“Oh, an administrator. A fair one. Just what they need.”
The tone had been so quiet the barb was in before he felt it.
“Yes, sir, it beats a bad one. And they’ve had that, too.”
“I’m very aware. So you were going into Native Studies. Getting a jump on the administrator part, it seems. You’d formed acquaintances among the downers.”
Bianca. It was the same thing Madelaine had hit him with. But now it had lost its shock value.
“Yes, sir. I did. I knew them before I went down. And there’s nothing in the rules that covered that.”
“I take it you checked.”
“They’re friends of mine! There’s nothing I did that would harm them.”
“Including going into the outback. Including endangering others. Including meeting with downer authorities.”
He’d told that to the investigators. He remembered lying in the bed, and them recording everything he said. He’d had to explain the stick. That he hadn’t stolen it. So it hadn’t been all Bianca.
“Why,” the captain asked him, “would you break the regulations?”
“Because you pushed me.”
“We weren’t there. I don’t think so. You made a decision. You went where you were forbidden to go, you stole lifesupport cylinders—”
“One from each. If anybody got out there compromised it was their own stupidity. You can feel it in the masks. They’d be too light.”
Was that a slight smile on the captain’s face? He didn’t take it for one. And JR was hearing entirely too much.
“You also,” the captain said, “went out there to outwait us. Endangering your downers, about whom you care so much.”
“Outwait you, yes. But not to endanger the downers.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it wouldn’t.”
“You were sure of that.”
“I know them. I was looking for the two I knew.”
There was a long silence then. James Robert leaned forward, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled in front of his lips. “Then,” James Robert said, “you thought it wouldn’t hurt them. You took conscious thought.”
“Yes, sir. If I’d thought I’d do them any damage I’d have turned around and given up. Right then.”
“Are you sure you didn’t?”
“I am absolutely sure I didn’t.” He was scared, however, that the captain knew more than he was saying… about what he’d boarded with. He waited to be accused.
“You invaded a downer shrine, on your own decision.”
“It’s not a shrine.” Had he said that part of it? God! He didn’t know now what he had said to the investigators, or how much more they’d inferred. “It’s a ritual site. There’s a difference.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Yes, sir.” They knew what he’d brought aboard. They were going to take it away from him.
“And why did you go there?”
“A downer led me.”
“Your friends did.”
“No. A different one.”
“And you still say you didn’t do damage.”
“I know I didn’t. They accepted me there. They brought me there.” There was more that he hadn’t said, but he wasn’t willing now for the Old Man to direct the conversation where he wanted it, chasing him into every corner of what he knew. “I talked to Satin.”
“So have I,” James Robert said.
For a moment he didn’t believe it. And then did. This was James Robert who’d been on Pell when the foremost of downers had been on the station.
“I’ve met Satin,” James Robert said. “An extraordinary creature. She went all the way to Mariner, and came back talking about war.”
He was impressed. In spite of everything.
“Do you know,” James Robert said, “they had no word for war until we told them?”
“She wasn’t on this ship.”
“On another merchanter ship. On a far more ordinary voyage. But even so she found the outside too threatening. She said the heavens were too troubled for hisa. She came back to her world, by what I understand, to sit by the Watchers and add her strength to the Watchers’ strength. To dream the future.”
A chill went over his arms. “What do you know about it?”
“I met her. I talked with her.”
He was vastly more impressed with this man than he’d planned to be. He’d tried to act righteous and the man turned out to know things that made him look like the rules-infracting fool he knew in his heart he’d been. A fool that deserved booting from the program—as they’d done with him, so thoroughly that Quen couldn’t even use reinstatement as a bribe.
Quen knew. Quen had told James Robert. And James Robert hadn’t met with him until now, when he’d have thought the captain who sued for his return would have been at the head of the list.
“What I know,” the captain said, “is the old ones sit by the Watchers and believe for the people. They expect things from the sky. Hell, we showed up. Something else might happen. There even might be peace. If you want my opinion, that’s what she’s looking for. That’s why she went back.”
“They say don’t attribute anything to them. That we can’t know what they’re looking for.”
“Bullshit. I know what she’s looking for. All of us who dealt with her know what she’s looking for. You don’t look so blind, either.”
His heart was beating very fast.
“And what’s that?” he challenged the captain. “What do you know that they don’t?”
“The meaning of not-war. We taught her the word for war. They didn’t have it. But they don’t have a word for peace either. And that’s what she waits to see. She’s got to be really old by now, in downer terms.”
Silver. Like an image. The captain made Satin so real in his mind it hurt.
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
“You know what this ship is, Fletcher, besides a recurring inconvenience in your life?”
“No.” The captain preempted what he’d have said. Diverted talk to the ship. Which he didn’t want.
“This ship,” the captain said, “your ship, Fletcher, the way it was your mother’s, is the oldest merchanter still working. It’s the one that broke open the rebellion against the Earth Company. It had been started before, but we made it inevitable. Your predecessor helped make it happen.”
“I know that.” He didn’t want a history lesson. He knew about this ship, God, he knew about this ship. He’d learned about his almost-immediate ancestor. This ship was armed, it went God knew where, it was a warship in disguise, and it was probably lying (he began to fear so, counting that carrier that had spooked the ship back at the last jump) when it claimed it was going back to merchant trade.
“This is the ship,” the captain continued in dogged patience, “that secured the right that no matter what law a station is under, a merchanter’s deck is sovereign territory. Without that, merchanters would have been sucked right into the War, or coopted by Union.”
“I know that part, too.”
“This is the ship that led the merchanter strikes, the first to resist Earth’s imposition of visas.”
“At Olympus.”
“Thule. Learn your Hinder Stars. There are those of us who remember, Fletcher. And you have to. People who meet one of our crew expect you to remember, so be correct on that point.”
“I wasn’t born then. You may have been, but I wasn’t.”
“I know other things, in your world. This ship, Fletcher, is what Satin hopes for.”