Into the Light

by David Weber

  In a lot of ways, he agreed with his brother-in-law and Abu Bakr that a more armed-up initial contact might have been a good idea. Malachi and his Heinlein would have been a very reassuring presence at his back this afternoon. But they were supposed to be making friends with these people, and the mission brief had been very clear on the point that he was supposed to concentrate on talking softly and not flourish any bigger sticks than he had to. Philosophically, he was totally onboard with that, but the last thing they needed was to send any messages of weakness, either. So perhaps his son’s “hammer of doom” analogy was well taken, after all.

  * * *

  “HOLY EXCREMENT,” QWELTH QwelSynChar murmured as ou watched the stupendous aircraft settle towards Accord Square. The vast concourse could accommodate thousands … and was barely big enough for that monster to find a footing. No wonder the aliens had requested that it be kept clear!

  “From your lips to Chelth’s crest,” Zhor ZhorSalDyr said. “Although, I’m not sure that’s exactly the sort of prayer Ou likes to hear. It does sort of sum things up nicely, though.”

  “Thank you.” Qwelth curled ous nasal flaps ironically. “Tell me you aren’t as … impressed as I am.”

  “I’m hovering somewhere between impressed and scared excrementless,” Zhor replied.

  “I imagine that’s pretty much what they had in mind. Smart of them, really. I imagine a lot of our esteemed colleagues are busy digesting the message.”

  “Those that aren’t thinking about ways they can steal the technology,” Zhor said.

  “Well, in that case, it’s your job to see to it that they don’t. Or that they don’t get their hands on any more goodies than we do, at any rate.”

  “My job? I’m just a lowly foreign minister. You’re the Prime Director around here!”

  “And I intend to rely heavily on your expertise. And to blame you for anything that goes wrong, of course.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  Qwelth chuckled, but ou also looked across the width of the Nonagon’s enormous portico at the Qwernian delegation. Ou wasn’t all that fond of Yerdaz NorYerDar, although ou had to admit the Charioteer Consort of Zyr was less mindlessly anti-Republic than many of her colleagues. Unfortunately, that just made her more dangerous. Opponents who thought about things made far more formidable foes than those who simply charged in.

  In a lot of ways, ou wished Juzhyr had come in person. Ou and the clan ruler had only met one another four times during Qwelth’s sixty-year tenure as Prime Director. It was a pain in the excreter, because ou’d always thought they might have been able to iron out at least some of their nations’ differences if they’d only been able to talk face-to-face instead of through bevies of diplomats, each of whom inevitably shaped the discussion. But the clan ruler’s dignity had to be protected at all costs. That was an essential part of Qwernian psychology, and it also meant the clan ruler always had the option of renouncing anything ous representative said as having been unauthorized or garbled in transmission. Even more to the point, perhaps, Qwernian notions of proper behavior … differed from those of the Republic. The rule of custom was far more important to the Empire than the rule of law, which was one of the most frustrating things about negotiating international compacts with it. But while the clan ruler’s diplomatic corps was totally free to lie, cheat, steal, and connive with the best of them, ou wasn’t. If Juzhyr gave ous word, ous own people would damned well expect oum to keep it.

  That was why ou went so far out of ous way to avoid any situation in which ou might do that.

  Qwelth, on the other hand, was a simple prime director, not a crowned head of state, and a commoner, to boot. Normally that meant ou was far down the pecking order, at least in the eyes of the Empire. But it also meant ou could attend any gathering ou chose in person without worrying about protecting ous dignity or who might think that ou’d given ous personal word about something.

  Which was why ou got to be here in person, watching with ous own eyes at what was undoubtedly the most momentous event in the entire history of Sarth.

