C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 6 - Explorer

EXPLORER

Carolyn J. Cherryh

the sixth book in the foreigner sequence

Jacket art by Michael Whelan

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

For my father

Chapter One

^»

Steam went up as the shower needled Bren’s back—a moment of blissful content in a voyage

neither that blissful nor content.

And considering the call he’d just gotten in the middle of his night, he stayed, head against the wall,

longer than his habit, eyes shut, letting the steam make a warm, blind cocoon around him, letting the

shower run on recycle for uncounted warm minutes. Complex input was suspended, output temporarily

unnecessary.

But a brain habituated to adrenaline could stand tranquility only so long before worry tunneled its

way back.

What’s Jase want?—followed closely by—We’re not that far from moving—and:

This could be the big move. Natural, wouldn’t it be, if that’s what the navigators are doing up

there, setting up the final move, that Jase would want to talk now?

It’s my night. He knew he’d wake me up. Jase could come here.

Couldn’t be any ship-problem, could it? Nothing mechanical. Mechanical problems surely

couldn’t be at issue.

That was it. Now he’d done it. He’d thought about the ship itself… about the frail bubble of metal

and ceramics around his cabin, beyond the shower, beyond the diplomatic enclave of passengers on

five-deck.

Said ship had already endured, be it centuries ago, one spectacular and notorious navigational failure,

stranding the original colonial mission in the great uncharted nowhere of the universe—after which

everything else had happened: escaping a nearly lethal star, reaching an inhabited planet. The survivors

had built Alpha Station, in orbit about that planet—and developed a bitter rift between those who

wanted to stay in space and serve the ship, and those who wanted to go down to the green planet, take

their fortunes and their lives in their hands and cast their lot with the steam-age locals.

A whole world of things had happened after that. The Alpha colonists, taking that dive into

atmosphere, forever changed themselves, their cultureand the native people in a direction no one had

predicted.

Meanwhile that faction of humans who’d stayed in space had taken the ship and gone searching for

their misplaced homeworld. But the fervor for that mission had come aground a second time. They’d

ended up building another station in a fuel-rich system. Reunion was its name. And things had gone not

so badly for them—until a hundred-odd years into that station's existence, an unknown species had

taken exception to their poking into other solar neighborhoods and attacked Reunion to make the point.

So the ship had come running frantically back to Alpha looking for fuel and help.

Which was at least the beginning of reasons why this ship now, with a sizeable delegation of

concerned parties from the former Alpha colony and the indigenous government, was headed back out

to that remote station—ten years late, because things at Alpha hadn’t been quite in order to jump to the

ship’s commands. The captain who'd ordered the mission was dead, Alpha Station was in the hands of

the atevi, the native, once steam-age species, who'd taken command of their own destiny—and the aiji,

the atevi ruler, had sent his grandmother and his heir, among others, to see for themselves what sort of

mess the ship-folk had made of their affairs at Reunion.

That was the quick version of ship history: a breakdown, a stranding, and local wars wherever they

went. Given the ship’s run of luck at important moments, and given a “see-me-in-my-office” from a

friend who also happened to be one of the ship’s two captains, well, yes, a dedicated planet-dweller,

descendant of the Alpha colonists, could feel just a little bit of anxiety about this after-midnight summons.

Maybe he shouldn’t have stopped to shower. Maybe he should have pulled on a pair of pants and a

sweater and gotten straight up there.

But there’d been a sense of “when-you-can” when he’d gotten the summons. It was Jase's watch, so

anything Jase wanted to say really was logically said in the middle of the night, granted the breakfast hour

would have been far more convenient.“Time to dress?” he'd asked. “Yes,” Jase had said. So he'd

blundered into the shower half-asleep.

And the black-skinned, pastel-clad figures that moved calmly about duties outside the steamed-over

shower glass—they were fresh from their beds, too, his atevi staff, his protectors, getting his clothes

ready. Hence the shower—a blast of warm water to elevate his fallen body temperature and call said

brain online.

He toggled offrecycle . The shower circulation, formerly parked on endless loop, sucked up the

damp from the air until what blew past was dry and warm as any desert. It stopped, preset, while his

past-the-shoulder hair, that dignity of an atevi lord, still retained a residual, workable damp.

