I hereby name Kevin Renner, commodore of the Imperial Space Navy, as executor to my will and confer on him full executive power to execute my wishes and dispose of my property in accordance with my original will as amended by this codicil. This supersedes the appointment of Ibn-Farouk named as executor in the original testament. Kevin, I suggest but do not require that you delegate the detailed implementation of my will, and particularly supervising the bequests of entailed property on Levant, to the law firm of Farouk, Halstead, and Harabi, and I commend to you its senior partner, Ibn-Farouk, as a longtime friend and counselor. I believe you will recall meeting him from time to time.
I confirm the bequest of my house, my lands, and all entailed properties on Ikhwan al-Musliman shall be divided among my blood relatives by the laws of my home planet; except that to my great-nephew Elie Adjami I leave the sum of one crown and what he has stolen from me. It is less than the law would have given him, but the choice was his.
It is my strong recommendation to the Empire that Kevin Renner be appointed the first governor of the Mote system, and it is my belief that the Empire will make that appointment.
Governor or not, I know that Kevin Renner will be ridden by demons if he cannot observe future events in the Mote system. I confess I wish I could be there myself. To aid Kevin Renner in satisfying his compulsive curiosity, I bequeath to him my personal ship known as Sinbad; and since I know he has not stolen any of my money, and certainly has not enough to operate my ship, I leave to him the sum of ten million crowns in cash to be paid after liquidation of assets other than Imperial Autonetics as described in the main body of my will, such to be deducted from the residual properties; and also I leave to Kevin Renner ten thousand and one shares of voting stock in Imperial Autonetics. Kevin, that’s five percent plus one share of the company, and there’s a reason I want you to have it.
The balance of my holdings of Imperial Autonetics, amounting to an additional sixty-five percent of the total voting stock, shall be divided as follows:
To my oldest living grandson, thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine shares. To Omar as representative of the Motie family known as the East India Company, twenty thousand shares. To Victoria as representative of the Motie Family known as the Crimean Tartars, five thousand shares. To the Motie Mediator known as Ali Baba, thirty thousand shares.
The remaining shares are held by partners, banks, business concerns, and other humans scattered through the Empire. If you care to contemplate the possible voting blocks, you will find the combinations interesting. Kevin, Allah has willed that you shall live in interesting times, and I do no more than abet His will.
One final bequest: to Roderick, Lord Blaine, onetime captain of the Imperial cruiser MacArthur, I bequeath the personal sealed files designated with his name. They contain information about agents who have been useful to the Empire of Man, but who may now be dangerous. I know that Lord Blaine will satisfactorily carry the moral obligations of this knowledge.
As for the rest, you will find the details in the cube I have entrusted to Nabil. I have provided generously for those who have served me faithfully. I believe that I have faithfully discharged my duties to Allah, to my compatriots, and to the Empire; and whatever Allah wills for my future, I am content that we have done all that we could do.
Witness my voice and signature, Horace Hussein al-Shamlan Bury, aboard the sip Sinbad, somewhere in the Mote system.
And then Glenda Ruth witnessed.
And then I understood. Doctor Cynthia had not given me to Glenda Ruth. Grampa Horace had altered his will. Grampa Horace had given me to—me.
4
FairServ
The earliest form of nationalism — one that I have called Creole nationalism — arose out of the vast expansion of some of these empires overseas, often, but not always, very far away. Such Creole nationalisms are still very much alive, and one could say are even spreading….A second form of nationalism…official nationalism…arose historically as a reactionary response to popular nationalisms from below, directed against rulers, aristocrats and imperial centres. The most famous example is provided by Imperial Russia, where the Tsars ruled over hundreds of ethnic groups and many religious communities, and in their own circles spoke French—a sign of their civilized difference from their subjects… But as popular nationalisms spread through the empire in the nineteenth century…, the Tsars finally decided they were national Russians after all, and embarked on a fatal policy of russification of their subjects. In the same way, London tried to anglicize Ireland (with substantial success), Imperial Germany tried to germanify its share of Poland…, Imperial France imposed French on Italian-speaking Corsica (partial success) and the Ottoman Empire Turkish on the Arab world (with no success). In every case,…there was a major effort to stretch the short, tight skin of the nation over the vast body of the old empire.
