Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  “I don’t like to think so,” Bren said, “but I’ve no way to deny your thesis.”

  “It could have been done,” Kroger said. “And they didn’t do it. The political pressure for a landing built and built.”

  “The question is” Bren said, “whether the robots weren’t built because they couldn’t work, or whether you’re right. I’d hope there’s a third answer. I really hope there’s a third answer, that we can’t have been that venal.”

  “Both factions had a greater good at issue,” Kroger said. “Both factions thought they were right, that if they gave in on one point, they’d erode all they had. Desperate, suspicious times. Both sides thought they all would die if they didn’t have their way. Robots. Common damned sense, Mr. Cameron!”

  “And a joint company,” Lund said. “Your large-scale engineering, our electronics, our control devices.”

  “I see no difficulty in agreement,” Bren said. “I see no difficulty at all.” His own people had a plan, buried deep within the departments of the government, but, thank God, a plan, and a viable one. He was for the first time in a decade proud to be Mospheiran. “Can you deliver it?”

  Kroger let go a long, shaky breath. “Mr. Cameron, seventeen of us have spent our careers assuring we can deliver it. We know the metallurgy—and damned hard that’s been to develop with all the materials having to be imported from the mainland—but damn, we’ve done it. For the robotics, the specific designs… that was a problem. The records had been lost. We just got those records, Mr. Cameron.”

  “If the archive should have those plans,” Bren began, and Kroger lowered her fist onto the table.

  “The archive does have them, Cameron. It does. I looked. I knew what the files ought to be, where they ought to be. I’ve worked my whole life around that hole in the records, and believe me I know where to look in the archive.”

  Her whole life… was that merely a figure of speech?”

  How long? Bren wondered with a nervous and sudden chill. How long had Kroger been working on this notion? More than three years back threw her into the whole pro-space movement, which had its roots in the Heritage Party, Gaylord Hanks’ party, with all its anti-atevi sentiment.

  But that didn’t mean everyone who’d ever taken that route because it was the only route for pro-spacers was automatically Gaylord Hanks’ soulmate. Their proposal, just voiced, was a pro-space proposal, but it wasn’t anti-atevi. That the Heritage Party might have drawn in the honest and sensible, the dreamers with a willingness to ignore the darker side of their associations… it was possible.

  Kroger, whatever else, was not a fool. She sat enjoying supper in an atevi household and proposing, with Lund, cooperation. Proposing a program that would save atevi lives if the aiji undertook the rough part of the operation. Proposing to better what he’d envisioned and give her benefit to the project.

  “I thought you might be Hanks’ partisan,” he said. “And I don’t think you are. I think you’re an honest negotiator, Ms. Kroger. Dr. Kroger. Mr. Lund, the same. I think this might be entirely viable.”

  Kroger said: “Damn Gaylord Hanks, Mr. Cameron. No few of us damn Gaylord Hanks.”

  “Damn Gaylord Hanks?” Lund said, with a sudden, cheerful smile. Kroger had somewhat neglected her main course in the passion of argument, but Lund had demolished his, looking up sharply now and again, clearly paying attention. “I know Gaylord Hanks. I’ve known him since school days, and now a lot of people know him. The Heritage Party has another wing, I’m glad to say, and Hanks can take a rowboat north for what most of us think.”

  “So I have the Heritage party for guests.” He’d picked up the prior signals of Kroger’s attitudes, the unconscious statements of prejudice; he didn’t see them in evidence at this table, in this room. He took that for a signal, perhaps, of a woman who’d adopted protective coloration, perhaps in a bid for survival.”

  “Certainly not Hanks’ followers,” Kroger said. “Neither one of us. I’m not a dogmatist; I’m a scientist. Tom’s an economist, performs wizardry, odd moments of magic, I don’t know what; but he’s no more a follower of Hanks than I am or you are.”

  “That’s quite good news.”

