Precursor (2 page)

“Mr. Cameron.” A human steward welcomed him aboard and took his formal coat as he shed it.

In that process he scanned the narrow confines of a jet configured for luxury. The passenger shell he’d used in the plane that had previously run this route had always sat as a removable inclusion in the hull just ahead of dried peas and fresh flowers; but this sleek Patanadi Aerospace number, the aiji’s plane, had tapestry for a carpet runner and seat upholstery of ornate atevi needlework. When it wasn’t ferrying the paidhi across the straits, it did transcontinental courtesy service for the aiji’s staff and guests… and the seats and furnishings were all to atevi scale.

Consequently, four Mospheiran diplomats sat like ten-year-old children in large-scale chairs, grouped around what was, relative to the chairs, a low table… sipping Mospheiran alcoholic beverages from atevi-scale glassware.

They’d be oblivious before they landed, if they didn’t watch themselves.

He knew who was who in the group, having been briefed; knew two of the four in the mission prior to this meeting, at least remotely: Ben Feldman was a spare, unathletic young man thinning at the temples, Kate Shugart, a woman with close-cut, dull brown hair drawn back in a clip—she’d trained to have his job, but the job had ceased to exist, and she’d never made the grade. Those two of the four were Shawn Tyers’ people, old hands in the Foreign Office. He trusted Shawn, or he had trusted Shawn—with his life, while he’d been an official working for the Foreign Office.

The other two… however…

He walked to the group, still with the taste of Barb’s lips on his mouth and a large breakfast queasy in his stomach. Shawn hadn’t briefed him about this more than to remind him Mospheira had applied to go to space, and to say that the aiji in Shejidan had cleared their mission most unexpectedly. They’d felt no choice but to go, immediately.

More, Shawn had said, the station in orbit had just called its second and
last
representative home, on this impending flight. A decision that would affect his work… profoundly.

And Tabini-aiji had cleared it.

It was one huge, upsetting mess, and Shawn couldn’t brief him fully, not any longer. They served different governments. He could only say the Mospheiran government wasn’t disposed to say no when the aiji approved a chance they’d looked to take, oh, a year to clear…

Mospheirans never had understood how fast the aiji could move when he wanted to.

The question was why the aiji wanted to.

The shuttle was still in testing; the payload for said test had been set and calculated to a fare-thee-well… one had to be atevi to fully comprehend just what manner of disruption such a change posed. Inconvenient, yes, but more to the point profoundly disturbing to a people whose culture revolved around
felicitous
numerical associations. Change one kilo of payload, and the entire mission might need to be redesigned.

It was more than Barb’s maneuver that had his stomach in a knot.

He could imagine Lord Brominandi making his speech in the legislature: Let the fool humans risk their necks in a shuttle that had only made four prior flights. Mospheirans suddenly declared they wanted seats, just seats, nothing major in the way of baggage, Shawn had told him, no great additional mass… oh, let the shuttle just carry enough fuel. No great problem. No recalculation at all, oh, no, nothing of the kind.

He was appalled. Infuriated. It was
his
shuttle, dammit, and even the possibility of a glitch-up and the loss of the shuttle turned his blood cold. God, the whole program set at incalculable risk. For what?

And Tabini cleared it to fly?

But the humans in orbit had called their interpreters home, first the one on Mospheira, which hadn’t alarmed anyone on the mainland. It was expected, though early.

And they’d thought nothing of it when, on the next turnaround with the only space shuttle in existence,
this
turnaround, this last flight… they’d sent down a senior staffer from the station to replace, so he and Tabini had assumed, Yolanda Mercheson as the human-to-human paidhi.

But when Shawn so innocently announced that the station had called home the only other human being on the mainland, the only human being he had regular contact with, to go back to the ship that had sent him down… a fait accompli. No negotiation, no request, no concession to protocols or his plans…

That
had been cause for alarm.

And had he only found out about that change in plans when the shuttle had landed and deposited said senior staffer unannounced on mainland soil, he might have been able to address those alarms. Instead, he’d been shipped off to Mospheira, delivering that same senior staffer from the station, one Trent Cope, to Shawn’s
superiors
, and now he had to learn of Jase’s imminent departure from a former colleague who had no idea the bombshell he’d been dropping.

Yolanda recalled to the station. Now Jase leaving without notice…

Now Tabini-aiji cleared a human mission to go into orbit and deal with the situation on the station before Tabini’s own representatives could go aloft?

He was more than appalled. He was furious. And having walked onto the plane with the matter with Barb simmering, an unreasoning fury boiled up in him at the sight of human smiles. The friendly greetings of former junior staffers in the Foreign Office grated on his nerves, and two senior staffers from Science and Commerce whose provenance he more than doubted were just the topping on the affair.

He knew damned well what the thinking on the island was: Mercheson had gone up with what
she
could report after her sojourn on the planet, and now the island government grew nervous about what she
would
report about them… justifiably, counting that certain injudicious fools on Mospheira had started shooting at each other in her witness.

The human government had changed three years ago, dumped out George Barrulin and his cronies, put in Hampton Durant as president… cleaned house, so to speak. Mercheson had fled the island briefly for the atevi-ruled mainland, feeling her life in danger among the human population. When the political dust had settled, then she’d gone back to her job… and as of a month ago was up in orbit spilling all the island’s sins to the Pilots’ Guild.

Which was the reason a shuttle existed: the ship that had brought his ancestors to this planet had left again, lost itself for a couple of centuries and then come back to find the space station mothballed, the labor force become colonists on the planet, and the species that owned the planet more or less in charge, despite the delusions of the island that they were the superior species. The humans on the planet had lost a war, agreed to turn over their technology step by step so as not to disrupt the world economy, and never quite grasped the fact that turning over computer science to the mathematically gifted atevi had let the genie loose. Humans on Mospheira weren’t the most technologically advanced beings on the planet… not any longer.

