by John Ringo
"Right. So I'm at the Mad Hatter's tea party and I'm supposed to do what?" The O'Neal wore the expression of a man completely out of his depth but willing to go down fighting valiantly.
"Primarily, avoid as many gross mistakes as possible while getting in specific talking points to illustrate how humanity, Clan O'Neal, and the O'Neal Bane Sidhe view the balance of favors between ourselves and the other Galactic races," the PA said.
"Oh. Is that all?" Papa asked sarcastically.
"Don't worry about it. You can take your PDA and wear an earbug. They'll pretend you aren't, but will be completely unsurprised that you need it. It's actually an advantage, as they'll hear what your PDA is telling you. In a certain sense, the PDA will be doing the actual diplomacy, while you maintain the relevant not-exactly fiction that the discussions are with the O'Neal." The younger man shrugged.
"Oh. A buckley is going to be negotiating our future with the entire Galactic civilization. I'm so relieved," Papa groused.
"This is all the better reason for you to understand those talking points well. If what you say contradicts or revises what they hear out of your PDA, they'll go with whatever it is you say. Which also means, I need not tell you, don't fuck up. Because at many levels, physical, economic, political and legal, the Tchpth can swat Clan O'Neal, and probably the whole human race, like flies."
"But no pressure," Papa said.
"Nope, O'Neal," Alan said with a grin. "No pressure at all."
Chapter Sixteen
Papa and Alan followed an Indowy guide through the bowels of the large ship, Papa with interest, Alan with apparent disinterest.
The ship was rara avis: a Tchpth diplomatic transport. Nearly the size of a Posleen War super-dreadnought, it could carry over a million Tchpth. How many were actually on board was uncertain since the only thing they saw were naked Galplas walls and their Indowy guide.
"These are service tunnels," Papa said, pointing to scuff-marks. "An insult?"
"It's a Tchpth ship," Alan said. "More likely they felt that it would be an insult if we had to crawl on our hands and knees the whole way."
"Point," Papa said. "I hope the meeting rooms are high enough for us."
"For you," Alan said. "I'm not going to be in on them."
Finally they arrived at a large hatch and the Indowy bowed to them politely.
"Wait here, please," he chirped. "You will be greeted."
"Thanks," Papa said and heard a groan at his side. "Thank you, Good Indowy."
The Indowy bowed formally, a bending backward at the waist with a complicated leg-twist reminiscent of a curtsey, and then scurried off.
"And now we w—" Papa broke off as the hatch dialed open to reveal a room the size of a cargo hold.
The bulkheads and overhead were masked by fine cloths in a riot of colors. Most of them tended towards blue and purple but there were a few he was pretty sure human eyes weren't meant to see.
The floor was similarly colored but the material appeared to be crystal. He quickly put a guess at it being some form of very expensive crystal.
Scattered around the room, at apparent random, were very low tables. Well, they were low to a human. They would be just about waist height to the many Indowy in the room. For a human they were more like ankle catchers.
Papa paused in his perusal at a whimper from the "diplomat" next to him.
"What?" he growled. So far none of the people in the room had taken the slightest notice of them.
"It's a . . ." Alan said, hyperventilating. "It's a . . ."
"It's a what?" Papa whispered fiercely. "Get a grip, man!"
"This is a formal negotiation," Alan whispered back shakily.
"That's what they said," Papa pointed out.
"No!" Alan said, his voice tight. "This is a formal negotiation! We've had 'formal' negotiations with the Tchpth and Indowy leadership before. That's just a way of saying it's not over tea and crumpets. But this is a formal Children's Negotiation."
Papa frowned for a moment and then blanched.
"Wait . . . You mentioned that . . ."
"This is the most high form of formal negotiation," Alan said. "No human has ever participated in one. Not even the highest negotiations of the Posleen War were conducted at the Children's Banquet. This is a ritual dating back to the very days of the Aldenata! The great table at the center . . ."
