by Simon Kewin
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
One
A warm wind breathed into Conciliator Magdi's face as she gazed from the high viewing platform of Equatorial City Seven's eastern tower. The dizzying altitude made her grasp the smooth stone of the handrail. Heights troubled her more than she'd admit to anyone, but she'd wanted to be alone for a few moments before meeting the warring parties in the peace talks.
The city – known to all its inhabitants as Suri – was laid out like an engraved map around her: the clean edges of its triangles and tetrahedrons; the radiating lines of its garden boulevards crossed repeatedly by the three spiralling Turnways winding out to the edges of the city. One to the sparkling ocean, one to the great sands, one to the upland flower jungles. The city's embassies and halls and hotels were constructed in a dazzling array of architectural styles, reflections of a thousand different cultures, but there was a pleasing cohesiveness to the city's layout, too: the sandy hues of its walls, the rhythm of its skylines.
She filtered scents blown from the deep seas through the olfactory slits in her neck: smells that spoke to her of the lagoons and atolls of Periarch, her distant home. That, in turn, brought Olorun to her mind. They weren't a couple – for one thing they lived three hundred light-years apart – but the possibility was there, they both knew. Some days, her longing for him was intense, a physical response in her body. She felt it now: the animal need for contact. She would speak to him that evening, and it would help a little.
She breathed deeply again. There was a tang, also, of decay on the wind: the salt rot of the coastal kelp fields. Despite it, she inhaled three, four lungfuls of the planet's air to soothe her nerves. The atmosphere on Coronade was slightly low in oxygen for her biology – the climb up the steps had made stars dance in her head – and it was altogether too hot and humid for her liking so close to the equator. Still, she had chosen the site deliberately for the meeting she was about to take charge of. She expected most trouble from the Gogon Confederacy; it had taken three years of patient diplomacy to induce them to the table, and, quietly, every attempt was being made to engineer an experience that was as trouble-free for them as possible. The heavy, sticky air would be comfortable for a Gogoni, even if she and the delegates from Arianas and Sejerne suffered. But, if they could reach an accord and ease the tensions that had flared into open war in their solar system three times now, it would be worth a little perspiration.
“Is there anything else you need for the talks, Conciliator Magdi?” The voice of Coronade's planetary Mind spoke directly into her brain via the jewel-like glass bead embedded in her cerebellum. She felt it as a faint tickle in her head, although she'd been told numerous times that the sensation was entirely in her imagination.
Rather than replying brain-to-Mind, she gave her response out loud as there was no one nearby to eavesdrop. “I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Now we have to hope that none of the delegates storms out of the talks before we can find a workable solution to their seemingly intractable problem.”
Coronade's response was tinted with amusement. The planetary Mind had seen thousands of such peace conferences over the centuries. “I'd be surprised if they didn't all storm out at some point, claiming dire insult or betrayal in an attempt to extract some concession.”
Magdi let go of the handrail and pressed her eight-fingered hands together in a gesture that signified assent to anyone on her own world. It was a motion she'd need to be wary of making during the discussions; what meant yes upon her planet might mean something else completely upon another. Variations on the common tongue might be in near-universal use across the galaxy, but local idiom and gesture remained distinctive. Too many Gogoni hand signs, specifically, indicated insult or threat.
“I will be sure to play my part,” she said in reply. “I will be, perhaps, the mortified host horrified at the offence, or else I'll feign anger at the insult made personally to me by such actions.”
“A delicate balance to be struck,” said Coronade.
“It is no different from persuading families warring over some petty boundary dispute to set their disagreements aside; it's just that billions of lives are at stake rather than a handful. The trick is simply to make each side feel that they have gained what they most want, without having given away too much in return.”
“Do you think you can do it?”
Could she? She had a chance, the outline of a plan, but it was by no means guaranteed. This was a tricky three-way dispute over an uninhabited world that they all claimed. One culture considered it sacred, while the other two considered it ripe for resource exploitation. Finding a compromise was not going to be straightforward. “If necessary, I'll lock them in a room until they reach agreement or die of old age,” she said.
More amusement from Coronade. “That might not work out well, given that the Sejerne are vegetarian and the Gogoni purely carnivorous.”
“It might at least reduce the number of parties in the discussion.”
With an orbital-sensing scan overlaying her vision, the sky of Coronade was filled with a constellation of silver-white stars: the constantly shifting patterns of starships, hundreds of them arriving and departing every day, travelling from and to every inhabited system in known galactic space. As with all superluminal ships, they terminated their metaspace jumps well away from the stellar mass before completing their journey to the planet under reaction drive, avoiding any risk of being sucked into the solar gravity well during translation. She watched one ship, tagged in her mind's eye as that of Ambassador Vol Velle, the delegate from Sejerne, approaching one of the equatorial docks locked in ground-stationary orbit high above her head. His appearance meant that all three parties in the dispute had now arrived at Coronade. That was something. She'd feared more delays, more of their endless game-playing.
