Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘As I said,’ said Alex, ‘you ought to be able to work it out for yourself. And if you believe that it may assist to enlighten the relevant authorities as to the genuine nature of location phobia and the correct, calm and supportive response to it, your help in that matter would be appreciated.’

  ‘Well, I can’t honestly promise that I can prevent spaceport security pouncing on him everywhere he goes,’ Lyn said. ‘But I will certainly do my best.’

  Alex thanked her and she went away, clearly relieved – he’d given her a tough workout but this pawn, at least, was not going to have to be sacrificed.

  All the same, Alex was left with a sour taste. He had believed that they had a very strong relationship with the Diplomatic Corps in general and an excellent working relationship with the Embassy here. And yet, at the first hint of something they didn’t quite understand, they’d launched a pawn-sacrifice intervention at him.

  There was tension, too, as the end of the week approached and they waited for three arrivals. One was a ship due in from Therik, one a courier from Chartsey and one the mission which had been withdrawn, at Silvie’s request, from Quarus.

  All three arrived as expected. The Therik ship appeared fifteen hours before its ETA, in fact, as if the combined urgency of its passengers had pushed it along faster than its normal cruising speed.

  It was, of all things, a media ship – technically a Diplomatic Corps vessel but effectively given over to the media who were now packing out all available quarters on board. There were nearly two hundred of them, the most that the relatively small ship could contain even in conditions of some discomfort. No staterooms there, not even private cabins – they had settled for bunks and crammed in their equipment anywhere it would fit.

  The sight of a ship stuffed to the airlocks with journalists and cameras at an active X-Base was not something that happened often – they had media crews here occasionally, filming either the university or Excorps, but they were small, feature-crews, not news journalists. Everyone was jittery about it, not just the Fourth. There were last minute meetings in all agencies, reminding people of the guidelines which had been issued for interaction with the journos, and security became a highly visible presence at the spaceport and around the base.

  Alex, however, was more interested in the news they brought with them than the news they were here to get. They had had word from Therik on their arrival of how the interview with Ungeline Beeby had been received in the first couple of days. As expected, the reaction had been mostly one of disbelief. Now, though, they would have the full picture over the three-week curve the story had been planned for. The fact that the media ship was here at all indicated that the first five days had gone as hoped, but the media themselves had been using high speed couriers to keep in touch with events at Therik, so they had, by now, the all-important reaction curve.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ said Buzz, as Alex put the curve on the command deck table for everyone to see. It was a match, an exact match, with the prediction.

  This was the analysis of public response to the disclosure that Quarus was a real place and that the Fourth was going there – a wavering line on a 3D graph. One of the horizontal axes represented belief about the disclosure, with positive and negative scales. The axis which crossed it at right angles represented levels of confidence, also with a positive scale indicating interest and a negative one indicating fear. An indicator that someone did not believe the news but who nevertheless considered that it would be frightening if it was true would therefore be marked in the ‘negative negative’ section. The vertical axis indicated level of exposure, the amount of information which had been released to the public. The line plotted, therefore, rose with time, indicating sharp peaks of major disclosures and plateaus where no new information had been released, with the potential for plummeting dives, too, if a decision was made to denounce released information as a mistake or a hoax.

  There were no plummeting dives. The line scrambled chaotically over the first few days and was almost all in the ‘we don’t believe a word of it’ section, but then, coincident with a major spike of information-given, it lurched into the belief scale, ducked briefly into fear and then started to climb into ‘we believe it and we’re interested’. It wasn’t a straight line, far from it, and there was a significant dive back over into ‘we’re scared!’ at the point where it had been confirmed that quarians practiced genetic engineering, but a further boost of information had brought it back into the positive zone.

  It was a global overview line, a highly condensed glance of a hugely complex situation. It did not show the fanatics at either end of the scale who were either standing on street corners ranting that the end was nigh or making posters declaring that they wanted the quarians to come and save their world. It did not show the political complexities, the enormous effort in inter-agency cooperation, the red-eyed exhaustion in the global crisis response authority. What it did show, though, was the big picture, and more importantly, that the predictions of the people responsible for this disclosure had been absolutely bang on right.

  ‘If they’re as accurate on all our worlds…’ Alex said, and let that hang unfinished because, anti-superstition though he was, he didn’t want to tempt fate.

  ‘Amazing,’ Bonny said, gazing at the graph with the awe it merited, given what a tremendous event it described. It showed the people of Therik moving from a position of virtual ignorance about the existence of Quarus, a firm majority who disbelieved in it as no more than an old hoax, and marked fear of ‘unknown aliens’. From this unpromising position they had moved, in just three weeks, to a position of informed, confident knowledge. ‘Genius,’ Bonny said, and Alex knew that she was referring to the individual who’d made the extraordinary suggestion that it might be possible to go forward with public disclosure about Quarus, with careful management, if the initial disclosure was made by a child.