—Benedict Anderson
Hand Glacier Civil Spaceport, Maxroy’s Purchase
What makes a thing worth doing? An unpleasant thing; a thing of minimal import, a thing hardly guaranteed of success? Asach began the trip to New Utah with profoundly mixed feelings as always. Trepidation. Excitement. Ennui. At Hand Glacier Civil spaceport, FairServ's operations had already become nearly routine. The jump point still had not opened, but the True Church’s no-longer-secret spaceport actually had long experience in shuttling dubious personnel to rendezvous with New-Utah-bound small craft in near orbit. On the other hand, FairServ had long experience with working alongside the Empire in getting various non-governmental humanitarian missions into and out of Outie worlds. The single TC ship was on station, under Imperial supervision, loaded with medical supplies, awaiting the imminent opening of the transient Alderson tramline that would provide near-instantaneous connection between systems. So it was a natural that, meanwhile, FairServ would set up what was jokingly referred to as the trudgeline.
Approaching the routine. There was still a funny little pre-check stand outside, with a young clerk and clipboard verifying names. She locked in long and serious negotiation with a missionary manager in sweat-stained suit, his Dutch sibilants excoriating poor communications between the back office and this operations shed. He has paid. No, he has not. Yes he has, and he can prove it. Sir, that is no receipt. It is a receipt, or what should pass for one. No. Yes.
On and on this droned, a bizarre riff on a muzak background hum. Coffee being off the menu, Asach sipped decaf tea and contemplated the meager selection of snack foods: they were a crossroads mix of stale imports from around the Empire. Asach passed on Asian salted fish and plums; contemplated Levantine—were they cheese?—puffs; settled for salty, sun-baked veggie crisps.
They passed the red dwarfs and rock ball with the predictable tedium, but without incident. Asach spent most of the trip semi-comatose, there being absolutely nothing to see but black space and the red suns. Then the yellow one. Then the rock ball. When they fell out of orbit HG threw up. The Librarian blanched. Asach sucked a salt crisp, pinched one wrist, and stared straight down the wing, in a straight line through the center of a corkscrew.
It was a tactical landing, done to hold the craft within the safe airspace of Saint George’s only functioning airfield and minimize susceptibility to ground-based small arms fire—a fact lost on HG, but noted wryly by Asach. The Lynx 3000 wheeled left, in a deft spiral anchored along its left wing tip. Like a gull, a large cheeky seagull, eyeing a tourist’s sandwich and oblivious to its own acrobatic feats, it flashed over ruined tabernacles; water gardens turned turquoise by a bloom of blue-green algae; oblong fields stretching fanwise from the river; heliports; tent cities; graveled lots shimmering white in the summer heat; green slashes of reed cane choking disused canals; bomb craters; tank traps; rows of defunct militarized aircraft, ranks of rusting armored vehicles; passing cross-wise to the runway in a blur of screaming rocket motors that suddenly stopped with a soft pop, leaving the gull to bank, glide and drop deftly onto the taxiway.
Asach stopped
, the first out the door and onto the ground transport pick-up point. Friedlander security stood out a mile, khaki ballistic body armor stuffed slick with Protector Plates riding high on their chests, ‘tooth seeds stuffed into their ears, bleeping invisible signals into a mystery of electronics buried within the sandwich-board protection zone of half-inch-thick hardened Plate.
Designed to flatten any projectile up to and including a high-velocity round fired at point-blank range, Plate was to executive body armor what double-boxed bubble wrap was to a padded mailer. If shot while wearing Plate, a man might well be slammed fore or aft with the full kinetic energy of that explosive slug, heated red by the friction of its passage through the air at Mach whatever, with a force equivalent to being struck full-on by a battering ram. Like as not, the hit might stop his breathing; his ribs might crack; certainly his pleural sac and every internal organ would be bruised by slamming with equal force into the interior of his rib cage first when he was hit, then again when he hit the ground. But the Plate would instantaneously spread the force over its entire surface, and redirect much of the shock laterally, out its edges. With luck and an iron constitution, he’d stand and breathe again.
