Emprise (31 page)

Holding station fifteen metres off mod E, the shuttle performed a quarter-turn, revealing the rectangular seam of a hatchway to one of
Pride of Earth
’s telescanner ports.

“I will come aboard your ship now,” Ryuka-voice said. “It will take me a short period to dress.”

“If you’re talking about getting into a spacesuit, there’s no need. I can connect our ships with a transfer tunnel.”

“By the Grace of the Founders, so be it.”

Charan had practiced with the teleoperated tunnel before leaving Unity, though they had left Unity before he had achieved anything approaching expertise. Extending the tunnel amounted to using small thrusters to “fly” the grappling end to the hull of the other ship. The low-mass ribbed tunnel was flexible but still exerted torque, complicating matters. It took Charan the better part of thirty minutes to secure the tunnel in place.

“I will come aboard your ship now,” Ryuka-voice said.

“I need to prepare the place where we will meet,” Charan said. “What type of atmosphere do you require? Please specify the elements and the proportions.”

“Commander, I beg you. Stop now. This is wrong,” Joanna pleaded with him on ship’s intercom. “I was to represent us.”

“I am sorry, Scion. You will have to content yourself with watching this first time. I hope that you will have your chance before long—wait, please. Ryuka-voice is answering.”

“Is this a test, Commander Charan?” Ryuka-voice said. “There have been no changes since the Founding. We are all in the Image. I breathe as you breathe.”

Charan had no chance to ponder that, for Ryuka continued, “Please open your hatch. I am entering the tunnel now.”

“No, Charan,” Wenyuan said sharply.

Charan switched off the intercom, wishing for a camera that would show him the view down the transfer tunnel. But there was none. Their first glimpses of the Senders were to have come via the com link. No surprises were ever expected to traverse the transfer tunnel. Or had Eddington been right? Perhaps there would be no surprises.

Ryuka had set the pace of the encounter, Charan realized. From the first it had been impatient, insistent on a face-to-face meeting. How would it react if Charan delayed opening the hatch? With anger, or new respect?

Then he wondered what delay would gain him. He knew that he would open the hatch in time. Why did he hesitate? Was he simply reluctant to be rushed by the Sender captain?

I’m afraid
, Charan thought with sudden realization. And under scrutiny, the fear evaporated like dew in morning sun. Charan reached out his hand, and the tunnel hatch ground open.

And the Sender Ryuka floated through the opening and into the far side of the meeting chamber.

Scion Joanna began to weep freely.

Major Wenyuan cursed loudly and vigorously, sprinkling his speech with invective from a dozen Chinese dialects. Dr. Rankin pressed his steepled hands to his lips with sufficient force to drive the blood from them.

Tilak Charan stared, his heart racing. He was enveloped in a special moment of awe, as though he were witness to one of the, great circles of life coming to a close. For the first time since
Pride of Earth
undocked at Unity, Charan would not have chosen to be anywhere else.

The Sender Ryuka pressed up against the dividing wall near the airlock, a hopeful look in his eyes.

Charan moved toward the airlock, wondering for the briefest moment if what he saw could be one final deception. Then he slid the stays aside and pulled open the airlock.

The human and Sender ceremonial embraces were different, and the result was awkward. But Charan was nevertheless overcome by a rush of emotions for which he had no label and with which he had no experience, and he had no doubt that Ryuka felt the same. For the tunnel hatch had opened to admit, not alien, but man.

“You are truly as was said,” Ryuka said, wiping tears from the age-lined corners of his eyes. He clung to Charan’s hands, unwilling to give up contact, and the two turned slowly in midair like a human carousel. “When your world’s voices fell silent we feared for you. Then this ship appeared so suddenly, and you did not speak with the Eye of the Founders.”

“You mean television signals—like you sent us.”

“Yes. Sialkot thought—”

“Sialkot?”

“She. is my lifemate. Sialkot thought your ship a tool of war. We knew the Founders had known war. We feared it had consumed you.”

“So that’s why you were so slow to answer—why you insisted on meeting me.”

“We feared for ourselves and for our trust.”

“What would you have done if your fears had been realized?” An embarrassed expression crossed Ryuka’s face. “It was my part to attempt to destroy this ship.”

“So that
Jiadur
could continue on in safety,” Charan mused. “I trust you have given up that notion. As we said in our first transmission, we were sent to welcome you to Earth space.”

“All is as I hoped and prayed. Please—I must call to Sialkot and tell her.”

A momentary flash of anxiety chilled Charan. “You may use our radio for that. This way,” Charan said forcefully, leading the way into the other compartment. He touched the switch-studded panel twice. “You can speak to her now.”

“Beloved Sialkot—by the Grace of the Founders, they are as we are. Set aside your fears and rejoice as I am rejoicing. It is the gathering at last.”

A few seconds later an answer came back, a woman’s voice, silky and breathless.

“Ryuka—by the Grace of the Founders, we are blessed indeed. I share your joy in this moment of fulfillment, and care for the trust until your return.”

Ryuka looked to Charan. “It is enough, for now. She understands. There will be more to say later.”

“Ryuka—why did you talk the way you did?”

