He did not, Alex realised, know about Andrei Delaney. He was not, in corporate parlance, Shareholder Aware. As far as he was concerned, Acko was a business corporation owned by thousands of shareholders and run by its executive board. If he’d been told that it was effectively owned by just one majority shareholder who directed its board behind the scenes, he would have dismissed that as paranoid conspiracy theory.
This was, though, effectively what happened. Though neither Andrei Delaney himself nor his representatives appeared directly at boardroom level, the fact that he could declare a shareholder’s vote of no confidence in the boardroom at any time gave him absolute control. A request from the Shareholder that they invest funding in this or that project, therefore, carried the weight of command.
‘Acko was asked,’ Alex said carefully, ‘to investigate ways in which the ecosystem here could be diversified into being more pleasing for quarian visitors.’
The Director snorted. ‘So they say,’ he said. ‘But we are in charge of environmental development here and we are certainly not going to allow them to slap random fish and birds into very carefully structured ecosystems. And as for monkeys – monkeys, I ask you!’
‘I understood,’ said Alex, ‘that the monkeys have been selected and adapted specifically for this environment.’
He was better informed on that topic, by then. One of Nyge’s tasks had been to prepare a briefing for him which Alex had read through that morning in the shower. So he had essential facts and key points, and knew rather more about the Angelus Monkey than he had the previous day.
The Director launched at once into a vehement statement of all the reasons mammals had not yet been introduced into the Serenity ecosystem and why throwing in a highly evolved species such as monkeys into what was essentially a primordial environment was scientifically inappropriate, potentially disastrous and anyway just wrong.
‘That is not how we do things in the EEDU,’ he said, and drew himself up impressively, ‘And before I let that happen on my watch, I would have no choice, if such an outrage was to be forced upon us, than to tender my resignation. And,’ he added, as if this was not sufficiently an Awful Threat, ‘many of my colleagues would do the same.’
He evidently envisaged a spectacular walking out of all, or at least most of, the EEDU scientists.
Alex felt quite sorry for him, really. The man was as passionate and dedicated to his own service as Alex was to his. It was his life’s work, too, patiently constructing the extraordinarily delicate, complex web of a developing ecosystem. He was an insect man, too, which went a long way to explaining his dismissive attitude to birds. His own contribution, a predatory dragonfly, had taken more than a decade to perfect before it was released. One of the aspects of this which he had not mentioned was that the monkeys would eat insects. They would eat, indeed, the dragonflies, and it would be a matter of evolutionary competition as to whether the dragonflies survived that predation in the long term. To see his life’s work being eaten and perhaps ultimately rendered extinct by some amateurs slapping monkeys into the ecosystem was more than the Director could bear. Alex could understand and even sympathise with that. But he had been paying attention during the tour, and had a fair assessment of how many of the senior and grassroots people were genuinely supportive of their Director. Inter-divisional tensions had been obvious. At least one of the divisional heads was gunning for the Director’s job and would be in that seat before it had even cooled down. If the Director imagined that he would have mass support through protest resignations, he was in for a shock.
‘I think, perhaps,’ said Alex, as gently as he could while formal manners kept him so stone-faced, ‘that you should consider hanging up your portrait.’
There was silence. The Director had mentioned during the tour that by tradition, the final act of a departing Director was to hang their own portrait in the hall of fame. The silence went on for a long time, during which the Director seemed as frozen as if he too had been put into stasis.
‘Are you…’ he managed eventually, ‘firing me?’
‘Me? No. I don’t have that authority,’ said Alex. ‘But I have to tell you that the monkeys will be introduced. Ambassador Silver, on behalf of her people, has asked for them. I, as League Ambassador to Quarus, am informing you that your Unit is required to cooperate fully with the Acko biology team to introduce the fish, birds and monkeys into the environment here. If you find yourself unable to give that endeavour the full, committed support it requires, then I believe you are doing the right thing in tendering your resignation. But you should discuss that, of course, with the campus faculty.’
There was no chancellor or dean here, but there was a faculty structure, effectively a council which ran the facility. It would be to them, initially, that the Director would hand his resignation, and it would be they who appointed an interim replacement. Whoever they appointed was quite likely to keep the job, too, as the various universities sending teams here found it easier to accept on-campus faculty decisions than to argue about it across several worlds.
They left the Director speechless and shaken, and Alex walked over to the Embassy. The morning earthquake rumbled across the landscape as they made their way over the plaza, causing Nyge to stop dead in his tracks.
‘My God!’ he exclaimed, as the subterranean roar passed beneath and the trees around the base shivered, huge flocks of birds whirling and calling in the sky above.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ said Alex, with an appreciative grin at the thunderstruck cadet.
‘Yeah!’ Nyge breathed, and then remembered who he was talking to. ‘I mean – sir, yes sir!’ They had studied gravitational dynamics at the Academy, so Nyge understood about lunar and solar tides, but he was puzzled. ‘But why now?’ he wondered aloud, gazing around as if the landscape might offer some solution. ‘Surely the tidal bulge is at maximum at noon, not dawn?’
