Foord was seated at his desk. He looked up at her.
“I’d like to ask you about Joser.”
“I know I spoke hastily on the Bridge, Commander, but I meant it.”
“No, it’s not that. He makes you uneasy, and I’d like to know why. You have permission to speak freely.”
He spoke as if their previous interview hadn’t happened. She noticed there was no ruler on the desktop.
She paused, and said “On the Bridge, when he told you It Would Be Murder…”
“Or tried to, until you shouted him down.”
“He told me later that he’d only said what any ordinary decent person would have said.”
“And your point?”
“Nobody on this ship has any right to be ordinary or decent… I don’t trust him, Commander.”
“Tell me why.”
“Three reasons. One, he’s always manoeuvring for position, as if he’s expecting what he does and says to be played to an audience later. Two, his work’s mediocre; he might be acceptable on an ordinary ship, but not on this one. Three, and following from One, I think he’s a Department stooge.”
“He wouldn’t be the first,” Foord said drily.
“Do I still have permission to speak freely, Commander?”
“Of course.”
“He’s dangerous. Get rid of him, get him off the Bridge, any way you can. Not because he’s a stooge, we’ve had them before, but because he’s fucking mediocre.”
Foord was silent for a couple of minutes, thinking.
“Thank you,” he said eventually. “That’s helpful. I’ll see you back on the Bridge.”
She turned and walked out, aware that he was watching the seat of her skirt, and the swaying of its pleats.
•
Foord yawned, settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and listened again to the muted background noise on the Bridge. It always reminded him of long summer afternoons from his childhood when he would lay alone with eyes closed on a crowded beach, and would listen: to the sea, to the sharp voices of other children, to the lower voices of their parents tossing everyday remarks tiredly back and forth like beachballs, and to the doppler effect of someone running towards him and past him, on the way to someone else. His childhood had been complex and solitary, but not unhappy; at least, not until the darkness came.
He had prepared carefully and thoroughly for what was about to happen, as he always did. He knew how he would destroy Her. He had worked with the ship’s Codex, the aggregation of its nine sentience cores, to extract from the onboard computers every last detail of the structure of Horus system and the known and suspected abilities of Faith. He had then constructed an intricate mechanism of initiatives, responses, failsafes and fallbacks. And now the entire mechanism, like the Charles Manson itself, was under way—as dense as a mountain of lead, as precise as an antique clock movement, and so finely balanced that his will needed only to touch it as lightly as a feather to move it all in a given direction. So he could afford to relax, for now.
“Commander,” Thahl said, “we’re now within twice the maximum distance at which She’s been known to monitor communications. You asked to be notified.”
“Thank you. From now until further notice, no external communication will be made or accepted without my prior authority. Please inform Sakhra; and then close their channels.”
It seemed everyone wanted to know about Faith: who She was, where She came from, and why She was doing this. Foord, however, was genuinely indifferent. All that concerned him was that She was an opponent—the only one, apart from another Outsider, who might match him. Others were working on Her identity and motives, and if anyone found anything they’d tell him. With a kind of cold irony which was almost Sakhran, he looked forward to destroying Her before anyone could find out who She was.
Almost everyone who served or commanded on an Outsider did so because, for various reasons, they would be unacceptable on an ordinary ship. Foord rarely thought about why he would have been unacceptable; but it might have been his reluctance to believe in things. He considered that other people, particularly those who gave him his orders, believed far too much in their own existence and in that of the universe. Human senses, unaided, could perceive the universe across a range of 10-4 to 10+4. Optical and mechanical devices increased the range: 10-10 to 10+10. Electronics made it 10-25 to 10+25, and the knowledge of which the Charles Manson was perhaps the last product made it 10-50 to 10+50. Upon the perception gained at each stage a body of knowledge was constructed, and upon that construction grew further constructions—philosophical, political, cultural, social. There was the clockwork of Newton, then the relative chaos of Einstein, though Einstein only wanted harmony; then the smaller and deeper chaos of quantum uncertainty, and then back to a post-Newtonian clockwork. Beyond that was a deeper and vaster level of chaos, not yet quite visible; by the time it was, people would no longer be travelling in things like the Charles Manson.
Each stage proved its predecessor an illusion, and waited to be proved an illusion by its successor. But they all continued to be part of the same accretion over time; because, Foord thought, they all shared the quality of illusion. In the universe which was currently believed to exist, Foord served current institutions by applying current knowledge and techniques to the orders he was given, but the difference between Foord and those who gave him his orders was that they believed it had a meaning, whereas he knew it did. But only in terms of itself.
•
Eighty minutes later, the Charles Manson passed uneventfully out of the Gulf and crossed the orbital path of Horus 4, giving the planet a wide berth as Foord had stipulated. Kaang commenced deceleration for entry into the Belt. As photon drive subsided to seventy percent and below, the simulation disappeared from the Bridge screen and was replaced by a real visual, overlaid by rectilinear filters and compensators to correct for spectral shift; and these overlays themselves dwindled and disappeared as the photon drive subsided to twenty percent and below.
“Switching to ion drive” said Kaang.
“Position of Faith is still 99-98-96 and holding,” Joser said, not needing to raise his voice above the faint velvet thud which, together with a brief play of lights from Kaang’s console and a grunt of something which might have been approval from Smithson, was the only indication that a switch of drives had occurred.
“And no detectable movement or activity on any waveband,” Joser added.
“Ion drive engaged,” Kaang said. “Ninety percent and falling.”
“Thank you,” Foord said. “Joser, from now on I’d like those positional checks every five minutes. Smithson, Cyr, I’ll be requesting your status reports when we complete deceleration, so please have them ready. Oh, and Joser, one other thing…”
•
The Charles Manson entered the Belt on ion drive at exactly thirty percent, and slid through it unhurriedly and without incident. Status reports were given quietly and received politely, while the ship picked its way between bodies ranging in size from large boulders to small planets. It stolidly maintained its own up and down as asteroids rolled and turned around it; the surfaces of the bigger ones loomed on the encircling Bridge screen, sometimes below them like floors pocked with craters, sometimes to either side like walls veined with crevasses, sometimes above them like ceilings from which mountain ranges hung inverted. Foord stole a glance at Kaang, and thought, We may have to come back through the Belt a lot faster than this. And with less leisure for observation.