Rather less protection was provided by their wrap-around shades, raked-backwards caps, and scowls of grim determination. Their desert-weight pants bulged in enough places to suggest entire concealed arsenals, in addition to the bristling array of personal side arms brashly unconcealed in external holsters. They were the very poster children of “personal security,” and as such appeared to confer upon their various besuited charges a confident air of relaxed machismo; of dangerous operations well-in-hand.
They stood out a mile, and that scared the crap out of Asach. They had “target” painted all over them. Asach presumed that anything sufficiently armed and hostile as to require Plate as a defense was likely to view these characters as bountied prey at the peak of hunting season. Asach sidled as far away from them as was possible on the narrow platform. A cleaner slid past, muttering apology. Asach gave him a small tip.
Saint George, New Utah
Harlan’s eyes rested briefly on the odd character at the end of the platform. He could not quite make it out. It belonged—nowhere really. Anywhere. Dutch, maybe. A Dutch trader, maybe. Or a Missionary. But not. All the wrong mannerisms. More—fluid than most Eurasians. There, but not there. Not jutting forward, pulling rank by just being there, the way most Imperials did. But not shrinking back, either. Not embarrassed for living. Nor nervous, for all of the shifting away down the platform. No idle, chatty, over-bright conversation. No shoulder sporting a hefty chip.
Preparation was mostly letting go. Draining. Draining away ambition; draining away desire; draining away intent. Letting go of any thought of who you were or who you had wanted to be. No false imagining of joining first families or making fortunes. No heartfelt sense of failure at what you’d taken for granted as achievement, and harsh reality of achievement unmet. No expectations. Only planning.
Planning was a different thing. Planning meant living in the now. Now you were a set of eyes, and a set of ears. Now you watched, and watched, and listened, and listened. You watched and listened to everything, and planned how to get from the now here, to the now there, without ever once, even for a moment, letting your mind or eyes or ears leave the now that was now—right here, right now.
It was the Zen of city driving; the Zen of city waiting; the Zen of being eyes and ears so that the eyes and ears that you were for could entertain the luxury of that other kind of planning: that kind of planning wrapped up in hope and ambition and aim and desire and maybe a future state and place where auxiliary eyes and ears were no longer necessary.
A cleaner scuttled past with mop and bucket, muttering apology in a language familiar to half the populations of half the transport worlds. Preoccupied with something else, the Dutch character answered in kind, and with an automatic gesture slipped the cleaner a token.
Clegg smirked inwardly at the thought of all the New Scotland aristos dutifully mastering unintelligible Anglic dialects. The actual diasporas had been less romantic than imagined communities transplanted from the Scottish Highlands. They were blithely unaware that their broad-nosed, flat-faced, brown-skinned, curly-headed predecessors were probably transportees sporting startling tattoos, displaced from drowned islands in Earth’s Pacific Ocean, who had never once laid eyes on a haggis—as was obvious to anyone who actually bothered to travel outside the capital and listen to real natives speak.
No, the real story began as so many did. On twenty-first century Earth, while politicians squabbled, sea levels inexorably rose. Rich cities, like Venice, or Dubai, designed barrier gates, or created land where none had ever been. Poor islands slowly drowned. The evacuations began with the entire population of Tuvalu. At first, Australia rejected them. New Zealand finally agreed to resettlement, but only under draconian terms. Then came Vanuatu. Then Carteret. Other drowning residents fled to New Britain—the earth island for which the terraformed planet was named— then fled New Britain for New Ireland (ditto), then fled New Ireland for New Guinea. Or fled Fiji for New Caledonia (ditto again), then New Caledonia for the selfsame fate.