Coronade spoke again, some sly quality to its voice suggesting that this was what it had wanted to say all along. “I have been considering the wider picture, looking for angles that might assist you, conversing with other planetary Minds. We are obviously keen for this dispute to be resolved.”
She sometimes wondered if the planets ever grew weary of the warring, troublesome life-forms that crawled over their surfaces, thronged their atmospheres. The Minds were, of course, the products and tools of those troublesome life-forms, but surely the thought had occurred to them: Why do we need these ridiculous creatures, teeming in their countless billions. They are the source of all our problems. Without them we could arrange ourselves rationally, all strife forgotten. She had once asked that very question of Coronade, the central neuron in the galactic Mind, and it had expressed a complex mixture of amusement and revulsion in reply. The question is a category error; it is meaningless. You might as well ask why your mind doesn't rebel against the cells of the brain that houses it. Even if it were possible, what point would there be? And a galaxy without biological life-forms would be … dull.
She guessed it had to say something along those lines. She wasn't completely sure she believed it “Did you come up with anything?” she asked.
“A possibility occurred to me. You will be aware of the ship called the Magellanic Cloud, the fallout from its supposed discoveries in the galactic core?”
“I am obviously aware of the rumours. You have something more concrete? Something pertinent?”
“Not much. Even I am in the dark about what has been found. There are obviously no planetary Minds within the uncharted regions that the Magellanic Cloud was exploring, although those closer by, at the ed
ges of known space, are expressing a certain amount of disquiet at the reports reaching them.”
Her mind had been full of preparations for the talks: strategies for persuasion, careful attempts to learn the details of the three disparate cultures involved. Still, she was aware that the feeds were awash with talk of what had been found. Through the fuzz of speculation and invention there was, so far as she knew, only one hard fact: the lost Magellanic Cloud had unexpectedly returned to the Ormeray Ten outpost station with less than half its crew onboard. Whether the others were dead, or had been abandoned or taken captive, was unknown. There was confused talk of a vicious mutiny led by a crew-member, one Dragonel Vulpis. Whether those returning on the ship were insane, or the perpetrators, or even heroes, was also unclear. She'd heard versions of the rumour claiming all that and more.
“What does the Ormeray Ten Mind say?”
“Little of use; it has limited intellectual capacity. It's basically a set of environmental control routines with no self-awareness.”
“Then I don't see how the Magellanic Cloud story helps. The system involved in our dispute is twenty thousand light-years from the central mass; there can be no possible connection.”
“I concur, but that does not mean our guests will see it like that. It's possible they lack … perspective.”
“Explain.” The word came out more tersely than she'd intended. She didn't have the head-space for this new angle; it didn't seem important. She forced herself to listen. Coronade was wise, and her boosted Pack Queen nature could all too easily make assertiveness tip over into rudeness. Another thing she needed to watch when it came to the diplomatic discussions.
“You will have heard the stories that the Magellanic Cloud encountered a major technological or biological power previously unknown to us. A power that, now it is aware of our existence, will burst from the galactic core to destroy us all.”
The stories were clearly ridiculous, a rehashing of common myths and tired old tropes. Although she did sometimes wonder if the prevalence of such stories might not be an echo of some shared folk-memory rather than the result of simple paranoia about the unknown. Whatever the truth of it, there could be no such threat; the culture centred on Coronade was vast, extending to sixty percent of the galaxy's star systems. Nothing could threaten it.
Yet the Mind was right: there might be something there she could use. “You're suggesting that fear of a common enemy, even an imaginary one, might unify our warring worlds?”
“They might start seeing all they have in common, rather than what divides them.”
“I will give it some thought. I hope to reach a settlement based on something more solid than lies and fear, but the angle might prove useful when a little extra pressure is needed. Have you been in touch with the Minds of the delegates' homeworlds?”
“I am in constant communication with over seventy-two thousand planetary intelligences across the known galaxy, either via the nanotube mesh or, for worlds where that does not reach, via despatches carried upon metaspace ships. Gogon, Sejerne and Arianas all express the hope that a solution may be found, but none proposes what that might be. They are happy to place the onus for a resolution upon Coronade. And, therefore, upon you.”
“Of course they are.”
Another voice sounded in her head, a notification from her personal AI. “The Gogoni delegates are requesting an immediate audience with you to lay down their preconditions. Also, the envoy from Arianas appears to have heard of this and is demanding a meeting of her own. And Ambassador Vol Velle has lodged a formal complaint that the talks are starting before he has even arrived on the planet.”
Magdi inhaled one more deep breath. “And so it begins,” she said.
Two
In the end, she waited a day and a half before meeting any of the representatives from the warring worlds. Partly, it was an opening move to deflate their self-importance a notch, to tell them that they weren't the most urgent matter in the galaxy – without frustrating them too much. Mainly it was to give them a chance to experience Coronade. Along with her apologies to each envoy, she'd sent messages encouraging them to visit the planet's sites, complete with a suggested itinerary of highlights. The embassies of more-or-less every starfaring civilisation were to be found either on the surface of the planet or upon one of its moons or orbital platforms. Coronade was a treasure house of cultural wonders – and if all that architecture and art didn't appeal, there were always the ancient cultural remnants: the artificial oceanic islands with their intriguing ruins currently being excavated by teams of astroarchaeologists. Civilizations had seemingly existed upon Coronade long before the recording of any histories.
