Into the Light

by David Weber

  * * *

  MYRCAL STEPPED INTO the audience chamber, glanced at Chancellor Erylk ErGarzHyn nar Qwern, and raised a questioning nasal flap. “I thought, Clan Ruler, that perhaps I might have a moment of your time … alone?”

  Juzhyr nodded firmly. “Anything you need to say, you can say in front of the Chancellor. Ou has my utmost confidence.”

  “As you wish, Clan Ruler.” Myrcal closed ous nasal flaps and took a moment to steady ouself. “I wanted to discuss the most recent cables I’ve received from the Nonagon, and propose a way forward.”

  “So we’ve received fresh word from Lyzan?”

  “We have, Clan Ruler, and I must say it’s … unsettling.”

  “Why is that?” Juzhyr asked. “Are the Diantians getting ahead of us in the negotiations?”

  “No,” Myrcal replied, nodding. “It’s nothing like that at all—if anything, the Earthians have been too even-handed in their dealings with us. Our envoy there has yet to find an opening where we might be able to advance our cause.”

  “What’s the problem then?”

  “The problem is, I don’t believe they’re telling us everything. Yerdaz doesn’t think they’re lying to us, but she does mention that there are things they haven’t been completely forthcoming on with us.”

  “Like what?” Erylk asked.

  Myrcal turned to the Chancellor and raised both nasal flaps.

  “The Earthians still haven’t told us how they—who were admittedly inferior in most ways to their enemies—were able to drive them from their planet … or even how they were able to get at the Shongairi in their spaceships,” ou said. “I—along with Minister Flythyr—find this somewhat disturbing. Did their enemies make a mistake … or are the Earthians hiding something from us? Some military capability … or maybe some dark side to this offer of theirs?”

  Both of Erylk’s nasal flaps opened wide in surprise, as Myrcal had expected—the old bearer’s over-cautious nature was too predictable—and ou turned to Juzhyr.

  “This is worrisome,” the Chancellor said. “I believe continued caution should be exercised with the Earthians, Clan Ruler, before we make any long-term agreements with them. It would be prudent to find out what they’re hiding first.”

  “That course does seem to be indicated,” Juzhyr agreed, shaking his head slowly. “But I don’t want Qwelth or any of ous sorqhs using our reticence as a means to get ahead of us in the negotiations, or to get something from the Earthians that we don’t get, ourselves.”

  “Yes, Clan Ruler, I will so advise Yerdaz.” Ou paused a moment as if considering Juzhyr’s orders, and then jerked as if an idea had just come to oum. “There might be something else we can do, too, Clan Ruler.”

  “What is that?”

  “Well, I was just thinking that there are three issues here: our lack of knowledge of the Earthians, our lack of faith in the Nonagon process, and our desire to crush the Diantians. What if we could come up with a plan that solved all of them simultaneously?”

  Juzhyr raised a nasal flap. “And you have an idea which will do so?”

  Myrcal shook ous head. “I believe so, Clan Ruler. What if we invited the Earthian representatives to bring a delegation to Kwyzo nar Qwern? That would give us greater access to them and would allow our scientists to study the Earthians more closely, and in a number of situations. Not only would it be helpful in understanding the Earthians better—and maybe we can get them to divulge information the Diantians won’t have access to—but it will also help us show the Nonagon for what it really is—unnecessary frippery and window dressing.”

  “The Diantians will never go for that,” Erylk said. “If we get access to the Earthians like this, they will want something similar.”

  “And that’s fine,” Myrcal replied, alternately wagging ous nasal flaps in a shrug. “As long as we get this Secretary Dav … Davi—as long as we get access to their ambassador, we’ll have the key to winning the Earthians over to our side.”

  “And if the Secretary refuses to choose a side? What if he decides to remain at the Nonagon?”

  “Then invite one of his assistants. Our observers say he looks to an Earthian named ‘Abu’ whenever he seeks approval for what he is saying. We can invite Abu; he appears to have the Secretary’s ear.”

  “That would give us an opportunity to learn more about them firsthand,” Juzhyr mused. “I would also be able to take a look at one of them myself.” He considered it a moment, then asked, “Do you think we can get the Earthians to go along?”

  “I believe so, Clan Ruler. We can couch this as a matter of hospitality and let them know we would consider it rude if they didn’t come. Then—if they are really here, looking for allies, as they say—they wouldn’t be able to say no and risk offending us.” He raised both nasal flaps in a smile.

  “But what if the Diantians oppose us?” Erylk asked. “What if they try to keep the Earthians in Lyzan?”

  Myrcal kept control of ouself through a supreme effort of will, despite the chancellor’s constant questioning. The bearer was really past ous prime, and Myrcal realized it was time for oum to be replaced with someone younger and more aggressive. Someone a lot like Myrcal, if the truth was known. He allowed ouself another smile, although ou made it seem as if it was a response to the chancellor’s question, not ous internal monologue.

