In the meantime, though, to the wonder of the Assegai’s company, Kate got up next morning, went to her solo parade, had breakfast and tootled off to class, just as usual.
Their pride in Kate, though – and the glory her discovery reflected on them – made it all the more imperative to address the issues of conceit with which Min had asked for his help.
They did that, therefore, in a carefully planned and timed conversation, just as discussed, on the command deck.
Strictly speaking, it should have gone no further. Regular ship crews were trained to regard the command deck as a holy of holies, only privileged personnel allowed to work there and that under orders that they were not to repeat anything they might see or hear whilst they were on duty.
Of course, that was a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance even on the strictest ship – the only difference it made, really, how strictly the rule was enforced, was how open the crew were about revealing what they knew.
On the Assegai, Min recognised within a matter of hours that Captain von Strada’s comments had gone through the ship like a shock-wave.
Alex knew it, too, hardly needing the covert, often reproachful looks he got that day as he went around the ship. And if that hadn’t been obvious enough, he had Simmy asking him, later, with big hurt puppy eyes, ‘You don’t really think we’re not as good as the Fourth, do you, Captain?’
Alex hardened his heart, knowing very well that Simmy had been primed to do this, to challenge him, by more forceful members of the Assegai’s crew.
‘Oh – the Assegai does very well,’ he said, with an unmistakeably patronising tone, and then uttered the fell word, ‘considering.’
That, reported faithfully by Simmy, punctured the Assegai’s vanity-bubble as nothing else could have. Considering, indeed, might have been the shipboard word of the day, muttered and hissed as it was between so many affronted Assegais. Alex’s popularity certainly took a hit – but he wasn’t troubled by that, any more than Min was. The ship was heading into port with a decent modesty, and that was all that mattered.
So, while the crew was still smarting from the sting of that considering, Alex held the last of the language seminars before they went into port.
They had long since developed past mere language practice sessions. Even the slowest linguistic learner could manage conversational Samartian by now, with discreet but efficient use of translator when they needed prompting. The hour-long seminars had continued, though, not only to develop language fluency but as an opportunity to discuss all sorts of things which fell outside the combat-skills curriculum. Some days, Alex could be persuaded to answer their questions about Fourth’s operations. Mostly, though, a topic was chosen at the end of each session, giving them till the next day to read up and think about it before they came to the discussion. They took turns doing this, and it so happened that the topic that day had been Dan Tarrance’s choice.
The choice of Camae as a subject was obvious. Dan, however, had opened up an unexpected angle with his topic, Camae – The World the League Forgot.
It was, Alex felt, one of the best of their discussions, for several reasons. It was conducted entirely in Samartian, naturally, and with people having such strong opinions that they forgot to be self-conscious in their use of language, speaking with speed and emphasis which made it apparent that they were now able to think in Samartian, directly, rather than think of what they wanted to say in Standard and consciously translate it. That was pleasing, but even more so was the knowledge and understanding the class revealed, with a far broader view of the big picture than Fleet officers were ever normally trained up to. The first time Dan had commenced a briefing with a reference to ten thousand year old history, there’d been the polite equivalent of howls of protest. Now, they took it for granted that you had to know the deep historical context to make sense of modern situations, unravelling the causes of problems.
Never had that been more true than with Camae. The problem with Camae was its social isolation, its near-invisibility in League affairs. Camae’s media was replete with stories, going back centuries, in which highly placed members of central authority had mistaken them for a colony, confused them with Cwmbracha or proved to be completely unaware of their existence. Of these, the most famous had been a League President who, when a question was asked about Camae, responded with the classic, puzzled, ‘Is that one of ours?’
And yet there seemed to be no reason for it. Camae was not geographically remote – they were, indeed, only just over the border of the rough blob enclosing the systems regarded as the Central Worlds. There were far more distant worlds which everyone knew about. There was no issue of difficult space around them, either, but free and clear passage from almost all directions. Nor did they have any of the factors which might explain their social isolation – they weren’t xenophobic like Korvold and Altarb, they didn’t have foul polluted environments like Carpania or alarming insects like Telathor. Theirs was a clean, friendly world, with a low bioshock index, nothing obviously off-putting at all.
And yet, somehow, Camae was under the radar. This concerned them so much that it had been an issue almost since they’d joined the League fourteen hundred years before. They had even, in a desperate effort to raise their profile and draw people in, established a ‘shop front’ at an uninhabited system which lay beside the nearest major shipping route.
This, Cwmbracha, had developed into a thriving port, the equivalent of a deep space station but constructed on a planet. It was, like Karadon, a trading point, transit hub and a holiday destination in its own right, with its famous casinos.
Very few people, however, looked beyond the glitz of Cwmbracha to the quiet world behind it. Even people at Cwmbracha, surrounded by promotions for visits to Camae, took no notice of it.
‘It is,’ said Skipper Hevine, voicing the orthodox League perspective on the issue, ‘because they are passive economically – they don’t buy enough imports to make them a valuable market, and they don’t export anything at all.’
