Assegai

by S J MacDonald

  Not today, though.

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Ambassador Suri was surprised, but as he gave her a speaking look, understood. ‘Ah! That question about Dr Payling’s paper?’

  ‘That question,’ Alex agreed. The journalist concerned had put it to him that according to Dr Payling’s report, Silvie had been treating Alex medically without his knowledge. Which was, he’d said, deceptive – when they’d been told over and over that quarians were incapable of lying or deception – and what he wanted to know was whether quarians were in the habit of giving humans alien medical treatment without their knowledge or consent. ‘I don’t know,’ Alex said, ‘whether it was incompetent, stupid or deliberately offensive.’

  ‘The latter, I’m afraid,’ said Suri. ‘I believe the gentleman concerned has ambitions to become Camae’s first hot-screen journalist – sees himself scoring a major intersystem scoop and being headhunted by one of the big channels on Chartsey. He’ll have been studying, no doubt, how they get their stories.’ She gave him an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry about that. But I suppose it is what we have to expect, if Chartsey becomes the standard to which people aspire.’

  Alex saw the subtle give-aways as she said that, and knew he was right.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and after a significant pause, ‘You supported the application to have us come here, though, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes – I had to.’ She paid him the compliment of not trying to deny what he’d realised. ‘I could hardly, as the League Ambassador, tell them that they’re much better off having as little contact with the League as possible, could I?’

  ‘Perfect as it is…’ Alex murmured.

  ‘Well, not perfect, obviously, nothing is ever perfect,’ said the career bureaucrat. ‘But it is a lovely world – unspoilt, both in its environment and in a way of life which has not changed, essentially, for millennia. Oh, tech has changed and they’ve moved from autocratic rule to an aristocrat-led democracy, so there are changes, of course. But in their way of life, the rural towns, the incredibly strong family and community bonds, the healthy, organically grown food… all of those things are very special, Alex, precious. And if you were to put me under veracity test I would have to confess that I’m not at all sure whether those things can survive the kind of culture-dominating pressure they’ll come under as they increase their contact with other worlds. I’m sorry – I know, its professionally inexcusable even to have these opinions, let alone air them to you, but I can’t help it, Alex, I do love this world, you can’t live here for any length of time without coming to love it, and I, well… one of my postings was to Canelon.’ She gave him a look of quiet but deep foreboding. ‘I do not want to see that happening to Camae.’

  Alex had been to Canelon too, posted there briefly as a Sub-lt. It was not a time in his life when he’d been inclined to think analytically about the cultures of the planets he visited. He’d simply enjoyed them, whatever they were, with the uncritical enthusiasm of youth. He could remember, though, feeling disappointed in Canelon. He’d been looking forward to seeing a world with such a thrilling heritage of castles, kings and knights, learning more about their history.

  What he’d found, though, when he went to visit historic castles, was that they were ‘living history exhibits’ with actors in costume, fanfares and pageantry on the hour, every hour, no real or serious historical content at all. And even by the end of his first week there, he’d learned to avoid any kind of venue with ‘Ye Olde’ on it. Which, given their prevalence everywhere on the planet, had not left him very many places to go.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Alex said. ‘And I do understand your concerns. Believe me, I do. I was facing just that kind of worry myself at Carrearranis, such a vulnerable world, and I felt so responsible for them, was so responsible for them, as the man on the spot. There was, I freely admit, a large part of me that just wanted to lock down another kind of quarantine and keep them safe from all the things I knew would come at them so fast, so fast, as soon as their discovery was known. It really made me understand, that, why Van Damek decided to lie about Defrica’

  ‘Uh?’ Suri only knew Defrica as the Lost World of myth and movies, so Alex’s evident belief in its reality was as startling to her as if he’d suddenly started talking about fairyland.

  ‘I believe that Van Damek found an inhabited world,’ Alex said. ‘Whether it was Defrica or he just called it that I don’t know, but I do believe he found an inhabited world deep in the Altarb Ranges. I even think it’s credible that he may have landed a shuttle there and traded candy for vegetables – that is just the kind of off the wall thing Van Damek was likely to do, his genius was not without its eccentricities. But when he got back all excited with his withered parsnip and said ‘I’ve discovered the Lost World’, he realised very quickly, I think, that once people had stopped laughing and believed him, that world would be overwhelmed, culture-swamped, even invaded – this is a couple of hundred years ago, remember, and attitudes to any world which came up ‘primitive’ on the Donavet scale were hugely imperialistic. This is the time at which news was coming out about what had been done to Mimos, too, and it’s my belief that Van Damek saw that, realised what would happen to Defrica, falsified his log to conceal its location and set about making sure that nobody would find it. I always used to think that was unbelievable, insane, that nobody would or could do that, abandoning a world where people were suffering and dying from diseases we could cure like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘But when I was looking at Carrearranis, I did understand it. It isn’t what I’d do myself, but I can understand how he’d feel so responsible for the fate of that world that he’d step away, perhaps hoping that by the time the next exploring ship discovered it attitudes would have become rather more enlightened. Which they have. Which was why I was able to advise Carrearranis, with clear conscience, that their best interests lay in accepting aid and development. I put my trust in the Senate honouring the terms of the Protectorate. And I put my trust in the Carrearranians, too, having learned that they were actually a lot smarter, tougher and more adaptable than I had given them credit for. And I do believe, Suri, that the Camag are more resilient than perhaps you are giving them credit for, too. They’ve kept their language and way of life this long, after all, and though things may change, will change, as they increase their interaction with other worlds, I think that there are two factors here which you may not be taking into account.’