  And that was genius. It was, analysis of previous global panics had shown, the initial shock which triggered global stop events – the presidential statement, typically, which hit people like a thunderbolt and sent them into ‘guard or retreat’ modes, either scrambling to stock up supplies and keeping their families home in a kind of siege mentality or fleeing the cities.

  Information provided by a twelve year old, though, had a completely different dynamic. Hardly anyone would be alarmed by something they were told by a kid – baffled, incredulous, amused, even, but hardly alarmed. By the time the president made the official announcement, people had had time to process the news already; what the president said was a confirmation, not a revelation.

  So, Ungeline Beeby and her interview with Alex. The fact that it was Alex von Strada would carry a high quotient of initial disbelief, too, which would also help to cushion the shock. Only as a trickle of official-source information was released by the media would people slowly realise that the interview wasn’t a wind up, and by then, their reaction would be more one of indignation at that so-and-so von Strada than trauma at their world-view being rocked.

  All across the League, every world was standing by to get the Beeby interview. Even if by some weird means the media got the news before the courier racing the Beeby Disclosure reached that world, there would be no broadcast about it. This was phased, managed disclosure, with the Beeby broadcast going out first and everything that happened after that being managed in the light of public response. Ungeline Beeby, aged twelve, was not only breaking the biggest story of the century but was also helping trillions of people to cope with that news. The individual who’d come up with that idea – formerly a Media Attaché but now a Presidential Aide – would be the next chief of the Diplomatic Corps.

  For Alex and the Fourth, though, all that mattered was that the Beeby Disclosure had worked. It had worked on Therik, at least, and provided everyone involved on every world did their part – which was a big proviso – then it ought to work everywhere.

  The big one, though, the one that really mattered, was Chartsey. The capital wo
rld also had the biggest system population in the League. If they freaked out the human and economic impact would be catastrophic. And they were, for all their cosmopolitan culture, rather more inclined to panic than on other worlds. They were entirely dependent on other worlds and on the continuous arrival of ships bringing them their food. Every Chartseyan knew that there was often no more than a two month supply of food in their system and that if the ships stopped coming, it would be only a matter of weeks before people began to starve. The first thing they would consider in any potential threat from outside would be whether they themselves had enough food in storage. Finding that food delivery systems were already fully booked and that certain goods were already being limited to a set number per customer, they would surge to convenience outlets. Footage of people fighting over the last few items in stock would hit the news, and the panic would spread like domino fireworks. If there was any sign of that happening, the authorities would have to back-track with the old ‘hoax’ routine and word would go out to other worlds to put their disclosures on hold. The old saying ‘As goes Chartsey, so goes the League’ was trite, but true.

  ‘Well, we’ll have to see how the initial disclosure was received at Chartsey,’ Alex observed. ‘But it is a promising start.’

  The courier from Chartsey brought encouraging news from the capital, too. The Chartseyans had started, as a population, in a rather more informed position with regard to the presence of aliens, since almost any Chartseyan would tell you that there were aliens not-so-secretly visiting the capital. Most people knew, even, that the authorities shut down places like museums and galleries for them to visit. It was in the realm of urban belief rather than confirmed knowledge, but it still gave them a higher entry point in the Big Picture scale than Therik, or most other worlds.

  Correspondingly, though, they had a significantly bigger lurch into fear in their reaction to the Beeby Disclosure – partly because they were sensitive to the dangers of being so completely dependent on shipping from other worlds and partly because they were more inclined to believe the disclosure straight off. There was a rather alarming dive into ‘we believe it and we’re scared’, which without the firm assurance that the Diplomatic Corps had expected it and had a plan to turn it around would certainly have got the disclosure pulled, right then.

  Now, data from a few days later showed that the people of Chartsey were still on track. The Diplomatic Corps had deployed one of their most effective strategic moves – a cooperative comedian. An intersystem-famous comedian, indeed, with one of the most popular chat/sketch shows on holovision, thoroughly anarchic and irreverent and known for getting even very important people to come in for ‘a chat’ which might end any way but always with the live audience roaring with laughter. On this occasion the comedian had agreed to having a Diplomatic-Corps scripted sketch in the show – all about mermaids – and he had promised on-air, too, to get someone in the know about this Quarus stuff for the next show, and have a chat with them over the Tank.

  Alex noted the laughter and uproarious applause which greeted that promise. The Tank was notorious, suspending an important person over a vat of revolting goo and attaching them to a lie detector. Seeing politicians having to make the choice between giving a straight answer and landing in the gloop was endlessly hilarious. The very high viewer reaction, too, made it apparent that the promised show would have a very large audience. The impact on the charted progress of the disclosure, though, was immediate – laughter, as always, dispelled fear, and while people were laughing at the daft mermaids on the comedy show they were not worrying about the scary genetic engineered mer-people on the planet far away.

  ‘It will be fine,’ Buzz said. ‘So long as nobody messes it up.’

