‘Pretty much,’ Alex affirmed. ‘They are extremely timid, sensitive to loud noises, and they just don’t have anything like our survival drive, either genetically or psychologically. When we’re scared we pump up adrenaline and get aggressive. When they’re scared their brains flood with trauma chemicals and they may well just stop breathing, yes. They certainly do if they’re taken prisoner and threatened with physical harm. At first, way back when, it was assumed that they were committing suicide rather than give away secrets in interrogation, but post mortems did eventually reveal that they were dying of shock and fear, at which point rather gentler, quieter tactics started to be developed. Anyone who is going to be meeting them is given special training for that.
‘And yes, sir, I have met them, myself. I was a cadet, the first time, on my final year shipboard placement aboard a ship taking Solarans out from a visit to Chartsey. I had the opportunity to sit with them for a while in their specially sound-shielded quarters, sitting in on discussions between them and their escorting diplomat. It was a very enlightening experience. You just don’t appreciate, even from watching recordings of meetings with them, how slow that is. You may sit there for half an hour at a time in total, unmoving silence, just waiting for them to speak. If you try to hurry them, prompt them, or ask them something else instead, they get totally confused and give up trying to talk to you at all. And then when they do say something, chances are that it will be so obscure you could interpret it fifty different ways. And if you ask them to explain it, you then need to ask them to explain the explanation, and more often than not it just ends up in a total morass of incomprehension. Diplomats have learned to focus on what seems most important and file the rest under ‘come back to at the point where communication has improved and we may be able to understand it’.’
‘But – you have actually spoken to them, yourself?’ The president looked closely at him. ‘Did you ask them questions? What did they say?’
‘The first time I met them I asked if they had enjoyed their visit to Chartsey,’ Alex told him, ‘and after long consideration they said ‘the art was beautiful, the air was toxic, we ate spun sugar.’ They are always in threes, taking turns to speak. The next time I met them – different three – I was a Lt, and had the honour of escorting them on a visit to a gallery. They wanted to see, particularly, a china horse – don’t ask me what was special about it, other than it being very old, but it was on travelling exhibit from Chevay, just a little ceramic horse thing, so big,’ he sketched with his hand, ‘part of an Ancient Empires exhibit. We took them to see it in the night, when the gallery was closed to the public. We placed chairs for them around the china horse and they sat there looking at it – every now and again they’d get up and move around to look at it from a different perspective. They were absolutely fascinated by it – asked for the lighting to be dimmed so that they could see it more clearly, as their eyes are more sensitive to light than ours. I didn’t disturb them, obviously, but I asked them afterwards, as I was escorting them back to the embassy, their embassy, if they’d enjoyed the exhibit. They said ‘It is a thing of perfect beauty, it speaks to the heart, it is a thing of joy’. And that is, you see, exactly what they come for, to build friendship and yes, bonkers as it may seem, to appreciate our art.’
‘But to come all that way,’ the president protested, ‘to look at art?’
‘It isn’t ‘all that way’ to them,’ Alex pointed out. ‘Journeys that would take us months may only take them a few hours. We call their ships ‘hyperlight’ but we have no idea what means of propulsion they use. We do know, though, that they don’t travel in any way as we understand it – they seem to just wink in and out of existence, one moment there, the next, gone. For them, though, the journey to visit us is not much more than you might make on a bus trip to go see something of particular interest. And art, I don’t know, I don’t pretend to understand it, myself, but I’m told that it speaks, culturally, in ways that bridge the rivers of confusion that arise in verbal communication. They may not be able to understand half of what we’re talking about, but they can understand a piece of artwork.
‘I’m told, too, that they often find it very moving to see evidence, in our art, of a continuing legacy from the civilisations that were on our worlds, pre dark age. The way that was explained to me was that if you had a much loved grandparent who’d been very musical, say, and they’d died, and then years later you had a grandchild and that small child picked up a flute and began to play it with obvious talent, you’d be moved by that, seeing the talent of the person you’d loved continuing in the next generation. That, I gather, is how they see our cultural legacy, particularly expressed in the arts.’