  * * *

  YERDAZ NORYERDAR STOOD in her place of honor behind Gyrdan FarSylGyr nor Howsyn, the current Speaker of the Nonagon. Gyrdan was also Sword Lord Consort Symkah and deplorably Diantian in his general outlook, but, as was an unspoken tradition at the Nonagon, he was neither from the Republic nor the Empire. In fact, he was from Desqwer, one of the two Diantian-descended nations of the continent of Deltar. The other Diantian daughter state of Deltar was Synchanat, and the pair of them shared one of the nine voting seats on the Nonagon. The indigenous nations of Deltar—Andryth, Chayzar, Serdian, and Ryzh—also shared a seat, and while everyone pretended not to realize it, the indigenous nations were firmly in the Empire’s sphere of influence, since the Qwernian military had supported them in more than one border clash with their “foreign conqueror” neighbors. They’d been handed their reproductive members on each occasion, unfortunately, but that was fine with the Empire. The clan ruler and ous bearer had bought a lot of goodwill replacing the tanks, guns, and rifles they’d managed to lose.

  As Desqwerians went, Gyrdan wasn’t that bad, and he always scrupulously honored the letter of the diplomatic code. Yerdaz would have felt better with a fellow Qwernian in the Speakership, but Gyrdan would do, she supposed.

  She glanced from the corner of her eye at Prime Director Qwelth. This morning had been as carefully choreographed as any moment in Sarthian history, allowing for the fact that they’d had barely two days to set everything up. And, as always happened at formal moments, the Nonagon’s permanent staff had been careful to put at least three other delegates between Yerdaz and Qwelth. The two of them would have to make nice at the formal dinner tonight, which would be tedious but part of the normal political theater. They might actually have something to discuss this time, although both of them would obviously be watching their words very carefully.

  The stupendous aircraft—although it would probably be more accurate to call it a spaceship, Yerdaz supposed—sat there, gleaming in the sun. Then a hatch opened far up on its side and a disk of what appeared to be metal a couple of cherans across floated out of it. There was no visible means of support, although the disk was the better part of a ran thick, so gods only knew what sort of alien technology might be hidden inside it. Whatever was holding it up, it was clearly rock steady—a point it demonstrated as half a sixteen of … beings stepped out of the hatch onto it and it didn’t even bobble.

  It stayed where it was for a moment, then slid silently to the multi-hued pavement, and Yerdaz heard a collective sigh of indrawn breaths as Sarthian eyes finally beheld the aliens who’d crossed the stars to reach them.

  They wore an awful lot of clothing, was Yerdaz’ first thought. Rather than the simple trousers or kilts of Sarth, they appeared to favor a wide variety of garments. Including ones that covered their entire torsos, which seemed … bizarre. And their cranial down seemed to come in an incredible profusion of shades. She could see at least four just looking at them, so with their scale patterns covered and such a bewildering palette of down, how did they recognize genders?

  Some of them wore headgear which hid most of their down, as if they were deliberately making that recognition even harder. Maybe that was some kind of species modesty taboo? And how could they hope to hear anything with their crests covered that way?

  Only they didn’t have crests, she realized with a sense of shock. And they had repulsively—or possibly exotically—flat faces, with no muzzle at all and what looked like feeble little jaws that would have trouble chewing anything. At least their eyes were in roughly the right place, although she wondered what the flaps on the sides of their heads were for.

  Then their hovering platform reached the ground, and Yerdaz swallowed as she realized another thing about the aliens. Even standing flatly on their wide, spatula feet, they were huge! Oh, a couple of them were no taller than a tall male or female, but most of them—!

  The platform sett
led. Most of the Earthians stood in what were probably respectful poses as one of them stepped off onto the pavement, and Yerdaz swallowed again. At just over one and a quarter rans, she was tall, even for a female, but this alien—this Earthian—would have towered over her. She—or he; something that size simply couldn’t be a bearer—was over two full seqrans taller than Yerdaz, and the Earthian’s shoulders were at least half again as broad.

  The alien stepped forward, moving with a flat-footed, undeniably ponderous-looking stride, to where Gyrdan waited alone to greet the visitors.