  “There was quiet cheering inside the party when the invasion bounced off the shores,” Lund said. “That’s not publicized, but, God, that wasn’t a direction we ought to have gone, and no few of us knew it. We didn’t have the means to stop it. There was cheering in some quarters when the ship came back; there isn’t, yet, in others, and in some surprising quarters: some of the pro-spacers don’t want it. They’d wanted to do it themselves, if you want the honest truth; they damned sure didn’t want another Guild dominion.”

  “I know these people,” Bren said quietly.

  “Robotics,” Kroger reiterated. “What we should have done from the beginning, what we couldn’t do then, what we can do now.”

  And from Tom Lund: “You’re not alone, Bren. Not you, not the atevi. Others share your enthusiasm for this new opportunity. Believe that, if nothing else.”

  “I do believe you,” he said. “And I’m very willing to take this to the aiji with a strong recommendation.”

  There was a small silence at the table, a trembling, hope-fraught kind of silence.

  “Well!” Lund said. “Well! Good! But I trust this room is secure. We understand your principals are rather good at that sort of thing.”

  “They are.”

  “Promise Sabin what you have to,” Lund said quietly, “and let’s get our own agreement nailed down, together, present a deal signed and sealed. Then tell the captains.”

  Bren gave a small, conscious smile, thinking to himself that these two were a tolerably good team. Sometimes Kroger seemed in charge, sometimes Lund, and he began to get the feeling that they were accustomed to sandbagging their way to agreements, much as the aiji was.

  But these two were from inside the Heritage establishment, the pro-space wing, perhaps, perhaps some more convolute— association was an atevi word, one with emotional depth, and implicit unity. Coalition of interests seemed more apt, a human way of operating quite similar and quite different from ways atevi would understand.

  “I’ll reserve what we’ve discussed,” he said, “and we’ll continue discussing it. This venue is secure. It’s one reason I encouraged you to come here. I hope you’ll come back.”

  “Every intention to,” Kroger said.

  It was a success, an unqualified success, Bren said to himself. Obstacles were falling down left and right because the situation mandated cooperation and old, old rivalries and attitudes didn’t survive the encounter. It wasn’t his triumph; it was the triumph of basic common sense, after a long night of bad decisions. Three years of diminished power for Gaylord Hanks and Mospheirans had gathered up their wits and brought the likes of Ginny Kroger into striking distance of a patient, lifelong work. The pro-spacers had made their move.

  Thank God, he thought.

  The servants had carried on their business in near-silence, dealing in small signals, whisking courses onto and off the table. Only at the end, Bren signaled Narani to come and meet the guests, whom he introduced in Ragi, with translation, and said, in Mosphei’, “A nod of the head is courteous. One doesn’t rise or take their hands.”

  His guests showed that courtesy; the servant staff lined up and bowed in great delight, and there were smiles all around, that gesture both species, both remote genetic heritages, shared… he’d never so much wondered at it or thought it odd until he saw Bindanda and Kroger smile at each other, both looking entirely self-conscious, each in their own native way… convenient in an upright species to unfocus the hunting gaze, perhaps, this bowing and smiling: hard to glare and smile simultaneously.

  “Very fine,” he said in Ragi. “Thank you, Narani-ji, so very much. Is the staff managing with Kaplan-nadi and with Ben-nadi?”

  “Very well, nandi,” Narani said, sounding pleased with himself; and courtesies wended toward a late drink and a social
moment, which stretched on uncommonly at table. They were short of a sitting room and the lord’s bedchamber seemed less appropriate for foreign guests.

  Narani had put together a supper for Shugart, alone at her post; and that ended up in Feldman’s hands as the guests departed, with Banichi and Tano and Jago there to bid them all a farewell, Kaplan in his array of electronics… he had at least put off the eyepiece to have supper, and had stuffed himself with food and fruit sweets, so Bren discovered.

  “He liked them quite emphatically,” Jago said, “and had eaten far too much to enjoy them, and wished more. So we quite by chance suggested through Ben-nadi that he put some in his pockets.”

  “He was very pleased,” Tano said. “Like Jase, he had never had such strong tastes.”