‘So that’s how they see us, you think? As children?’
‘Well, as a young and rising civilisation,’ Alex said, ‘Which, given that it’s only three hundred years since we stopped killing their ambassadors, is something we do just have to accept, okay, they have a point. Solarans are a much longer-lived species than we are. Some of them actually remember the last time that we captured and experimented on their ambassadors. It is something, I feel, and something we have a right to be proud of, that they no longer regard us as barbarians. It barely seems ten minutes ago, in their terms, that they observed us living in castles and killing each other with swords. So to them, we are rising with extraordinary speed, both technologically and culturally.’
It was not to be expected that the president, given his views, would just accept that. He and Alex sat for some time, talking, the skipper answering his questions fully and clearly. President Tanaya learned a lot, but he remained unconvinced.
‘I can’t believe you had the opportunity to talk to them and didn’t ask anything more than ‘Did you enjoy yourselves?’’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What about the big questions, like why won’t you let us go to your world, or why won’t you share your technology?’
‘But those questions have already been answered, sir,’ Alex reminded him, gesturing towards the big picture briefing file, still open on the desk between them. ‘Asked, and answered, many times. And me, I’m not a diplomat, my job was simply to escort them to go see the china horse. I can’t speak, really, about the big questions, other than to repeat what I’ve been told myself in briefings. If you want to discuss things at that level, you need to be having that conversation with someone like Ambassador Snowden.’
The president took the hint.
‘All right, fair enough,’ he said. ‘And you honestly think she’ll talk to me about it, sensibly?’
‘I have no doubt of it, sir,’ Alex said.
They parted on that basis, the president thanking Alex and commenting, as he left, that he’d given him a lot to think about.
Alex hoped he had been of help. If he’d achieved nothing else than opening up lines of communication between the Novamasian government and the Diplomatic Corps, he felt, it had been a good day’s work.
Tari Snowden obviously thought so. She called Alex a couple of hours later and thanked him, too, telling him that a private meeting had been set up between her and President Tanaya, and that she was hopeful that they would be able to develop a productive conversation.
‘I really must compliment you on your big picture briefing, too,’ she said. ‘We’ve just finished evaluating it, ourselves, and the exo team is very excited, here. There just isn’t anything like a step by step ‘how to tell people about aliens’ guide, as you know.’
Alex did know. He and Buzz had looked in vain for one, finding only massive documents littered with complex process-diagrams.
‘We’ve commissioned research into producing an exodiplomacy manual, many times,’ Tari told him, with a wry smile. ‘Usually involving academics at great expense and at least three years to think about it. And then, every time, what we get is a highly academic analysis, yet another process diagram modelling how people respond and assimilate high impact information, and the bottom line of ‘you have to use your own judgement in each
individual case’. Even our own training manuals don’t give us any more than the broadest outline and ‘don’t overwhelm people with too much all at once.’ Your briefing is the best I’ve ever seen for just setting it out, step by step, in logical phases, with clear and straightforward instructions in how to deliver it. Our team has been role-playing with it and have done some staff briefings with it, too, and they feel it has very exciting possibilities. And it has, obviously, already been of great help in supporting President Tanaya through learning about these things.’
‘Well, we wrote it for our own use, primarily,’ Alex said, ‘in the hope of finding some way to tell people about our exodiplomacy missions that didn’t overwhelm them. But if it’s of any use to you or anybody else, of course, you’re welcome to it.’
Tari chuckled, seeing that it really wasn’t something that Alex himself considered to be at all important.
