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should. We were confined to quarters. That part’s normal on an exit. You know. But we moved closer, still without information. And linked up with the station. And took on fuel. And during that process we were shown the view outside, the station damage, while Ramirez broke the news we’d seen aliens and now they’d hit the station and killed everybody. And he said all we could do was go back to Alpha colony, where we thought there might be support we needed, and resources . . . oh, give or take a couple of hundred years of neglect. So we went. Ramirez called me and Yolanda in privately during the voyage, and he talked to us about how people changed into nations and accents turned into languages in a couple of centuries. Yolanda and I being the only ones who’d studied any other language and who really knew on an operational level—on a mindset level—how that sort of thing worked, we were critical to what wascoming. And wasn’t it marvelous and lucky we existed? We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t ask him, ‘So how did you know in advance you’d need us?’ That was our best chance to ask why we existed, and we were so overwhelmed with finally having a practical purpose we didn’t ask that question. Didn’t even ask each other, until I guess, between us, the time for questions passed. And after that—I don’t know: maybe I was scared of the answer. Maybe I was just too focused on the future to question the past.”
    “And you think now?” Bren asked. “What
is
the truth?”
    “My innermost guess,” Jase said, “my middle-of-the-watch-and-can’t-sleep guess used to be that he’d had us born because there always was some secret plan to go back to Alpha, some scheme either the Guild had cooked up, or something he meant to do secretly in a breach with the Guild. I was sure he intended for us somehow to figure those cross-cultural differences he foresaw. Ramirez studied history. He knew about cultures outside ship-culture. He created
paidhiin
without ever having seen one. Without ever knowing atevi had gotten in charge of the situation back at Alpha—he was prepared.”
    “You
used
to think that. And now?”
    “He had us born and set to the course he wanted long before aliens were in the picture. That tends to exclude them as a cause—so far as I know. So maybe he
was
thinking about Alpha. Second—he shoved me into a captaincy I begged him not to give me and tried to get rid of. And he wouldn’t give it to Yolanda, who wanted to be on this ship. She got left behind on this trip, and I got ripped away from the world I wanted more than anything, to be on a ship I can’t run. Ramirez wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t arbitrarily cruel. But it seemed unfair. And you know——when something’s not damn fair, it does make you mad. And you don’t think straight. You ask why, but you constantly ask the wrong why, and you don’t go back to first questions. And ever since we’d gone back to Alpha and the atevi seemed our only hope, Yolanda and I had forgotten all about the whys we
used
to ask. We had a job to do. Dealing with outsiders was work Yolanda flat hated, and work I really took to,
really
took to—and both situations were just as distracting. I was lucky enough to draw the atevi side. Yolanda had humans trying to use her to get at each other. So the two of us grew apart. And then Ramirez had the gall to give
me
the captaincy, for God’s sake, permanent ship assignment, at the same time he used Yolanda secretly to dotranslation, bound to the planet, keeping major secrets from me. It wasn’t fair.”
    “And?”
    “So on this voyage, maybe I’ve gotten some mental distance, enough to deaden the emotional charge in that situation. I think about Ramirez frozen down there in storage—and I think about what I should have asked him. Questions I wish I’d asked Yolanda, to the point, that she might not have thought to tell me before we left. What she might have assumed I knew.
    “And at the