His servants would have heard the shower enter final cycle. He stepped out into comparatively cold

air, and immediately Bindanda—to whose stature he was about the size of a ten-year-old—flung an

appropriately child-sized robe about him. Bindanda, broad as well as tall, black-skinned, golden-eyed—

atevi, in short, and a somewhat plump fellow, very fond of food—lapped the belt about him with hands

that could break human arms and tied it with a delicacy that required no adjustment.

Perfect. The dressing-bench awaited. Bren sat down and let Asicho, the sole female among the

servant staff, comb and braid his hair in its requisite pigtail.

Lord of the province of the heavens, Tabini-aiji had named him, sending him up from the planet to

manage the space program—oh so casually claiming in that action all the power that a newly named lord

of the heavens could possibly lay at the aiji’s feet, a small fact which Bren wasn’t sure any of the ship's

captains had ever quite grasped. It had takenhim a little time to figure it—and he’d been Tabini’s chief

translator.

But it was perfectly reasonable, in the atevi view of things, to believe that where the aiji’s

representative went, so went the aiji’s sphere of influence. Therefore sending the lord of the heavens to

the limits of explored space expanded the aiji's claim of power, absent some strongly dissenting power in

his path. There was a space station. So ofcourse there was now a province of the heavens. Had not the

aiji sent him there and appointed a lord to rule it? Second point—had anyone contested that

appointment? Had anyone else attempted to exert authority over the station? The Mospheirans, that

island nation of former human colonists, couldn’t make up their minds without a committee decision and

the ship-folk certainly weren’t interested in administering an orbiting province. The ship-folk as well as

the Mospheirans had actually seemed glad to have some competent individual, atevi or human, handle it

and see that the vending machines stayed full and the air stayed pure.

So that claim stuck. Therewas a province of the heavens.

And now that the ship-folk took their starship back to Reunion to deal with matters the ship had left

unfinished—dangerous ones at that—the aiji in Shejidan sent out his emissaries to deal with deep space.

Tabini-aiji sent his own grandmother, the aiji-dowager, and he sent his heir—a minor child—both

constituting representation of the aiji’s house itself, to show the flag, so to speak—but to make that claim

of a more permanent nature, he sent out his lord of the heavens to claim whatever territory seemed

available. A man who’d originally hoped to add a few words to the atevi-human lexicon as the sole

monument to his life, Bren Cameron had certainly gotten farther than he intended.

By various small steps accelerating to a headlong downhill rush, his life hadn’t gone as planned. Bren

found himself here, wherever here was. He found himself assigned to assert a claim the aiji-dowager

would… well,witness orbless or otherwise legitimize… establishing an atevi claim to presence in the

universe at large. Most pointedly, he would assert the atevi right to have a major say in the diplomatic

outcome of whatever they met, and the dowager would look it all over and nod politely. And he wasn’t

sure the ship-folk, except Jase, remotely understood he was doing here.

Maybe, Bren said to himself, he ought to be honest about his mission—not go on wearing the white

ribbon of the neutral paidhiin, the translators. Maybe he should adopt a plain one, black, for a province

of empty space—

Black, for the Assassins who watched over him. Black, for the lawyers of atevi society, the

mediators of last resort. White of the paidhiin was, well, what he hoped to go on doing: translate,

mediate, straighten out messes. Lord’s title and assignment to the heavens be damned, he planned to

come home and ask for his old job back: more extravagantly, someday next year or so he hoped, at

lordly leisure, to sit on his porch and watch the sea for three days straight… granted Jase wasn’t calling

him up there at the moment to give him advance warning that the ship had broken down and stranded

the lot of them forever in deep space.

Asicho finished the ribbon-arranging. He stood up from the bench. Narani, his white-haired and

grandfatherly head of staff, had already laid out the appropriate clothing on the bed, and Jeladi, the man

of all work, assistant to everyone on staff, waited quietly to help him on with the starched, lace-cuffed

shirt. The stockings and the trousers, he managed for himself. And the glove-leather, knee-high boots.

“Nadi,” he said then to Jeladi, inviting the assistance. Narani had pressed the lace to knife-edged

perfection, and Jeladi moved carefully, so the all-grasping lace failed to snag his pigtail. Asicho, in turn,

helped him on with his knee-length day-coat while Jeladi held the pigtail safely aside from its high collar,

and Bindanda helped arrange the shirttail.

