Explorer

  He wanted Jase to rush down to five-deck right about now with a handful of log records assuring him there was a quick, even brilliant answer to what Ramirez had agreed to with the Guild, and it was all fine, but that scenario wasn’t going to happen. By now, he understood the dowager locking herself in her cabin and refusing to come out.

  Fragile, that was what he was feeling. Fragile and entirely in the dark.

  Stupidity might help. The simple disinclination to ask what came next.

  As it was, his mirror and his computer and his steadily lengthening letters home asked him that question, every morning and every evening of their arbitrary, diversion-filled days.

  * * *

  On a certain morning Bren opened his door, bound for breakfast, and a motorized car whizzed noisily past his foot, destination right, origin left.

  He looked left, at the future lord of a planet on his knees, control unit in both hands, looking entirely sheepish.

  “I’m testing new wheels,” Cajeiri explained, and added in frustration: “They aren’t working right. But one thinks it’s the ship moving.”

  “It may well be,” Bren said numbly. “Or not.”

  Cajeiri scrambled up and chased down the corridor after his car, where it had swerved and stalled against the inner wall.

  “May one go ask Gin-aiji’s staff, nandi, about the wheels?”

  Oh, now one knew why the aiji-to-be raced his car past authority’s door.

  “If Cenedi agrees.” One suspected Cenedi had just said no to the young wretch. And that diversion was in order. “My breakfast is likely waiting . . . a simple one, aiji-meni.” One never, except through staff, invited a person of higher status to share a meal. One could, however, suggest that breakfast was available at a whim. “I’m sure Bindanda could manage another place.”

  “I already had breakfast,” Cajeiri said. And confessed the ultimate catastrophe. “And I’m bored, Bren-nandi.”

  “Well, there you have the dreadful truth about adventures, aiji-meni. A great deal of adventures is being bored, or scared, or cold, or wet, or not having breakfast or information on schedule. But adventures often improve in the telling.”

  Cajeiri belatedly saw he was being joked with. And took it with an expression very much his father’s when things didn’t go well—not angry, more bewildered at the universe’s temerity in trifling with his wishes. And next came, unmistakably, great-grandmother’s tone.

  “Well, I detest boredom, Bren-nandi. I detest it. I brought my own player, and I want tapes, and nadi Cenedi says I have to have your permission to have them.”

  “That’s because it’s the human Archive, nandi-meni, and what’s human is very different, and some of it confuses even humans who aren’t ten yet.”

  “I know. But I’m very intelligent.”

  “Well, one supposes one could go back to the computer and find something. If the young aiji were interested, he might watch.” One didn’t ask an aiji under one’s roof, either. One suggested there might be something of interest under that roof and the great lord went, if he wished.

  Cajeiri wished. He all but tumbled over himself in longing to be somewhere new and entertaining, in a generally off-limits cabin where he hadn’t yet put a dent in something or scratched something or met local disapproval.

  So, well, with Bindanda’s forgiveness and given the staff’s devious ways of knowing where he was, the lord of the province of the heavens decided breakfast could wait a few moments.

  “The nearest chair is comfortable,” Bren said, sitting down at his desk, and opening up his computer. “Tapes, tapes, tapes.”

  “Cenedi doesn’t have to know,” the young rascal suggested. “I want the war ones.”

  “Oh, but Cenedi is extremely good at finding out, aiji-meni, and I am Bren-nandi, and dare I say that the young aiji’s latest statement held an unfortunate two?”

  “Bren-nandi.” Cajeiri was occasionally experimenting in the adult language. “And it was not two, Bren-nandi.”

  “Mode of offer, young aiji, was the implied infelicity of two, since though I trust you were speaking regarding my action, you nevertheless omitted my courtesy.” He could be quite coldly didactic when his fingers were on his keyboard. But one didn’t dwell on an aiji’s failures. He called a list of film titles to his display. “Ha.”

  And sifted them for classics as Cajeiri leaned forward, looking . . . as if Cajeiri could even read the list.