  “Nothing could be easier, Chancellor,” ou replied. “It won’t be difficult to have our allies and clients back us in this proposal. In fact, we will phrase it so the Earthians have to send people throughout all of Sarth, which will give our spies the ability to watch them in a variety of environments.” His nasal flaps wiggled in amusement as he warmed to the idea. “In fact, if we spread the Earthians far enough, they’ll have to draw on some of their junior diplomats, who might be a little more approachable or more likely to let something slip that one of their senior officials might not have. Yes … I think this would kill a number of krats with a single arrow.”

  “I like this plan,” Juzhyr said. Myrcal noticed ou didn’t look to Erylk for confirmation and smiled to ouself. “Contact our representatives throughout the Alliance and let them know what they need to do to assist in bringing it to fruition. Make sure they know it was my idea, and that I will be most displeased if they fail to assist in this endeavor.”

  * * *

  “WHAT DO YOU make of Myrcal’s brainstorm?” Dave Dvorak asked, looking around the conference table aboard PUNS Outlook. Silence answered for a moment, then Abu Bakr shrugged.

  “On the one hand, I don’t much like it. I’d really prefer to stick with your original game plan and run all negotiations and all contact through a single interface. You were right from the get-go when you said that was the best way to avoid misunderstandings. On the other hand, it gives us an opportunity to be more hands-on with Sarthians in general. As long as we don’t step on our swords, I think the opportunity to have contact teams out in as many locations as possible would probably help overcome any xenophobia these people might feel.”

  “Of course, there is that bit about not ‘stepping on our swords,’” Alex Jackson put in.

  Jackson, Dvorak’s senior aide, was only about a third of Abu Bakr’s age, although that didn’t mean as much as it once had now that humanity had acquired the Hegemony’s antigerone technologies. He was also a very strong-willed, no-nonsense sort of fellow who’d lost his entire family to the Shongairi.

  “Expand on that, Alex,” Dvorak invited, although he was confident he knew where the younger man was headed. Sometimes he thought they thought a bit too much alike, that he might have needed someone a bit less likely to see things the same way he did, like Arthur McCabe, for example.

  “It’s just that despite everything in the Hegemony database, despite everything we’ve seen since we got here, we’re still dealing with aliens, Mister Secretary.” Jackson was always careful to observe formal courtesy in public. “We have—or we ought to have—a lot better window into how they think, how they’re likely t
o react, than they have for us, but we’re still a hell of a long way from really understanding them the way we might other humans. If that’s true for us, it’s got to be ten times as true from their side. And we’re already tending to anthropomorphize them; what happens when they start … I don’t know, sarthopomorphizing us? That’s bound to happen, and if we’re spread out all over the planet, they’ll have a lot more opportunity to do it. And to make exactly the same kinds of mistakes we might make doing it to them.”

  “There’s some truth to that, Mister Secretary,” Arthur McCabe said.

  That was the way the “special advisor” usually addressed a remark he intended to disagree with, Dvorak thought wryly. He was only in his thirties, only a year or two older than Dvorak’s son, Malachi, and he’d grown up in Raleigh, where he’d been protected from the worst aspects of the Shongair invasion. He’d been attached to the mission at the strong urging—it would never have done to call it “insistence”—of a small but growing coterie in the Senate who were concerned that the “first-generation” leadership might be so blinkered by its traumatic experiences that it had developed tunnel vision. It would have been a gross exaggeration to call McCabe “soft” on the Shongairi or the Hegemony, but he belonged to the group which pointed out—correctly, Dvorak conceded—that the only actual contact humanity had ever had with the Hegemony was through the Shongairi, and that the Hegemony’s own records made it clear that the rest of the Hegemony regarded the Shongairi as barbaric and bloodthirsty. Perhaps it might be wiser to remember how that sort of hideously traumatic experience might be shaping their interpretation of the Hegemony as a whole and driving their assumption that it had to be automatically hostile to humanity when they finally met once more.

  Personally, Dvorak didn’t think there was a chance in hell they’d misinterpreted anything about either the Shongairi or the Hegemony, but he recognized the need for countervailing viewpoints. The last thing the people responsible for leading the human race in any confrontation with something the Hegemony’s size needed was to live in a damned echo chamber. Too many politicians had done just that, and in the process forgotten that they were supposed to be statesmen first and politicians second.

  “At the same time, however,” McCabe continued, right on track, “we do know a lot more about the Sarthians and Sarthian psychology than they know about us. And, courtesy of the translating software, any of us can be completely fluent in conversations with them and be confident we’re not going to make a wrong word choice. That doesn’t mean they can’t misinterpret something we say, anyway, but it’s not going to be because of a language barrier. And we have a significant advantage in the computers’ ability to read their body language and expressions.