  ‘Really?’ Suri was intrigued, not offended, and evidently wanting his opinion.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex smiled. ‘The first is the Quarus factor. Our worlds are going nuts about Quarus, right now, hugely excited about what most people think is our first alien contact, right? And it is in the light of that that people will be looking at Camae, as a world that is so special that this is where quarians want to come. Which it is, and will be – Silvie has already sent word to them on Serenity that Camae is amazing, and it will be the next world they visit after Cestus, no question. Here, not Chartsey. The fact that Camag is so similar to quarian will make it, instantly, a wonderful thing, something people want to hear spoken. And since Serenity is far away and right on the Gulf, while Camae is right here within easy reach of the League’s most populated worlds, my guess is that a lot of people will be heading here, too, to see the world the quarians admire. So I don’t believe there will be any great pressure to flood it with Chartsey shops and fast food joints.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Suri conceded. ‘But that is the kind of pressure which might push them towards becoming another Canelon.’

  ‘True,’ Alex said. ‘But that’s my second point. When it comes to holding on to traditional values and customs, Suri, there is a core resource which I personally would back against the most exploitative, theme-park building forces in the League.’

  ‘Hmmm?’ Suri was cautious, and uneasy. She thought Alex meant the Lamarre family, standing against the culture-bombing impact of people like Andrei Delaney.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Alex said, and
with a totally straight face, ‘Have you met Aunt Migan?’

  Her staff were quite surprised, during the rest of that day, to find that Her Excellency was not only in a remarkably good mood, as if some long-standing worry had been lifted from her shoulders, but that she was even observed, when she thought nobody was looking, to give way to little trills of the giggles. None of them mentioned it, though.

  They were, after all, diplomats.

  Sixteen

  Three days later, Alex was sitting on the veranda of the house he’d learned to call ‘the croff.’ Croffs were an important part of life on Camae. Even the lowest income families would own the use of one for at least part of the year, while owning your own family croff outright was pretty much a marker of middle class standing. They were essentially mountain chalets, scattered throughout every mountain and significant hill range across the continents, used as a holiday home by any members of the family who wanted to use it.

  Theirs, Migan had told him, was pretty typical. It was a single storey chalet set on a natural shelf midway up a hillside. It wasn’t, apparently, a mountain, though the sweeping grandeur of the scenery certainly looked mountainous to Alex. These were glacier-carved hills, forested on their lower reaches but rough gorse and heather higher up.

  Alex loved it there. The croff itself was so basic it was hard to avoid the use of the word primitive. There were really only two rooms – the living space at the front with a kitchen in one corner and the bunkroom at the back, with an outdoor living space formed by an overhanging roof and the stone-floored veranda. The roof was tiled with solar absorb tiles which provided sufficient power for domestic use. Water was provided via a pipe which tapped directly into a subterranean spring, with a pump and sanitiser bringing clean water into the house. The furniture was mostly natural wood – something which would cost a fortune on any of the Central worlds – and had an oddly crude, home-made appearance. There were a lot of personal belongings there, too; family pictures, outdoor gear, lots of toys. Migan said it had been specially tidied up for them. In which case Alex could only imagine how much clutter there had been before. Even out on the veranda, there was a mess of skis, grass-boards, footballs, waterproofs, boots, boots and more boots.

  Alex didn’t mind. He couldn’t have tolerated living like that for one day on board ship, but it seemed fine somehow at the croff, just part of the experience. And he was, in any case, already so used to it that he moved around the clutter automatically.

  He was sitting there then, watching the valley below darken as the light faded out. It was an overcast day, with the hills still wet from recent rain, so the sunset was nothing special. Even so, it was absorbing to watch the shadows deepen, the shallow river which ran through the floor of the valley visible briefly as a pale ribbon in the gathering gloom. Darkness was rising up the hillsides – a perfectly ordinary phenomenon, of course, but not one which Alex often had the time just to sit and appreciate. Mostly, in his experience, planets were for hurtling around at high speed.

  Migan, lounging on the bench next to him with her legs outstretched, was watching the scenery too, content to sit for a while in companionable silence.

  No comment had been made at the Embassy earlier that day when he’d informed them that he was taking his gear and would be staying at the croff with Migan for the rest of the visit. In his off-duty time, obviously. There was still work to be done. But he would be spending his nights here.

  ‘Shame about the clouds,’ Migan said eventually, and when he looked enquiringly at her, ‘I wanted there to be stars, for you.’

  Alex chuckled. ‘I see stars every day,’ he said. ‘Clouds, that’s special.’ He glanced up at the lowering sky. ‘I’m hoping it will rain.’