"The Parent's Table," Papa said, dredging it up from memory. "That's a really silly way of—"
"It's not even the proper term," Alan snapped. "It's a shorthand. It doesn't actually mean those are the Kids' Tables and the one in the middle is the Parent's Table. Don't be absurd. It's just how it gets translated. But this ritual is more formal than a Japanese tea ceremony. Do exactly what the PDA tells you to do. Make no gesture, make no facial movement, that is not instructed. Fortunately, it moves very slowly. I don't know where your starting position is—"
He broke off as one of the Indowy in the room came towards them at a slow walk. It was the sort of slow ceremonial walk Papa dredged from the recesses of memory as being used in a coronation.
Or a funeral.
It seemed like it took forever for the guy to get to the hatch and Papa realized that the one thing he was most going to have to cultivate was patience.
"Clan O'Neal," the Indowy stated, bending forward in an informal bow.
"Bow forward slowly," the PDA ordered. "Keep going. Further. Slow down. Hold it there. Up just a smidge. Hold that. Say: Clan Kooltan."
"Clan Kooltan," Papa parroted.
"I am your Guide for the Banquet," the Kooltan clan leader said. If he found any distaste it was not apparent. His face gave away nothing and he had exactly zero body language. "If you will follow me."
Kooltan turned and began to slowly walk back into the room.
"Wait for it," the PDA said. "Don't step off until I tell you."
"What are you going to do?" Papa whispered out of the side of his mouth.
"Stay here," Alan said. "I'm not invited."
"Don't lock your knees," Papa said.
"Step off. No, not fast!" the PDA snapped. "Just shuffle. You need to move at the same speed as Kooltan. Don't stride. Never stride!"
I'm going to get Nathan for dumping this on me.
The intricacies of the ceremony were lost on Papa O'Neal. He was pretty sure that it was all incredibly special and that he was missing a bunch of stuff that really mattered. But it was like a tea ceremony. What in the hell was wrong with just dropping a bag in hot water?
Walk, slowly, shuffle, to a table. To a particular position at a particular table. There would be a morsel of human food at that particular position and particular table. Bend over, at the waist, pick up the morsel of food. Straighten up. Look into the distance.
An Indowy or Tchpth might or might not already be at the table. If there wasn't one or the other one would show up sooner or later. Or two. A maximum of four, total, at a table, no more. Usually two.
A statement would be made. The first person speaking was determined by some arcane rule Papa had no clue on. This person was the Prompter. A second person would speak. This was the Rebuttor.
Prompter, Acceptor, Rebuttor, Supporter. Each of the four possible combinations had a name, a time to speak, and a particular subject to discuss. Most of them related to some equivalent of "The vacuum outside is very hard today, isn't it?"
Occasionally one of them would speak in Indowy or Tchpth. Twice he had to reply in Indowy. They apparently gave him a pass on Tchpth. Since he couldn't even pronounce the species name, doing the whole language was out of the question.
Apparently at those times they were actually negotiating something and he had no clue what, how or why. He just parroted what the PDA, with occasional references to Alan, told him to say.
Even when they engaged in actual negotiations in English he didn't have any clue what, how or why.
"Clan O'Neal," the Indowy Prompter said.
"You're Acceptor, third," the PDA whispered. "W
ait for your Acceptance which is fourth."
Whatever the fuck that means, Papa thought.
"Now: Clan Selatha," the PDA said.
The Rebuttor and Supporter had both greeted each other, an off-hand way of introduction apparently. Papa wasn't bothering with trying to keep up with any names.
"Clan Selatha," Papa said, bowing from the waist.
"Stop there!" the PDA screamed. "You're a major Battle Clan! Selatha is known for mass Galplas production which is about as bottom of the food chain as you can get! You nearly raised his social prominence by about fifty points!"
After a moment Selatha said: "Disassociative resonance in material space is unharmonious."
An Indowy was the Rebuttor and replied almost instantly: "All change is motion state."
