Lonely, perhaps, interested in what he did: he recalled that she was not ignorant of such machinery, only of that human-made, and he dared not try too much in her presence. She surely knew that he was repeating operations.
He took the chance.
Elapsed time, he asked of the records-storage.
It flashed back refusal. No record.
Other details he asked. No record. No record, it answered.
Something cold and hard swelled in his throat. Carefully he checked the status of the navigational tapes, whether retrace was available, to bring him home again.
Classified, the screen flashed at him.
He stopped, mindful of the auto-destruct linked into the tape mechanism. Suspicion crept horridly through his recollections.
We want nothing coming home with you by accident.
Stavros’ words.
Sweat trickled down his side. He felt it prickling on his face, wiped the edge of his hand across his mouth and tried to disguise the gesture. Melein still sat beside him.
The dus came nearer, moved between them, close to the delicate instruments. “Get out of there,” Duncan wished it. It only lay down. “Kel’en,” said Melein, “what do you see that troubles you?”
He moistened his lips, shifted his eyes to her. “She’pan we have found no life… I have lost count of the worlds, and we have found no life. What makes you think that your homeworld will be different?”
Her face became unreadable. “Do you find reason there, kel’en, to think we shall not?”
“I have found reason here… to believe that this ship is locked against me. She’pan, when that tape runs to its end, it may have no navigational memory left.”
Amber eyes flickered. She sat still with her hands folded in her lap. “Did you plan to leave?”
“We may not be able to run. We will have no other options, she’pan.”
“We never did.”
He drew in his breath, wiped at the moisture that had gone cold on his cheek, and let the breath go again. Her calm was unshakable, thoroughly rational: Shon’ai… the throw was cast, for them by birth. It was like Niun with his weapons.
“She’pan,” he said quietly, “you have named each world as we have passed. Do you know the number that we have yet to see?”
She nodded in the fashion of the People, a tilt of the head to the left. “Before we reach homeworld,” she said, “Mlara and Sha, and Hlar and Sa’a-no-kli’i.”
“Four,” he said, stunned at the sudden knowledge of an end. “Have you told ?”
“I have told him.” She leaned forward, her arms twined on her white-robed knees. “Kel Duncan, your ships will come. They are coming.”
“Yes.”
“You have chosen your service.”
“Yes,” he said. “With the People, she’pan.” And when she still stared at him, troubled by his treachery: “On their side, she’pan, there are so many kel’ein one will not be missed. But on the side of the People, there is only one twice that, with me. Humankind will not miss one kel’en.”
Melein’s eyes held to his, painfully intense. “Your mathematics is without reproach, kel Duncan.”
“She’pan,” he said softly, moved by the gratitude he realized in her.
She rose, and left.
Committed the ship to him.
He sat still a moment, finding everything that he had sought under his hands, and suddenly a burden on him that he had not thought to bear. Had he intended betrayal, he did not think he could commit it now; and to do to them again what he had done on Kesrith, even to save their lives That was not an act of love, but of selfishness… here, and hereafter. He knew them too well to believe it for their own good.
He scanned the banks of instruments, that hid their horrid secrets, programs locked from his tampering, things triggered perhaps from the moment he had violated orders and thrown them prematurely onto taped running.
Or perhaps as SurTacs had been expended before it was planned from the beginning, that Fox would not come home, save as a rider to Saber.
There was the pan’en, and the record in that; but under Saber’s firepower, Fox was nothing… and it was not impossible that the navigational computer would go down as the tape expired, crippling them.