“Forgive me,” Saxtorph said softly, “but I've got to ask this. Could it possibly be true?”
“No! We, his family, knew him. Year by year we had heard as much of his pain as he dared utter, and felt the rest. He loved us. Would he free-willingly have left us, for years stretching into decades, whatever the payment? No, he simply never thought in terms of helping the kzinti in their war, until they did and it was too late for him. But the hysteria immediately after liberation— There had been many real collaborators, you know. And there were people who paid off grudges by accusing other people, and— It was what I think you call a witch hunt.
“The feet that Peter Nordbo had cooperated, that was not in itself to be held against him. Most Landholders did. Taking to the bush was maybe more gallant, but then you could not be a thin, battered shield for your folk. Just the same, this was part of the reason why the new constitution took away the special status of the Nineteen Families. And in retrospect, that Peter Nordbo gave knowledge to the kzinti and fared off with them, that was made to make his earlier cooperation look willing, and like more than it actually was.” Tyra's grip on the table edge drove the blood from her fingertips. “Yes, it is conceivable that in his heart he was on their side. Impossible, but conceivable. What I want you to find for me, Captain Saxtorph, is the truth. I am not afraid of it.” After a moment, shakily: “Please to excuse me. I should be more businesslike.” She finished her wine.
Saxtorph knocked back his beer and rose. “Let me get us refills,” he suggested. “Care for something stronger?”
“Thank you. A double Scotch. Water chaser.” She managed a smile. “You may take you an akvavit this time. I have not much left to tell.”
When he brought the drinks back, she was entirely self-possessed. “Ask whatever you want,” she invited. “Be frank. I believed my wounds were long ago scarred over. What made them hurt again tonight was hope.”
“Don't get yours too high,” he advised. “This looks mighty dicey to me. And, like your dad, I've got other people to think about before I agree to anything.”
“Naturally. I would not have approached you if the story of your adventures had not proved you are conscientious.”
He attempted a laugh. “Please. Call 'em my experiences. Adventures are what happen to the incompetent.” He sent caraway pungency down his throat and a dollop of brew in pursuit. “Okay, let's get cracking again. I gather no details about that expedition ever came out.”
“They were suppressed, obliterated. When the human hyperdrive armada arrived and it became clear that the kzinti would lose Alpha Centauri, they destroyed all their records and installations that they could, before going forth to die in battle. Prisoners and surviving human witnesses had little information. About Yiao-Captain's mission, nobody had any, except what I mentioned to you. It was secret from the beginning; very few kzinti, either, ever knew about it.”
“No report to the home world till success was assured. Nor when Wunderland was falling. They were smart bastards; they foresaw our new craft would hunt for every such beam, overtake it, read it, and jam it beyond recovery.”
“I know. Ib has described to me the effect of faster-than-light travel on intelligence operations.”
Her grasp of practical things was akin to Dorcas', Saxtorph thought. “When did the ship leave?” he asked.
“It was— Now I am forgetting your calendar. It was ten Earth-years before liberation.”
“And whatever messages she'd sent back were wiped from the databases at that time, and whatever kzinti knew the content died fighting. She never returned, and after the liberation no word came from her.”
“The general explanation was—is—that it and the crew perished.” In bitterness, Tyra added, “Fortunately, they say.”
“But if she did not, then she probably got news of the defeat. A beam cycled through the volume of her possible trajectories could be read across several light-years, and wasn't in a direction humans would likely search. What then would her captain do?” Saxtorph addressed his beer. “Never mind for now. I'd be speculating far in advance of the facts. You say you have come upon some new ones?”
“Old ones.” Her voice dropped low. “Thirty years old.”
He waited.
She folded her hands on the table, looked at him straight across it, and said, “A few months ago, Mother died. She was never well since Father left. As surrogate Landholder, she was not really able to cope with the dreadful task. She did her best, I grew up seeing how she struggled, but she had not his skills, or his special relationship with a ranking kzin, or just his physical strength. So she… yielded… more than he had done. This caused her to be called a collaborator, when the kzinti were safely gone, and retrospectively it blackened Father's name worse, but—she was let go, to live out her life on what property the court had no legal right to take away from us. It is productive, and Ib found a good supervisor, so she was not in poverty. Nor wealthy. But how alone! We did what we could, Ib and I and her true friends, but it was not much, and never could we restore Father to her. She was brave, kept busy, and… dwindled. Her death was peaceful. I closed her eyes. The physician's verdict was general debility leading to cardiac failure.
“Ib has his duties, while I can set my own working hours. Therefore it was I who remained at Korsness, to make arrangements and put things in order. I went through the database, the papers, die remembrances. And at the bottom of a drawer, under layers of his clothes that she had kept, I found Father's last notebook from the observatory.”
Air whistled in between Saxtorph's teeth. “Including the data on that thing? Jesus Kristi! Didn't he know how dangerous it was for his family to have?”
“He may have forgotten, in his emotional storm. I think likelier, however, he hid it there himself. No human would have reason to go through that drawer for many years. He knew Mother would not empty it.”
“M-m, yah. And if nothing made them suspicious, the kzinti wouldn't search the house. Beneath their dignity, pawing through monkey stuff. And they never have managed to understand how humans feel about their families. Yah. Nordbo, your dad, he may very well have left those notes as a kind of heritage; because if you've given me a proper account of him, and I believe you have, then he had not given up the hope of freedom at last for his people.”
A couple of fresh tears trembled on her lashes but went no farther. “You understand,” she whispered.
Enthusiasm leaped in him. “Well, what did the book say?”
“I did not know at once. It took reviewing of science from school days. I dared not ask anybody else. It could be—undesirable.”
Okay, Saxtorph thought, if he turned out to have been a traitor after all, why not suppress the information? What harm, at this late date? I don't suppose it'd have changed your love of him and his memory. You're that kind of person.
“What he found,” Tyra said, “was a radiation source in Tigripardus.” Most constellations bear the same names at Alpha Centauri as at Sol—four and a third light-years being a distance minuscule in the enormousness of the galaxy—but certain changes around the line between them have been inevitable. “It was faint, requiring a sensitive detector, and would have gone unnoticed had he not happened to study that exact part of the sky. This was in the course of a systematic, years-long search for small anomalies. They might indicate stray monopoles, or antimatter concentrations, or other such peculiarities, which in turn might give clues about the evolution of the whole— But I explain too much, no?