  Migan laughed too, but before she could say anything, Alex’s wristcom gave a small but insistent fleep. Migan looked momentarily annoyed, even as if she might protest when he went to answer it. She stopped, though, reminding herself that he wasn’t being rude, taking calls when they were supposed to be having intimate time together, but would only be taking calls if they were really important.

  Alex looked at the priority-code message displayed on the comm, and all the tranquillity of the moment vanished at once. The message was from Shion, consisting of the ominous words Silvie is fine.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to Migan, and was calling Shion even as he said it.

  ‘Sorry, skipper.’ She apologised for disturbing him, but it was apparent that she was trying not to giggle. And not trying very hard, either.

  ‘Ah.’ Alex relaxed at that, looking expectantly at her.

  ‘Silvie,’ she told him, ‘has just rescued an army dive-crew from a deep-sea cave rescue exercise.’

  As she spoke, she transmitted a report. In the usual way of Fourth’s reports, it was nested – a critical point precis on top, then a standard Fleet preliminary incident log, followed by a more analytical incident report, and behind that, rafts of recorded footage and reference material. Shion would have put that together in a matter of moments. And Alex, casting an eye down the precis, was able to reconstruct events from it with rapid understanding.

  The army had been running deep-sea rescue exercises. Nothing unusual in that. They handled air-sea rescue at Camae and had been made responsible for having primary response teams on standby everywhere that Silvie went. They were training and drilling their rescue units extensively, too, in an understandably urgent desire to be ready for anything that might happen.

  Silvie had gone to assist with the exercise. Again, not unusual. Silvie considered it part of her role here to help the Camag prepare for future quarian visits, and while she herself did not consider that she needed rescue teams on standby, she did recognise that other quarians might get themselves into some difficulties in unfamiliar environments. So, if she knew there was an exercise on somewhere and she had nothing better to do, she might well drop in on them and offer what she considered to be helpful critique and advice.

  Alex took in the outline of the exercise – three kilometres down, in a sea cave network Silvie had swum in a few days earlier. The exercise involved a ten-member dive crew under the direct command of a Lt, with a Colonel directing the exercise from a sub which had grounded on the sea-bed above the caves. They had sent in a robot programmed to behave like a quarian. Silvie had, indeed, been very helpful with that, hooting with disdain at their original quari-sim, and reprogramming it to behave, as she said, as much like Othol as a robot could.

  And this, perhaps, had been part of the problem, since the quari-sim had detected further caves beyond a tiny hand-sized hole and had promptly enlarged it, wriggled through, and set off to explore.

  It was at that point that the Colonel supervising the exercise had made a bad decision. The exercise had never been intended to go beyond the known cave system and the army risk assessment actually specified that. In the zeal of the moment, though, the Colonel had said that this was just the kind of unexpected situation they were here to train for, and had ordered the Lt to take the team in after it.

  Silvie had appeared on scene at a point where the Lt and Colonel were in some dispute. Deep, fine sediments had been kicked up in the caves, blinding the divers and making them entirely dependent on infra-red goggles. The experienced dive crew knew how much danger they were in there, and they wanted out. The Lt was wanting out, too – if this was a real situation, with an injured quarian genuinely needing rescue, fine. But he wasn’t about to put his own people in a life-threatening exercise they hadn’t even planned for, so he’d halted their progress and was telling the Colonel they had to withdraw. The Colonel, however, sitting snugly on the sub, was of a different opinion.

  Silvie, taking in the situation very rapidly, had gone into the caves herself and brought the dive crew out, taking them back to the sub where she’d expressed herself in forthright terms to the Colonel. Finding that he was defensive and trying to argue with her, she’d poked him in the chest, hard, called him a blithering idiot and delivered a brief but
pungent lecture on command responsibility and the vital importance of complying with health and safety procedures.

  ‘Ha…’ Alex turned to the secondary log-report and saw a transcript of what Silvie had actually said. ‘Aha ahahahaha…’

  Shion chuckled happily, eyes bright, giving a little nod of confirmation. Silvie had, she really had, lectured the army – the army – on sensible and disciplined behaviour.

  ‘I have tried to diffuse,’ Shion said, meaning that she’d done her best to calm everyone down, ‘but I expect you will get calls.’

  ‘Already am,’ Alex confirmed, seeing that Ambassador Suri was on call-waiting, and bringing his chuckles under control. ‘Thanks, Shion!’ He was about to break off, but saw that she had something else she wanted to say.

  ‘Silvie,’ she told him, ‘is on her way to you.’ A quick, flashing grin, and all the information he needed to tell him what was bringing Silvie eight thousand kilometres from the deep-sea location to the croff in the hills. ‘She wants cookies.’

  ‘All right,’ Alex grinned, and with another thanks, ended the call.

  He’d got the grin under control as he answered the waiting call from Suri, but she could see the twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, all right, I know, all highly amusing, no doubt,’ she said, fully aware of the rivalry between the Fleet and Groundside Services, and of how merrily the Fleet would pass this story round. ‘And yes, I know, we have to be prepared for anything and everything in exodiplomacy. But seriously, Alex! In what reality could anyone have expected a quarian to rescue humans and tell them off for irresponsible behaviour?’