  “Ahh,” Bren said as enigmatically as possible.

  “Where?” Cajeiri asked sharply, and immediately, under threat of no tapes, remembered the courtesy form: “What does one find in this list, nandi?”

  Another sort through the list. Children’s classics. One owed the aiji a proper response for his newly-discovered courtesy. “The very best of stories, aiji-meni.” He considered Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee—no, problematic in approach to authority. And one had no wish to see Cajeiri discover practical jokes or paintbrushes. Robin Hood . . . no, not good: not only defying authority, but promoting theft.

  “Ha.” The Three Musketeers. Satisfying to most atevi principles: the support of an aiji’s wife by loyal security personnel, the downfall of base conspirators.

  The education of a young man with more ideas than experience.

  He copied it and gave the lad the disk. “Your player will handle this, aiji-meni. One believes the piece is even in color. One is advised to set the switch to second position.”

  “Thank you, Bren-nandi!”

  “A pleasure, young aiji.” God, he’d forgotten the story himself. And remembered it, once his mind was on it. The whole notion of youthful derring-do came like a transfusion. Oxygen to the blood.

  Dared he even think age came on with a little stiffening of the backbone, a little too much propriety, a few too many situations that numbed the nerves?

  “Perhaps it would suit the young aiji for me to examine that racing car, after all,” he said. “After breakfast, that is, which the young aiji might still attend.”

  Cajeiri happily changed his mind.

  And handed the car to him under the table, in a hiatus of service. He had a look at the wheels. And in lieu of a consultation of Gin’s engineers, he proposed an after-breakfast investigation of available possibilities, which ended up providing bits of plastic tubing to stand the wobbly wheels off from the sides.

  Which was how, in this transit between places in the depths of space, the dowager’s security happened to find the lord of the heavens down on his knees at one end of the corridor with the future aiji similarly posed down by the galley.

  And that was how the dowager’s security ended up, with Banichi and Jago, designing a remote-controlled car whose wheels did not wobble. One understood there were secret bets with Gin’s staff. And a proposed race date.

  The staff’s new passion became Alexandre Dumas, books and tapes alike, even the dowager requesting a copy, via written message. Bren began reading the works himself, amid the growing tendrils of Sandra Johnson’s plants, which now formed a green and white curtain from their hanging baskets, and writing daily to his brother.

  Banichi and Jago have a chess match going, was one entry. The staff is laying bets.

  And at the resolution: Jago is trying not to be pleased with herself; Banichi is trying not to notice. They’ve started another game.

  I think there was a car race. And I don’t think we won. I haven’t heard a thing, but Banichi is building a small remote control device of his own, and bets on that are secret, but not that secret.

  Jase turned up at one lunch, Jase’s midnight snack, and for an hour they sat and discussed nothing in particular—the merits of cork fishing and the currents off Mospheira’s south shore—whether or not Crescent Island development had ever taken off and whether a small yacht dared try the southern sea.

  No, the log records had not surfaced, Sabin was growing peevish, and he had found no key to the information.

  Damn.

  I had lunch with Jase
. We talked about Beaufort Bay. We’ll have to talk about the exact plans when I get home. That’s how crazy we’ve become.

  God, Toby, I want to get home. I want to get home—and it comes to me that it’s not just the chance of waking up somewhere we didn’t ever mean to go that scares me spitless. It’s that I want to get home, I, me, the me that’s going to have a home when I get back. I changed when I went to the mainland, but not so that I didn’t recognize home. I changed when I began to live on the mainland, but not so that I didn’t dream of trips to the north shore. I changed when I went to live in space, and the situation was always hot, and getting back to the island meant running a gauntlet of press and politics that just wouldn’t let me alone. It’s so strange out here—not that we’ve seen anything or done anything but sit in our cabins for a year and read Dumas and race toy cars—but it’s still strange; and it can only get stranger, and I think so much of home. I’m a little desperate today. I wish I had answers I don’t have.