But New Guinea was neither far nor big enough. Polar caps kept melting. Sea levels kept rising. Prime coastal zones were drowned. Farmland disappeared beneath the sea. Marine catches plummeted. In the end, most wound up in Queensland after all, packed into tents and shantytowns, where they joined the greater Southeast Asian labor pool. One month, construction contracts in the Gulf, building indoor ski slopes. The next, vertical towers in Singapore. Never resident, never citizen, rarely managing even to stay on the same work crew for two jobs running.
What were left of Melanesia’s islands survived as breaker-washed ridgelines with no navigable harbors, their people departed, their languages subsumed into the what had started, in the seventeenth century, as a regional trader’s pidgin, and ended up, in the twenty-fifth, as the first language of most “blackbird” kids. Trainloads, shiploads, planeloads of workers, all highly skilled, all classified as “unskilled” by simple virtue of ubiquity and liquidity, washed from shore to shore, the shores of their own islands long gone. So, when the Alderson Drive flared into life, promising release from the tiny prison of the solar system, for these, and for their labor contractors, it was just One More Jump.
Transportees? Only in the sense that they were transported. They worked their way across the stars. They erected gantries. They cleaned the toilets. They installed Wind Collectors. They folded and shrink-wrapped blankets. They blasted mining shafts through asteroids. They mopped up puke by the bucket load after every jump. Every day, they paid their way, until they finally managed to pay their way out of the very real tiny prisons of the labor pools. For some, that took half a millennium.
Thus, the lingua franca of labor contractors sending cheap, skilled work crews from Australian ports became the lingua franca of interstellar mobile service industries catering to hot, sticky, miserable corners of the Empire where people of better means would not even travel without heavily armed escort. Want to really know what’s up in a Tanith (or Makassar, or New Caledonia) hotel? Don’t talk to the manager. Talk to the maids. Talk to the construction workers. Talk to the liveried security guards. Talk to the service contract engineers. Talk to the concierge. Talk to the ticket agent. Talk in the language spoken by anyone descended from those heaved out of drowning refugee camps, and anyone dumped there with them. Talk in Tok Pisin.
The cleaner gave a curt nod. “Tenkyu. Yumipela Kasin. Yumipela pundaun tudak wantaim. Yumipela wanwakaaout arere bilong kantr. Mipela yupela hous pekpek clinim. ” Thank-you. We’re cousins. We once jumped together. We could travel to the frontier together. I could clean your house toilets.
“Narakain, pren. Mipela stap bikples dispela. Lukim yu behain.” Another time, friend. I’m staying in the city this time. See you later.
So, just a regular. Not a threat.
Then two others strode up, o
bviously Imperial Suits. Obviously nervous. The conversation switched to Anglic.
Harlan’s eyes moved on.
“I don’t see why,” whinged HG, who Asach was beginning to think of as His Goonship,” we can’t have real security accompany—”
Asach cut him off. “Because, milord, here on an outworld, real security depends on a lucky combination of flying beneath notice and posing no possible threat whatsoever to anyone. Driving around surrounded by a Friedlander security detail accomplishes neither of those objectives.” And in your case, faint hope of the former in any event, thought Asach. HG might fancy himself the great expert, able to blend in by doffing a workman’s cap or some such nonsense, but despite only average stature, his ego swelled to fill all visible space. Not to mention audible. His every breath was so obviously not Purchase, or New Cal, or anywhere else Trans-Coal Sack it was painfully offensive.
What Asach did not bother to point out, because HG would assuredly turn it into cocktail chatter at the earliest opportunity, was that their little entourage was in fact extremely well-protected. The grinning, leathery, skinny farm boy in the driver’s seat looked exactly like any other local farm boy, precisely because he was one. However, unlike most farm boys, he had a burp gun concealed beneath his feet, and his driver’s side door panels were stuffed with Plate. Riding shotgun, in shades and a buzz cut, armed with, well, a shotgun, was a big dumb lummox clearly more at home taking potshots at dinner. Except that behind his shades, his eyes never stopped moving. The battered old wreck of a transporter bore ancient reg plates, dating well before Maxroy’s Imperial accession. Anywhere they went, frick and frack up front smiled and waved and chatted up the local traffic cops.
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