‘Thank you,’ she said, with a mock-formal inclination of her head, to which Alex responded with a grin. It was a mark of just how charming Tari Snowden was that she’d got Alex von Strada past formal manners with her in less than an hour from their first meeting, though it helped that they had been in correspondence for some time before, and that he already saw her as a very capable and helpful ally. ‘One other thing, though,’ she said. ‘I’m a little concerned, Alex. I’m getting definite vibes from the president’s office that they’re not at all happy with Admiral Vickers – and who could blame them, indeed, the way he’s behaving – but all the signs are there that they’re about to ask for his removal. What concerns me is that I believe Admiral Vickers himself is aware of that, and I also have the definite impression that he is holding you responsible for it. The, er, stunt you pulled over getting the supplies you wanted had, I understand, already rendered him positively incandescent.’
Alex looked surprised. ‘That wasn’t even my idea,’ he observed, purely as a matter of academic interest. It had been Captain Alladyce who’d called Buzz, a couple of days earlier, telling him that they had surplus tech supplies on both the Braveheart and the Albatross, which the Fourth was very welcome to have on an inter-ship transfer basis. Strangely, the ‘surplus supplies’ offered to them turned out to be exactly what they’d asked for from the Novamas supplies yard.
‘Well, Admiral Vickers thinks it was,’ the ambassador informed him. ‘And now he thinks you’ve gone behind his back and said things to the president to get him pushed out of his post. I’d have thought, myself, that he’d have welcomed the opportunity to go back to Chartsey, but evidently not.’
‘Well, no, no Fleet officer would want to have to go back to HQ with the embarrassment of the system government having asked for them to be replaced,’ Alex observed. ‘Is that not the case with diplomats too?’
‘Oh lord, no,’ she said, comfortably. ‘Host worlds often demand the removal of the League Ambassador as a sign of their displeasure with something central government is doing. It’s not something we take personally, and has no adverse effect on career unless it’s because of some genuine misconduct on the part of the diplomat concerned. Novamas has quite a history of dumping ambassadors, and port admirals, too – Admiral Vickers has lasted longer than most. I believe the average is less than five years, and he’s been here for longer than that. Too long, perhaps. I certainly won’t be trying to mediate for him, myself. Quite apart from the offence that he is causing with his attitude, it seems to me that if he thought he could get away with it, he’d actually sabotage your mission here rather than see you succeed. I’m concerned that, feeling that he has no future here anyway, or if anger gets the better of his self control, he may cause real problems. I don’t think it is too dramatic to say that I feel that he would do you harm, professionally, if he could.’
Alex smiled. ‘Thanks for your concern,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be losing any sleep over that, Tari. He may hate me like poison but there’s nothing he can do about it. And I do, bottom line, believe that someone who’s been in the Fleet for more than forty years and is holding down flag rank responsibilities is not going to throw that away over personal animosity against a frigate skipper. He may be trying to inconvenience and annoy me, but I do not believe that he would even contemplate sabotage of any Fleet operation.’
‘Well, you know Fleet culture a lot better than I do, of course,’ Tari conceded. ‘Just... be careful, Alex, all right?’
Alex told her that he would, and thanked her again, but truth to tell he didn’t give the matter any more thought than that. It didn’t bother him when Admiral Vickers told him that they would have to hold on to the fuel they’d brought with them because he was having the fuel storage facility at the base overhauled. He merely accepted an offer from Skipper Bast to take the fuel aboard the Albatross for them, so that there wouldn’t be a problem with that if the Heron had to leave port before the admiral had finished his ‘overhaul’ of the fuel storage facilities. Nor did it bother him when Admiral Vickers banned all Fourth’s personnel from taking any shoreleave at the station, on the grounds that he’d heard rumours of some kind of drunken rampage at Penrys.
It didn’t even bother him when Admiral Vickers attempted to remove all the senior gunner ratings the crew had achieved during the Ignite test. Whatever the port admiral might say about it being an insult to all the Fleet personnel who’d got that rating legitimately, and however long he might rant about any fool being able to get his whole crew up to senior gunner status if he hung around letting them shoot at rocks for long enough, there was nothing he could actually do about it. His demand that von Strada strip the crew of those ratings could only be a demand, not an order, and Alex merely responded with a copy of the regulations and Fleet precedent that justified what he had done.