  “One hopes he is careful,” Bren said.

  Fruits. Vegetables. Jase called them water-tastes and earth-tastes, and said they made his nose water. It hadn’t stopped him making himself sick on them. Tano knew, and he trusted Tano had warned Kaplan before stuffing his pockets full.

  Fruit sweets.

  Kaplan’s first taste. There was one of the likely first imports. Jase had said he would miss the fruit most of all.

  And wouldn’t have to miss it long, if the meeting tomorrow went well, and if they gained agreement with the captains.

  Send and receive produced no messages from Toby. A hello, and I have made up our arguments and everything’s fine would have capped off the evening beyond any fault.

  But that there wasn’t… that was understandable. He’d been too damned much in Toby’s life the last several years; it was more than time to leave Toby to settle his own life, his own marriage… his own kids. He had to keep hands off.

  Meanwhile he had a small flood of messages answering the morning’s mail, answers from the mainland, a note from the office asking on what priority they might be translating the transmission of what was, in effect, the archive, and that was a question that deserved an answer on better information than he had at the moment. He needed to compose a query to the University to see whether they might release what index they compiled.

  Algini, meanwhile, was freed from his isolation, having had supper slipped in to his station. His security needed a briefing, and he provided it, a rapid, Ragi digest of what he had discussed with Kroger and Lund.

  “Computer-operated machines,” he said, but that was too cumbersome. Roboti sounded distressingly like a vulgar word for lunatic, which would never inspire atevi workers to trust them.

  “Botiin.” he said, which sounded like guide or ruler. “Like manufacturing machines, but capable of traveling out to the job, in the very dangerous regions. One sits back in safety and directs them.”

  “Air traffic control,” Banichi said, which summed up a great deal of what atevi thought odd about Mospheiran ways, a system about which there was still fierce debate, regarding individual rights of way and historic precedences, and felicity of numbers.

  He had to laugh, ruefully so, foreseeing a battle on his hands—but one he could win.

  One he would win. “I have a letter to write to Tabini,” he said to his earnest staff. “I want you to help me make it sound better than air traffic control.”

  They thought that was funny, and he went off to his evening shower with that good humor, undressed, preoccupied with the explanation of robots, entered the shower, preoccupied with the query about translation of an index for atevi access to the archive.

  He scrubbed vigorously, happier than he’d been in years.

  He expected a counter-offer tomorrow. He also expected not to get one. Possibly the captains were making an approach to Kroger’s party, and certainly the captains were informed the guests had been putting their heads together in private discussions. There would be anxiousness on that score.

  The water went cold. Bitter, burning cold. Pitch darkness. Silence.

  “Damn!” he shouted, for a moment lost, then galvanized by the sense of emergency. He exited the shower, in the utter dark, feeling his way.

  And saw a faint light, a hand torch, in the hallway.

  Atevi shadows moved out there. One light source came in, bearing a hand torch, spotting him in the light. He flung his arms up and the light diverted, bounced off the walls in more subdued fashion.

  “The power seems to have failed,” Jago said.

  “I’m all over lather,” he said, still shaken. “Things were going entirely too well, I fear. Nadi-ji, please inform the staff. Power here is life and death. I trust the fuel cylinders in the galley will hold a while for warmth, but I understand warmth can go very quickly. Be moderate with them. Gather the staff near the galley.”

  “They should last a time,” Jago said. “So should our equipment.” Bindanda joined her, and moved in dismay to offer a robe.

  He accepted it. “Warm water, if you please.” Outrageous demands were not outrageous if it meant giving the staff something to do, and he was covered in soap. “I’ll finish my bath.”

  “Immediately, nandi.”

  Immediately was not quite possible, and he had all too much time to listen to his staff bearing with the disaster, to attempt the communications panel, and to find it not working.

  Warm water did arrive in reasonably short order, all the same, and Bindanda assisted him in rinsing off the soap, a hand torch posed like a candlestick on the counter.

