If they survived.
The thought had not escaped him that anyone with a drive-space detector could tell where Sunshine would be coming out and when. There would most likely be a 'welcoming party' waiting for them. Gabriel spent the early part of the fourth day working out with the JustWadeln software. He was increasingly needing less of the 'gunman' mode as he learned to fight the ship properly, as if he were the ship, tumbling in six axes, firing along six axes, and anticipating action in three dimensions rather than 'on the flat.' He was by no means certain of his ability. He was glad enough to know that the 'gunman' paradigm was there to fall back on if he needed it and that Enda had been working out with the software as well, sharpening her own skills-not that they seemed to need much sharpening. 'Well, old habits are hard to break,' Enda said. 'I did gunnery once before I left the city-ship with which I traveled. It was a long time ago, but they say these talents stay with you forever if you learn them young enough. Weaponry has changed a lot, but tactics do not shift much as regards combat in space. If you have a good enough grasp of spatial relationships, and can lose the 'craving' for gravity or a 'down' orientation when you fight, you can be very effective, but practice makes the biggest difference.' Later that evening Gabriel found her in the sitting room, lounging and looking at an image of stars slowly shifting around them. While she listened to a recording of one of her favorite fraal choirs over the audio system, the entertainment system projected what one would be seeing at this point if there were any stars to be seen in drivespace.
He sat down and said, surprising himself somewhat, 'Do you miss it?' She turned thoughtful eyes to him. 'Miss what?' 'The cities? The Wandering?' 'Well, I have not stopped, precisely.'
'But there aren't hundreds of other fraal with you. Don't you miss that life?' Gabriel asked. Enda put her feet up and sighed. 'It is not that long ago, really, that I should begin to miss it yet,' she replied. 'Only a hundred years ago now since I left my own and... well, not precisely 'settled.' But I wanted something different from the verities and assurances of fraal life, so I have roamed far and wide, but it has been with humans that I have done it. I have had brief partnerships before and seen them break up, never otherwise than amiably. Both alone and in company, I have done many kinds of labor, physical and mental.' She smiled slightly. 'I have been a rather unusual sort of migrant laborer, I suppose. Well, work is not necessarily an evil.' 'Isn't it?' Gabriel said.
'Not if you do it willingly, certainly. If you do it unwillingly-well, that can be bad. Sometimes a piece of work comes that transforms itself from something annoying, even repellent, to something more worthwhile than you thought. That transformation itself works backward and shifts all the other works you have done that led to it, so that a life that once looked useless, or blighted, becomes something much more positive.' She smiled very slightly, a look that reminded Gabriel of a piece of ancient artwork he had seen in facsimile-the dusky human lady in question very demure, but the secret of why she smiled hidden most securely behind her eyes.
Gabriel breathed out, a skeptical sound. 'Huh. I didn't think fraal went in for religion.' 'We do not, generally,' Enda said, 'for 'religion' is a binding. This is a setting free, if that is even the right idiom. How can one be set free when one has never really been bound? That is the discovery that this transformation entails.'
Gabriel shook his head, amused. 'You'll be telling me that life is an illusion next.' 'Blasphemy,' Enda said, and this time she smiled much more broadly. 'Death is, possibly, but where life is concerned, there is nothing more real. Of course it all sounds paradoxical, but fraal do not mind that. Humans often have a problem, though.'
Gabriel would have laughed, but at the same time he knew some scientists said that many of the basic paradoxes at the heart of the fraal-based gravity induction engine had never been solved and probably never would. The only thing to do with them was leave them alone, because the laws in which the paradoxes described unresolvable conflicts worked just fine nevertheless. One slightly facetious scientific paper that Gabriel had seen excerpted at the Academy suggested that if enough people started querying the basis of the gravity induction engine, it might stop working. Now he looked over at Enda and wondered exactly how facetious that paper had been. 'You've had this 'transformation' yourself then?' Gabriel inquired.
'Oh, often,' Enda said, 'and lost it again as many times, which reminds me. Where is the water bottle?' Gabriel chuckled. 'Where you left it.'