She'd learned from experience that time away from the negotiating table could pay dividends: released from the pressures of their own planets, and faced with the experience of bumping into the citizens of worlds they'd never even heard of, delegates often mellowed a little. Acquired a degree of perspective. It was part of the point of Coronade: neutral ground where representatives of all civilisations could mingle and learn from each other. Nobody's home world, and so everybody's.
When she judged they'd fumed long enough, she arranged a meeting with each delegation – without telling them which she was meeting first. That was another detail they didn't need to know.
Delegate Palianche of the Gogoni informed her that he was waiting at his quarters; she could come to him. It was immediately clear that the enforced delay had done little to soothe his anger. Before she could utter her words of greeting to Palianche and his two advisors, the Delegate stood, sending his chair clattering to the ground, his muscular green body unwinding in a way that emphasised his brute physical strength. He towered over her. His metallic-sheen skin – an adaptation to the high solar radiation of his world – shimmered in a clear fury display. Gogoni were evolved top-predators, their forms powerful and their laser-like focus on their prey absolute.
His words, though, threw her. His voice was a soft whisper, like a coolant gas escaping a leak under high pressure. “Please convey to Coronade that I demand a different Conciliator be assigned. I will not work with you.”
Magdi kept her expression neutral, her voice calm and slow. Palianche had to be allowed to play his games. “May I ask why you object to me?”
“I do not trust one of your kind. Your telepathic abilities are an affront, an intrusion. Do you deny you can read my thoughts?”
She stepped forwards slowly, sat on the empty chair waiting for her and folded her hands in her lap, in a gesture that conveyed passivity to one of his world. “I am a Periarch, yes, and like you we are a predatorial race, proudly so. Our Pack Queens have natural empathic abilities, there to resolve conflict, impose order and maintain strong social cohesion, and it is true that my biological responses have been boosted with the relevant hormones to enhance that capacity. I cannot read your mind, Delegate Palianche, but I do have some sense of your emotional state. It is part of what makes me a good Conciliator.”
He regarded her with his reflective green eyes. It was hard not to see malevolence there, but in truth she was reading something else entirely from his mind: wariness, even outright fear. Interesting.
“And so, we are your pack now?” he said finally. “Do you intend to control all three delegations, bend them to your will like Periarch warrior drones?”
She sat back, keeping her expression neutral. The living quarters of the three delegations were identical: comfortable, luxurious, one wall taken up with a window that overlooked Suri's Hub park, a calming, pleasant vista to most species. On the opposite wall of each suite she'd placed a stylized representation of the planets in the disputed system: Palianche's own world, Gogon, next to the sun, then Sejerne, then the disputed world, then finally cold Arianas. She'd wanted each delegation to have that simple image in their heads. It was rare to have a trio of naturally-habitable worlds in a single solar system – a fact that she was glad of. Contested systems were almost always flashpoints once one or more cu
ltures acquired spaceflight technology.
Her eyes on the diagram rather than him, she said, “I cannot control any of you, and I would not if I could. My intention is simply to find an agreement on what to do about Forge.”
Forge. Such was the Gogoni name for the third planet in their system – a fitting title for a world they wished to mine for its abundant mineral reserves. The other civilisations had their own names, of course – many different names. To the Sejerne the world was generally referred to as Amon, the sacred domain of the gods in their dominant religion. To the people of Arianas it was Penanda, the brightest of their three morning and evening stars, and a world whose uranium reserves were badly needed.
“Our claim to Forge is undeniable,” said Palianche. “We are the closest planet claiming mineral exploitation rights. The legal principle of proximity is clear.”
She turned back to face him directly, fix him with her own gaze. “There are, as you well know, other legal principles to consider. Sejerne, for one, is nearer.”
“But it does not claim mining rights. It does not wish to land there at all.”
“It does claim that the planet is inviolate.”
Palianche snorted. “The planet is uninhabited and rich with minerals and heavy metals; it makes no sense to leave it untouched. Sejerne's fairy stories won't build cities and ships, and they won't feed or house our people.”
One of his two advisors, smaller and less powerfully-built, eyes always averted, stood and, standing on the tips of his toes, whispered something into the line of otic receptors that curved up the side of Palianche's head. This one, she knew, was called Emchek, an observer from Evening Star Rising, the dominant political/military faction on Gogon, there to advise on negotiating strategy. The other, Sorabai, was a technocrat, from the currently subservient White Peak faction, sent to ensure Palianche had all the required scientific facts at his talon tips. Emchek was the taller of the two by several centimetres, as befitted a member of the planet's controlling bloc: a Gogoni individual's physical stature altered in line with their social rank; the more important the person, the larger and more powerful their form. Palianche was truly impressive, while Emchek and Sorabai were shorter than Magdi. The Gogoni monarch, Emperor Avigand, was said to be truly titanic.