‘Indeed,’ Alex gave him an approving look both for his curiosity and for his confidence in asking questions. ‘Dawn and sunset are solar tide minimums. But that, you see, is the point. Serenity’s crust is fractured into more than half a million plates which rise and fall with the tide. Vertical movement is actually quite smooth, inter-plate faults worn smooth over millennia and lubricated by quantities of rock dust, too. At dawn and sunset, though, the solar tug is directly sideways, which causes plates to squeeze horizontally, creating a ripple effect.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Nyge was fascinated, and delighted, too, that the skipper would take the time to explain something to him rather than merely telling him to find out about it for himself. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘All right…’ Alex smiled and resumed walking, so Nyge hastily kept pace with him. ‘I’ll be in a meeting here for about half an hour,’ he indicated the Embassy. ‘New task.’ He gestured at Nyge’s noteboard. ‘Keep count,’ he instructed, ‘of how many people address me as ‘Your Excellency.’
Just over half an hour later, as they left the embassy, Nyge reported, ‘Forty seven, sir.’
‘Ah.’ Alex looked pleased. ‘Buzz is still winning,’ he observed, and as Nyge gave him a bewildered look, ‘Ms Bonatti and Mr Burroughs have a small wager on the matter. Since the Ambassador here has been requested to ask the Embassy staff not to call me ‘Your Excellency’, Ms Bonatti is of the view that they won’t. Mr Burroughs, though, is of the view that organisational inertia trumps a request to behave in a way that they consider to be less than fully respectful, and Mr Burroughs, clearly, is right. A word of advice, Mr Tomaas. Do not ever bet against Mr Burroughs on a socio-psychology issue.’
‘I won’t, sir,’ Nyge promised, so earnestly that Alex grinned.
‘All right.’ They were heading back towards the spaceport, where the shuttle was parked. ‘I’m going over to the aqua dome, now,’ Alex told him. ‘You can pilot.’
It was the most routine of flights – just a few thousand klicks at mid-altitude in a sky with no other traffic as soon as you’d cleared the spaceport area. It was the k
ind of air-car flight, in fact, which Alex would normally leave to autopilot. For Nyge, though, piloting the shuttle at all was a thrill, and to be allowed to pilot it here was amazing, flying over land and sea so very different from any environment he’d experienced before. He was a city boy, was Nyge, and the huge uninhabited green of Serenity was like an alien world. Which this was, now, technically, since it belonged to a non-human race.
‘Thank you,’ Alex said, as Nyge brought the shuttle down to a slightly tentative landing on the floating platform above Silvie’s dome. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said, ‘so you can head back to the ship or wait for me here.’
Nyge blanched, not at the thought of piloting the shuttle back to the ship by himself, which he was qualified for and would love, but at the suggestion of leaving the captain. He had been taken aside by Mr Burroughs, over and above the instructions he’d been given as to the nature of his duties when accompanying the captain groundside. The captain, Mr Burroughs had said, was not normally allowed to go groundside without a security escort. That had been waived here as the base had been security-assessed as safe for him to go about unescorted, but even so, Mr Burroughs said, they felt happier knowing that there was somebody with him. He wasn’t to guard the skipper, as such, but was to keep an eye for any potential trouble and run interference if people were harassing him. Nyge did not want to think what Mr Burroughs would say if he went back and said he’d left the captain here by himself.
‘Oh – I’ll wait, sir,’ he said, and Alex, who knew very well that Buzz was playing a snotty-wind-up on the cadet, besides pulling his own leg by inflicting a shotgun on him, just said ‘Fine,’ and left him to it.
He had to wait for a couple of minutes at the pontoon. There was a small sub there which he could have used to get down to the dome, but Silvie had said she would pick him up and take him for a drive in her aqua car, so he waited. He got in without hesitation, too, when the car bobbed up and the door opened, though Silvie was laughing as he slid into the passenger seat.
‘You’re not going for dental surgery,’ she pointed out, justifiably since Alex was feeling just that kind of apprehension. ‘Trust me!’ She whipped the car under the water and flashed him a grin. ‘It’ll be fun.’
It was, if your notions of fun included white-knuckle rides. Alex’s did not, generally – he found such things as rollercoasters a poor substitute for the real thrill of a superlight launch. Silvie’s driving, though, was a genuine white-knuckle experience and as he settled into it Alex began to enjoy himself.
‘Yaaay!’ he exclaimed, laughing, as Silvie leapt them high out of the water and span them before going back in with a tail first high-splash entry.
‘Knew you’d like it.’ Silvie still did not quite understand the human enjoyment of pumping adrenaline, but she recognised that Alex was having a blast, there. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘how did it go at the terraforming place?’
Alex looked across at her as the car went supersonic, and she grinned. Silvie herself did not find either the speed or manoeuvres exciting in the same way humans did; she had virtually no capacity for adrenaline production and in many regards really was fearless, physically incapable of fear as humans understood it. What Silvie took pleasure in was the sense of freedom and agility, the grace of high speed movement. Going supersonic underwater felt great – the clouds of bubbles being generated at the nose created an almost frictionless glide, and the sonic shockwave rippled out behind them like a fan-tail. Seeing that Alex would not be able to concentrate if they were still hurtling about like that, though, she dropped the speed and set them to cruising sedately on a gradual descent.
