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 that 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.”

Bonner said, “Lieutenant, tell me, what do you care if Earth ceases to exist?”

He said, halfway into it before he remembered whose quote it was, “ ‘If Earth didn’t exist, we’d have to create one.’ “

Emory of Cyteen had said, a now-famous remark: “We all need to be from somewhere. We need a context for the genome. Lose that and we lose all common reference as a species.”

But the committee didn’t seem to recognize the source. Likely they couldn’t recall the name of Cyteen’s Councilor of Science—or conceive of the immense arrogance in that statement. Cyteen was terraforming, hand over fist. Ripping a world apart. Killing a native ecology, replacing it—and humanity—with its own chosen design. He’d seen the classified reports. And he wasn’t sure Bonner had. Mazian was taking those records to the highest levels of the Company and the UN.

A senator said, “We’re here to discuss technology. The fitness of a machine.”

“The fitness of the men who fly it,” Bonner said, “is also at issue.”

The pod reoriented. Flesh met plastics. Dekker tried to defend himself, but something grabbed his collar, held him. Someone shook him, and said, “Straighten up, you damned fool, or I’ll hit you again.”

“Trying to,” he told Ben’s hazy image, and tasted blood in his mouth.

“Why in hell?” Ben asked him. “Why in hell did you have to ask for me?”

“Dunno, dunno, Ben.” Blood tasted awful. He tried to get his breath and Ben shoved him back against the pillows. Ben looked like hell.

Ben still had his fist wrapped in his collar. Ben gave him another shove. “I can’t blame whoever shoved you in that simulator. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? You’re a damned recurring pain in the ass!”

“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t want his lips to tremble, but they did, and tears stung his eyes. A long, long time he’d been alone. There’d been others, but they’d died, and Ben hadn’t, Ben wouldn’t, Ben was too hard to catch and Ben wouldn’t get himself killed for anybody. He trusted Ben that way. Ben was too slippery for the sons of bitches.

Someone shadowed the doorway.

“Need to check his blood pressure, sir.”

Somebody had said something about Have a nice trip. Someone who’d told him go to hell....

He caught at the bed. Caught at Ben’s arm as Ben started to get up and turn him over to the nurse. “No.”

“Your blood pressure’s getting up, Mr. Dekker.”

“Screw it. —Ben, —”

“Lieutenant.”

He swung his legs off the bed, made a try at getting up and the room went upside down. The nurse made a grab after him, he saw the blue uniform, and he elbowed it aside. He caught himself with a grip on the edge of the bed.

But Ben was gone. Ben had left him, and the nurse got a hand on his shoulder and his arm. “Just lie down, Mr. Dekker. Lie down. How’d he get in here, anyway? Visitors aren’t supposed to be in here.”

He didn’t know either. But a lot of things happened here that shouldn’t. And he hadn’t been dreaming. Ben had been there. He had a cut inside his lip and a coppery taste in his mouth that proved it, no matter what the nurse said about visitors. He lay down and ran his tongue over that sore spot, thinking, through the shot and everything, Ben’s here, Ben’s here... and knowing it was Sol Two where Ben had found him: Ben hated him; but Ben had got here, Ben talked sense to him and didn’t confuse him. Even if Ben wanted to beat bell out of him. He liked that about Ben—that for all ; Ben wanted to go on beating hell out of him, Ben hadn’t. Ben had held on to him. Ben had shaken him and told him where right side up was and told him to get there. Only advice he’d trusted in days. Only voice he’d wanted to come back to, since— since his crew died. Died in a fireball he wasn’t in. Couldn’t have been in, since he wasn’t vapor.

Somebody’d said, later, Enjoy the ride, Dekker.

He couldn’t remember who. Someone he’d known. But the voice had no color in his mind. No sound. And he couldn’t recover it.

They said, shadows leaning over him, “Need to keep that blood pressure down, Mr. Dekker,” and he said: “Screw all of you, I don’t need your help,” and kept his eyes shut.

Whine of mag-Ievs. You got that through the walls. There was light out there, but it didn’t diffuse, despite the distances across the huge sim chamber, where a solitary pod was working. There was a safety stand-down in effect. Lendler Corp techs were doing an inspection on this shift, remoting the pod from the number two access. You could see the light on, far across the chamber.

Easy ways to get hurt out there. Pods pulled a lot of g’s,positive and negative. Graff touched the cold plastics of the dead panel, drifting in the zero g, antagonizing an already upset stomach, and watched the pod, figuring how hard a body could hit, repeatedly, doing that gyrating course. Dekker was strong for his slight frame. Only thing that had saved him. God only knew how conscious he’d been, but enough he’d protected his head somehow. And his neck and his back and the rest of his bones. The meds who hadn’t seen the inside of the pod had said the belts must have come loose. But the belts had been locked together under Dekker, deliberately to fool the safety interlocks, by somebody who hadn’t left prints—unless it was the last man to use the pod, and that was Jamil, who hadn’t a motive that he knew. Belts locked underneath Dekker—otherwise the pod wouldn’t have moved. The MP’s report had said, Suicide is not ruled out.