  But I can’t govern the changes that have already happened.

  I can’t govern what happens to me on the way. I never could. And every change has been away, not toward, and every change makes the circle of those who’ve been through this with me smaller, not larger, until at this moment I think I’m becoming a sort of black hole, and I’m going to pull everything I know into a pinpoint so none of us can get out, and then I’ll stop existing at all in this universe. I’m terrified of never getting home, that you’ll never get this letter.

  A few people still on earth matter. You. Tabini. And if you are still speaking to me, and if I can get there, I’d like to take about a month sitting on the beach and telling you all the things most people on Mospheira wouldn’t at all want to hear about. I don’t know if you’re curious or if you’re just that patient, but for either reason, I think you’d listen and nod in the right places, even for this. I love you, brother. I miss you. And one part of me wishes you were here and the sane part says thank God you’re not. Thank God something I remember is still there.

  By the fact I’m now panicking, you can guess this is the scary part of our trip coming up. This is where I need every scrap of courage I’ve got, and I wish I had more information of substance. I think about Banichi and Jago, and if they or the staff ever doubt our success in this crazy venture, they don’t let me know it. The dowager—she won’t spook, no matter what. Meanwhile I’m thinking this is the scariest thing I’ve ever contemplated, and there’s a six- or seven-year-old kid down there playing with a toy car and thinking it’s all fairly normal for a kid to be racing cars in a starship corridor. He’s not afraid. He doesn’t imagine the trouble we could be in . . . or he does, but at his age everything’s an adventure. Being alone in the dark scares him. The thought of dropping into deserted space just doesn’t faze him. I’m not sure anything scares Banichi and Jago but the thought of losing me somewhere out here. So is any fear real? Do we become self-focused cowards by measures as we get older? Or am I the only one on this deck who really knows the odds?

  Jase is likely as scared as I am. Ginny hasn’t got nerves. I don’t know what drives her. She’s just busy seeing to her staff, and that’s what she does. But my staff sees to me, not the other way around, and I suppose that leaves me time enough to think, way more thinking about the consequences of various things than I find comfortable.

  The beach and the sound of the waves can take all that away. I’d say, the deck of the boat, but right now, considering just stringing thoughts together is like swimming in syrup, sitting very still on a planet’s solid skin sounds good to me.

  * * *

  On a certain day he’d had entirely enough.

  He left his computer, left his notes, gathered Banichi and Jago without warning, and headed for the lift.

  “Is there an emergency, Bren-ji?” Banichi asked.

  “A conference,” he said, and neither Banichi nor Jago asked further questions.

  Nor did they evidence any surprise whatsoever that he ordered the lift to the bridge and strode out and past working operations on the consoles, down that screened aisle. He was bound, since Sabin’s bodyguards, Collins and the rest, were sitting watch down in the executive corridor, for executive offices.

  The guards got up from benches—not quite hands on weapons, but close.

  “I’m here to see the senior captain,” Bren said in Mosphei’. “Now.”

  Jenrette happened to be part of that group of five. But the seniormost of Sabin’s guards, Collins, was a man who’d been Sabin’s for decades before Jenrette came into the picture. The lot of them might have had orders of one kind about crew coming up here—but they likely had special orders about care and coddling of their alien passengers, too, and those separate trains had suddenly intersected, headed for collision.

  “I’m not going back down,” Bren said plainly, standing a little out of hearing of techs on the bridge behind him. “She won’t want an incident, I can assure you.”

  Collins looked at him, looked at Banichi and Jago, a solid dark wall behind him.

  And they were indeed about to have an incident: he was set, however muzzily, on course, and stood his ground.

  “Captain,” Collins said to the empty air. “Mr. Cameron’s up here saying it’s urgent business.”

  Whatever the answer was, Collins opened the door.

  “Kindly wait here, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly to Banichi and Jago, facing Sabin at her desk, Sabin—who leaned back in her chair to have a look at the intrusion into her day’s problems. “Senior captain, good day.”