  “Very fine,” Bren said with chattering teeth, trying not to think of a general power failure.

  A large shadow appeared against the dim glow of the hall. “Bren-ji?”

  Banichi.

  “Any news?” He expected none. “If power has gone down, there will be the ship itself, trusting this isn’t the alien attack.”

  “That would be very bad news,” Banichi said in that vast calm of his.

  But in that moment a sound came from the vents. The fans started up, failed.

  “Well,” Bren said. “They’re trying to fix it. The air is trying to come through.” He seized up the damp, still-soapy robe, with the notion of reaching Cl if there were moments of power, and Bindanda hastily snatched the robe away, substituting a dry coverlet. Bren gathered that about his shoulders and punched in Cl.

  There was no answer.

  “The lock is electronic,” Banichi said, “and we can access it, to the exterior of this section.”

  “We aren’t completely sure there’s air on the other side of the door,” Bren said, wishing they might supply power to the panel; but that did no good if no one was listening. “Do we have radio, Banichi-ji?”

  “We have,” Banichi said confidently. “We would rather not use it.”

  “Understood,” Bren said. “Perfectly.” He was comforted to think that, in extremity, they might have a means to contact the ship or the shuttle itself, hoping for some word of what was going on outside their section.

  The lights came on. Fans resumed moving air.

  He and Banichi looked at one another with all manner of speculations; and he heaved a great sigh.

  “Well,” he said to Banichi, “presumably it will go on working. Conserve, until we know what’s happening.”

  “One will do so,” Banichi said. “In the meantime… we’ll attempt to learn.”

  “Wait,” he said, and tried Cl again. “Cl. What’s going on? Do you hear me?”

  “The emergency is over,” Cl answered, not the main shift man, but a woman’s voice. “There’s no need for alarm.”

  “Does that happen often, Cl? What did happen?”

  “I believe a technical crew is attempting to rectify the problem, sir. It’s a minor difficulty. Out, sir.”

  Cl punched out. Cl might have other problems on her hands. God knew what problems.

  “It’s not an alien invasion,” he said to Banichi. “The central communications officer claims not to know the cause.”

  Banichi might have understood that much.

  “One wonders how general it was,” Banichi said. Jago had appeared, and there was some uncommon c
alling back and forth among the staff, confirming switches, in the hall.

  “I’ve no idea,” Bren said. “Cl certainly knew about it.”

  “One should rest, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “One of us is always on watch.”

  He had no doubt. And he had no doubt of the rightness of the advice, no matter what was going on technically with the station.

  There was not another alarm in the nighttime.

  In the morning he was not utterly surprised to hear Cl say that Sabin had canceled their scheduled meeting; he was not utterly surprised to hear that there were no communications with Mogari-nai. The earthlink was down. Neither ship nor station was communicating with anyone.

  “Is there still an emergency?” he asked. “Is the station intact?”

  “Perfectly intact, sir,” Cl answered, the regular, daytime Cl, which reassured him. “Sorry. I don’t have the details. I have to shut down now.”

  Disappointing, to say the least. He went to report the situation to his staff, that the day’s schedule had changed.

  “I don’t know why,” he said to the staff. “We felt no impact, as if there were explosion, or a piece of debris, but I don’t know that we might, on so large a structure. I’ll work in, today. Simply do what needs doing.”

  It was a slow day, in some regards, a frustrating, worrisome day, but power at least stayed rock-steady.

  He made notes on the discussion with Kroger. He answered letters. He wrote letters… restrained himself from writing to Toby, and asked himself whether the link was going to be in operation.

  There was a quiet supper. He had pronounced himself not particularly hungry, and perhaps a little overindulged from the day prior. “I get very little exercise here,” he said to Narani, “I don’t walk enough. Satisfy the staff, certainly. But I have no need for more than a bowl of soup.”

  He was primarily concerned, after his day’s work, to have the earthlink function smoothly, and it seemed to.

  But the messages were all from the mainland.

  “Put me through to Jase Graham,” he said, the ritual he and Cl had established.