Here, though, he could see himself being happy, not just for shoreleave but to make a life here.
It was nonsense, of course, as he realised himself just a moment later. He would not, seriously, even contemplate giving up his command or his life as a spacer, not even for this. And even if he did want to come back here one day to live, even if the quarians allowed him to do so, there would be immense practical difficulties.
As then. A delivery bot arrived with his meal while he was still gazing out of the window, after which Salomah sealed the door and depressurised the room to the point at which Alex’s helmet disengaged. Such rapid depressurisation would have killed a human but it didn’t cause Salomah herself even the smallest discomfort, not so much as an ear-pop. She had, after all, been designed for these conditions.
Alex was considerably more fragile, and did take a moment just to confirm the safety of the pressure and atmospheric composition as his helmet disengaged. Reassured, though, he sat down in one of the hammock-like chairs with the dish set to a comfortable position.
‘You’re right,’ he told Salomah, having sampled the food. ‘This is the nicest thing I’ve had.’ It was like a thick soup, with a consistency not far from porridge and a comforting, savoury flavour. He thought he could taste something like beetroot, with some subtle spicing, and the flecks of green in it were like little pops of freshness. He could see that Salomah was amused by that, and raised an eyebrow. ‘What is it?’
‘Baby food,’ Salomah told him, with a grin.
If Alex paused, it was only for half a second. Then he chuckled, dug his spatula-like spoon back into it and ate some more. ‘It’s good,’ he said, and Salomah smiled.
It was only then, really, that Alex took much notice of what she looked like. That had seemed completely unimportant when they’d met and was only of mild interest now. She was tall, he saw – at least twenty centimetres taller than himself. Given the type of adapt she was, with her extremely strong bone density and muscular physique, she probably weighed about twice as much as him, too. She was a deep water adapt, lightly scaled, dense skin shading from leaf green to deep turquoise, her hair copper-green and scale-protected gills around her neck. Turquoise eyes were outlined in an elaborate make-up. She was looking at him with just as much interest, evidently comparing what she could see with what she had heard.
‘You’re very young,’ she observed, after a while.
‘I’m thirty four,’ Alex said, a little startled and perhaps just a shade defensive too. He had never enjoyed the notoriety which he’d had to endure at the start of his command career, as the youngest skipper the Fleet had had in living memory, and then the youngest captain. Part of him wanted to point out that he had been commanding ships for ten years now and had more operational experience than many officers achieved in their entire careers.
Salomah gave an appreciative chuckle.
‘Isn’t that very young for the position that you hold?’
Alex had to admit that it was. It intrigued him, though, to realise that she knew that, that she understood enough about human culture to recognise how unusual it was for their species to give someone of his age this amount of authority.
‘You’re well informed,’ he observed, at which she gave a light shrug.
‘I’ve been studying humans for years,’ she said, and added, ‘I helped to raise Silvie. And I did president too, for a while.’
Alex did not have an eidetic memory. He had studied previous interactions in some depth, of course, but without feeling it necessary to commit to memory the names and images of every quarian who’d stepped up as president throughout the history of contact.
‘I’m sorry, I …?’ he looked enquiringly at her and she obliged with the information.
‘Fifty two years ago,’ she informed him, and as he looked at her in some bewilderment, explained, ‘your years.’
The bewilderment didn’t go away. He was finding it hard to accept that she had been undertaking exodiplomacy while his own parents were still teenagers.
‘I wouldn’t have said you were more than thirty,’ he said. That wasn’t an impression from her physical appearance but from an indefinable sense that they were about the same age.
‘I’m eighty three,’ she told him. Alex just looked, and felt, interested. The fact that she was old enough to be his grandmother didn’t, he found, change the way he felt about her at all. And in fact, since quarians could expect to live considerably longer than humans, she wasn’t even middle aged yet. ‘I did try,’ she observed, ‘studying everything we knew about your people, or thought we knew, before I attempted the presidency. But the woman I met there, your ambassador, was in a dreadful mess, and so very offensive, too, I just couldn’t stand it.’
Alex cast his mind back. Fifty two years ago. Yes, that would coincide with the most militant phase of the Senate’s various attitudes towards Quarus over the decades. Angry, frustrated orders had come out to the Embassy that they were to stop being messed about, to lay things on the line with the quarians and make it very clear to them that humans would not stand for being treated this way. There had been, at the back of that, a very disturbing suggestion that the Senate was prepared to consider imposing some form of government on the quarians ‘for their own good’ as the anarchy in which they lived was, it stood to reason, intolerable. Luckily they hadn’t quite got so far as to send an invasion fleet before the next elections changed the political agenda, so much so that within a few years the orders going out were ‘give them anything they want.’ Salomah, unfortunately for her, had stepped up to being president at the worst of times, when ambassadors had been under orders to lay the law down with a hint of threat.
‘I can only apologise,’ he said, with a surge of remorse, not just for what Salomah had endured but for the offence suffered by so many of her people at the hands of their ambassadors.
‘Why?’ Salomah laughed again. ‘You weren’t even born.’ She gestured at his meal. ‘Eat,’ she prompted. ‘It will go cold.’
