Explorer (16 page)

What foolish thing had Ramirez done?

“Nandi-ji.” Bindanda presented a tray. Tea. And sandwiches. Bren looked at them as alien objects until, a heartbeat or so later, he recalled dismissing Bindanda’s last request for attention. Bindanda was absolutely determined he eat.

“Thank you, Danda-ji.”

“Your bed is also prepared, nandi.”

Was it that time? He wasn’t prepared to consider ordinary routine. Not now. Not given what he still didn’t understand. The sandwiches he was grateful to have. “I shall manage to sleep here, Danda-ji. Please don’t let my schedule disturb staff. See that Banichi and Jago rest. My orders. And you rest, Danda-ji.”

“Yes, nandi.” A bow. The tray stayed. Its contents disappeared bit by bit as Bren worked, considering one piece of non-fitting data and the next . . . in this gift freighted with every blip and hiccup of the ship’s operations in those hours, and on the other hand lacking all human observation that might have informed him on Ramirez’s
state of mind, on what he thought he saw, on what he hoped.

What had Ramirez done to contact outsiders? Nothing that involved Jase—or Jase would have known more. Nothing, one surmised, that involved Yolanda, who’d been equally a novice when she’d landed on the atevi world, to try to deal with disaffected humans. Neither of them had had any experience of outsiders—not to mention planets. Ramirez had prepared them for some venture, but they were still junior; and they weren’t well-prepared for planets. And they were, at that time, just very young.

And for that reason he hadn’t asked them. Hadn’t used the tools he himself had prepared. Hadn’t
planned
the encounter. It had come on him. And he’d simply—

Perceived another ship. That was the first fact in the data log. Another ship. A huge ship.

Another ship—just sitting there. So Ramirez had gone to passive reception, no output. Dead silent.

Then . . . then Ramirez had recorded one cryptic note:
A massive ship has appeared in the orbit of the second planet. We have received a signal. Three flashes, no other content apparent. We are holding position without answering.

Without answering.

Next entry, forty-eight minutes later:

No movement. No signal.

And after two hours:

No movement. No signal. Retreat seems most prudent at this point, in a vector that doesn’t lead home. First vector to Point Gamma, then wait for the wake to fade. After that, home and report.

The log record broke off there.

He didn’t have any record of their arrival at Point Gamma, whatever that was, however useful that record would have been. But Jase had stated they’d gone to that place. Trying to obscure their origin, one guessed.

The segment ended.

No record of further output from the alien before departure. Nothing.

Bren wiped his face. Went through the record multiple times, looking for any chance output that might have
generated a misunderstanding.

Running lights had been on. Those stopped when Ramirez ordered no-output. Nothing but cameras and passive reception, gathering signals in, putting none out.

He couldn’t find an active cause prior to that silence. Couldn’t find it.

He realized he’d slept, head down on the desk, neck stiff from hours of bad angle. He rubbed his face and tried to gather up all his threads, found the pieces of last shift’s thought—no wiser than before.

Narani, missing nothing, provided breakfast, offered a dressing-robe instead of his rumpled clothes. “One can think in the shower, nandi. One does suggest so.”

That, Bren thought, might be useful to clear his head; and he tried, but the warm shower only tended to put him to sleep. He came to himself leaning against the wall, and all but fell asleep a second time when Narani was helping him into his bathrobe.

His brain, past experience told him, was vainly trying to assemble diverse parts of a pattern, one that, thanks to missing bits, wasn’t willing to make sense. Conscious thought was timed out while the hindbrain tried its own obscure pattern-making out of the bits and pieces; but it wasn’t getting anywhere, while his waking forebrain came up with images of Jase, younger Jase, sitting in his cabin in those days wondering what was going on.

Those progressed to remembered images of Ramirez himself sitting at his desk, hands together in that deep thinking attitude of his, Ramirez asking himself, in those hours, whether he ought to engage his two translators, whether it was time, yet, to risk contact.

And what could he do? Initiate the plan he’d been building for over twenty years, with two junior and necessarily inexperienced translators who hadn’t finished their educations . . .