'You are not helpful,' she said, getting up to go look for it. 'If you tell me again it is in 'the last place I will look,' I will serve you as I served that poor thug with the knife in Diamond Point.' Gabriel laughed out loud. 'That kind of service I can do without,' he said.
'It was the service he required of me and the universe at the time,' Enda's voice came down the corridor, 'and I had little enough choice but to oblige him. I expect a higher level of request from you, however.' Gabriel shook his head and sat looking at the stars shifting slowly on the entertainment system screen. 'I don't get it,' he said. 'What kind of transformation do you have to have 'often'? I thought once was supposed to do it, as a rule.'
'Your sources have misinformed you,' Enda said. 'As regards the kind of which I speak, one must often have it again and again to get it to 'take.' It is not like a software upgrade.' 'Or not a very good one,' Gabriel said.
Enda chuckled at that from down the hall. 'Perhaps the failure is in the hardware,' she said, 'much upgraded with varying versions of wildly differing code over long periods, applications that get into fights with each other over system resources and bring the whole thing crashing down. Well, never mind that.' She returned with the water bottle and bent over the bulb, watering it carefully. 'You're going to need a bigger pot for that soon,' Gabriel said.
Enda gave him an amused look. 'Your sense of irony is likely to need a larger container, as well.' Gabriel chuckled, leaned back, and looked at the stars again. 'Seriously, I've never heard you talk like this before.'
'You may have to wait another hundred years,' she said. 'It would be a poor life-philosophy that kept you thinking about it all the time. The point is to live, in the philosophy or around it, perhaps, but not because of it or through it so that you miss your life while trying to live it correctly. There would be little point in that.'
'What about when you live your life incorrectly?' Gabriel asked. 'When you make mistakes?' Enda did not look up at the sadness in his voice. 'There is no such thing as a life incorrectly lived,' she answered. 'There are lives which lack that crucial transformation. Experienced once or many times they bring perspective and show you the way through and past the pain and error. Without it, yes, there is much pain and evil that one can inflict on oneself and others. With it everything shifts. Ancient pain becomes a signpost. Present error becomes a gateway. The future becomes clean, as the past eventually does. It all becomes one road.' She sighed and put the bottle down, examining the bulb. 'It is paradoxical, and if you try to apply sense to it, it will bounce. I would think it was ridiculous myself, if I had not had it happen to me so many times.' 'When you first came to me, I suppose,' Gabriel said.
'Yes,' Enda said, and then sat down and looked rather bemused. Gabriel blinked, not expecting quite so emphatic a response.
Those long, slender, pale hands knotted themselves together, and her blue eyes looked at him earnestly.
'I do not know how it is for humans, not for sure,' Enda said, 'but sometimes something-not the hunch, the source is more central, I think-something comes and says in your ear, Do this. Usually other people are involved. There is some service you must do them, and if you do it, your life changes. You may rail and complain afterward, but eventually the change is revealed to have been necessary, and the service you did turns out to be as much in your interest as in the others'.' 'That happened to you?' Gabriel said.
'Yes.' Enda looked up at him as if with some difficulty and said, 'I wonder if it might have happened to you, too.'
All Gabriel could do, for the moment, was stare at her.
'Dangerous to speculate,' Enda said. 'Only the person at the heart of the action can tell for sure. The danger lies in mistaking the source of the call for something lesser-or for thinking that service is, well, subservient--a disadvantaged state, a state of being 'one down,' somehow. From my people's point of view, there is probably no higher state than service, for all that it can be painful and annoying as well. The greater the service done, the greater the result.'
Gabriel shook his head. He too was becoming uncomfortable. It was not that he disliked the abstract per se, but that he had trouble with some aspects of it. Politics he could understand quite well, relations among visible things and people, but the invisible made him twitch.
'Look,' he said, 'there's no question that you did me a service, and I thank you for it.'
At that Enda laughed gently and tilted her head to one side. 'But it does not end there. It never does.
Service cuts both ways. You too are serving me, though I may not understand how, and I think you may be caught up in some larger service as well, though of what you must be the judge.'
