“You are such a liar,” said Miro.
“And you are not worth talking to,” said Jane. “Delusional. Megalomaniac. But you are entertaining, Miro. I do enjoy your company. If that’s love, then I love you. But then, people love their pets on precisely the same grounds, don’t they? It’s not exactly a friendship between equals, and it never will be.”
“Why are you so determined to hurt me worse than I’m already hurt right now?” asked Miro.
“Because I don’t want you to get emotionally attached to me. You have a way of fixating on doomed relationships. I mean, really, Miro. What could be more hopeless than loving Young Valentine? Why, loving me, of course. So naturally you were bound to do that next.”
“Vai te morder,” said Miro.
“I can’t bite myself or anyone else,” said Jane. “Old toothless Jane, that’s me.”
Val spoke up from the seat next to him. “Are you going to sit there all day, or are you coming with me?”
He looked over. She wasn’t in the seat. He had reached the starship during his conversation with Jane, and without noticing it he had stopped the hovercar and Val had gotten out and he hadn’t even noticed that.
“You can talk to Jane inside the ship,” said Val. “We’ve got work to do, now that you’ve had your little altruistic expedition to save the woman you love.”
Miro didn’t bother answering the scorn and anger in her words. He just turned off the hovercar, got out, and followed Val into the ship.
“I want to know,” said Miro, when they had the door closed. “I want to know what our real mission is.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Val. “I’ve been thinking about where we’ve gone. A lot of skipping around. At first it was near and far star systems, randomly distributed. But lately we’ve tended to go only in a certain range. A certain cone of space, and I think it’s narrowing. Jane has a particular destination in mind, and something in the data we collect about each planet tells her that we’re getting closer, that we’re going in the right direction. She’s looking for something.”
“So if we examine the data about the worlds we’ve already explored, we should find a pattern?”
“Particularly the worlds that define the cone of space that we’re searching in. There’s something about worlds lying in this region that tells her to keep searching farther and farther this way.”
One of Jane’s faces appeared in the air above Miro’s computer terminal in the starship. “Don’t waste your time trying to discover what I already know. You’ve got a world to explore. Get to work.”
“Just shut up,” said Miro. “If you aren’t going to tell us, then we’re going to spend whatever time it takes to figure it out on our own.”
“That’s telling me, you bold brave hero,” said Jane.
“He’s right,” said Val. “Just tell us and we won’t waste any more time trying to figure it out.”
“And here I thought one of the attributes of living creatures was that you make intuitive leaps that transcend reason and reach beyond the data you have,” said Jane. “I’m disappointed that you haven’t already guessed it.”
And in that moment, Miro knew. “You’re searching for the home planet of the descolada virus,” he said.
Val looked at him, puzzled. “What?”
“The descolada virus was manufactured. Somebody made it and sent it out, perhaps to terraform other planets in preparation for an attempt at colonization. Whoever it is might still be out there, making more, sending more probes, perhaps sending out viruses we won’t be able to contain and defeat. Jane is looking for their home planet. Or rather, she’s having us look.”
“Easy guess,” said Jane. “You really had more than enough data.”
Val nodded. “Now it’s obvious. Some of the worlds we’ve explored have had very limited flora and fauna. I even commented on it with a couple of them. There must have been a major die-off. Nothing like the limitations on the native life of Lusitania, of course. And no descolada virus.”
“But some other virus, less durable, less effective than the descolada,” said Miro. “Their early attempts, maybe. That’s what caused a die-off of species on those other worlds. Their probe virus finally died out, but those ecosystems haven’t yet recovered from the damage.”