Ramirez, hesitating and hesitating, asking himself how much of this meeting he could now keep out of record, how much of his resources he could keep the Guild authority from laying claim to, if he brought them into the question and entered something of their activity on record . . .

Like the Guild snatching Jase and Yolanda onto Reunion, grilling them for every detail of that encounter,
and finding, perhaps—clues that led under other doors.

The Guild appropriating twenty years’ worth of preparation into the Guild’s hands, with its demonstrably isolationist theories.

Ramirez would find his precious program stopped. His ideas quashed. Twenty years tossed down a black hole. The Guild never had released what it laid hands on. If Ramirez engaged Jase and Yolanda in a contact he wasn’t ready to pursue, the Guild might then take them and never let them go—or not let them go until they were thoroughly Guild, on a Guild mission. A senior captain who’d invested twenty years in a project knew he didn’t have another twenty years to rebuild from scratch, and wouldn’t have the resources to get ahead of the Guild. He had to get through this, lay his plans, try a second time.

Guild—and ship. Two authorities running human affairs.

Guild—and ship. One wasn’t necessarily the other, but ship depended on Guild—and hated its dependence on the Guild for fuel, the lack of mining bots. Ramirez wasn’t independent. He couldn’t make a total break from the Guild’s authority.

But in this system he had his fuel source and he had a green world—if he could have used it. He’d flirted with alien contact—so Sabin said—maybe before this. He hoped to break out of Guild control. He hoped to get a source not dependent on the Guild.

But here the aliens confronted him.

So what was prudent?

Sit still. Hope it didn’t notice?

It noticed. It waited.

Awaited contact? Wanted some gesture? Theoretically a civilized entity ought to realize the signals under such circumstances wouldn’t be congruent—but grant atevi and humans, highly civilized, had very clearly botched their own contact well into the process, and nearly killed themselves before they straightened matters out.

Ramirez left. Ramirez had left the confrontation. That was the conclusion of the affair. That was the one
rock on which he could build a theory. Whatever his surmises about Ramirez’s reasons and Ramirez’s thought pattern and what a civilized entity on the other side ought to expect—the fact was Ramirez had unilaterally broken his freeze-state, and left in a vector other than Reunion.

That redirection hadn’t fooled the aliens for a minute. Had it? So they had an idea where he came from. They’d been watching.

Silence. Then a deceptive vector.

Touching off, perhaps, as Jase said,
emotional
responses—those sub-basement responses and assumptions that clouded thinking, those gut-level conclusions that were beneath clear thought.

If he put himself as, say,
ship-human
, in the aliens’ position—how would he react to seeing an intruding ship pull out without responding? He had no clear idea.

If he put himself as
Mospheiran
in that situation—he’d—well, he’d find a superior and give a report. And if he was President of Mospheira—he’d call his ally and ask what his ally Tabini thought. He’d get a committee together. He’d fund a study. He’d be paralyzed until the committee report came in. A Mospheiran had a thoroughly despairing view of official decision-making. On the other hand, the average Mospheiran tourist could be an incredible fool.

If, next thought, he put himself as atevi in that situation—

He thought he knew what he’d do if he were atevi. He thought he knew what responses would follow, acted-upon and otherwise. But he had the opportunity to ask someone whose nervous system had those other answers. He called in the least warlike ateva on staff. He called in Jeladi.

“What would one believe that meant?” he asked, having explained the situation, “if the stranger ship left, under those circumstances?”

“It went to its associates,” Jeladi said, “by a devious route.”

“And, nadi?”

“It will return with weapons, nandi.”

He was not particularly surprised. Several thousand years of atevi experience led to that conclusion. He
gathered himself up, in his bathrobe, and went to Banichi and posed the question. Jago arrived, and he repeated it. “What would you expect?” he asked them collectively.

“A lure to an ambush,” Jago said.

“We would not take that bait,” Banichi said.

Atevi were not the most peaceful of species. Hadn’t been, even before the petal sails dropped down. There was a reason the Assassins’ Guild mediated the law, a civilizing force in the society.

