“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.”
“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.”