Thorn shut his eyes. There were tears. (“Don’t you know by now I can’t?”) They ran when he blinked and shattered Duun’s image when he looked at Duun again. ‘You’re maneuvering me.”
“I’m hatani. Of course. I always have been. I told you that.”
“The way you maneuvered Tangan. Gods- why? What do you want?”
“You’re the world’s long nightmare. A bad dream. Everything earth has went to build Gatog, to build that other ship- You understand what it is to jump that far that fast in industry? New materials, new processes, new physics-new fears and new money and all that goes with it. Politics. Companies. A world that had just reached out into space-and all of a sudden- discoveries that shatter it. Energies that, gods help us-we’re still unraveling, technologies with potentials we’re not ready to cope with, with all that means. We didn’t know, when that ship transmitted, how long we had before an answer might come. We know now that ship came from a star nine light-years out. That’s when the first message came-nine years after that ship first transmitted. We don’t know how fast the ship traveled. We’re beginning to understand that. It’s fast. It’s very fast. Translight. I was naive at first. I imagined we had years- half of a century-to get here. Duplicate the ship. Teach them a lesson. Send the kosan guild to deal with them and hatani to settle matters. We know a lot more now-what the cost of a ship like that is when you have to develop each part and joint as a new technology; the social cost of changes. It’s made us rich. It’s made us capable of blowing ourselves to hell. The tapes, minnow, the tapes-we salvaged off the ship. The machine that runs them, the drug that we found with them. A whole new category of drugs; a new vice. Gods, I had to be so careful with you. Every substance, every damn plant you touched-drove the meds crazy. Livhl you could take; sjuuna and mara; dsuikin, never-”
(“Try this, minnow, try it on your tongue, never swallow first-off-“)
“-you tolerate most things; we tolerate most of yours. Thank the gods that’s so, or you’d have lived in virtual isolation.”
(Sheon, the leaves moving in the summer wind, green and fragrant-)
(The stinging smell of high-flowers on the long road down from home to exile-)
“Am I the only one, am I all, Duun?”
“Yes. There was argument on that point. A lot of it. All they could see was the tapes; read the tapes; if he doesn’t live, if he should meet with accident… But there was only one of me, minnow; and I had to teach you, my way; learn from you, my way. If you’d been in isolation, I would have been too. We were bound together. To make you what you are took me, and it took those tapes, minnow- Some of them, gods know, maybe simple entertainment for the crew-the one that was the key. There are others. The audio you heard-that’s from Gatog. The messages come regularly. You know what I imagine they say? ‘Here we are. You killed our messenger.’ But I don’t know what they say after that. I don’t know how long they’ll wait. They know we’ve got a ship. They know whatever that pilot told them. They’re killing me. I can’t leave. They’re poor primitives. They’re not worth much. But look out for them.’ ”
“You think they’re going to attack.” “I planned to be capable of coming to them- whatever they’re doing. But the way that ship works-the way they think it works- We guess wrong and we might lose Gatog. We might lose everything. The irony is, minnow, we can push it out to some safe distance and try-but we’d be flying that ship with no knowledge how to do it. Even if it works. And we can’t start that kind of engine near anything else. And not from a standing start, they tell me. The awful truth is we don’t know the last things. We don’t know how to fly it. If we did we could have saved Ganngein and Nonnent. It’s that fast- even inside a solar system. Outside-gods help us, we don’t know.”