Daisy Fay spoke up. "But there arc things we have to know. We need to set a course, Moon. Didn't the—aiodos—tell you where we're supposed to go?"
The girl shook her head, already on her way to the food warmer. "I think Thrayl will do that, when he's had something to eat. And the other thing I think—" She pursed her lips before she said it. "I think he wasn't talking about where we were going, so much as when."
That made the Turtle squawk excitedly. "One must ask more!" Litlun said, the voice from the transposer almost trembling. "Is it possible then that one can really return to the planet of the Mother before it was destroyed?"
Moon was already on her way to the warmer. "I think that's what he meant," she confirmed.
"But that is traveling back in time!" the Turtle barked.
Moon shrugged. "All I can tell you is what he said: 'There is no time. There is only an eternal now.' Whatever that means."
Tired of questions that had no answers, Krake rubbed his eyes wearily. It wasn't just fatigue, though there was plenty of that. It was the harsh, ammoniacal stench left by the destroyed body of Chief Thunderbird that made his eyes sting. Looking at Moon Bunderan popping a meal into the warmer reminded him that he was hungry, too—and made him wonder if he could get anything down in that pervasive stink.
Moon saw his expression. "You don't notice it so much after a while, Francis," she said. "The air circulators are cleaning it up."
"Not fast enough," he grumbled. He watched her give the first meal to the awakening Taur, who ate quickly—and fastidiously, too, as he always did; but mostly quickly, and held out his plate for more as soon as he was through. Moon ruffled his head affectionately.
"I'll have something for us right away, Francis," she promised. She glanced at the Turtle, glumly staring with both eyes. "I'm sorry I can't tell you more, Lit—I mean, Facilitator," she said, softening. "I'm sorry about your friend, too."
Lidun was silent, studying her. "One suffers pain at the loss of an Elder Brother," he said at last. "It is no more than that." Then suddenly he turned his whole body to confront Moon Bunderan. "The Taur is now fully awake!" he said, his tone abruptly peremptory. "Can he not now tell us what we must do?"
Moon stood up to confront him, one hand straying protectively to rest on Thrayl's broad head. "Leave him alone," she commanded. "He's had a hard time!"
"But one wishes to know," Litlun pleaded, both eyes rotating around the control room, seeking support.
He got it from the Taur himself. Thrayl paused in his delicate eating and looked up, the huge eyes kindly. He rumbled something to Moon, paused, added something else and then quiedy returned to his meal.
"What did he say?" Krake demanded, as impatient as Litlun himself.
Moon glanced doubtfully down at Thrayl. "He said, yes, he will take us to your Mother planet, Facilitator, but we must use up many, many long years first. And he also said something for you personally. He said—" she hesitated, then finished—" 'The Facilitator should know that a fine, good thing may come of a selfish wish.'"
"What do you mean, 'use up' years?" Krake demanded, but Moon wasn't listening to him. She was looking at the Turtle, who was muttering agitatedly to himself.
"Do you want to tell us something, Facilitator?" Moon asked, her tone kind and friendly.
The Turtle drummed his claws on his belly plate for a moment, his eyes wandering. Then he engaged his transposer and said in a burst: "One was not selfish! One wished only for the privilege of doing a great thing for the Brotherhood! The Proctor was wrong!"
They were all looking at him now, fascinated by the spectacle of a Turtle experiencing an emotional outburst. "One perceives justice in the Proctor's death!" he cried. "One grieves, but he was at fault. It was this one, not the Proctor, who devised the plan to use this ship for the Mother's sake. It was improper of the Proctor to insist on coming along, when he knew that only one male could receive the reward of success and pair with a new Mother." He turned away, glaring emptily up at the whirling star patterns on the screens.
"Are you saying he forced you to bring him along?" Krake asked.
"Force?" The Turtle rotated one yellow-red eye back to gaze incredulously at the captain. "There is no intelligence in that question. How could one Brother ever force another?"
"Then why did you let him do it?"
The Turtle gave him both scorching eyes now. "Why? Because he was one's Elder Brother." He closed the parrot beak with a snap, and then, without a word, gestured to Marco Ramos to take his place and waddled away to his solitary room.
As Marco slipped into place he turned his eyestalks on his captain. The face on the belly plate was grinning wryly as he said, "Turtles, Francis. We'll never understand them, will we?"
No, Francis Krake knew, he would never understand Turtles. He could accept that equably enough. It was only one more failure of comprehension to add to all the others that had borne themselves upon him. If he did not understand what made Turtles do the things they did, he was certainly no better at understanding these things called aiodoi, or the Sh'shrane—or, most of all, women.
He found himself yawning. He knew that he should go off to his own room and sleep. He even wanted to. He simply did not have the energy to make himself get up and do it. He sat before the board, gazing wearily at the changing constellations outside the ship, and was all but asleep when he heard Marco Ramos calling to him from the other board. "Francis! I've got something to show you!"
Krake shook himself awake. He turned toward the second board, where Marco had thrown a grid of rainbow lines on a small screen. It was too far to make them out, but he didn't have to. Marco was pointing up at the outside view. "Notice anything about those external galaxies?"
Krake blinked up at them. "You didn't expect to see much of external galaxies at normal magnification—the Magellanic Clouds, yes, and M-31 in Andromeda if you looked in the right place, maybe one or two others. . . .
But now there were fifty or a hundred in plain sight. Puzzled, he turned to Marco. "Why are there so many of them?"
"That's what I wanted to know, Francis. It isn't that there are so many. It's just that they're so close! So then I began checking spectra." He waved to the rainbow patterns. "Look at the elemental abundances, Francis. Out of the first fifty stars I looked at, every one was metal-poor. Almost pure hydrogen and helium, no matter what kind of star it was!"
That woke Krake up. "The stars are different? You mean, then this isn't our universe?" he asked, bracing himself for new trouble.
"Oh, no, that's not it, Francis. At least, I don't think so. I think it's our universe, all right, probably even our own galaxy —it wouldn't make sense for the aiodoi to have sent us into a different one, would it? But early. When the universe was young. It hasn't even expanded very much yet—that's why we see all those galaxies outside our own." The metal-man's tentacles were waving excitedly and the imaged face wore an expression of delight. "That explains what Thrayl was trying to tell us, skipper! We have to keep going at wave-drive speed—time-dilated, just using up time—until the universe gets old enough for our own planets to be born!"