It was almost cold already, never having been more than lukewarm to start with. Alex resumed eating, not without an amused look at finding himself being treated like a child.
‘I’ve been taking an interest, since,’ she said. ‘Not all the time, of course. You can’t get too involved with humans.’ She regarded him with some sorrow. ‘Such a troubled, unhappy species,’ she observed. ‘I have interest in psychology. I practice, in your terms, helping people with psychological dysfunction. I don’t treat more than one or two patients a year because that would impact on my own mental health, and it’s the same with humans, that we can only cope with you in small doses. Or at least, that’s what we’ve believed until now.’ She broke into a wide, deeply contented smile. ‘Finally,’ she said, ‘humans who are at least sane enough to be able to have a conversation.’
Alex had to break off eating again at that, as a fit of the giggles was threatening to choke him. Salomah regarded this with some amusement as he laughed and coughed and got himself back under control.
‘I don’t understand, though,’ Salomah observed, ‘why we haven’t met people like you before. Silvie says you’re an unusual group amongst humans but that she’s met many others like you in her travels, people of integrity, and happy, too, which isn’t something we’ve even glimpsed very often in humans. So why haven’t you sent any of them here until now?’
‘We have,’ said Alex, who’d come to that realisation early in his own analysis of the failure of diplomacy here. ‘The Diplomatic Corps, who have been managing things here, have recruited all kinds of people with characteristics they hoped would be, uh…’ he gave a huge grin, ‘sane enough to be able to have a conversation.’ He was evidently tickled by that description and Salomah laughed again, seeing how much he was enjoying it. ‘But the problem is,’ Alex said, ‘that having recruited them, they trained them. Candidates were put through extensive training for months, even years sometimes, before they even so much as set foot on a ship heading
out here. And in the months it took to come here, isolated from any other influence, they were trained even more intensively. So, by the time they arrived, they had internalised a good many Diplomatic Corps beliefs and attitudes. They were never free to just come and engage with you in the way that they wanted to, either. There was always a plan, a formal plan, decided by committees. And committees, by their very nature, generate micro-control over details rather than supporting someone in the freedom to do whatever they think best. Then, firmly reminded of all that the Corps had invested in them in terms of time and training, warned that they only had one shot at this and must get it right or they’d be deemed a failure and sent straight home, the poor ambassadors were fired out in states of restricted action, massive expectations and high stress. So you haven’t, I’m afraid, seen our people at their best.’
Salomah was intrigued. ‘And it has taken this long,’ she wondered, ‘for your people to realise that that was the problem?’
‘To be fair,’ Alex replied, ‘I believe it was recognised quite early on that the basic incompatibility between the Diplomatic Corps and your people was an issue. Even amongst us, the Diplomatic service is recognised as an extremely rigid, hierarchical organisation, heavy with bureaucracy and with enormous cultural inertia. Those are actually good things, purposeful for them, in their role within our own society, as an anchoring, stabilising web between our worlds. It serves them well, too, in our dealings with the Solarans, who are themselves an extremely slow and methodical people, of course. But it was recognised quite quickly that the hierarchical thinking and resistance to innovation was not working well in relationships with you. The difficulty was that nobody could agree who should be sent out instead. The Fleet? Unthinkable!’ He conveyed shock-horror with his tone, though his emotions were wry. ‘Sending military units to other worlds,’ he explained, ‘is considered a hostile and potentially invasive act, the Senate wouldn’t allow it. The Buzzard was allowed to come a few years ago, of course, stripped of its missiles and with all guns disabled, but their efforts were controlled by the Diplomatic Corps people here at the time, so again, didn’t achieve very much. So who, then? An academic-led expedition? Several were contemplated, all fell apart, all were reduced to sending the academics out here to work under Diplomatic Corps supervision. Creating a specialist exodiplomacy unit specifically for Quarus was also contemplated more than once, but the Senate couldn’t agree on who should run it, what its basis of operations should be and who should pay for it, so those proposals were scrapped, too. All they could agree to do was to issue the latest in a long stream of orders to the Embassy here and to send out people they thought would be able to take charge here effectively or be the kind of people you could get along with. In either case, the Diplomatic trained them so thoroughly that by the time they got here, or at least, after a few weeks in the hothouse intensity of life on the Embassy, they were as rigidly constrained and stressed as everybody else.’
‘Humans…’ Salomah shook her head, quite tolerantly. ‘But they allowed you to come, with a warship?’
Alex remembered the six hour Senate debate. It had been held off-camera, within locked doors, publicly described as a special session on League Security which was barred from public broadcast. Alex had been sent a recording of it though, by the First Lord, and had watched the whole thing. It had been an informative background to the terse set of instructions which had emerged as the result of the debate.