  * * *

  DVORAK KEPT HIS eyes resolutely on the single Sarthian waiting to greet him. What he wanted to do was to gawk at the crowd at the Speaker’s back. The color palette of their kilts was an armed assault on a human’s optic nerve, which only emphasized the fact that Sarthian eyes and human eyes didn’t see things the same way, to put it mildly. Fortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot of clothing in evidence. Sarthians experienced very little temperature variation, given their planet’s lack of axial inclination, so standard daytime wear consisted only of the bare minimum—his lips twitched in a totally inappropriate smile at his choice of adjective—to modestly conceal their reproductive organs.

  Unlike the Sarthians, he’d at least spent months watching them on tridee, so their appearance wasn’t coming at him cold, the way his must be coming at them. But there was a distinct difference between watching images and seeing them in the flesh. For one thing, their diminutive size was much more apparent now, and so was the peculiar, fluid grace of their stride. They really did move a lot like Jurassic Park’s velociraptors, he thought, although without quite as much “bounce.”

  He reached the waiting Speaker and raised both arms, forearms crossed before him in the formal Sarthian salute between equals to whom one had not yet been introduced, and the Speaker—Gyrdan—returned it. Then Dvorak lowered his arms and cleared his throat.

  I will not say “Klaatu barada nikto,” whatever Rob wants! he reminded himself. Although, he admitted, the temptation was great. Once the Sarthians discovered human movies, though, they might be less than amused. Not that his chosen phrase would be all that much better if they decided to take it that way. Still, he had to say something, so best to proceed as he’d already begun.

  “Greetings, Speaker Gyrdan,” he said, his translator converting the words to the Desqwerian dialect Gyrdan had grown up speaking. “My name is David Dvorak, and I have the honor of serving as the Planetary Union of Earth’s Secretary of State. On behalf of my President and all the people of Earth, I greet you.

  “We come in peace.”

  . V .

  THE NONAGON, CITY OF LYZAN, RYZAK ISLAND,

  PLANET SARTH

  It was nice to see that humans weren’t the only species that did things its own way because … well, because That’s the Way Things Are Done, Dave Dvorak reflected. He’d offered to give every delegate to the Nonagon his/her/ous own human-made earbuds (except that they were actually a very narrow headset designed to fit over the Sarthian crest) to translate into every Sarthian language simultaneously. But the Nonagon’s staff had politely refused. So, instead, they had him speaking to all of them in Speaker Gyrdan’s native tongue while an entire staff of Sarthian translators murmured over Sarthian-made headsets which were far bigger and clunkier than the hardware he’d been prepared to provide. He couldn’t quite figure out why a native Sarthian’s translation of a Sarthian translation of English was superior to a direct translation, but it wasn’t his planet.

  The enormous Hall of Nations, the Nonagon’s official meeting chamber, was packed. The delegates and their staffs were seated at ornate podium-like desks, and the spectators’ gallery was standing room only. Those desks were rather taller, proportionately, than humans would have preferred, but then Sarthian torsos were longer and their shoulders and elbows were jointed differently. Their thighs were proportionately shorter than their calves, as well, which gave their chairs a contour that was distinctly odd by human standards. He didn’t think he’d be very comfortable perched in one of them for long. Worse, none of the Sarthians he’d met so far came as high as his shoulder, so he was pretty sure he’d feel like he was sitting at the kiddie table, anyway.

  And isn’t that a splendid example of thinking about inconsequential nonsense to pretend I’m not about to pee myself up here?

  He snorted and couldn’t quite suppress the grin that thought evoked. Fortunately, Sarthians didn’t have a clue how to read human expressions yet. Still, there were standards to be met as his species’ top diplomat, he reminded himself sternly as Gyrdan finished his introduction.

  “And so, Members of the Nonagon,” the Speaker concluded, “it is my responsibility and my honor to yield the podium to Secretary of State David Dvorak.”

  The title he actually assigned Dvorak was chirzahlk, which didn’t translate exactly as “Secretary,” but came close enough. On the other hand, he absolutely butchered the pronunciation of “Cavid Dcorak,” although Dvorak was confident the Sarthian had come closer to getting it right than he could have come to pronouncing Gyrdan’s name and title without cybernetic assistance. Then the Speaker stepped back, crossing his forearms, and bent his head slightly as he invited Dvorak to take his place.