There remained a third source of information. “I shall dress,” he said to Narani, and began to do so, thinking of begging the dowager to receive a petitioner, no matter that none of them were at their mental best.

But before he had quite donned his coat, a message cylinder arrived.

We have heard your question,
Ilisidi said—God, how did she manage?
Even my great-grandson has an opinion in this case. One should not follow, except with superior force. One should lie in wait. My great-grandson believes we should blow it up immediately and fortify against general invasion. His great-grandfather would have concurred.

Go to bed. We order it.

Bren stood there with his limbs wobbling, half-dressed and chilled, thinking—well, now he need not call on Ilisidi. Now he should call Jase with his multi-sided answer and inform Jase how provocative Ramirez’s apparently prudent actions could seem.

He should call Jase—when he had a brain. And when it wasn’t the middle of Jase’s night. Jase was still asleep. At the moment, he thought, sleep in his own case might produce more intelligence than study would.

He didn’t want to fly his theories past Sabin until he had his wits about him.

He undressed as meticulously as he’d dressed, thinking, thinking—how the ship had gone off its direct track home. But the aliens hadn’t wasted time. They’d known where the human base was.

One assumed an advanced civilization wouldn’t be mindlessly, pointlessly violent.

One assumed that, based on humanity’s rise from the caves. Based on atevi’s general progress—toward television and fast food. On the whole it tended to be true, for these two species. Any two points made a straight
line. But a third—felicitous third—wasn’t guaranteed to be anywhere on that line, was it? Not at all.

He was losing his train of thought. Points that didn’t lie in a straight line.

Aliens had gone straight to the station. What they’d done before they hit it, what the station had done—no record.

Ramirez had left the encounter. That didn’t say, on the other end, what the station had done. Or not done.

He lay down in bed. Thinking.

Did the ship observe a pattern in the three blinks from the alien craft? A variation of color, of duration? No information on that score. No image.

One
assumed
, humans being sensitive to visual input, that Ramirez would have recorded any such anomaly in the signal—
if
he hadn’t tucked all the really useful notes somewhere outside the official log.

But then, if Ramirez had known enough to take the right notes, he’d have stood a chance of taking the right actions. Wouldn’t he?

Eyes were already shut. Brain drifted toward dark.

He felt the give of the mattress. Felt a familiar warmth, smooth skin against his.

“Jago-ji.” He’d been thinking back and forth in Mosphei’ and Ragi. At the moment he didn’t know which he spoke.

“Have you reached a conclusion, Bren-ji?”

“Not that I trust.”

“Ramirez’s actions were peculiar,” Jago said.

“Not for a human,” he murmured. Senses were leaving him. He settled against Jago’s warmth, still trying to think through Ramirez’s actions and beginning to suspect his thinking had gone off the edge of reason.

He felt Jago’s hand on his face. Felt a caress on his shoulder. He tried desperately to reconstruct his train of thought. Everything was dark, dark and the touch of a familiar hand, the whisper of a familiar voice: “Rest, Bren-ji. Rest now. You try yourself too much.”

He did sleep. He was sure he slept, because,
“Bren,”
the intercom said, Jase’s voice, in the middle of his
night, and he had to wake. He groped for the side of the bed, momentarily forgetting that he was in a steel and ceramics world, where words were sufficient. He thought he was in the tall bed in his own apartment in Shejidan, and was shocked to meet the floor sooner than he expected.

“Lights,” he remembered to say, and thoughtlessly blinded himself and Jago. He held a hand up to shield his eyes. “Two-way com.—Jase? What’s up?”

“Looks like we’re finding an interface,”
Jase said.
“Not certain yet, but take this for a warning. Whether we’re there or not is always a question, but the navigators think this should be a straightforward entry.”

“Thanks,” he said, muzzy, out of breath. “Thanks.” And tried to organize what he knew. “We’re not done yet. Jase, I’m not done. I’ve learned things—”

“I’ve called the senior captain. My chief navigator estimates one to three hours, big give-or-take.”

“Have you got an answer yet out of that tape?”

“Makes no sense,”
Jase said.
“No sense.”