‘Not easily,’ he said, and as she looked enquiringly at him, ‘It had been suggested before that we might come to Quarus, after our encounter with Gide, but the Senate feels very strongly that sending armed warships to Quarus is sending the wrong message entirely. Things had been complicated too by our Carrearranian mission in which it had become necessary to declare war on them – a pure technicality of course, no hostilities of any kind, but still, a highly controversial thing to do particularly given the might of the League and the tiny, undefended, pre-industrial society there. The very idea of sending me out to Quarus straight after that was, well…’ he grimaced as he recalled the animal yelping and howling which had pervaded the Senate for several minutes after that suggestion. ‘It wasn’t,’ he admitted, ‘something many of the Senate wanted to do. Most of the Senate, really. If the vote had been taken right then when the suggestion was first made, there’s no doubt they would have vetoed it. But others – specifically, Senator Machet – made the case for us coming here so clear that others saw the sense in it and came around to agreeing – not very enthusiastically, it has to be said, but they did agree. The deciding factor in that was Silvie’s own choice. The president had told her that she could have her own choice of ambassadors to her world and the Senate recognised that they had to honour that promise, or that they themselves would be doing a great deal of damage to the relationship just when it was starting to go well.
‘So…’ he spread his hands, ‘here I am. And since we came independently and made the decision early on not to follow Diplomatic Corps training and advisories, we’ve had all our training from Silvie.’ His feelings about Silvie, his admiration and his gratitude for all the selfless work she’d put in, were very evident as he said her name, and Salomah smiled again.
‘She is wonderful,’ she agreed. ‘Very odd – singular – but then, she had to be in order to stand any chance of understanding you. She has done very well, I think, for both our peoples. And I love her, too.’ She smiled at the strength of Alex’s parental feelings. ‘I spent many hours chasing after her when she was little, as she was always off investigating what was over the horizon, such curiosity, a unique child.’
There was a companionable silence for some time while they both considered Silvie in a warm sense of shared affection for her. Alex finished his meal, and moved aside the plate to indicate that he had eaten as much as he wished.
Salomah smiled. She could see the hope rising in him now, the yearning to go back out and explore more of this city. It was understood between them, without the need for words, that she would be his guide. ‘So, what do you want to see?’ she asked, and answered her own question with a laugh before he could even begin to respond. ‘Everything! Of course, everything!’ She was heading for the door already and he followed, grinning with anticipation as the pressure surged back up and his helmet re-engaged. This was going to be fun.
It was more than fun, it was wonderful. They spent six hours exploring the city and its environs, with so many extraordinary sights and experiences that Alex’s mind was awhirl with them. It would have been hard to pick out any favourite moments – hand feeding a blue crab considerably bigger than he was himself was certainly one of them, but so was going onto a building site. There, he swam amongst machines which ranged from mighty dozers to shrimp-sized mini-bots. They were building a new accommodation dome. They were doing it at speed, with a thousand tasks going on simultaneously, and with an efficiency which left Alex lost for words. Supply bots were bringing in materials as and when they were required. Dozers, with their claw-like grabs, were assembling the core structure with girders and struts. High-pressure panels of many kinds were held in place by smaller bots while shoals of the tiny ones flitted about laser-bonding. Power and other tech was being installed by their own specialist bots, all of them moving around one another in a mesmerising, complex dance.
‘How long will it take them to build the dome?’ Alex asked. It was a six storey structure, oval in floor plan and with two asymmetrical spires, similar to others already in the city. Given the size of it, Alex guessed it would take several months to create such a building on a human world, from foundations to occupation.
‘A few days.’ Salomah drew a line in the water, checked information on a screen and amended that to, ‘twelve days.’
‘Twelve.’ Alex looked from her to the swarming site, then back to her. ‘Days.’
Salomah laughed. ‘It’s only an ordinary house – standard design,’ she observed. ‘We decided we needed one. We get a lot of visitors at Feyor an
d it can sometimes be a little crowded.’
Alex was struggling to understand. ‘But – are there people supervising this?’ He asked. ‘An architect? Builders? People checking it?’
Salomah looked surprised. ‘Why would we need to?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t a new kind of building. The bots will build it perfectly well. They would call for help if there were any problems, but we don’t expect there will be. This is very ordinary tech for us, the way we’ve been building for thousands of years. We find it works very well.’
Alex watched as a clear-view panel was fixed to the outside of one of the sections. It looked almost as if the building was constructing itself.
Yes, he thought. It was extremely efficient. Safe, no doubt, resource-efficient and extraordinarily fast. And humans would never allow it on their worlds. Small wonder, he realised, that the Diplomatic Corps had not brought this tech back to the League. Or perhaps they had, and the powers that be had decided to warehouse it. It wasn’t beyond their technical reach to engineer systems like this. It might even be possible to integrate mining, refining and manufacturing to coordinate with the needs of building work. Theoretically at least, it was even possible to programme systems to perform such tasks autonomously. And any government which attempted to introduce such systems would be out on their ear, fast, more than likely driven out by waves of furious mass demonstrations and a strong probability of riots. Humans would not tolerate this. The human tolerance for autonomous machines on their worlds was very low and had always been so.
‘You’re very thoughtful,’ Salomah commented, looking curiously at him.
‘I was just thinking about how my people would react to such tech on our worlds,’ Alex admitted. ‘They would hate it.’
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