  The human stepped up to the podium, which—predictably—was far too short for him. There was no equivalent of the teleprompter a pre-invasion human diplomat or politician would have used, but that didn’t matter.

  “Bring it up, Calamity,” he murmured so softly no one could possibly have heard.

  “Yes, Papi,” the AI replied in Maighread’s voice, and the text of his remarks suddenly appeared before him, floating in midair as the computer projected them onto his corneas. Not that he really needed them.

  “Thank you for introducing me, Speaker Gyrdan,” he began, turning to give a human-style bow to the Sarthian. He was careful to move slowly, making certain that his audience would recognize that it was a formal gesture on his part. The fact that Sarthians nodded their heads when they disagreed and shook their heads when they agreed was something he’d have to bear in mind.

  “And I would like to thank all of the Nonagon’s members for permitting me to address you,” he continued, turning back to the crowded chamber before him. “It’s a great honor to be the first representative of my species to speak to you here, on your home world, in your own chamber. It’s also exciting, because you are the first non-human species we’ve voluntarily contacted. This is the sort of thing that someone gets to do for the first time only once, and I think it’s inevitable that all of us will be going down in our own species’ history books.”

  He paused to let that settle in … and for the merely mortal Sarthian translators to do their jobs. Then he straightened and squared his shoulders.

  “Exciting as this moment is, however,” he said in a more somber tone whose weightiness he hoped his audience would recognize, “we did not come all this way just for the adventure. We came to warn you. And we also came because, frankly, we’re seeking allies.”

  He watched the stir rustle through the Hall of Nations, and the translation software threw a faint orange overlay across his vision. The translator had been loaded with Sarthian body language and micro-expressions, culled from literally decades of the survey footage in the Hegemony’s data base, then run through sophisticated analytical algorithms. It had apparently never occurred to the Hegemony’s psychiatrists to do that, which was fortunate for the human race. Dvorak hated to think what would have happened to Judson Howell if the Shongairi had possessed the equivalent of a lie detector every time he spoke to one of them!

  Human psychs had used micro-expression analysis for decades, however, and they’d seen the possibilities almost instantly. The legal system had moved promptly to limit their use in both marketing and court testimony—which Dvorak thought was an interesting juxtaposition—but the new software could read human emotions with devastating accuracy. It could also parse them with a subtlety wh
ich would have been almost useless in most conversations simply because of information overload, so the psychiatrists and the programmers had come up with a color-valued system which used the six basic emotions Paul Ekman had identified in the middle of the last century: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

  If Dvorak had wanted to, he could have set the software for a detailed analysis of emotions presented in text format, projected onto his corneas. Trying to read and digest the information would have been a nightmare, however, so the default setting tied each emotion to a specific color. Then the software overlaid them on an individual’s face—or, as in this case, on a large group of people—with a weighted intensity reflective of the depth of the emotion in question, blending them into distinctive hues. It had taken him a while to get used to it, but he’d practiced diligently on his human companions on the long voyage from Earth, and (always assuming the people who’d analyzed Sarthian emotions had gotten their sums right) what he was seeing now was a combination of surprise’s red and an edge of fear’s yellow projected across the delegates as a group.

  Could really have used this playing Spades all those years, he thought, waiting for the motion to subside once again.

  “My people were attacked, without warning or provocation, by a species which calls itself the Shongairi,” he continued then, his tone steady and level. “We were at a somewhat more advanced level of technology than Sarth has yet achieved, but they were far, far more advanced than we were. Fortunately for us, however, they were grossly overconfident when they attacked us. The Shongairi think of themselves as a warrior race, but they discovered we were better warriors than they were. Their technology was vastly superior to ours, but they hadn’t applied it to war-fighting as thoroughly as we had applied ours. It also helped that they’d expected us to be at a much more primitive level than we’d actually attained. In the end, we proved too much for them to digest. Indeed, in the end, we captured their ships and gained access to their entire tech base. The species which came to conquer and enslave us ended up giving us the stars, instead.”