O’Carroll turned thoughtful. “I don’t know. The first one left a few things unsettled.” When the Fudir said nothing, he sat back, very square, and tucked one hand under his other arm, cupping his chin with the latter. “It’s like chemistry. Jumdar stopped the reaction before it had gone to completion. Matters hadn’t fully precipitated. Jack Garrity already sent one man to kill me. Am I supposed to let that go unanswered?”
“Why? Do you take turns?”
“If I restore the rightful government, Jack has to understand that and accept it.” Hugh said “rightful government” without the slight irony that the Fudir usually gave it. Things were always clear in his mind. There was a bright line dividing right from wrong and you were on one side or the other. Yet, as a Terran proverb states, “Ultimate justice is ultimate injury.” Justice is metaphysical, more abstracted from the reality of men and women than even the mathematical objects the ship’s intelligence pondered, and what is bright and clear in that realm may become muddy and approximate in the lower. To the Fudir, that “bright line” was rice flour drizzled in complex patterns, like the kolams that Terrans drew on their doorsteps. It was not always clear just where the other side was, or even if there was one.
“Are you so certain it was Jack who hired the assassin?” he said.
The hand fell from Hugh’s chin. “Who else then?”
The Fudir shrugged. “There’s a Terran proverb: ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Sometimes the exiled leader is a better rallying cry than the one who comes back. Prince Charlie was a lot bonnier while he was awa’.”
The younger man leaned forward, so that his face and the Fudir’s were inches from each other. “My Loyalists…!”
“…may have gotten used to your absence. If you come back, someone has to step down.” The Fudir was surprised that the scenario had not occurred to O’Carroll. He sat back and, after a moment, O’Carroll did, too. “Don’t worry,” he said. “With the Twister in your hands, it won’t matter what they or Handsome Jack think.”
“Although it may matter what Jumdar thinks.”
The Fudir spread his hands. “Legally, you are Planetary Manager. Jumdar was confused by the chaos she stumbled on, but she’s had a chance to sort things out by now. If you press a demand for January’s ‘Dancer,’ she may hand it over, even if it’s just to buy you off. The law is on your side, remember. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“That’s your plan? Wait and see? Somehow, I imagined something more…devious.”
“We can try devious; but I’d rather not make plans before I know the situation. ‘A plan is blackmail levied on fools by the unforeseen.’ It’s a barn door for absent horses. It’s always based on what you know, and what you know is always out-of-date. The situation on New Eireann when we get there may be very different from when you left. If Jumdar’s discovered the Stone’s power, that’s one thing. But if not…” He reached out and turned the viewer around. “What’ve you been reading? Bannister’s Treasury of Prehuman Legends. Forget it. Bannister’s not reliable. He doesn’t take the stories seriously.”
“I found it in the ship’s library. If we’re going wild goose chasing, I want to know what the goose looks like.” He pointed to a fanciful drawing of a dun-colored crystalline creature brandishing a macelike scepter in its claw.
“The scepter actually looks like a brick,” the Fudir said, “so I don’t suppose the prehumans looked like faceted gems.”
O’Carroll turned the viewer back. “Ah. You mean, legend not true?”
The Fudir nodded to the screen. “Bannister doesn’t have the story of the Twister.”
“I know. So far, have only your word legend even exist, let alone that it true.”
The Fudir spread his hands. “Thus raising the subtle matter of trust.”
O’Carroll logged off the viewer and put it away. “Not really. It doesn’t matter if I trust you or not. Either way, I’ll be back on New Eireann. Look, Fudir, I’m grateful you helped out in the alley back then, but you are living a childhood fantasy. Those legends tell us nothing of prehumans, only what we made up after we started finding artifacts. The stories don’t even fit together. No wonder Bannister doesn’t take them literally.”
“That wasn’t my complaint. I said he didn’t take them seriously. Think about this: Twenty years after Bannister collected those stories, rangers on Bangtop-Burgenland discovered the Grim Chrysalis in a chamber in the Southern Troll Mountains. And a generation later, recreational divers found the Finespun in Lake Mylapore on New Chennai. Half a dozen artifacts described in Bannister’s collection were discovered after publication. Explain that.”
O’Carroll smiled coldly. “Old sage say: ‘What man expect, man see.’ ‘Kalim,’ those artifacts were found by people who’d read Bannister, so they saw what Bannister prepared them to see. You’re on a fool’s errand. And so am I. The difference is: I know it.”
Kalim was on deck when they finally lost the push from the magbeams, and Malone, back in the power room, engaged the alfvens.
“Very well,” said Captain January, when Kalim had taken dopplers of the beacons in the cooper belt and the intelligence had verified New Angeles’s vector and position. “We shall go on watch-and-watch. Remember, it’s a ballet out there and the dance is chaos. Bill, go fetch us some sandwiches and drinks. Kalim, go grab some shut-eye. You’ll take the second watch with Maggie.”
Kalim left the deck with Tirasi. “Remember, it’s a ballet out there,” the acting astrogator muttered as they climbed down the spiral staircase to the wardroom. “Every bleeding time he says the same bleeding thing!” Of course, it was a ballet, and all of the bodies, including the cooper beacons, were in constant motion and ultimately influenced by every other body in the universe—and the equations really were unsolvable. But Kalim did not point that out. It was the iteration that irritated Tirasi, not the fact. “Sleep tight, ye bleeding heathen,” he told Kalim in the wardroom. “You’re up in four—and don’t you bollix my instruments.” With that, he grabbed a basket of sandwiches that Ringbao had prepared, two cups of coffee, and climbed back up to the control deck.
Four hours later, Kalim relieved Tirasi and, shortly after, Maggie B. relieved January. The captain glanced pointedly at the chronometer, but said nothing. Maggie handed Kalim a cup of coffee and settled herself into the command chair, sipping a second. “Get me a position,” she said when the first watch had gone. “Let’s see how far off true Old Two-face let us drift.”
Kalim did not react to the gibe. From what he had seen so far, January was a rather competent shiphandler. He checked the log to find what benchmarks Tirasi had shot—Larsen’s Star and the Giblets—and set up the parallax cameras to take fresh images for comparison. He ran the diagnostics, judged the results acceptable, and downloaded them to the stereograph so the intelligence could calculate the parallax, and from that their direction relative to the fixed sky.
Maggie queried the intelligence, which recommended a slight course correction. “Not too badly off,” she admitted, entering the correction in the astrogator’s log. “Maybe because Annie isn’t here to distract him.”
Kalim sensed alien ground involving the captain and the two women in the crew. He and Ringbao were aboard for the free—and anonymous—passage to New Eireann, not to take sides in the crew’s internal squabbles.