‘Of course they don’t,’ said Min. She had slipped into the daily seminar not long after leaving Chartsey, asking if she might join them to practice her own Samartian, and was as forthright as any of them, now, in the privacy of the seminar room. ‘They refused to have their planet turned into a proto-bean farm, and they won’t sell and ship out their natural resources, either, and good for them!’
‘What they do produce is first rate quality,’ another member of the class opined, ‘but they’re kept out of the export markets by Central Worlds imposing trade-protective import taxes on them, so it’s hardly their…’
‘They have options,’ another interrupted, ‘There are things they could do…’
A flurry of debate on that ensued, before Eldovan cut through it with the remark that they could talk that one in circles all day.
‘It’s timing,’ she said. ‘The key factor here is the timing of when they were discovered – where we were at, where they were at, defining the relationship right from day one.’
Alex looked at her approvingly. That was what he’d put his finger on as the critical factor, too, in looking at the issue of Camae’s social isolation. He said nothing, though, leaving Eldovan to expand on that opinion.
‘They were found,’ she pointed out, ‘mid-phase in our own Age of Exploration. It was after the first burst, when it was all so new and exciting that every discovery of an inhabited world was like – well, like the reveal of Quarus is, right now! And it was before discoveries trailed off so that finding new worlds had come to seem rare. Mid-phase, finding new worlds was so commonplace it might not even make top headline in the news. Excorps had more ships than the Fleet back then; they were reeling in first contacts at the rate or two or three a year, and after a few decades of that, it became routine. So when Camae was found, the first reaction was – Oh, is it anything unusual? And when the answer was no – just a bog standard atomic-age planet – nobody was interested.’
There were cries of protests at that, and a clamour amounting to a refutation that Camae was in any way ‘bog standard’.
‘You think that,’ Dan observed, ‘because we’ve studied it, and we see the significance of their ancient history.’
Eldovan was nodding, picking up from him.
‘At the time,’ she said, ‘the ‘angels’ thing would have been dismissed as typical Dark Age superstition – still is, in many quarters. And – this is important – they were a bog standard atomic-age world. If you look at the Donavet descriptors for – yes, yes, I know it’s a stupid continuum but it’s the only one they used at the time – if you look at the descriptor for atomic-age development, then look at Excorps’ notes from the first contact survey, they are a perfect match. They had atomic power, obviously, and near-world space exploration, a cosmology which recognised green-world indicators by observation of the stars, pre-superlight physics leading to the belief that it would never be possible for them, or anyone, to travel between stars in any practicable fashion. Culturally, too – civilised standards in law and order and in social care, the rudiments of a global government in a regular summit meeting of their national heads of state, basically a tick-list of the Donavet descriptors. So that was how they were seen – bog standard, nothing special, nothing even interesting. And that attitude, right from the start, runs through, and through, and through – at every level from the Senate deciding where to invest development funding to freighter skippers tramping freight about. They could sell at Camae, and yes, the stuff they export is expensive and difficult to sell on, but you can always pick up some kind of cargo. The real factor is that Camae just isn’t a cool place to go, neither profitable nor interesting enough to make people go there.’
‘It’s been underdeveloped,’ Skipper Hevine said, stubbornly clinging to the orthodox view. ‘Industries should have been developed there to…’
He was cried down, with general agreement that the Camag had been right to refuse to allow their world to be turned into a feeder-farm or factory planet for the Central Worlds. This was no colony, set up as an agricultural or industrial supplier. This was a world with ten millennia of history, protecting a unique natural environment and rich culture.
‘But they can’t have it both ways,’ Hevine argued. ‘They can’t cling to their language and customs and refuse any large-scale development and then complain in the next breath that they’re left out of things.’
It took several minutes for the opinions over that to subside, at which point Dan put in again, airing a view which would have made little sense to the rest of them even a few weeks ago.
‘I think one of the issues in that is that the Families didn’t take it on,’ he said, and as he said it, looked at Davie.
Quiet fell, as everyone else looked at Davie, too, keen to hear his views on that.
He was with them, as he often was, though not often staying for all of a seminar. He dropped in most days to add his mite to the discussion – quite often, as they’d noted, dropping an opinion into the mix which had much the same effect as dropping a lump of sodium into a beaker of water. And having got them all fizzing, he’d stroll out before the explosion developed. So far today he hadn’t said anything, just sat there eating cookies and looking interested.
‘And just what,’ he asked Dan, ‘makes you think that?’
Dan’s eyebrows raised. ‘Because on every other world the League discovered,’ he said, ‘one or more branches of the Founding Families took it on, pouring in major investment industrially and socially, university chairs and all that. And none of that is evident on Camae.’
Davie chuckled.
‘I have,’ he said, ‘cousins on Camae.’
That caused a stir… a little piece of sodium, skittering over the surface.
‘We don’t have a lot to do with them,’ Davie said. ‘Frankly, they went native.’ Another grin at the sputter and fizz that remark generated. ‘You are right, of course,’ he said, to Dan. ‘We have always regarded it as an obligation to support development both on newly discovered worlds and on colonies. And that’s the case, even now – one of my cousins has moved to Korvold and is putting major investment into developing their trade and cultural links, since the Fourth…’ a cookie-salute to Alex, ‘resolved the issue of ships boycotting it as a jinxed port.’
