CHAPTER EIGHT
When An-Tine entered I was hardly surprised. Now there would be no artful fencing; he would dictate terms, and we would agree. If the ship had figured out where we were, or maybe if we knew what the treasure was, the roles might be reversed, but for now we were not in charge. As unpleasant as I’d found him before, he now set new standards for oiliness.
“Mr. Ambassador! You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand?”
Ranak allowed himself a small, satisfied smile and tossed me some very thick-looking socks. “Mr. Jedub has been quite forthcoming with information, Mr. Daskal. He hopes to put himself in our good graces by confessing all your sins. If you know anything of our background then you’ll understand the implications of his being in a cell while you two are here. By the way, your other confederate, Mr. Lordano --wherever has he gotten to?”
“We don’t know. We left him here to sniff around and fill us in when we got back from our trip” I was gingerly putting on my sole-saving socks.
“Hmm. Nothing that can’t be dealt with, I suppose. In the meantime, let us, you and I, put our cards on the table.
“We believe you can still fulfill a valuable function for us. At present nobody knows of your, shall we call it a defrocking? Thus, there is no reason for you not to continue with your tour of our planet, in the style to which you are becoming accustomed, provided you agree to work with us. However, there are a few things I must make deadly, seriously clear.
“You are to promote the interests of the Planetary Union as if they are the same as those of the Empire. As part of that, you shall work to isolate Caliuga City, and use that isolation to bring whatever pressure you can to bring them into the P. U. Fair enough?”
W and I exchanged looks – he shrugged. “Sure.”
“What condition is your ship in?”
“Okay. I landed her okay, past the mountains beyond Caliuga City. She looks to have some scorchmarks from when we were chased, but she’s sound enough.”
An-Tine nodded. “All the other ships that landed on Caliuga were ferries and liners, and unsuited to the stresses of planetfall, and can therefore never leave Caliuga. Only ours was built with the power and strength to survive entering and leaving the gravity well of a planet such as Caliuga, and ours was damaged before the jump by an Imperial patrol. Am I right in thinking that your ship, like ours, has a very favorable power-to-mass ratio, consistent with a ship used to transport very valuable and compact cargo at high speeds, and able to outmaneuver almost any Empire craft?”
What a roundabout way to describe a smuggler, I thought. I thought we were laying cards on the table – still, if he wanted to describe my ship that way, he could – it was accurate enough. “Yeah, you’re right. Before we landed I did the calcs and figured we could take off again, barely. But not much point to that if we don’t know where we are, which way to head.”
He nodded. “Naturally, when you appeared and acted out your charade the prudent assumption was that your arrival and reception were not by accident, and that you already knew your co-ordinates and had your exit strategy in place. But that was in error, was it not?”
I hate that kind of question; not only was he trying to pin me down, but the question had a negative in it. “Yes it was – not. I mean, no, it wasn’t wrong, it was right, we didn’t know. Okay?”
“And, am I right in thinking you set your ship’s computer trying to hash out the problem, and it’s supposed to radio you when it has deduced its co-ordinates, but it hasn’t yet, perhaps because of the intervening mountains, and perhaps because it doesn’t know?”
With arrests and torture and all, W and I had forgotten that we were probably bugged. Well, we could now skip the ‘probably’ part of that. My eyes went up left while I tried to remember all the parts of An-Tine’s question. “Yes, yes, yes. Oh, and yes. Almost missed one there, and it might have been the most important one. And, if you’re needing another ‘yes,’ you can have it, no charge. I’m feeling pretty agreeable right now.”
That threw An-Tine was off-stride for a moment, then he was back at it. “Why don’t you simply tell us where the ship is, and we’ll retrieve whatever information it has?”
“Can’t say I care for that idea, Ambassador. I’m not that agreeable, or stupid. See, if I tell you that, then you don’t need us any more. No, if it’s alright with you, I’ll go along to make sure the ship is secured, and the information in our hands too.”
“That’s fine, but I don’t understand how that protects you. Surely you understand we can get the information ourselves, too, even if we have to extract it from you. Jedub is proving most cooperative. I believe you can be convinced to cooperate, too.”
