Explorer

by C. J. Cherryh

  But there was also the minute-by-minute telemetry report, the autolog, another kind of text, mostly numerical, and huge. That was there. Thank God. Thank Sabin for including it. It was a fair record, best impartial record they seemed to have of those encounters, right down to the chaff of information from the air quality units, reams of it.

  One could arrange. And filter. So he filtered. He filtered for hours, going through every internal system’s chatter, dumping the chaff and lining up the log record for the sparse useful facts, all with a brain packed about with cotton wool and unaccustomed to the kinds of data he was trying to sift. He wouldn’t attempt to organize a social dinner in his current state—and here he was put to figuring out an alien contact gone wrong, and figuring what in the data had still changed when Ramirez gave a no-output order.

  Fact: Phoenix had spent a decade founding a space station to supply her and spent most of the next couple hundred years poking about in various neighborhoods likely to have supply—supply that came to the ship most conveniently when it came in space—planetoids, not deep planetary gravity wells that the huge and fragile ship had no means to plumb. That fact, he had heard from Jase over a number of years.

  No gravity wells—being so fragile: so the choices a Mospheiran or an ateva would logically think of first were excluded. Phoenix had arrived at the atevi world not only with no landing craft, but, embarrassing as it was, and admitted much later, the ship had no atmosphere-qualified pilots who could land on a planet and get off again—well, except by brute force and massive lift, something that didn’t rely on air and weather—and which they couldn’t soft-land in the first place. He wasn’t, himself, qualified to pronounce on the feasibility of just lighting a powerful rocket and aiming it straight up; but such a craft had no ready reusability, nothing to enable mining and agriculture on a regular basis, so, from the ship’s point of view, relying on anything in a gravity well was a damned inconvenient way to run a space program.

  Not to mention the fact that ship-folk floating in orbit didn’t in the least know what to do with crops outside a hydroponics tank, and weren’t inclined to fall down a gravity well to find out, either.

  So scratch landing as an option, and as a basic intent of Ramirez’s illicit explorations. Mospheirans had landed on a no-return basis—and taken two hundred years getting back into space again. No, definitely Phoenix had been interested primarily in space-based resources. Asteroids. Comets. Floating real estate. They’d mine, occasionally, gather, occasionally . . . that was the way they’d lived.

  The ship had had mining craft once upon a time. Which the ship hadn’t had when it showed up at Alpha. They’d lost their resources of that sort. Or maybe the ship usually had them and just hadn’t carried the extra mass on the voyage in question. It was a lot of mass.

  And where would they have left them? At a remote star, when they’d pulled up stakes in a hurry?

  At Reunion, when they’d come in and found a station in ruins?

  Would they have left them as station relief, an aid to rebuilding? Or had they just not been carrying them?

  Thoughts slid willfully sideways, into lunacy. Into human behavior that hadn’t, no, been wise at all. They were not figuring out right behavior, even rational behavior, in tracing the history of station and ship decisions. They were second-guessing a senior captain who’d done some peculiar things wrong, including arriving in atevi space with no way to refuel.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Question for Sabin—exactly how much mining the ship had been doing in Ramirez’ tenure as senior captain? Did the ship have mining bots?

  If not, where did you leave them—and when? And why?

  Risking stranded themselves? Risking exactly what Phoenix had run into in the disaster that had stranded them? Was it at all sensible, not to have had that capability, when they’d learned their historical lessons?

  Something didn’t add up. Or something added up to mining craft either not loaded for the mission, or deployed and not recovered, or left to aid Reunion in a critical situation.

  The Guild held refueling as a weapon, hadn’t Jase said?

  So was it a Guild decision to keep all possible refueling operations under its own hand?

  Worrisome thought.

  Had the Guild begun to be suspicious of Ramirez’s intentions, his activities when he was out and about? Or suspicious of the ship’s independence, from the time they built Reunion Station, centuries ago? They should have foreseen the ship would develop different interests. If they were wise.

  Four times damn. He called Jase.

  “Jase. You have a record you’re working on? Did she give it to you?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “No queries into your line of thought—but did the ship ever have mining craft? And where did they go?”

  “Weren’t loaded,” Jase answered. There was a long pause. “Never were. Guild monopoly.”

  “Fuel at Gamma, possibly?”

  “Ported out there. Occasionally there was. Such as there was. If there still is any, I have no knowledge. If the aliens haven’t hit it, too, by now.”

  “But fuel exists—in its raw state—at Gamma. One could mine.”

  “If we got into that kind of situation. Yes. That’s the option. What are you thinking?”

  “No comment yet,” Bren said. He didn’t want to prejudice Jase’s thinking, or change its direction. But he was muzzy-headed with folded space. With things that didn’t make sense. With fears, that got down to station’s power play, holding that mining machinery to itself. It hadn’t trusted Ramirez, dared one think? “Ramirez’s personal notebook. Without useful comment from Sabin. Does it make any sense to you?”

