that it had been sped up by a factor of millions for his sake. Millennia of movement were happening every second, as the myriad relationships among the stars shifted, shifted, and shifted again by tens and hundreds of light-years.
How much good, the image seemed to say, do you think our maps are going to do you now? You must go looking. Were we with you, we could not do better ourselves.
Darkness fell— wham!—with the contact cut off as suddenly as a door being shut.
Gabriel sat there and blinked. Suddenly his stomach turned over, a queasy flip, and he hurried into the head and had a prolonged discussion with the waste reclamation utensil. Possibly his body was outraged on some very elementary level by being forced to experience so much time, even indirectly, and it retaliated by attempting to throw up everything Gabriel had eaten since he first went on solid food.