Not so much froth on the shirt sleeves as to make it necessary to put both coat and shirt on together

—but not quite a one-person operation, as styles had gotten to be. His increased rank had increased the

amount of lace—which had turned up in baggage: trust Narani. The lord of this household would go out

the door, onto executive levels, as if he walked the halls of the Bu-javid in Shejidan.

The shirttail went in immaculately. The pigtail survived the collar. His two servants gently tugged the

starched lace from under the cuffs, adjusted the prickly fichu, and pronounced him fit to face outsiders.

In no sense was a man of rank alone… not for a breath, not an instant. The servants, including

Narani, including Bindanda, lined his doorway. The sort of subterranean signals that had permeated the

traditional arrangements of his onworld apartments, that they had translated to the space station, had

likewise established themselves very efficiently on the ship, in human-built rooms, rooms with a linear

arrangement in—that abomination to atevi sensibilities—pairs. In their section of five-deck, in loose

combination with the aiji-dowager’s staff in the rooms considerably down the hall, the staff still managed

to pass their signals and work their domestic miracles outside the ship’s communications and outside his

own understanding.

So it was no surprise to him at all that Banichi and Jago likewise turned up ready to go with him, his

security, uniformed in black leather and silver metal, and carrying a fairly discreet array of electronics

and armament for this peaceful occasion: a lord didn’t leave his quarters without his bodyguards, not on

earth, not on the station, and not here in the sealed steel world of the ship, and his bodyguards never

gave up their weapons, not even at their lord’s table or in his bedroom.

“Asicho will take the security station,” Jago said, pro forma. Jago and Banichi were now off that

station. Of course Asicho would. In this place with only a handful of staff, they all did double and triple

duty, and even Asicho managed, somehow, despite the language barrier, to know a great deal that went

on in ship’s business.

But not everything. Not middle-of-the-night summonses from the second captain.

Guards they passed in the corridor marked Ilisidi’s residency—her security office, her kitchen, her

personal rooms. No more than polite acknowledgment from that quarter attended their passage: but that

they were awake and about, the dowager’s staff now knew. Ilisidi's security, perhaps Cenedi himself,

given the unusual nature of this call, would be in constant touch with Asicho—not the dowager's idle

curiosity. It was Cenedi's job, at whatever hour.

Two more of Ilisidi’s young men guarded the section door. Beyond that, at a three-way intersection

of the curving corridors, on the Mospheirans’ collective doorstep (meaning Ginny Kroger and her aides

and technicians, their robotics and refueling operations specialists) was the short alcove of the so-named

personnel lift. They walked in and Banichi immediately pushed the requisite buttons.

The lift this time lifted fairly well straight up, where it stopped and opened its doors onto the bridge

with a pressurized wheeze. They exited in that short transverse walkway at the aft end of the bridge.

Beyond it, banks of consoles and near a hundred techs and seniors stayed at work by shifts—half a

hundred tightly arranged consoles, the real running of the ship. The walkway aimed at the short corridor

on the far side of the bridge, where the executive offices, as well as the captains’ private cabins—and

Jase’s security guards on duty in that corridor—were found.

If those two were there, Jase was there. On Jase’s watch, the senior captain, Sabin, was likely snug

abed at the moment—a favorable circumstance, since Sabin had a curious, suspicious nature and wasn’t

wholly reconciled to atevi wandering through her operations. She was bound to have an opinion on the

matter—but at the moment it was all Jase's show.

So they walked straight through, keeping to that designated passage-zone where they weren’t in the

way of the techs—not even a couple of towering dark atevi or a human in atevi court dress rated notice

from navigators trying to figure where they were. Business proceeded. And the two men, Kaplan and

Polano, on a let-down bench at Jase’s office door, stood up calmly, men as wired-in as Jago and

Banichi. No question Jase had known the moment the lift moved. No question Jase, like his bodyguards,

was waiting for him. No question Jase had expected Banichi and Jago to come up here with him when

he called, and no question Jase knew they'd be armed and wired.

“Sir.” Kaplan opened the office door for him.

Jase looked up from his desk and waved him toward a seat, there being no formality between them.