The Sender looked suddenly pained. “Have I given offense? Please—I will correct my errors.”

“You’ve given no offense, Ryuka. It’s just that I expected you to use your own language to talk to Sialkot.”

Ryuka’s dismay deepened into abject horror. “Were we to keep the old languages? It was presumptuous—please do not judge us—of course—of course—the Voice of the Founders belongs to the Founders alone. It will be corrected.”

Charan reached out a comforting hand and grasped Ryuka’s shoulder. “You still misunderstand. I know how you must have learned our language, English. I realize why you used it to call to us and why you use it now. But why do you use it with Sialkot?”

Ryuka turned his head away, ashamed. “We took the language out of respect. We meant only to honor the Founders.”

“To honor us?”

“Yes. To honor the Founders.”

It was only then that Charan began to consider that the Journan’s many references to the Founders were not casual expressions in the vein of “God knows” and “good God” but references to Charan’s crew, his species, some sort of twisted theological fantasy which had grown up during the Senders’ long voyage. Charan could not say he was surprised, all the yardsticks by which he measured the known world having been broken when Ryuka first appeared. But he was illuminated by the realization.

“Let me hear your native tongue,” he said gently.

A cascade of mellifluous sound poured from Ryuka’s throat. It was delicate, sibilant, evocative.

“Beautiful,” Charan said.

“You are too generous. I stumbled badly. It has been a very long time.”

“It was beautiful, nonetheless.” Charan grasped Ryuka’s hands again. “I want to meet Sialkot and the rest of your crew, and to have you meet the rest of mine. I want you to show me the
Jiadur
. I want to talk with you about a thousand things. But first I need to sleep. Will you return to your shuttle for a few hours to allow me that?” He asked as much to confirm a suspicion as from real need.

“Of course, Founder Charan. Of course. I will wait for your call.” With no hesitation, Ryuka released his hands and moved gracefully through the airlock and into the tunnel.

Charan closed the tunnel hatch after him, noting as he did so that the ship’s intercom was still switched off. He left it that way, knowing that the others had watched and listened and would be bursting to talk, but feeling too weary to face them.

Mod E had neither toilet facilities nor sleep gear, but Charan did not care. In a storage locker he found an extra waste kit from the walkoid spacesuit, which met one’s needs adequately if not elegantly. Then he darkened the meeting chamber, curled into a loose fetal position, and fell soundly asleep. Neither the air currents carrying him gently into the walls nor his frenzied dreams managed to disturb him.

Charan slept for more than ten hours and awoke yearning for ten minutes in a shower and two minutes with a toothbrush. Neither amenity was available, and so he made do with a scrap of cloth moistened with water from the walkoid cooling circuit.

Then he drew a deep breath and called the bridge. It was Rankin, and to Charan’s surprise he did not sound angry. “Morning, Commander. I was beginning to wonder how long you’d be sacked out.”

“Where are the others?”

“In their compartments, I think. Scheming and sulking, respectively. I’m to call them when you resume contact.”

“Why don’t you wait a few minutes before you do?”

“That was my intent—I have some questions, and I’d rather not fight them for the mike,” Rankin said. “Commander, you touched it. Was the body temperature higher or lower than your own?” Charan was nonplussed by the question. “That wasn’t something I stopped to take notice of.”

“What about smell, then? Were there any unusual odors in the compartment?” Rankin pressed.

“What are you getting at?”

“I was just hoping you could help. You opened the airlock so quickly I wasn’t able to analyze its contribution to the atmosphere—its respiration byproducts and so forth.”

“You talk as if he wasn’t human.”

“How could it be, Commander? How could it be?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that when you’re in the room with him, no alarm bells ring, no little voices shout warnings. Everything feels right.”

“That feeling could come from outside—from it.”

“Albert—”

“A lot of the time you spent sleeping, we spent talking. Joanna’s got her own ideas as usual, but the Major and I, well, we agree that you’re not seeing what you think you are. We want to see you pass over the com link and move us a safe distance away. It’s gotten the meeting that it asked for. No need to turn it into a seminar.”

“You don’t want a tissue sample?”

“Want? Of course I want one. But it won’t give you one. It would be the giveaway.”

“My guess is Ryuka will be very cooperative.”

“You don’t understand, Commander—”

“I think I understand perfectly. You came on this mission with certain expectations and believing certain paradigms. Your expectations were wrong and your paradigms are lying in a heap, but you’re trying as hard as you can to pretend otherwise. I’ll get you your tissue samples. But will you believe what they tell you, or will you continue to prefer an orderly falsehood to a disorderly truth?”

Rankin was slow to answer, and Charan wished he had tapped bridge video and could see the scientist’s expression. “They couldn’t simulate our biochemistry,” he said finally. “If you can get samples, and if they prove out human, I’ll have no choice but to accept it.”

“I’ll get you samples,” Charan repeated. “Better put out the word to the others—I’m going to call Ryuka.”

As Charan predicted, Ryuka was more than willing, almost grateful, to accede to a request for a skin scraping and ampule of blood. Charan took the samples in the full view of all three of the others via the meeting chamber video, then placed them outside the drive core hatch when all three were in full view on the bridge video.