“Truth be told, I’m not thinking that clearly right now, but this seems a safer course than placing our fates entirely in your hands. And Jedub can’t get into the ship without me. No offense intended to your skills of persuasion.”
“None taken. I understand and appreciate your caution, and for now agree to your conditions. Take to heart, though, the usual warnings about trying anything funny while touring or dire consequences will ensue, alright?”
I nodded, and saw W was nodding too.
“All right then, I shall see about your tour, and a de-tour to your ship.” He smiled at his play on words. I was disliking him more all the time, and was glad when he was about to leave, but I had a thought. “Excuse me, Ambassador. From what you said I guess you also had a smuggler craft. How, then, did you come to have speeders and weapons and what-all, all the big gear you arrived with?”
He looked at me, raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “No harm in telling you now, as we’re on the same side, as it were. When we jumped, we were being pursued by an Empire squadron. Seems the supply ship we’d taken was bait, and they were lying in wait. Perhaps with abated breath. We still were attached to the cargo ship when we jumped, and so arrived on Caliuga comparatively wealthy and powerful.”
“You jumped while attached to another ship?” I asked, incredulous.
He shrugged. “I know, I understand it’s supposed to be suicide, but we didn’t have time to get clear, so rather than waiting to jettison the cargo ship and get proper spacing, we included her in our integrity field and jumped together as one mass. And somehow we all made it through.”
I couldn’t deny they’d survived, although everything I knew of the tidal forces involved in jumping said they shouldn’t have. “Maybe it was our clean living that guaranteed our survival. As it has guaranteed yours, thus far at least, it seems,” he grinned. Then, smirking slightly, he departed.
We sat quietly for a while, then I breathed a “Well,” nodded to W, and crawled to my bed. Clearly, our adventure was entering a new phase, and I had to be ready for it. Yoga, as well as I could manage it, meditation, no zoocaine, no sex. I won’t say that sloppiness was what done us in – it was pure dumb luck, although karmically I have to wonder just how pure, and how dumb – but I had to wonder if somehow, somewhere, I’d missed something. A happy thought intruded; I didn’t think sore feet would make sex impossible. Maybe I’d have socks appeal.
After a few hours alone I gingerly went out on the verandah again. My mind was clear, and I saw things as for the first time, and remembered things I’d noticed before.
We take much for granted in our Empire. For generations our buildings have been without real seams or joints, and without routine repairs. Invisibly and tirelessly, nanobots have been building, repairing, and remodeling the places where we live and work and play. We’ve become accustomed to rounded edges, beveled corners, and integral organic pathways for water, sewage, ventilation, and whatever lighting and com lines still require ‘wiring.’ Moreover, if we need or want to change something, we program the ‘bots and soon enough it’s done, without demolition and dust and such.
The original Caliugans had been part of a convoy of ‘back-to-basics’ fundamentalists, so they’d been set up to farm their own lands with livestock, which they could and would slaughter and eat also. This
is all entertaining and informative when you go to visit one of those historical villages, but these people chose to live like this, all the time, without going home afterwards.
Just as they had farmed, they had felled trees, baked bricks and concrete and smelted metals and melted sand and clay so they could build things, and nobody who’d arrived since had been set up to use ‘bots to build, so as I looked out at Solip City it was to me an exotic view into an alternate past. Instead of the organic hive-look of typical Empire civilization, Solip City was rectilinear and made of discrete components, and for all their pride in their accomplishments, the citijects of S C were building what looked like a giant historical village, from, say, our tenth century. The efforts to do all this from essentially scratch boggled my mind. These people were determined. To have electricity, for instance, they’d had to mine, smelt, refine, manufacture and install an entire system of generators and wires and transformers. And to me it was all obsolete, museum stuff. Bewildering, sad, and impressive, re-creating long-abandoned technologies in the cause of a different kind of progress. What did all this get me, all this insight? Nothing useful, at least not that I could see just then.
The sun was lowering when Wanliet joined me. Silently we watched the light catch the angles and edges, flowing, shifting and changing, shining and shading, easing our eyes in the darkling twilight. Dusky shadows softened the cityscape, and I was reminded that no matter how exotic the situation, it was still full of people, their purposes hidden, their agendas secret, but yet not wholly foreign and unknowable. Somehow we would survive.