And since it was a meeting of intimates, Banichi and Jago automatically lagged to talk to Kaplan and

Polano outside, such as they could. Atevi security regularly socialized during their lords’ personal

meetings, if they were of compatible allegiances—as Kaplan and Polano indisputably were; so Bren

discreetly touched the on-button of his pocket com as he went in, being sure by that means that Asicho,

on five-deck, would have a record for staff review.

The door shut. Bren dragged one of the interview chairs around on its track. Sat.

Unlike Sabin’s office, which had a lifetime accumulation of storage cabinets, Jase’s office was new

and barren: a desk, two interview chairs—no books, in all those bookcases and cabinets—and only one

framed photo, a slightly tilted picture of Jase holding up a spiny, striped fish. It was his most predatory

moment on the planet.

What would you do with it? shipmates might ask; and if Jase wanted to unsettle them, he might say,

truthfully, horrifying most of them, that they had had it for supper that night—a rather fine supper, too.

They shared that memory. They shared a great many things, not least of which was joint experience

in the aiji’s court, with all that entailed, before Jase had gotten an unwanted captaincy.

“Good you came,” Jase said. “Sorry about the midnight hour. But I’ve got something for you.”

“Got something.” He had niggling second thoughts about the pocket-com, and confessed it. “I’m

wired.”

“I’m always sure you are.” Jase two-sided the console at a keystroke and gave him a confusing

semi-transparent view of a split screen.

Bren leaned forward in the chair, arm on the desk edge. With a better light angle, he figured it out for

a view through a helmet-cam on one side and, on the other, a diagram of the walking route among

rooms and corridors.

His heart went thump. He knew what it was, then. And he’d expected this revelation eight moves

and eleven months ago.

Nowthey had it? Close to the end of their journey, this showed up?

“Sabin knows?” he asked, regarding the extraction of this particular segment out of the log records.

“Not exactly,” Jase said.

There was the timing. There was the non-cooperation of the senior captain. That Jase called him up

here to see it, instead of bringing it down to five-deck… he wasn’t sure what that meant. Relations

between the two on-board captains had been uneasily cordial since—well, since the unfortunate incident

at undock, Sabin having insulted the dowager within the first few hours and the dowager having

poisoned the captain in retaliation. The two women had gotten along since, wary as fighting fish in a tank.

The two captains had gotten along because they had to: the ship regularly had four, and ran now on part

of its crew, part of its population, and two of the three surviving captains.

And despite his conviction this tape existed and despite the dowager’s demands and Jase’s requests

for the senior captain to locate it in log and produce it—Sabin hadn't acknowledged it existed, hadn't

cooperated, hadn't acknowledged the situation they suspected lay behind the tape. In short, no, Sabin

hadn't helped find it in the last number of months, and now that it had turned up, didn't know Jase had it.

And what was the object of their long search? The mission-tape from the ship’s last visit, the record

none of the crew had seen, the record that Ramirez, the late senior captain, had deliberately held secret

from the crew. A man named Jenrette, chief of Ramirez’s personal bodyguard, had entered that station

and met survivors—and those survivors had allegedly refused to be taken off the station.

Those survivors included, one suspected, the hierarchy of the old Pilots’ Guild, an organization

whose management had caused the original schism between colonists and crew—and managed the

contact with aliens who’d already taken offense and launched an attack. Not a sterling record. Not a

record that inspired confidence. Or love.

Captain Ramirez, during that strange port-call, had told his own crew that Reunion was dead…

destroyed by the alien attack. He’d refueled off the supposedly dead station, and run back to Alpha,

where that lie about Reunion’s condition had held firm and credible for nearly a decade—until Ramirez’

deathbed confession had blown matters wide.

But secrecy hadn’t ended with one deathbed revelation. His suspicion of other facts withheld had

made this particular tape an item of contention between Sabin, who’d been one of the captains nine

years ago, and Jase, Ramirez’s appointee, whose assignment to a captaincy had nothing to do with

knowledge of ship’s operations. Jase had been aboard that day they’d found Reunion in ruins, but he

hadn’t been on the bridge—he’d been twenty-odd, junior, and not consulted, far from it. Sabin Couldn’t

talk about that time at dock; no member of the bridge crews had talked to anyone they could access.

Every member of Ramirez’ personal security team except Jenrette was dead—killed in a mutiny against

Ramirez—and Sabin had snatched Jenrette into her security team immediately after Ramirez’ death, the

very day, in fact, that Jase had wanted to ask him questions about this tape.

