Olivia Ferranti slowly shook her head. “And, of course, they were wholly correct in doing so. Even in S-space, one is not wholly protected from accidents and disease. There would inevitably be deaths, and without replenishment we foresaw our society shrinking — not at once, but over many thousands of Earth years. In Melissa and the other arcologies we saw a possible answer.

“Either we were unusually stupid, or we were simply naive. To make the Melissans believe us, and to show how we could be people who actually remembered Earth’s final war, we explained S-space to them.

“They went crazy. They wanted S-space more than anything else in the Universe. You see, we were misled by our own experiences. We had been slow to accept and move to S-space. We didn’t realize that our reluctance wouldn’t apply to them. They hadn’t been there for the early, risky experiments. To them, our existence proved that S-space must be safe. So they thought we were deliberately goading them, tormenting them with a look at immortality while refusing to share its secret with them.

“Most of our ship’s crew had gone on board Melissa. They took them, eight men and six women, and tried to draw the secret of S-space from them by force. It was useless, of course. The conversion equipment was on the ship, as it is on this ship, and the crew had used it to go from S-space to the perception rate of the Melissans. But they didn’t know the theory, any more than Garao or Captain Rinker know the theory.

“The inquisitors tortured those crew members to death. Only the two who had remained on our ship were able to escape and come back to tell us what had happened.

“That’s when we adopted our rules for interaction with all colony ships and colony worlds. We would have limited contact, and it would be handled with great care and with fixed procedures. We would never again return ourselves to normal space for the purpose of first contact, as was done with Melissa. Contact would be done with robots as intermediaries; and we would never, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to fall into the hands of the colonists.” Olivia Ferranti shrugged. “We just flunked that one, right here. Well, let’s skip forward four thousand years. That’s when another of the arcologies, Helena, finally found a habitable planet. They named it Beacon’s World, colonized it, and moved on. That’s when we learned another lesson. Beacon’s World was settled long before we sent a ship to visit it. When our ship finally got there we found that the population had increased from the original few thousand to forty million; but along the way much of their scientific knowledge had been lost, or had degenerated to hearsay and legend.

“We tried to help. We reintroduced the basis for a more advanced technology. They were keen to receive the information from us — but they applied it to weapons development. Then they started a war, between the two major settlement centers on Beacon’s World. Our ship and crew felt helpless, watching while they slaughtered each other. But we felt we had to do something — it was impossible to stand by, uninvolved, when we knew the information we provided had allowed the conflict to be so savage. The crew of our ship tried a desperation tactic: through our robots, they ordered the warring parties to stop fighting — without saying what would happen if the order were disobeyed.

“It worked. The fighting stopped.

“We had learned another important truth. By being ‘Immortals,’ with a technology and a life pattern that was incomprehensible to the colonists, we could have enormous influence.

“That provided us with our next rule of contact: remain as aloof and mysterious as possible. And if we recruited anyone to join us in S-space — we wanted only exceptional specimens — we would introduce them to our society gradually, through a long and thorough indoctrination.

“Our rules worked very well. People joined us from Maremar and Jade — two other planets settled by Helena — and have been working in those systems and at Headquarters for thousands of Earth-years.

“Finally, there was your world. You probably don’t know it, but Pentecost is a very recent addition to our planetary visits. We found you only a few months ago, as we perceive time in S-space, and it was a minor miracle that we found you at all.

“You see, Eleanora was the unlucky one of the colony ships. The other two arcologies found several planets suitable for settlements. But your ancestors had to wander the interstellar wilderness for over fifteen thousand years, without ever once approaching a habitable world. We know why, now. For the past four thousand Earth-years we’ve been able to predict pretty well the stellar systems and planets likely to support life. And Eleanora just went to the wrong star systems, in terms of our new knowledge. Unfortunately, that same knowledge led us astray in following Eleanora, when our tracking probe finally wore out. As it happens, the Cass system is generally not suited to life, or the occurrence of habitable worlds. The existence of Pentecost, Gimperstand, Fuzzball, and Glug is an accident, the by-product of resonance locks between planetary orbits.

“We could have found you on Pentecost four thousand years ago if we had thought to look. As it was, we only detected your radio emissions a few hundred years ago. And we finally made contact with you.

“We followed our standard rules. Slow and limited involvement, and don’t try to change the government of the world. As it happens, Pentecost has had a classical totalitarian regime ever since first contact — a government more concerned to remain in power than anything else, and sublimely disinterested in interstellar affairs. From our point of view, that was perfect. Everything worked according to plan for hundreds of your years — until this Planetfest, when Headquarters was informed that an unusual group of winners was likely. You don’t know who the winners will be in advance, you see, but our people down on Pentecost had a pretty good idea. We expected trouble, but we didn’t know what. Personally, I think something would have happened even if Wilmer hadn’t taken the action he did on Whirlygig. Your profiles are all too far away from the standard patterns. But that’s my speculation. The main thing is, something did happen. And” — Olivia Ferranti looked at the intent young faces around her and shook her head — “here we are. We have to decide what will happen next.

“I’ll accept that you have control of the ship. And I hope you’ll accept my word when I tell you your control could be dangerous, with the limited knowledge you have. The present situation is bad for everyone, including you. So let me start the ball rolling for more discussions, by telling you that I was sent here with a proposition from all of us — even including Captain Rinker.”

The group around her came to life. They were suddenly fidgeting, looking at each other questioningly. For over half an hour their present situation had been pushed into the background by interest in the fate of others. The return to the present was an uncomfortable one.

Peron met the eyes of each of them in turn. Finally he nodded.

“We’ve nothing to lose by listening to you, so long as you remember that we have physical control of you and of the ship. So all right. We’ll listen. What’s your proposition?”