  “It’s all coordinates. Bearings. I think he could have been watching something come and go. The points given don’t match up with past destinations that I know about. We didn’t ever go to these points. He only wrote them down, outside the log. There’s absolutely nothing else I can get out of the notes.”

  Scary implications. Spying on the aliens. Wonderful. Visitations that frequent, and station not aware of them? “Want to come down for lunch? I swear social only. No contamination.”

  “Can’t,” Jase said. “Wish I could. Sabin’s set me an administrative job. Have to. You take care down there, Bren.”

  “No question.”

  Conversation ended disappointingly, a conversation kept entirely in ship-speak, nothing to worry Sabin or make her question what the former paidhiin had been up to—nothing to make Sabin doubt them at a critical moment yet to come—the way the Guild might have doubted Ramirez. Everything was too fragile. Everything depended on Sabin’s judgement of them. And Jase hadn’t risked her opinion by coming down to consult.

  Their lives all depended on that brittle thread of Sabin’s judgement. And the solution to Ramirez’s actions relied on brains that couldn’t work at maximum efficiency. So, just to help out, Sabin had loaded Jase with something extra to do. Maybe necessary, maybe not. He was annoyed. Frustrated. But he didn’t want to push Sabin further, not yet.

  Conclude one thing for a fact. Ramirez hadn’t had mining capability on the critical run into trouble. He wasn’t likely to get it from a station that didn’t trust him. And he hadn’t been after material gain at that star—not immediately. Information. Data. Scouting things out. Maybe for future mining, if he could beg, borrow or steal a craft. Maybe not. But by what Jase said, he’d been nosing about where he was, possibly watching some sort of activity—without, he thought, getting involved, without going to those destinations.

  Wasn’t ready yet. Was still collecting data. Still training Taylor’s Children to be his go-betweens, his eyes and ears for another world.

  But the list in the notes, if it was observation of alien craft—was that observation a notation kept aside even from the auto-log? Difficult, one would think.

  Log recorded the last arrival at star 2095 on chart, G4, small planets. A great deal of data on all the planets. But the second, tempe
rate planet . . . temperate planet . . . had atmosphere. Liquid water. Abundant water. Moderate vulcanism. A single, modest moon—old enough, perhaps, to have swept up all its competitors. A human’s natural interest turned to that world—ignorant as his interest might be.

  Resources useless to the Guild, again, at the inaccessible bottom of a gravity well. Guild interest might well be piqued by the data, far more abundant, on the debris in the outer system. Ices. Iron. Nickel. A radiation-hot fourth planet gravitationally locked with an overlarge satellite and surrounded by an unstable ring—that was no place a sensible operation would like to conduct business. That world’s well held a rich debris cloud; but from the Guild’s point of view, not because of that hellish place, but because of that inconveniently attractive number two planet, the whole solar system was less attractive to them—a temptation all of history indicated the Guild wanted to avoid like the plague. Both a rich hell to mine, and a quasi-paradise sitting within potential rebels’ reach.

  The Guild had had that situation once, at Alpha. And colonists and workers there had staged a rebellion that worked only because the green world allowed a soft landing. Consequently that gravity well wouldn’t give up a single craft, not for centuries—placing all local resources off-limits for a Guild that had forgotten atmospheric flight—so the Guild could whistle for obedience: no one had had to listen, and finally the station had folded, oh, for a couple of centuries.

  Interesting, that beautiful green world. Decided temptation, as a Mospheiran saw matters. Temptation for an atevi ruler. Temptation for anybody interested in population growth—

  Even for a Guild captain who should be doing his Guild-bound duty and avoiding another planet-based colonization?

  A captain with questionable loyalty to the Guild—a captain legally obliged to convey his log back to close Guild scrutiny . . . and who might not want to tell them everything.

  So said captain heaped up piles of data on the hellish fourth planet. Stayed there weeks, observing that fourth planet. From a distance. Which argued to a suspicious son of rebels that the fourth planet wasn’t all Ramirez was observing and might not be the focus of Ramirez’s real interest.

  But if there had been notes on his intentions, they weren’t in the log. And they weren’t in the little file.

  No evidence of any foreign occupancy around that green world . . . no evidence that Ramirez chose to record. That was all the soft tissue of memory, attached to those simple numbers in the little file. And all of that was gone, evaporated, when Ramirez died.

  But there were witnesses. Sabin said Ramirez had found something somewhere. Said Ramirez sought alien contact—had wanted to find somebody to deal with, somebody excluding atevi and their own troublesome rebel colony at Alpha. And where was Ramirez to find that, except near such a green planet? And might natives of such a green world, if they had an installation in space, have the supplies Ramirez needed to break free of the Guild?

  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.