That done, he returned to Ryuka. “You asked to
set Jiadur
, to meet Sialkot. If your ship would take us to them, I would be most honored—”

“There are things we have to know first,” Charan said. “Will you answer some questions?”

“Of course, Founder.”

Charan called a velocity-normal view of the constellation Cassiopeia to the display screen. Since most of the faint and very distant stars were blacked out for clarity, the pattern of the constellation was clear.

“Can you identify your home sun?”

Ryuka reached out and touched the screen, then jerked his finger back as printing appeared instantly on the screen next to the spot he had touched.

MU CASSIOPEIA

“A fine yellow sun, constant and warm.”

“Tell me about your home world.”

“Surely there is nothing I could tell the Founders—”

“Please.”

“You gave us a good green planet, warm and rich with life,” he said fervently. “We are grateful.”

“How many planets are in your system?” Ryuka waggled a finger in an unfamiliar gesture. “I understand—the Founders wish to know how well we have learned. Very well. Journa is the third planet of eleven.” He smiled. “When we left Journa, by all authorities, there were but ten. The eleventh is very small and very distant.”

“Does Journa have a natural satellite?”

“Neither so large or so striking as the Founders’ own.”

“You know about the moon?”

Ryuka ducked his head. “As a keeper of the trust, I have been favored by seeing the images from the Eye of the Founders.”

“I see.” Charan hesitated. “Ryuka, I am wasting your time with unimportant questions. What I most want to hear from you is how you discovered the Eye of the Founders, and why you came searching for them.”

Ryuka nodded. “Yes. I ask only that if I fall into self-pride in the telling, please correct me, for I look on it as our finest hour.”

And this was the story he told:

It all came to pass because we needed to know the Purpose. Journa is so beautiful and suits us so well that the question was long in coming. Our naturalists imagined a harmony that was not there. Our historians ignored a mystery that was.

But beginning five hundred years ago, our naturalists came by fits and starts to grasp the span of cosmic time and began to look into the past. In the sands of Kalim they found the ancestors of the molnok, and in the crusts of Eldenshore the forerunners of the sepi. The muck of Babbanti gave up whole skeletons of rentana, and the rock of Tenga the shells of ancient f’rthu. The naturalists learned of experiment and change, of death and failure, and evolved a picture of a spreading tree of life.

But nowhere did they find the father-stock of the gelten that provides breadgrain, the tell that brings companionship, or, most disturbingly, of the Journans themselves. Some excused the failure because so little time had gone into the search, and others because so much time had passed. All were sagely confident that further studies would prove that molnok, tell, and Journan were in their essence one.

In this same period, the historians—and I count myself as one in their tradition—were probing the past and learning a different lesson. Sifting the layers of cities which had stood for thousands of Journan years where they had risen, we found in the undatable deepest layers of five of them the same tools, the same spokelike city plan, the same forty-letter alphabet. Searching the history of knowledge, we found that those apocryphal ideas for which no known thinker was credited all traced to the five First Cities.

We asked the unaskable—what had preceded the First Cities? Why had their populations, so admirable in many ways, left no histories of their own? How had knowledge sprung into flower so fully rounded? Some dismissed the questions because they thought them unimportant and others because they did not like what they suggested. But all were hopeful that signs of an earlier pastoral life would soon be found.

It fell to Yterios, a scholar in the First City of Kelnar, to draw the conclusion that those who followed him think obvious and unremarkable. Yterios saw that the findings of the naturalists and the historians both pointed toward the same truth—that Journa was not our first home. The gelten, the tell, and ourselves were newcomers, placed on Journa only yesterday.

Yterios saw that the taboo against eating the flesh of molnok and caravasu was nothing more than a recognition that the chemistry of a lifeform not kin to us would slowly poison us. He saw that the reason why the stands of gelten were always strong and thick was that there were no native forms to which it fell prey, unlike the parasite-ravaged wild sepi. He pointed out that it was a blessing to be part of a world where we were neither food nor had any reason to kill for food, that we had been granted a gentler, more tranquil life than we otherwise might have known.

But Yterios could not demonstrate by what force we had been brought to Journa, or from where, or why. Who were the Founders, and what was their Purpose? Once asked, the questions obsessed us. Yterios said the first did not matter, since the act was done. On the question of Purpose, Yterios taught that the good life we had been granted both allowed and obliged us to be the preservers of Journa and the stewards of our own talents. It was not the Founders who had Purpose, but ourselves.

For three hundred years Yterios’s teachings held sway. But then the lone voice of Rintechka the Skeptic raised disturbing questions. If the Founders were mortal beings who had passed this way and gone on, how would they ever learn of our stewardship? Was the duty an endless one, or were they to return some day? In either case, what was to be our reward for serving the Purpose? How were we to know before that day how well we had discharged our charge? From Rintechka we learned it was up to us to find the Founders. It was up to us to bring to you proof of our good stewardship.

So we searched for you, in every corner of the globe, in every inner voice of conscience, and among the stars. We looked and we listened. And we discovered the Eye of the Founders.

As we learned more from the Eye, we saw more clearly with it, though there was always much we did not understand.