  “Mr. Cameron.” No invitation, not a cue or a clue. Sabin folded her hands on her spare middle. The door shut behind him, securing their privacy.

  “The record we mentioned, senior captain.”

  “Record.”

  “You want my help . . .”

  “I don’t recall requesting your help, Mr. Cameron. I do recall your request. I’ve reviewed it. Hell if I’m giving you our log to play with. Go find other amusement.”

  “I want the record, captain. I’m sure it doesn’t take you eleven months to find a log entry. I’m sure you had it that same shift we discussed it. I take it you view your survival as a matter of some importance. I want the record.”

  A lively, analytical regard. A pursing of the lips. One thing about long-time crew—they adapted to the mental conditions of folded space, did it far better than planet-dwellers. Sabin’s thought processes at the moment might far out-class his. “You do.”

  A little caution might be in order. “Politely put, please, captain.”

  “You want it.” Sabin moved her chair so suddenly assassination-honed reflexes twitched. Inwardly. He didn’t budge as she opened a cabinet. And took out a tape. And held it up to his view. “You think this holds answers.”

  “If you know what you were looking for, with your accustomed ability, yes, I hope it does.”

  She flipped it to a landing on the desk. Making him reach to pick it up, a petty move. He wasn’t inclined to object to that.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  “More than this,” he said, and pocketed the tape. “More than this record, captain, what’s your estimation of the facts?”

  Momentary silence. And cold irony. “Forty years and someone finally asks the question.”

  “I’m asking, captain. You’ve had, all along, a very keen sense of the risks involved in contact. If we’d had you in charge of the original contact with the atevi, we might not have fought a war. Let me guess—you’ve tried to figure this without my input. You wanted your own uncontaminated assessment, uncolored by my opinions. You have some opinion of your own. What do you think?”

  Cold, cold stare. “I want your uncontaminated assessment, Mr. Cameron. Enough is there. Beginning to end. You figure it. You tell me. Five days likely to system entry. You’ve worked miracles, so they tell me. You figure this one.”

  “You weren’t going to give me this.”

  “I lead a full, busy life,” Sabin
said. Then, less provocatively: “I was still asking myself whether I was going to give it to you, to Jase—or not at all.”

  “Copy to him. I won’t consult him until I’ve seen this.”

  “Done.” Sabin shifted the chair and punched one button. “Good luck, Mr. Cameron. Go do your job. And don’t do this again.”

  “Only to mutual advantage, captain. Even you need a backup.”

  He walked out. He gathered up Banichi and Jago and walked back the way he had come, to the lift, and they rode it down.

  “Was it a success, nandi?” Banichi asked him.

  “One waits to see, nadiin-ji,” he said to them, and felt of the tape in his pocket to be sure it was there, that his muzzy, half-dreaming brain hadn’t dreamed this gift.

  Folded space wasn’t a place to try any complex analysis. Sabin, having a keen brain, being used to these conditions, surely, even so, observed a certain caution about critical decisions. Maybe that was why she made this one belatedly, to hand him the record.

  And the ship went, and space bent.

  Five days out, Sabin said, five muddled days left, in which, without his going up there and confronting the issue, she might have laid it on Jase’s desk, and might not.

  Now he took himself back to his computer, and back to software, Jase’s gift, that could unravel the ship’s image-output or plain-print files.

  It wasn’t image. It was text, a sparse, scattershot text that Ramirez had recorded—in Ramirez’s unskilled, demonstrably flawed notion of what to record.

  There was a small file of personal notes—that, to a casual scan, revealed nothing but coordinates and dates and a handful of cryptic symbols.

  Bren’s heart sank. What might the man have left out, that might be absolutely critical? What was the second record? A notation of where they’d been? What sites the ship had looked at, at vantages far removed from station?

  Granted there was something Ramirez hadn’t wanted the Guild to know, the record was disappointingly . . . useless. Useless without Ramirez’s living brain to explain the memories, the intentions, the actions he associated with those cryptic references.