“No. Satin doesn’t. Satin doesn’t care what humans do.”
“Yes, she does.”
“It’s a cheap try. The downers have no connection to us. They don’t know why we do what we do and we shouldn’t confuse them.”
“Did Satin tell you that?”
A shot straight to the gut.
“What did she say?” the captain asked. “Did she tell you that their culture is equivalent to but aside from protohuman development and that she’s a mirror of ourselves?”
“No.”
“I don’t think it’s her job, either. No more than it’s your job to run her planet for her.”
“I never said it was.”
“You have to take that line if you want to be an administrator. You have to work with the committee, play with the team, and leave the downers alone. If the committee had found out what you were doing they’d have had you on a platter, and by now they probably do know and they’ve got three study groups and a government grant to try to find out what happened. You were doomed. They’d have had you out of that job in a year.”
“It wouldn’t have gone the way it did.”
“Yes, it would. Because you questioned the most basic facts in the official rulebook… that Satin’s people have to be left alone and her people can’t learn anything they don’t think of for themselves. Those are the rules, Fletcher. Defy them at your own risk.”
“I never risked them.” It was the one thing he could say, the one thing he was, in heart and head, sure of, that Nunn never would believe.
“I know that. I know that. And Satin won’t talk to the researchers. Not to the researchers. Not to the administrators. Do you think she’s stupid? She has nothing to say to them.”
“What do you know? You talked to her once”
“Like you. You talked to her once.”
“I’ve studied them all my life. I do know something about them.”
“Something the researchers don’t know?”
It sounded ludicrous. He was no one. He knew nothing.
“You love them?” the captain asked. That word. That word he didn’t use.
“Love isn’t on the approved list. Ask the professors.”
“I’ll give you another radical word. Peace, Fletcher. It’s what Satin’s looking for. She doesn’t know the name of it, but she went back to the Watchers to wait for it. That’s why she’s there. That’s why she folded downer culture in on itself and gave not a damn thing to the researchers and the administrators and all the rest of the official establishment. It was her dearest wish to go to space. But we weren’t ready for her.”
“Satin went back to her planet rather than put up with the way we do business!” Fletcher said. “Wars and shooting people on the docks didn’t impress her. And she didn’t like the merchant trade. Downers give things, they don’t sell them.”
“When you met her, what did she tell you?”
His voice froze up on him. Chills ran down his arms. Go, she’d said. For a moment he could hear that soft, strange voice.
Go walk with Great Sun.
“We talked about the Sun. About downers I knew. That was all.”
“Peace, Fletcher. That’s the word she wants. She knows the word, but we haven’t yet shown her what it means. She knows that the bad humans have to leave downers alone. But that’s not peace. We haven’t been able to show it to her. We showed her war. But we never have found her peace. And that’s what we’re looking for, right now. On this ship. On this voyage”
“Fancy words.”
“Peace is a lot more than just being left alone.”
“You couldn’t give it to her down there,” the Old Man said. “You’re a child of the War. So is JR.” His eyes shifted beyond Fletcher’s shoulder, to a presence he keenly felt, and wished JR had heard nothing of this. “Neither of you have any peace to give her. And where will you get it, Fletcher? Your birthright is this ship. This ship, that’s trying to make peace work realtime, in a universe where everybody is still maneuvering for advantage mostly because, like you, like Jeremy and his generation, even like Quen at Pell, you’re all too young to know any better. You’re as lost as Satin. You don’t know what peace looks like, either.”
“What do you know about me or her? What the hell do you know?”
“The hour of your birth and the prejudice of several judges. The fear and the anger that sent you running out where you knew you could die… we never wanted you to be that afraid, Fletcher, or that angry.”
“You don’t want me! You wanted your fourteen million! And I was happy until you screwed up my life! Besides, I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“But if you hadn’t run out there, Satin would have come to the end of her life without talking to Fletcher Neihart.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Nothing, if you don’t do anything. A great deal if you commit yourself to find out what peace is, if you learn it, if you find it and take it to your generation. Satin’s still looking at the heavens, isn’t she? Still waiting to see the shape of it, the color of it, to see what it can do for her people, Fletcher. Right now only a few of us remember what peace looked like, tasted like, felt like.”
He caught a breath. A second one. He’d never been up against anybody who talked like James Robert. Everything you said came back at you through a different lens.
James Robert did remember before the War. Nobody he knew of did.
“Work for this ship,” he said in James Robert’s long silence. “Is that what you mean? Do the laundry, wash the pans…”
“All that we do,” James Robert said, “keeps this ship running. I take a turn at the galley now and again. I consider it a great pleasure.”
“Yes, sir.” He knew he’d just sounded like a prig.
“What good were you at laundry anyway? You think the first strike happened at Olympus.”
“Thule, sir.”
“Good. Details matter. If it wasn’t Thule everything would have been changed. The borders, the ones in charge, the future of the universe would have been changed, Fletcher. Details are important. I wonder you missed that, if you’re a scientist.”
“Biochemist.”
“Biochem? Biochem isn’t related to the universe?”
“It is, sir. Thule.”
“Precisely. I detest a man that won’t know anything he doesn’t imminently have to. Just plod through the facts as you think you know them. ‘Approximate is good enough’ makes lousy science. Lousy navigation. And keeps people following bad politicians. Are you a rules-follower, Fletcher?”
The Old Man was joking with him. He took a chance, wanting to be right, aware JR was measuring him and fearing the Old Man could demolish him. “I think you have my record, sir.”
A small laugh. A straight look. “A very mixed record.”
“I’m for rules, sir, till I understand them.”
“I knew your predecessor,” the Old Man said. “There’s a similarity. A decided similarity.”
He hoped that was a compliment.
“So JR tells me he’s assigned you to keep young Jeremy in line.”
“Jeremy’s been keeping me in line, mostly.”
A ghost of a smile. And sober attention again. “Biochem, eh?”
He saw the invitation. He didn’t know whether he wanted it. James Robert had a knack for getting through defenses, with the kind of persuasion he wanted to think about a long time, because he’d gotten his attention, and told him the truth in a handful of words, the way Melody had, once: you sad.