‘You were right,’ Alex said. ‘I didn’t like it there either. Nothing I could say was really wrong, just a lot of little things that weren’t quite right.’
‘Ah.’ Silvie was gratified. ‘I wasn’t sure,’ she admitted. ‘I got so upset at seeing the birds treated like that – just as if they were plankton – and I thought perhaps it was a Wall thing.’
Alex understood. The Wall was what the Diplomatic Corps called an issue which could not be surmounted by any amount of explanation or even goodwill, a fundamental lack of understanding between profoundly different psychologies. In this case, the difference in how quarians regarded fauna. To them, there were basically two classes of animal – those which were empathically responsive and those which were not. Those which weren’t, like plankton or corals, were regarded in just the same way as plants and quarians had no qualms whatsoever about eating them. Those which were empathically responsive, though, were treated as a higher form of life altogether, to be treated with care and respect not just for their physical wellbeing but for their feelings. Eating a creature which had emotional awareness was as abhorrent to quarians as it would have been for humans to sit down to a meal of roast puppy with baked kitten for afters.
‘Well, even if it was,’ Alex pointed out, ‘this is your world now, your rules, remember?’
‘Yes, I know, but I don’t want to be some kind of tyrant queen,’ Silvie said. ‘I’m me now, not Oceanica. And I’m sensitive to human feelings, too – your people live here, your people made this place what it is, and I don’t want to ride roughshod over how they feel. But you didn’t like it, either, the way they treat the birds?’
‘I didn’t, really, no,’ Alex said. ‘Logically, practically, I know that there is nothing wrong about it, the birds are not being harmed and all the welfare rules are being followed. It’s just that I had a wholly illogical emotional reaction to it, seeing them being handled like they were just things, robosims, not living creatures. Yet I didn’t feel at all the same way about the insects, or for that matter the sea-life.’
‘No, the fish here are dumb,’ Silvie agreed. ‘Emotionally void. Jellies don’t feel scared or angry or affectionate. Birds do. Many of the species here pair-bond for life, which is very high order as far as we are concerned, emotional sentience, the kind of species we regard as companions – pets, I suppose, in your terms, though we don’t keep them at home. The fact that they bond with one another means that they can bond with us, recognise us, like us, interact with us the way domestic pets do on your worlds.’
She had told him that before, and Alex nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And many of our own people would have just the same instinctive emotional reaction to seeing birds being treated like that, because we see them as more important than insects, too, even if we wouldn’t put in in quite the same terms. Bigger animals, especially furry ones, get a far more emotional response from us than bugs or fish. I think perhaps that scientists who work in that kind of lab become accustomed to seeing the specimens as things and get quite defensive when outsiders do the ‘aww, poor little birdies!’ reaction at them. That’s the impression I got, anyway. But even more importantly, it was clear that the current Director of the EEDU is not prepared to cooperate with the kind of environmental enrichment you want here. I think it quite likely that he will resign.’
Silvie picked up on the fact that this was not a strictly accurate statement.
‘You mean you fired him?’
‘Me? No.’ Alex said, and then as she gave him a speaking look, ‘Well, yes. Though not officially, I don’t have the authority to just stride into his office and tell him, ‘You’re fired!’ And in fact, he was the one who said he would resign if the monkeys were brought in – all I did was say that I considered he’d be making the right decision, there. And yes, okay, I had a word at the Embassy expressing some concern about the diplomatic issues if the EEDU is not fully on board with the wishes of the new owners, and they will be discussing that with the campus faculty, for sure, so basically yes he is fired but there will be some face-saving agreement.’
‘That’s good,’ Silvie said. ‘The face-saving thing. That’s what’s so confusing, really, because the Director is doing these nasty things to the birds but really isn’t a nasty person at all – not very bright emotionally and a bit of a grump but basically a good person. It’s ver
y much easier to understand when someone doing bad stuff is a stinky toad.’
‘Well, we all like things simple,’ Alex said philosophically. ‘Good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. But I believe it will be sorted out, Silvie, and the new management at the EEDU will do things as you want them to be done.’
‘Thanks,’ Silvie said. ‘And do you think it’s okay? About the monkeys? Only it seems to have upset people and you keep laughing about it so is there a problem about it, skipper?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Alex laughed again at that. ‘I’m no kind of expert on developmental ecology – you know more about that, for sure, than I ever will. I can tell you that it’s only the Director at the EEDU and a very few other people there who are upset by the monkeys, which I believe is more of an issue about their territorial rights here than anything to do with the monkeys per se. As for me, well, yes, I do laugh, but it’s an in-joke, one of those things where you really had to be there and in the moment to see the humour, and by the time I’d explained it it wouldn’t be funny at all, so you still wouldn’t get it. It was just the statement, perfectly pitched and perfectly timed, at a point where I was already nearly hysterical with things I hadn’t been able to laugh at, of ‘he brought monkeys’, which just finished me off…’ he was chuckling even as he said it, ‘so now every time the monkeys are mentioned it’s just…’
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