Alex, in fact, was enjoying himself at Novamas, feeling as if he was playing several games of poker at once, but with good hands in all of them.
He certainly had an ace in the hand, in Professor Garaghty. The professor was like a force of nature, storming the academic, diplomatic and political worlds with his own enthusiasm for the re-packaging of Novamas as ‘Ancient Alar.’
They had some first hand experience of that enthusiasm when the professor came to dinner on the Heron. He bounced aboard, laughing and shaking hands with everyone around the airlock and on the command deck, even rushing around the duty stations there to shake hands with the crew. Congratulations poured out of him, and it was some minutes before the compliments on how brilliantly they’d handled everything here turned into an amazed question about the gesture that they’d used in the memorial.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, touching one shoulder, then the other. ‘That’s really really old, you know! We see it on Tenyang dynasty pottery images, from Chevay – sometimes one shoulder, sometimes the other, associated with grief or mourning. It’s remarkably obscure, though, I don’t suppose there’s more than a handful of academics off Chevay itself who are familiar with it. Did you read about it somewhere?’
The truth was that they’d picked it up from Shion. Cultural exchange went two ways, after all, and they’d been learning from her just as she was learning from them. Just as Shion had learned to put her hand where her heart would have been if she had human physiology, to signify sincerity, members of the crew had picked up the shoulder-tap gesture she used to signify sorrow. It could be very casual, even playful; Alex had seen it being used as a tease, even, when rival supporters were watching a match on deck two and one team had scored an own goal. The other team’s supporters had tapped their shoulders in spurious sympathy, grinning.
‘I guess we must have seen it somewhere,’ Alex said. ‘And it seemed appropriate.’
‘Certainly was, excellent,’ The professor beamed. ‘Though we don’t know, of course, how authentic the way you did it was, it was amazing to see people doing something with roots in such ancient, long-forgotten ritual. And such a beautiful ceremony. Oh! Oh, and I meant to tell you! I have a new piece of text for you, skipper – the Song of the Alari, that the
Solarans sang. I took another look at it on the liner coming out here – spent quite a lot of time looking at it, in fact, and realised that the original translation was completely off. They had the wrong tense, and the wrong person – easy to do, of course, when you’re trying to translate something that’s already been translated from Alari into Solaran, and Solaran, you know, a language with sixteen conditional tenses and everything in the third person impersonal, not easy. But I do believe I’ve got at least the spirit of it – it wasn’t, ‘Petals fall, water sighs close, travel silent speed, brain always.’ It should have been something like, ‘Remember me. As I walk quietly beside the flowing river, the petals fall.’
He became aware as he said this that it wasn’t getting the reception he’d expected, as many of the crew were looking frankly amused.
‘We thought ‘We go quietly beside the peaceful water’,’ Alex informed him, and at the professor’s astounded look, couldn’t help but grin. ‘We’ve been working on it too,’ he explained.
‘Really? Wow!’ Said the anthropologist, and commented, ‘You must have some remarkable linguists!’
‘It was more a case of figuring out all the possible translations and debating it through till we reached some consensus on the one we felt fitted the best,’ Alex said. ‘It wasn’t anything official, just something the crew worked on as an interesting puzzle.’
And that was true. Shion had certainly helped with working out all the many hundreds of possible permutations there were of the translation, but it had been the crew themselves who’d figured it out – there’d been many a discussion about it on the mess decks, and in the wardroom, too, before they came together for an evening of debate in the gym, sharing their ideas and reaching at least a majority consensus view.
‘Well, good job, good job!’ The professor enthused. ‘And I like that, too, ‘We go quietly beside the peaceful water’ – that’s every bit as valid as mine, no argument there.’ He beamed at them as if discovering that a student he’d not felt to be very bright was actually emerging as a genius. ‘Well done.’
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