Fortunately it was a bit like chess. You had a four-minute clock. Actually, it was more like four minutes and twelve seconds since it was based on the Tchpth clock.
They almost ran out before Alan and the PDA between them came up with a response:
"Life is aentropic," Papa parroted.
The Crab Supporter took nearly as long a pause. Papa had to wonder if it had a PDA stashed somewhere.
"Life is motion."
"Take a quarter turn to your right," the PDA whispered. "See the table right in front of you?"
"Hmmm . . ." Papa hummed.
"Wait for it. Wait for it. Step off."
Papa took a step that nearly trod on the Tchpth Supporter. He could only look straight forward except when taking the food off the table.
"Small steps!" the PDA said.
"How'd we do?" Papa asked.
"I think we just bought a solar system," Alan whispered in his earbug. "Just shut up and soldier."
It was the end of the whole complicated, annoying, slow as hell shooting-match when they got to get to the big, huge, vital, future of everything hinges on it issue.
For that he, finally, was allowed to approach the Parent's Table.
"Stop here," the PDA said, when he was a good two steps away. "You can't actually stand at the Parent's Table."
The Parent's Table was bigger, with room for at least twenty Indowy and Tchpth or ten humans. And it was actually tall for a human. The Indowy and Tchpth were looking under it. Not that they were saying much.
Part of the big kicker to the Crab withdrawal had been not just the killing of Erik Winchon. A large part of their break with the O'Neal Bane Sidhe had been their own shock at the ripples of what they'd done. They'd reached out to make an admittedly significant adjustment to the scheme of things to protect one extraordinary human, and had destroyed an entire Darhel business group, completely by accident.
The Tchpth keenly felt this as a blunder on their part, and Alan had drilled him, and role-played with him, and generally hammered into him over, and over, and over again that he must wait for them to bring it up, it was dead certain that they would, and when they did he could not say anything that remotely could be construed as humanity, the Bane Sidhe, or the O'Neals taking responsibility for any of Epetar's demise.
When Papa had pointed out that that wasn't exactly true and wouldn't they see through it, the PA had just about gone ballistic on him. Alien minds being alien, the O'Neal could and should and by God would use the Galactic prejudices against humanity to the hilt, in the interests of the O'Neals, humanity, etc. That is, as primitive barbarians, humans couldn't possibly have had any significant causal role in bringing down the Epetar Group, but instead were mere pawns in the machinations of those wiser and more advanced than themselves. In a way it stuck in Papa's craw to do it, but any reluctance was far overwhelmed by his vicious sense of schadenfreude that the Galactics' damn presumptions and prejudices could be used to screw them. Or at least to get the best of them, anyway.
So in his little role plays with the PA, he had been trained out of, "I'm sorry to hear that." Or, "I can sympathize with you." Or even, "We heard about that with regret." Over and over he'd had it drilled in that what he must say, and all he must say, was a perfectly neutral statement that acknowledged that the event was a bad thing.
This is a causal relationship with high entropic reality.
Papa had memorized it because this was the one, vital element that absolutely could not come as a prompt from the PDA. Even before they knew they were doing a Children's Negotiation they'd known that. If a Clan Leader was so low in functionality that it couldn't even manage a simple statement like that, Clan O'Neal might as well be written off.
He'd memorized it carefully. He'd practiced it carefully. They had role-played it a dozen times with a holographic Crab and Indowy.
"Recent events create a stochastically chaotic causal chain," the Rebuttor said.
The Rebuttor was a muckety-muck Tchpth. Lord High Master of Something Complicated. The Indowy Prompter, not a minor Clan Leader, had brought up the problem, which Papa damned well wasn't going to do. The Tchpth Rebuttor had, as far as Papa could tell, dumped the whole thing in humanity's lap.
Now all he had to do was dump it back and be done.
At the end of the long day of shit he knew damn-all about, when the big moment finally came, he fucking froze. His mind had gone a complete and total blank. He looked at the dancing and bouncing ten-legged alien Rebuttor who held so much power over humanity and said: "That's gotta suck."