Thatwas the state of relations between the ship’s captains—Sabin, very senior, and Jase, appointed

by the late senior captain, very junior—and a lot of data not shared between them.

“Anything entirely astonishing about the tape?” Bren asked. “I trust you’ve reviewed it to the end.”

“The match-up with station plans is my work,” Jase muttered, keying while the tape proceeded. The

screen afforded them a helmet-cam view of airless, ravaged halls picked out in portable lights as Jase

skipped through the venues, freezing key scenes. “For a long stretch, things go pretty much as you’d

expect to see. Fire damage. Explosion damage. Outwardly, the kind of thing you’d expect of a station in

ruins. But the boarding team doesn’t wander around much. No exploring. Straight on.”

“As if they knew where they were going?”

“Exactly.” Jase skipped ahead through the record, and now, in motion, the exploration reached a

section that looked far less ravaged. “Their entry into the station, which is a long, tedious sequence, was

through the hole in the mast; but after they got in, the lift worked on emergency power, which saved

them quite a bit of effort. Piece of luck, eh? Emergency generators back up a lot of functions. Fuel port.

Critical accesses. No questions there. Now we’re in the C corridor, section… about 10. Notice

anything really odd here?”

The matching map had the numbers. If one could assume the station architecture as similar to the

atevi earth station’s structure, the investigating crew was on second level near the cargo offices at the

moment. Lights were out. Power was down. Helmet lights still picked out walls and closed doors. Intact

doors.

“It’s not that badly damaged here,” Bren observed.

“No, it’s not.” A small pause. “But we did see part of the station survived. What else do you notice?

For God’s sake, Bren…”

He was entirely puzzled. After a silence, Jase had to prompt him:

“They’rewalking .”

God.God . Of course. They were walking. Walking was so ordinary. But he’d helped revive a space

station. He knew better. Walking, in space, was a carefully managed miracle… and on a station with an

altered center of mass? Not easy, was it?

He felt like a fool. “The station’s rotating.”

“As good as put out a neon sign,” Jase said. “To anyone born in space.”

A sign to tell more than the investigating ship. A sign to advise any alien enemies that this station wasn’

t utterly destroyed. That much beyond any small pocket of light or heat where a handful of surviving

tenants might cling to life, as they’d assumed all through this voyage was the case—this huge structure

was rotating and managing its damage in ways very suggestive of life, intact systems, and sufficient

internal energy to hold itself in trim.

“Computer couldn’t manage this on auto,” he said to Jase, “could it?”

“Less than likely. A dumb system—possible, I suppose, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think crew

will.”

“But you can see rotation from outside,” Bren said, confused. “The ship docked, didn’t they? How

can crew not have seen it?”

Jase gave him a dark look. “We’ve never left home. We’re still sitting at dock at Alpha. The atevi

world’s below us. Can you prove differently? Can you prove we’ve ever traveled at all?”

Once he thought of it, no, he couldn’t. There was no view of outside… except what the cameras

provided the viewing screens. They underwent periods of inconvenience and strangeness that made it

credible they moved, but there was no visual proof that didn’t come through the cameras.

And had Ramirez somehow ordered a lie fed to those cameras? A simple still image, that crew

would take for the station’s lifeless hulk, when the truth was moving, lively, self-adjusting?

From when? God, from how early in the ship’s approach had Ramirez faked that output?

“If Ramirez faked the camera images,” he asked Jase, “how early did he? Did he come into Reunion

system expecting disaster in the first place?”

“I’ll tell you that niggling suspicion did occur to me. But long-range optics might have seen there was

a problem, way far off. Down below, I assure you, we didn’t get an image… we don’t, routinely until

bridge has time to key it to belowdecks. It’s not often important. It’s protocols. And if bridge is busy, if

a captain’s too busy, or off-shift, or in a meeting, we sometimes don’t get image for a while. For a long

while, in this case. We saw the still image. We saw the team entering the mast.”

“Where it’s always null-gee.”

“No feed from helmet cam beyond that. This section went straight into the log’s black box and

nobody belowdecksever saw it.”

Anger. Nowonder this particular tape had stayed buried for nine years. No wonder the current

senior captain had silenced the last living member of the group that had made that tape and challenged

the technically untrained junior captain to find the log record—if he could.

