Heaven's Reach by David Brin Page B

expedition came to Jijo, computers had been legendary things one read about in dusty tomes within the Biblos archive. Even now, he saw them partly through two centuries of fear and half-superstition. Of course, even the star-sophisticate Ling would have trouble with this unit, designed for Jophur use. So Lark chose not to touch any buttons or sense plates.
    Anyway, sometimes you can learn a lot just by observing.
    This bright box over here … I know I’m in that quadrant of the ship. Could it signify this room?
    The symbols were in efficient Galactic Two, though he found the specific subdialect technical and hard tointerpret. Still, he managed to locate the security section where he and Ling had been imprisoned when they were first brought aboard on Jijo. A deep, festering blue rippled outward from that area and spread gradually “northward” along the ship’s main axis, filling one deck at a time.
    A search pattern. They’ve been driving me into an ever smaller volume … back toward the control room.
    And away from Ling.
    From their slow, methodical progress, he estimated that the hunter robots would reach this chamber in less than a midura. Though it was a daunting prospect, that realization actually made Lark feel much better, just knowing where he stood. It also gave him time to seek a flaw in their strategy by studying the map for a while.
    If hunger pangs don’t muddle my brain first.
Unfortunately, the pursuers were also herding him farther from the one place he knew of where a human could find food.
    Looking around the laboratory, he found a sink with a water tap. Ling had called it a constant on almost any vessel of an oxygen-breathing species. The fluid was distilled to utter purity, and so tasted weird. But Lark slurped greedily—trying to wash myriad complex ship flavors out of his mouth—before returning once more to peruse the data screens.
    Other than the ship map, most of the displays were enigmatic—flickering graphs or cascades of hurtful color, impossible to comprehend. Except for one showing a black field speckled with glittering points of light.
    Ling and I saw something like this in the Jophur command center. She called it a star chart, showing where we are in space, and what’s going on around us.
    It still made Lark queasy to picture himself hurtling at multiples of lightspeed through an airless void. Unlike Sara, he had never dreamed of leaving Jijo, where his life’s work was to study the life-forms of a richly varied world. Only war and chaos could have torn him awayfrom there. Only his growing ardor for Ling compensated for the loss and alienation.
    And now she was gone from his side. It felt like being amputated.
    Staring at the display—a black vista broken by a few sparkling motes—he felt utterly daunted by the distance scales, in which vast Jijo would be lost like a floating speck of dust.
    One pinpoint glowed steady in the center—the Jophur dreadnought, he guessed. And a great, yarnlike ball in the lower left must be a flaming star. But without his cosmopolitan friend to interpret, Lark was at a loss to decipher other colored objects shifting and darting in between. GalTwo symbols flashed, but he lacked the experience to make sense of them.
    In frustration, Lark was about to turn away when he noticed one slim fact.
    That big dot over there, near the star … it seems to be heading straight for us.
    I wonder if it’s going to be friendly.

Emerson
    N OTHING COULD FEEL MORE NATURAL OR familiar than looking at a spatial chart. It was like regarding his own face in the mirror.
    More
familiar than that, since Emerson had just spent a dazed year on a primitive world, gaping blankly at his reflection on crude slabs of polished metal, wondering about that person staring back at him, with the gaping hole above one ear and the dazed look in his eyes. Even his own name was a mystery till a few weeks ago, when some