“Now she’s off with Louis Nenda and his crew of alien thugs. Heaven help her. I can’t see him taking care of anybody but himself.”
“Look on the bright side. Maybe this is what she needs to sort her out. But I don’t think you asked if you could come to my cabin so we could sympathize with Sinara or anyone else. Where are you going with all this?”
“I’m going to see Julian Graves. But I wanted to talk to you first.” Teri uncrossed her legs and stood up from the bunk in one easy movement. “I think you ought to come with me. You’ve confirmed what I have been thinking, now let’s find out what Graves has in his head. He must have been given a detailed report on each of us before the Pride of Orion ever left Upside Miranda Port. I want to ask him: Why has he left his best two survival team members—no time for false modesty, Arabella Lund as good as told us that herself—to sit here staring at our belly buttons, while others who are less qualified are taking the risks?”
Teri had felt and sounded totally confident when she talked to Torran Veck. She could feel that assurance draining away when their knock on the door of Graves’s cabin was answered with a quiet, “Enter.”
The councilor managed to be a formidable presence without even trying. It wasn’t his size—Torran topped him by half a head. And it wasn’t his manner, which was unfailingly polite and courteous. Maybe it was the knowledge that the misty blue eyes of Julian Graves had looked on multiple cases of genocide. The brain within the bulging cranium had been forced to make lose-lose decisions that condemned whole species in order to spare others. Every one of those choices was graven in the deep furrows on face and forehead.
There was no sign of that traumatic past in the warm smile that greeted Teri and Torran, or in the friendly, “What can I do for you?”
Teri’s self-confidence dropped another notch. It was Torran who finally said, “Can we put it the other way round? Everyone else is busy, working to find a way to reach the Marglotta home world. Teri and I have been sitting around for days, totally useless. What can we do for you, or for anybody?”
“To begin with, you can sit down.” Graves waved them to seats. His cabin on the Pride of Orion was bigger than anyone else’s, but so crowded with consoles and displays there was hardly room for its table and six chairs. Teri slid in easily enough, but Torran had to squeeze through and fitted the space between table and wall like a cork in a bottle.
Graves went on, “I have been well aware of your lack of activity, and I expected your arrival before this. Let me congratulate you on the patience that you have shown. However, it was impossible for me to meet usefully with you until certain other activities were complete. When you learn what those activities imply, perhaps you will decide that your enforced idleness was not so bad after all.”
He placed himself so that he faced Teri and Torran directly across the table. “You have borne with me for a long time. I ask you to bear with me a little longer, for what may initially seem to be a tedious explanation of the obvious. My aim will fairly soon become clear; but first, a simple fact: there are at least thirty sentient species scattered around our own Orion Arm. In my role as Ethical Councilor, I have encountered and been obliged to deal with more than half of those. An equal number of intelligent species probably exist here in the Sagittarius Arm, although the only one with which I have direct experience is the Chism Polyphemes. The species vary widely in their physiology, their reproductive habits, their life styles, and their notions of morality. What they do not vary in—what is common to every one of them—is the underlying logic of their thought processes. When it comes to the way that we think, even the most alien species follows the same patterns as we do. Are you with me so far?”
Teri said, “We all think the same. Except—” She paused, unsure of herself.
Graves smiled. “My dear, I see that you are not only with my argument, you are ahead of it. As you say, except. Except that we find ourselves in a situation for which the laws of logic do not appear to apply. Before we embarked on this journey we were provided—you might say, spoon-fed—a set of Bose transition coordinates to carry us across the Gulf. Our end point was to be the Marglotta home world. We crossed the Gulf successfully. But rather than finding the Marglotta, instead we find this.” He waved an arm. “This, a barren system where the central star suffered some unnatural fate, where there is no sign of life, and where one planet is impossibly cold. The general answer was to blame the perfidious Polypheme. As a habitual liar, it had deliberately directed us to this system in order to keep secret the whereabouts of our real destination. Everyone agreed, we should not be here. Everyone was eager to be on their way immediately, to find and proceed to Marglot.
“You may argue that I could have said no. I could have insisted that we do additional analysis. I am, after all, the official leader of this expedition. But as you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is treated by others. On this expedition there are individuals with far more experience than I of unknown territories and hidden danger. Unlike you, they lack respect for authority. Had I attempted to propose analysis rather than action, I would have faced open rebellion. Uncomfortable as I was with my own decision, I therefore permitted them to go. I would, however, remain here. I did not reject the need for action. I merely postponed it, until I could prove a conjecture. And I would keep with me the most competent members of the survival team.”
Torran nodded and smiled. Teri did not smile, and she felt embarrassed. She wondered why the councilor was taking such care to lavish compliments. He wanted something from them, but what could it be?
Graves went on, “Let me tell you my difficulty, and see how you react. I have been puzzled since the moment we arrived here by three observations which are either facts, or at least strong conjectures. First, everyone has emphasized that the Chism Polypheme was dead when it arrived at Miranda. Polyphemes enjoy enormously long life spans. Surely this means that the Polypheme never expected to die in transit. It thought that it would bring the Marglotta to Miranda, and return with them—and us—to the Sag Arm. Second, the death of the Marglotta on the Polypheme’s ship was also not anticipated. They, too, must have expected to reach us and tell us of their problems. They hoped we would go with them to their home world of Marglot. So the fact that Polyphemes are traditional liars is not relevant, unless the Marglotta are also liars. Not one persistently lying species, but two? As I told Professor Lang on another subject, I do not like to concatenate implausibilities. And now for my third observation: there were many Marglotta on the ship—eighteen of them. There was a single Chism Polypheme, and the Polyphemes are justly famous as navigators. If you agree with all this, what conclusions would you draw?”
Teri and Torran turned to glance at each other. He gave a little wave of his index finger. You first.
She grimaced. Thanks a lot. Let me be wrong. And to Julian Graves, “It was the Marglotta’s idea to come to the Orion Arm. They were in charge, and the Polypheme was just a hired hand.”
“Precisely. Which means?”
Teri nudged Torran’s leg under the table. Your turn.