  Alex gave him a speaking look. ‘The human element,’ he said, ‘is always the least predictable.’

  ‘True, but there are plans upon plans and rescue after rescue, just in case some idiot goes on the holly shouting ‘The aliens are coming, run for the hills!’’

  This was not really a joke. The president of Altarb had effectively done just that when the first news of the discovery of Quarus had been made – ignoring all the Diplomatic Corps’ most desperate efforts to prevent it, he had gone on live global holovision and made the announcement in the most portentous manner imaginable, adding that they were currently evaluating potential threat to their world and that people should remain calm.

  The resultant global panic was still taught both in the Fleet and Diplomatic Corps as how not to handle a high impact disclosure. But lessons had been learned, since then. From then. And the Fourth’s own Big Picture briefing, adapted for use as a tool for evaluating a population’s response to high impact disclosures, was a key element in this. It functioned in just the same way that they handled the same kind of disclosures at an individual level, evaluating where someone was at in their current levels of knowledge and fear, then making staged disclosures with pauses and halts at any indicator that the person was finding it too much to cope with. It had been adapted, rendered infinitely more sophisticated by the factoring in of a huge range of global social and economic indicators, but it was still essentially their ten-stage scale and being used in much the same way. Alex still found it hard to believe that something he and Buzz had worked out between them as a way to prevent passengers passing out with shock had ended up being used in League-wide disclosure on Quarus. Part of him felt sure that it couldn’t really work, not on that scale. And experience had taught him that if something could be messed up by some idiot, it would be messed up by some idiot.

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said, though they would have to wait a long time – the Chartsey curve was rather longer than the one planned for Therik, with an expected four and a half weeks between Ungeline Beeby’s interview with Alex going on air and the presidential confirmation. It would be the president of Chartsey making that, not Marc Tyborne. His moment would come later, months down the line, and only then if it was apparent that the disclosure had been managed safely across the League, at which the League President would make the final confirmation that it was true. He was, Alex knew, not looking forward to that one little bit. Not from any concerns about public safety, but because it would be embarrassing for him, personally, to have to go on air and admit that previous governments had lied. That his government had lied. And that yes, he himself had not always been entirely candid on this matter, though with the safety and welfare of the peoples of the League as a justification. Politicians generally did not like to have to admit that they’d lied to their electorate. Doing so generally signalled the end of a political career.

  Alex had no sympathy at all. Either the public would accept that President Tyborne and the rest of the Establishment had misled them out of concern for public safety, or they’d make their feelings clear at the next elections. Either way, it wasn’t Alex’s problem.

  The arrival of the Embassy I, however, was. At the same time that she had asked President Tyborne to appoint Alex as the new ambassador to Quarus, Silvie had asked for their current embassy there to be withdrawn entirely. That news and those orders had been raced out to Quarus along with Silvie’s own messages to her people explaining what was going on. The Embassy I had been told to withdraw immediately and to make best speed to rendezvous with the Heron at Serenity.

  If they really had done that, pulling out of Quarus within hours and making top speed back across the Gulf, the first courier running ahead of them could have been expected on the 22nd of the month. When no courier had appeared by the 28th, though, Alex was not even surprised.

  ‘I thought the Embassy was supposed to be maintained in a condition ready for launch within twenty five hours,’ Bonny observed, expressing the disquiet and impatience which many of the crew were starting to feel, by then.

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ Alex said. The Embassy was a carrier-grade ship, crewed by a relatively small Fleet contingent who took no part in diplomatic affairs. ‘But the skipper takes his orders from the Ambassador, of
course.’

  There was a silence, during which Bonny looked expectant, hoping that the skipper would elaborate on that, and Alex remained placidly uncommunicative.

  There were aspects to this situation which even Alex was not prepared to discuss on the command deck; aspects so sensitive that he’d had to promise the Diplomatic Corps not to reveal even to his officers, even in confidence. It had simply been stated that the Embassy I was being withdrawn ‘at Silvie’s request’. Given Silvie’s frequently expressed opinion of the diplomatic efforts inflicted on her world, nobody was tremendously surprised by that. There was, however, a subtle sense amongst the crew that there was more going on here than that. They were quite right, there was, but Alex was obviously not about to reveal it.

  The Embassy I courier, in fact, did not appear until the 33rd, by which time the Embassy itself was only four days out from the system. Couriers had a limited range. In the League they were able to swoop past ISiS or even liners, grabbing supplies with barely a pause. In the Gulf, though, they could barely even make it half way across and there were no supply opportunities out there. The custom, therefore, was for the last courier chasing after a departing ship to be carried by them across the Gulf, releasing to chase ahead as soon as they came within range of the destination system.

  If that had been done here, the courier would have arrived nine days in advance of the Embassy I. Seeing that it was only four days ahead of its mother ship was evidence either of serious technical difficulties or strong and pointed reluctance to engage with the Fourth.