And that technological transfer, two hundred years of it, was at an end, as regarded Mospheira passing technology to the atevi government in Shejidan. Right now the only humans with anything to teach the atevi were in orbit, the crew of the returning starship… the Pilots’ Guild; and the atevi government had turned its attention in that direction. As a consequence, the paidhi, the human interpreter to the atevi, currently one Bren Cameron, as an officer of the Mospheiran Foreign Office, was out of a job; the paidhiin, Bren Cameron, Yolanda Mercheson and Jase Graham, as officers of the atevi government and the Pilots’ Guild respectively, were the interpreters of the new order of business.

Now the ship, as if oblivious to the highly specialized nature of that post, called back both their experienced paidhiin, sent a new man down who couldn’t keep his meals down, and he…

he shared a plane with an unexpected human delegation, on their way to orbit, on
his
space shuttle.

Shawn Tyers, always trustable, had not quite answered why they scrambled to this sudden order from Mospheira, when he’d asked the blunt question.
People are nervous
, had been Shawn’s answer.
Average people are nervous. They called Mercheson back
.

One could damned well bet they were nervous.

“Mr. Cameron.” Ben Feldman, his own age, courteously rose out of his chair to welcome him with a handshake. “We’ve met.”

He wanted to choke the life out of all of them. But diplomats didn’t have that luxury. He smiled, instead. “Bren, if you will. Ben, Katherine…”

“Kate.” Kate got up, offered a hand, and the portly gray-haired man rose. “Tom Lund.”

And the gray-haired, long-nosed woman: “Ginny Kroger, Science. Dr. Ginny Kroger. Pleased to meet you.”

Virginia
Kroger. Out of Science. He knew that name, put a face with it, one of the old guard. And Tom Lund, from Commerce… that was a department of the government just a little too close to Gaylord Hanks and George Barrulin, whose influence had damned near taken the world to war three years ago. Their brilliant management was
why
Mospheira was renting seats on an atevi shuttle… that and the fact that a few billion years of geologic time hadn’t put titanium, aluminum, iron, and a dozen other needful substances in reach of the islanders, where the current aiji’s predecessors had settled human colonists.

“You’re certainly a surprise,” Bren said. “What prompted this sudden hurry?”

“The aiji,” Lund said as they sat down. “Cleared the visas, like that. No warning. We’ve learned… we were ready, even if we didn’t expect it.”

“What—pardon my bluntness—” He suffered a moment of desperation, seeing a thoroughly unpleasant situation shaping up in what had been the world’s clear course to the future. “What do you expect to get, up there?”

He,
at thirty, was the veteran diplomat. The people he faced, with gray hair in the mix, were utter newcomers to the trade.

No one on Mospheira but him had actually negotiated with a foreign power in two hundred years. The Mospheirans from their origins had not been models of good sense in international relations… and now they were rushing to insert themselves and their lack of expertise between two armed powers which had had a diplomatic contact proceeding fairly well and without incident.

And they were doing it at the very moment that other armed power pulled its diplomats back without explanation.

He kept a pleasant expression on his face, knowing he was rattled by the whole situation. He certainly didn’t intend to blow up the interface, not with people he knew were going to go do their best to double-deal the atevi
and
the Pilots’ Guild. He knew it wasn’t the friendliest question, but he asked it. “Is this a test run, or is there something specific you intend to do up there?”

“I beg your pardon,” Lund said in distress.

“Serious and sober question. I’m worried.
Is
there a reason for rushing up there?”

He saw the flicker of thoughts through various eyes… their remembrance, doubtless, that though they were talking to a human being, and though they were on a first name basis, he didn’t work for the Foreign Office anymore… they were talking, in effect, to the aiji’s representative. The aiji had just cleared them to go, but the aiji could unclear it.

“It’s your government’s decision,” Ginny Kroger said, leaning forward. “We filed the request. We had word last night it was cleared. On your own advice, we cooperate, Mr. Cameron. I believe that is your advice.”

He couldn’t deny that, and he gathered up his self-control, such as still existed. “I don’t deny that.” So it
was
Tabini-aiji’s doing, more than theirs. The ruler of the major civilization in the world had just reacted to the move the Pilots’ Guild had made, serially recalling
their
ambassadors for consultation, in effect, and sent up, not his own people, but a complete wild card… a handful of Mospheiran experts, two from the ivory towers of University and State, and two old hands in island intrigue.

God, he said to himself, uneasy at the possibilities, and belted in.

“Then I understand what he’s doing” he said.

“Do you?” Lund questioned. “That’s ahead of anyone in the State Department.”

“Atevi occasionally grant audacious requests when they’re made… just to observe the outcome, even in serious matters. A roll of the dice, you might say. Watching where they fall.”

He shot a small glance at the two translators, looking for any sign of comprehension, and it troubled him that only one, Feldman, seemed to twig to the suggestion it was a test of human intentions; but maybe Shugart was practicing that other atevi habit: inscrutability.

“You sent a mission request through.” He let the implied accusation enter his voice. “I didn’t get it.”

The reply and confirmation of the mission had almost certainly come out of Mospheira in the Ragi language, translated by some junior functionary, which was against Foreign Office policy, and he knew Sonja Podesta, an old friend, head of the Foreign Office these days, had to have authorized that message… or had it slipped past her.

But past Shawn, her superior in the State Department? Shawn, who had just briefed him?

It was not a pleasant thought that Shawn might deliberately have tried to put one past him, and lied about it face-to-face.