Alex smiled, but said nothing. It had been Shion, in fact, who’d figured out that the ‘jinx’ which was said to haunt the Korvold system, causing ships in parking orbit to experience weird groans and shudders, was in fact a remnant of ancient technology buried deep within the star, still trying to send out a feeble quarantine warning. Since there was no way to deactivate it, Alex had merely done what was needed to compel the Korvoldian authorities to reorganise their system space so that no ship would be exposed to the quarantine-shudder again.
‘And I myself, come to that,’ Davie commented, ‘am putting in infrastructure and investment at Samart and Carrearranis. On, of course,’ a pointed look at Alex with that, ‘a Clean and Green, ethically and environmentally positive, non-exploitative basis.’
Alex grinned again – it had taken a long time for him to become really convinced that Davie’s corporate enterprises really were as clean and green as he claimed. But again, he said nothing.
‘But at Camae,’ Davie said, as conversationally as if this was something that had just happened fourteen months ago instead of fourteen centuries, ‘a branch of the Lamarre Family did move in with every intention of doing the usual; industrial development, university chairs, hospital wings, the usual package. But the twenty eight times great grandfather of the current Lamarre no sooner got there than he went off his rocker, ditched the development, settled down with the natives and married a prince.’
‘I really don’t think,’ said Dan, as the emotional temperature in the group rose rapidly, ‘that it is acceptable to refer to the Camag – or any people – as ‘natives’, Davie.’
Davie looked sublimely innocent.
‘Natives,’ he clarified, ‘as in – ‘the original inhabitants of a specified region.’’ A reproving look at Dan. ‘If you have any more pejorative interpretations of the word then that is your issue, not mine. I am a native of Flancer. Eko Lamarre was not a native of Camae. As an incomer, representing the Families, it was his role to stand aloof, funding development through investment and philanthropic support, but in no way, God help us, taking on a directive, controlling role. That’s what we mean when we say that one of us has gone native – like my darling cousin Terese, who went native at the age of sixteen with a bizarre experiment to live on minimum wage for a year, launched herself into politics and is now in the Senate. Shocking behaviour, going against the Families’ absolute commitment to protecting and serving the League but in no way ruling it. Marrying a ruling prince and becoming actively, directly engaged in the government of Camae, that’s about as transgressive as it gets. And all their descendants since have been raised in that tradition, regarding themselves as Camag first and foremost, actually proud to be hands-on with government and standing against any heavy development because Camae is, and I quote, perfect as it is.’ He shook his head. ‘My cousin Migan – Prince Migan Lamarre Jonvawr, that is, and that speaks for itself, that the Lamarre has taken second place to her Camag heritage – my cousin Migan was a national president for nearly twenty years.’ He shook his head again, mournfully. ‘Disgraceful. So you can, if you like,’ he told Dan, ‘ascribe the lack of development on Camae to unwarranted interference from a branch of the Families which went native, rogue or renegade, or to the fact that no other branch of the Families has seen fit to take on the Lamarre-Jonvawrs over it, but that’s a very different situation from us never having bothered with it in the first place.’ He got up, having finished the box of cookies he’d been nibbling his way through, and smiled. ‘You can,’ he suggested, ‘tie yourselves in knots debating the ethics of that one.’
And with that, he left, grinning to himself as the exothermic reaction be
hind him burst into explosive argument almost before the door had closed.
They did tie themselves into knots, too. It was only a few minutes before the argument had reached the fundamental questions which Alex himself could never resolve in his own mind.
Given that the League only existed as it did because the Founding Families had poured their personal wealth and commitment into developing superlight travel – an endeavour which had spanned several generations in itself – there was no sound argument for saying that they should not then have been allowed to continue to invest in the infrastructure and economic development of the League as it expanded. The only arguments against their continuing to do so were that they protected their own privacy so ferociously that hardly anyone in the League even knew how much they owned, and the obvious risk of such uber-wealthy families having undue influence in government affairs. And the latter, as Davie had just made clear, was anathema to the Families themselves, dedicated as they were to the principles of democracy their ancestors had enshrined in the sacred Constitution.
And that, of course, raised questions. Had the Lamarre family been right to offer investment and philanthropic support to Camae in the first place? Had they then been right to involve themselves in Camae’s government? Should anyone have done anything about that if it was stifling Camae’s development? And if so, was that the responsibility of the League government or of the Families themselves?
A side-argument then broke out – the hardy perennial of whether the League’s push towards homogenisation was of benefit to member worlds, raising standards of living for all, or imperialist and destructive.
‘Of course it’s destructive!’ Dan burst out.
‘If Camae,’ Eldovan agreed, ‘had abandoned speaking Camag, allowed the influx of Chartseyan architecture, fashions, arts and entertainment, intersystem chain-stores, all of that, they would be a Central World.’
Skipper Hevine started to argue with this, but was knocked down from several directions and with more than one voice exclaiming, ‘Look at Canelon!’
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