“Yes, general. I call the general’s attention to the fact that he did not so admonish the colonel. Can we assume it was an oversight?”
He expected the gavel. Instead Bonner leaned forward and said very quietly, “The colonel knows he’s under oath. Make your statement.”
“It’s very brief. The colonel ordered me not to tell the truth to this committee.”
There was a moment of silence. Bonner hadn’t expected that shot. He should have. Bonner said, then, “Are you through, lieutenant?”
“No, sir.” He thought of Dekker. And the bloodied sim-pod. And wondered if he would see another day in this place. “I intend to answer the committee’s questions. If it has any.”
A long silence, subjective time. Then a senator asked, “You think you could have flown the rider?”
“If I were trained to do that, yes, ma’am.”
“You couldn’t, say, step from the carrier into the ridership. Given the familiarity with the interfaces.”
“I’ve had years of training for the mass and the characteristics of a large ship. Cross-training could confuse me. Jump makes you quite muzzy. You’re riding your gut reactions quite heavily in those first moments of entry. Certainly so in combat.”
Another “You think a training program can produce that kind of skill, here, in a matter of months.”
“No, sir. Not without background experience, I don’t. That’s why the Fleet didn’t recruit from the local military. Test pilots like Wilhelmsen—he could have done it. I’ve no wish to downplay his ability. He was good. We’d have taken him in a moment if the UDC had wanted to release him. Or if he had wanted to go.”
“Are you doing the recruiting, now?” Bonner asked. “Or speaking for Captain Mazian?”
“I’m agreeing with the colonel, sir, based on ray knowledge of Wilhelmsen’s ability. But that ability can’t be trained in the time we need; we need prior experience. We particularly need crews that can feel insystem space. The Shepherds and the miners and insystem haulers aren’t trainees as the term implies; and they’re not eighteen-year-old recruits who think a mass proximity situation is an exam problem.”
“What is a mass proximity situation, lieutenant?”
God.
“A collision alert, sir.” It was the least vivid description that leapt to his mind. He had no wish to offend the senator. The senator laughed, like a good politician, and leaned back.
Another asked, “Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To what government do you hold loyalty?”
A handful of days ago he would have said something about historical ties, a center for the human species. But he didn’t want to get into abstracts. Or create any apprehension of an outsider viewpoint. He looked the senator in the eyes and said quietly, “To Earth, sir.”
But the answer appeared to take the man aback; and it struck him then for the first time that he was looking at Earth, at this table: a row of incomprehensible special interests. None of them could see Earth from the outside— the techs from subsidiaries of the Earth Company; the senators from the Pan-Asian Union and Europe. Bonner, from the Western Hemisphere. (Who first defined east and west? he wondered, hyperfocusing, momentarily as bereft of referents as they were, taking in everything. Politics of dividing oceans? And why not north and south—except the ice?)
The same senator asked, “And these recruits from the Belt? To whom are they loyal?”
Touchy question. A good many Belters were political exiles from Earth. He said, “I’m sure they’d tell you, individually, whatever their concept is. The human race, certainly. The one that nature evolved on this planet, not UK one from labs on Cyteen.”
“Loyalty to themselves, would you say?”
He quoted Bonner. “Isn’t mat the issue of the war, senator? Freedom of conscience?”
Silence from Bonner. Deathly silence.
“If this design goes AI,” Graff continued quickly, wishing for Saito’s eloquence, “so the enemy can predict it; or if some legislative compromise replaces our command with officers who don’t know jumpspace tactics—we’ll the, ship by ship. Then let the UDC hold the line with no carriers, no deepspace crews. Lose us and you won’t have the merchanters. You won’t have the far space stations. We’re the ones that have risked everything carrying out your orders, trying to hold the human race together. What’s on Cyteen isn’t like us.”