"Sorry," Papa said as they made their way back through the corridors. "I think I screwed the pooch."
Papa had been expecting a scathing review as soon as the hatch closed, Indowy guide or no Indowy guide, so the silence was getting uncomfortable.
Alan didn't reply.
"Uh, penny for your thoughts?" Papa said. Better to get it out of the way as soon as possible.
"I don't, really, think it matters," Alan said morosely.
"Future of Clan O'Neal?" Papa said. "Future of the Bane Sidhe? Future of the human race? We just participated in really high level negotiations. I'd figure you'd have something to say."
Alan let out a sigh.
"You know what I said about the Parent's Table not really being the Parent's Table?" Alan asked. "That it was just translation? A sort of metaphor?"
"Yeah?"
"I was wrong," Alan said. "No human had ever seen this negotiation. We'd had it detailed, we analyzed it, we spindled, folded and mutilated it. Which is why, with the exception of your last Response, you did fairly well. Intonation and body language issues, but fairly well. Your last Response may, in fact, have been masterful."
"What?"
"Listen to me!" Alan snapped. "Think. I said it was a metaphor. I was wrong. The monsignor was wrong. Every human who has ever studied the Children's Negotiation Ceremony was dead, completely, utterly wrong."
"How?" Papa asked. His back hurt and his feet hurt and his legs hurt and he was seriously ready for a very big drink of whisky. But he felt like Alan might finally be saying something important.
"Think about a family party," Alan said. "There's a few grown-ups at the Grown-Ups' table and there's a dozen or so kids running around playing. Kids engage in negotiations. We don't call it that but they do. What, really, do the Parents care about such negotiations?"
"Nothing," Papa said, his mouth suddenly dry. "They're kids."
"It's better to ask forgiveness than permission," Alan said. "So mostly the children keep their secrets to themselves. They don't bother the parents."
"They get more quiet when they don't want to be noticed," Papa said. He wasn't only a multiple father but a multiple grandfather. And great-grandfather.
"Every now and again, the kids will feel it's necessary to get a seal of approval on something," Alan said.
"So they go to the Parent's table," Papa said. " 'Dad, we're going over to Billy's to play video-games.' So . . . who are the Parents?"
"That's the kicker," Alan said. "This was, as much as anything, a religious ceremony. The Indowy, the Tchpth, the Darhel, even the Posleen, are referred to as Children of the Aldenata. They view them as Gods. Well, in
the case of the Posleen as demons, but that's beside the point. The real point is that the Aldenata may or may not have real power, what is called hard-power. They may still exist and influence events."
"They might have been listening?" Papa said. "So humanity's first communication with God-like aliens was 'That's gotta suck'?" Papa paused and shook his head. "Great. Just fucking great."
"But then there's the big problem," Alan said.
"There's a bigger problem?"
"We, humans, are not Children of the Aldenata," Alan said. "We're the kids from next door who wandered in. And, as reported, through no fault of our own we're causing problems. It's entirely the local, older and wiser, kids' fault. But there are problems."
"Ouch," Papa said.
"If you've had a nice, neat, playful little party and some neighbor kid wanders in and all of a sudden there are problems," Alan said, "what do you do?"
"Toss the little bugger out," Papa replied. "Or teach him manners."
"That is why I said 'I don't think it matters.' I think we just, for the first time ever, got formally introduced to the Aldenata. And if they have a problem with our behavior, we don't have any 'adults' to negotiate for us."
Xikkikil stood on the bridge of the ship and looked at the plot of relevant ships in the tank. It had traveled inward with the ship carrying the Human O'Neal, so as to allow that vessel to begin the acceleration for its return to Earth. Now they had to pay the price of that choice in the time to decelerate and return to the jump point. No matter. The job was done, the relationship reestablished. Specific favors would, of course, depend on situations as they arose. It was the relationship that was the thing.