“But the captains all knew,” Bren surmised. “Sabin was there. She had to know the station wasn’t

dead. Anybody on the bridge, any of the techs, they had to know, all along, didn’t they?”That had been

a question before they launched on this mission. It loomed darker and darker now, damning all chance

of honesty between executive and crew.

“It’s all numbers readout on those screens,” Jase said. ”You get what the station transmits. Or doesn’

t transmit. Or ifit feeds you a lie—you’d have that on your screen, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that all

the ops techs on the bridge knew. Some had to. But it’s possible some didn’t.”

More and more sinister, Bren thought, wishing that at some time, at any convenient time, the late

captain Ramirez had leveled with his atevi allies… and his own crew.

“I’ll imagine, too,” Jase went on, “that the minute we got into the solar system and got any initial

visual inkling there was trouble, bridge showed a succession of still images from then on out—in space,

you can’t always tell live from still. I’ll imagine, for charity’s sake, that Ramirez ran the whole thing off

some archive tape and a still shot and nobody else knew. He might have been the only captain on the

bridge during the investigation: you just don’t budge from quarters until you get the all-clear, and it didn’t

come for us belowdecks for hours. Maybe he didn’t tell anybody but his own techs. Maybe the other

captains got his still image andthey didn’t leave their executive meeting to find out. I can construct a

dozen scenarios that might have applied. But I’ll tell you I’m not happy with anything I can imagine. The

more I think about it, I’m sure Sabin had to know.”

“You docked at the station, for God’s sake.”

“Tethered. Simple guides for fueling. We’re not the space shuttle.”

Not the space shuttle. Not providing passenger video on the approach. Not providing a cushy

pressurized and heated tube link.

Entry through the null-g mast, where even a trained eye couldn’t easily detect a lie.

“There’s another tape,” Bren said, on that surmise. “There’s got to be some log record where the

station contactedPhoenix and gave Ramirez the order not to let the crew know there was anybody

alive.”

“You know, I’d like to think that was where the orders originated,” Jase said calmly. “And I

earnestly tried to find a record to prove that theory. But I couldn’t. My level of skill, I’m afraid. Took

me eleven months to break this much out. I know a lot more now than I did about the data system. But

you get into specific records by having keys. I’ve cracked a few of them. Not all. Not the policy level.

Not the level where Guild orders might be stored. And the senior captain isn’t about to give them up and

I’m not about to ask.”

“You can’terase a log entry, can you?”

“You’d think. But at this point—we’ve rebuilt a lot of the ship’s original systems, over the centuries,

and I’m not sure that’s the truth any longer. At my level of expertise, no. Not possible. If there’s a key

that allows that—it rests higher than I can reach. Maybe it sits in some file back on old Earth, that

launched us. Maybe Sabin has it. I don’t.”

Jase wasRamirez’s appointment, and Sabin hadn’t approved his having the post.

And the crew, the general, non-bridge crew—who’d all but mutinied to get them launched on this

rescue mission—if they saw this tape, they were going to be far faster on the uptake than a groundling

ambassador. There was a reasonable case to be made that the Pilots’ Guild itself, in charge of Reunion

Station, was behind all the trouble and all the lies and all the deception. There was a reasonable, even a

natural case to be made that the alien hostility that had wrecked the station was directly the Guild’s fault,

and not Ramirez’s. But believing the old Guild was the sole culpable agency required suspending a lot of

possibilities, because the station wasn’t mobile. The station wasn’t gadding about space poking into

other people’s solar systems.

And the ship’s executive hadn’t talked. Hadn’t breached the official lie that Reunion Station was

dead.

Nine years without talking? Nine years for that many people on the bridge to keep a secret from their

friends and relations among the crew?

Mospheirans never could have done it, Bren thought. Then: atevi… possibly. And ship-folk—

He watched Jase watch the tape, thinking that all the years he’d known Jase hadn’t gotten him

through all the layers of Jase’s reticence. Even with friendship. Even with shared experience. In some

ways ship-folk were as alien to Mospheirans as a Mospheiran could imagine.

And the ease of lies in this sealed steel world of the ship…

They continually heard reports that told them where they were. They imagined stars and space. They

imagined progress through the universe.

The ship docked with a station mast, and went null-g. Theship would have been perfectly normal,

null-g, even while the station wasn’t. Surviving relatives could have been just the other side of the hull,

and crew might not have known.

