Intellivore - Diane Duane [5]
Ileen, who had wandered over to join them, looked at Clif with an amused expression. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise. But we’ll be getting to that. Lobster, Clif?”
Clif introduced his science officer, Tamastara, a handsome slender Orynchid lady completely covered in soft gray fur; and his exec, Elen Miraitis, an Andorian. They got talking to the Enterprise and Marignano crew members, and the three captains took themselves off to one side of the room to eat and small-talk for a while. Picard mentioned Pentarus V, and the events surrounding the Phoenix incident on the borders of Cardassian space, and was privately glad that Wolf 359 was now far enough in the past not to come up automatically as a topic of conversation. Clif had been nearly at the other side of Federation space for half the year, and had spent three of the last six months getting back to “inner” space, before being sent off out this way a month previously to meet Marignano. He and Picard amused themselves for a couple of minutes playing an informal version of the “who’s been out farthest” game, as if they were a couple of Earth-born cadets bragging about who’d first been to the moon. Ileen watched them with a tolerant smile while they calculated light-years and parsecs in their heads. Clif won by a hair, AX Arae being a bare twelve parsecs farther than 1020 Octantis, Picard’s farthest distance reached by normal means. He stopped himself just short of mentioning extragalactic distances. Those were accidental, he thought wryly, and it doesn’t seem fair to brag …
“And you, Ileen,” Clif said. “I saw you last—where?”
“It’s got to be sixteen years ago now,” she said, sitting down again; she had been up getting another glass of wine. “I was sorry to hear about Rael, by the way.”
Clif nodded, looking just a touch sad. “I got your note. It was much appreciated.” He paused for a moment, then smiled, only half-convincingly, as he did a brisk search for a less painful topic. “Well, you’ve certainly taken the grand tour since then.”
“Yes,” she said. “A long time out here at the empty end of things. About two years, alone, on this segment of the investigative sequence.” She waved at the map showing on the screen, on which Marignano’s course for the last few standard years was plotted: a long, leisurely, waving line, wandering through the huge volume of space at the fringes of the Sagittarius Arm. Picard, used to much less casual and easygoing course sequences, looked at it with mild envy.
“That’s an investigative sequence?” Clif said, bemused. “It looks more like an inebriated stagger.”
Ileen laughed. “You spent too long running the inner-system routes, Clif; you’re too used to straight lines. We just slouch along looking at stars and planets and nebulae and things, checking to see if there’s anything interesting that no one else has seen; and if one of the science staff convinces me that we need to go back the way we came, we do it.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” said Picard, with a wry smile.
She leaned back in her seat, crossing her legs comfortably. “It is,” Maisel said.
She reached out to get a cracker from a nearby tray. “Now, while we’re doing our long-term studies, there’s plenty of opportunity to look into other matters in this neighborhood as well. This might be a fairly empty part of space nowadays, but it wasn’t once, as I think you both have heard.”
Picard nodded; this lay within his area of expertise. “I haven’t looked into it in all that much detail,” Picard said, “but there are supposed to be a surprising number of so-called vacated planets around here. Worlds that were inhabited once, by sentient species, but which those species seem to have simply moved away from.”
“Or died out,” Clif said. “Sometimes under odd circumstances. Species that otherwise seemed perfectly robust, civilizations that were peaceful,