“Never?”

“We lost the signposts. The stellar signposts that should have been a clear marker for us. If you can’t see the noisiest stars in space, either something’s between you and them, or you’re way far from where you thought you were, so far lost that finding old Earth’s not even possible. No, it’s never been possible, beyond the original accident.”

“That’s not what the ship told my ancestors.”

“The great search. Along with a lot of other myths. But without an elaborate arrangement of fuel depots and far more ships, by what the navigators say, it wasn’t ever going to happen, and somehow the Guild never got around to building other ships or arranging any fueling stations. Whatever their reason, we can’t reach a point of vantage without traveling a lot farther than may be prudent, counting everything that’s happened, and we don’t know what direction to start looking. Take it from me, that never was really the reason we left Alpha. I think you know that by now.”

“I know the ship’s current story.”

Jase was silent a beat or two. “Fair enough.”

“The ship wanted to take the colony out of Alpha, set up in deeper space, and the colonists—my ancestors—wouldn’t go for it. Is that still true?”

“The Guild was for setting up further out in space. Building a place that would be just human, and just spacefaring. We weren’t supposed to live on a planet. Weren’t supposed to contaminate ourselves with what wasn’t human.”

“Small choice atevi ever got about being contaminated.”

“The Guild. The Guild’s decisions. The Guild split over Alpha. The faction that prevailed didn’t want your ancestors going down to the nice green, inhabited planet. No. And once it happened, even the solar system was too close for comfort. They were diametrically opposed to atevi contact—not so much to protect the atevi culture, though that was a consideration; but to protect our own.”

“From us.”

“Us. Which us ? We were so few. The universe is so big. It’s an article of faith that original Earth exists somewhere—but from the Guild viewpoint, we’re the sole true custodians of the Archive, the guardians of human culture. Your ancestors wanted to dive into an alien gravity well and give it all up.”

“That’s not all there was in the decision.”

“You know I agree with you. But Guild leadership was obsessed with establishing a secure base where only human ideas had currency.”

“It was a human idea to go down to the planet.”

“But not a solely human idea that came back. In that they were right, weren’t they?”

“Does it matter?”

“To them it matters. It’s still going to matter. When they couldn’t control Alpha, they took the ship and left.”

“To preserve their purity .”

“And as soon as Guild leadership found a likely spot, they built again, not near a planet, this time, not near any attractive, living world where people could escape by a low-tech dive to a living world, oh, no, not twice. They built Reunion out where everyone would be under their orders, always, totally, dependent on them and their orders. And the Guild leaders got off the ship. And established their rule over Reunion. And then—then I’m guessing here—I think after they’d built up their population a while, after they’d educated the population the way they wanted, they might try to terraform a moderately liveable planet, and keep it only human. I think the Guild couldn’t find Earth. So they were going to create Earth.“

Mindboggling. “You’re kidding.”

“Give them some credit. They weren’t going to do it to the atevi planet. Give them that much virtue, that they were looking for somewhere they could claim for themselves,”

“You keep saying they, they, they .” Aboard ship, the term was we . Crew. Family. And it hadn’t been we at very critical points. “The ship, I take it, held a different view in the proceedings.”

“The ship is the ship. The Pilots’ Guild went ashore and became something aside from the ship’s executive. The Guild began to run station business. It became station business. It had done that from way back at Alpha. So, yes, there was a schism between the ship’s executive and the Guild—at least—there was an increasing division of interests.”

“And we , meaning the ship, weren’t as interested in Reunion?”

“We had relations on Reunion. We refueled there. They mined fuel for us. It was all interconnected. You know there’s an emotional connection. But no, we weren’t Reunion. We were Phoenix . We’d never stopped being Phoenix . And we never trusted the way the station was run. We just couldn’t do anything about it.”

That was the universe as he’d speculated it existed. Populations achieved self-interest, and wider interests cooled. Only the ship had stayed footloose, traveling. Capable of change. And ominously so, of meddling in new things.

“So,” Bren said, “the ship created Reunion, and used it, and thought of it as home away from home. And the ship never came back to Alpha. But still reserved that notion for itself.”

“Reunion we knew was safe. We were loyal to Reunion.”

“Was Ramirez?”

Jase might not have anticipated that question. He blinked. He keyed. The image on the screen froze.

“Good question,” Jase said. “Useful question.”

“Was Ramirez loyal?”

“He created us. Me and Yolanda.”

Back to that same pathway. “And you were—what?”

“I think,” Jase said slowly, “and this is a difficult thought—I have this niggling suspicion, sometimes, that, the same way I suspect the Guild had its notion of defining humanity, Ramirez meant me and Yolanda to out-human the rest of the Guild—filtering the human Archive through our perceptions. Being able to challenge their concepts. We were learning Latin and Chinese. The ship was still working for the Guild, cataloging planets, investigating likely ones, ones that met their criteria. Purely scientific, they said. Increasing the human database. For what? For what logical purpose were we going about, that had the station devoting so much energy to our energy needs? But not for us to ask, I suppose. There was always fuel. We’d dock, we’d go. We’d explore and refuel. That routine was my whole world. You don’t question the world—not until the plumbing fails, isn’t that what you said once?”

“And now?”

“Now that the plumbing’s really failed? I don’t believe pure scientific curiosity had anything to do with it. I’m sure the Guild sent us where we went, or they wouldn’t have gone on refueling us. Maybe they simply wanted to have us gone as long as possible, to keep our influence out of the station. Maybe they wanted the unification, the symbol, of us as the focus of community effort, the pressure valve. The reason for sacrifice. And they could control us. Fueling was always the sword over our heads. And while all that was going on, I’m sure we were gathering information that would eventually be useful, investigating other solar systems, and fuel sources. But Ramirez—I have this tenuous theory—didn’t ever mention his two linguists to the Guild, not that I ever was aware. And I wonder—did he mean to create what he was looking for? He knew about diversity , which wasn’t quite the Guild’s insistence of everyone walking in step. He didn’t know the lost languages, but he knew he couldn’t create a new Earth on a ship where everybody is cousins and brothers and sisters, and living the same lives doing the same jobs. He couldn’t do it on a space station Guild’s running. But he could do it if he ever found a place he could get supply that the Guild didn’t control, and he could establish an orbiting base that wouldn’t hold fueling as a sword over his head. He had the genetic storage. He had the Archive. Fantastic as it is on a human level—I think he was hoping to find a place where he could build another station and ultimately set down an unregulated colony.”