A very, very different set of perceptions, from certain consoles on the bridge, to those that weren’t

involved with that reality. While certain other techs, deep in the inner circles of the ship’s operations,

kept secrets until told otherwise—policy. Policy, policy.

The Pilots’ Guild had once run this ship. It was a good question how much it still ran the upper

decks. Did the ship workwith the old Guild?For the old Guild?

Or for itself, these days? The Pilots’ Guild hadn’t actually consisted of pilots for centuries.

Supposedly they’d gone stationside at Reunion, and let the ship’s captains go their way, under their

authority in name, if not in fact.

Jase touched a button. Sound came up, the ordinary hoarse whisper of a man’s exerted breathing. “

Almost there, sir,” a voice said.

“They know where they’re going,” Jase said. “They never ask. They’re about to pass a working

airlock. They know in advance certain of the lifts are going to work. There’s no mystery about this, not

to them. They’re representing Ramirez and they’re going in to meet with the station authority.”

“And that is Jenrette we’re hearing. The one with the helmet cam.”

“Affirmative.”

Sabin’s man now. Sabin’s sympathy for a man decades in Ramirez’ service, a man too senior to be

on a despised junior captain’s staff?

For Jenrette, with, maybe, a whole raft of executive secrets on his conscience, a much more

comfortable assignment, that with Sabin.

“Presumably,” Jase said, “Sabin’s thoroughly debriefed him by now, even the things he wouldn’t

want to say. So I assume she knows as much out of Jenrette as her imagination prompts her to ask and

his sense of the situation lets him answer. Presumably, once we raised the possibility this tape existed,

Sabin immediately reviewed it and questioned Jenrette. What else she may have gotten out of Jenrette, I

wish I did know.”

“She’s going to know I came up here. She’s going to ask why.”

“True.” Jase picked up a disk from off his desk and gave it to him,tape being in most instances a

figure of speech on this ship. “This is a copy. Your copy. Consider—I was aboard when we docked at

Reunion. I was belowdecks being lied to like all the rest. Iremember how it was. Iremember the

announcements that we were going in. I remember the solemn announcement that we were going back

to Alpha to find out if the rest of the colonists we’d scattered out here had survived—with the

implication things were going to change and we were going to patch everything and find a friendly port

and then prepare against the possibility of alien invasion at Alpha. Right along with crew, I got behind

that promise. I was young. I’d had a peculiar course of study, and I understood I was going to be useful

in that approach. I had a notion that was the reason I existed at all; and all during that voyage I bore

down on my studies: French and Latin and Chinese and history, a lot of history. Yolanda and I were all

impressed, because Ramirez was so incredibly wise as to have had us going down that path in the first

place. Wise… bullshit. I’m thirty years old. I’m relatively sure I am. Tell me: why was he so incredibly

ahead of the game?”

Thirty years. A human who lived among atevi, to whom numbers were as basic as breathing,

twitched to numbers. He immediately dived after that lure, wondering. Attentive. But answerless.

“What have you found out?” he asked Jase.

“I don’t know what I’ve found out. I wanted you to come up here in human territory, where I’m not

thinking like atevi. Where it’s a lot easier for me to remember what happened, because, dammit, I

should have been asking questions. Thirty years old. That’s question number one. Ramirez had me born

out of Taylor’s Legacy, and picked me a mother who’s now found it convenient not to have been on this

voyage, for reasons I can fairly well understand are personal preference, or maybe a desire to live to an

old age. Or maybe to avoid questions I’d ask when we got closer to our destination, who knows?

Maybe it was Sabin’s order. I know Ramirez had me studying French and Latin and Chinese,he said,

since humans might have drifted apart from us over the last several centuries. So I was created to

contact Mospheirans, before Ramirez had any idea Mospheirans existed… because he was a student of

history and he did know that a few centuries of separation can make vocabulary and meanings drift, and

we might not understand each other. Isn’t that brilliant? That’s what he told me when we headed back to

Alpha.”

“It’s factually true—at least about linguistic drift. But I don’t buy the prescience.”

“Nor do I. Andmaybe I was created to contact humans—maybe to contact atevi, too, because

Ramirez did, of course, know there was a native species. Contacting them had been at issue before

C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 6 - Explorer

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