  “It’s entirely possible that what Alex is worrying about could turn around and bite us, but the bottom line is that it would provide a major increase in our ability to interact with them and learn more about them firsthand. I believe I understand Yerdaz much better now, after our personal conversations, for example. In fact, I can’t help wondering if that’s not part of the reason they’re suggesting this. And in relation to that, we need to remember that while the Empire may have proposed this, it has solid support among all of the Qwernian allies and client states. That’s somewhere between a third and half of the entire planetary population. If we ignore the request, then we risk alienating—” his lips twitched slightly at his own choice of verb “—that part of Sarth.”

  “True,” Abu Bakr said. “I can’t dispute a single word of that. At the same time, though, I’m not comfortable allowing the Sarthians to dictate the terms upon which we’ll have access to their political leaders. And I especially don’t like the thought of finding our mission tangled up in purely Sarthian international politics and power rivalries.”

  “With all due respect, Mister Bakr, it’s their planet,” McCabe pointed out. “If we want to convince them to join us as allies, don’t we have to respect their wishes about how they conduct their political business on their world?”

  Abu Bakr frowned. Dvorak knew he wasn’t one of McCabe’s greatest admirers, and he’d made it quietly—and privately—clear that he had reservations about the advisor’s personal contacts with the Qwernians. On balance, Dvorak was tempted to agree with him, but Yerdaz had been quietly insistent on meeting with the younger man, and openings were too precious to be passed up. And every word of their conversations was recorded by McCabe’s personal computer for later replay, so it wasn’t like he could accidentally commit them to anything without their knowing it. But Abu Bakr was obviously less than fully onboard with McCabe’s last comment.

  “That’s certainly true within limits,” the secretary of state observed now, before his second-in-command said something unfortunate to his special advisor. “The converse of that is that we’re the much more advanced civilization—technologically, at least—which is offering to share that technology with them. That means we have a right to set limits and conditions on the way in which we go about that. And I watched the Diantians and their allies pretty carefully while Yerdaz was presenting Myrcal’s ‘proposal.’ They didn’t say so in so many words, but unless the software was way off the reservation reading their expressions and body language, they weren’t at all happy about it. I think they and their allies and clients would very much like to maintain a single point of contact at the closest thing to a neutral site they’ve got.”

  “That’s because the Republic is a politically more mature system, Sir,” Jane Simmons, Dvorak’s third in command on the civilian side, said. She was only a few years older than Dvorak, but she’d been a State Department attaché for the United States in several Third World countries before the invasion.

  “I’ve seen a lot of this in purely human terms,” she continued. “The extent to which national leaders can approach domestic and international politics like responsible adults is governed by the ability of their own political system to absorb that kind of behavior. One-party nations, or nations where political chicanery in elections is routinely expected, aren’t exactly noted for producing moderate leaders. And if you couple that sort of problem with a sense of inferiority or victimhood—even if, or perhaps especially if, a nation has truly been victimized—you produce a policy and diplomats who are defensive and passive-aggressive at the best of times. The Republic has a many-generational tradition of open debate, representative politics, the art of learning to accept compromise, and the importance of a rule-of-law system which is binding on all parties. My read is that the Qwernians aren’t there yet, and that’s part of what this is about. They don’t trust anyone else not to be cutting secret deals with us at the Nonagon, so they want to spread out points of contact, if only to give themselves and their allies the chance to cut secret deals of their own. Assuming, of course, that any secret deals are being cut in the first place.

  “The Diantians have a lot more faith in the process through the Nonagon, partly because they have that domestic tradition, but also, frankly, because they figure they can game the situation better than the Qwernians can in the Nonagon’s environment. It’s more congenial to them, and they expect to be able to dance circles around the Empire because of that. So there are a lot of factors in play here, on both sides.”

  Dvorak nodded soberly. He always known Simmons was a smart cookie. And, of course, the proof was that she pretty much agreed with his reading of the situation, he thought sardonically. Maybe he wasn’t quite as free of that echo chamber–friendly thinking as he liked to pretend he was?

  “I think there’s a great deal to be said on both sides,” he said finally. “The bottom line, though, is that the Nonagon is going to vote on the proposal in a couple of days. If the decision is to accept Myrcal’s proposal, then our choices are to go along with their desires as our hosts or to tell them to pound sand, which is unlikely to endear us to them. So either we’ll be staying with the arrangement we have, or we’ll be forced to split up our mission between national capitals. I think we can legitimatel
y insist on limiting the number of individual missions we’re prepared to staff, but however we slice it, we’ll be spread a lot thinner than anyone envisioned when we set out. Right this minute, I’m thinking that we insist that our primary mission—our formal embassy—will remain at Lyzan and continue to work through the Nonagon, and that that will be my point of contact as Secretary of State and our senior ambassador. I think we have to do that to avoid the appearance of taking sides by assigning me to any single nation.”

  He paused, looking around the conference table, until a wave of sober nods had answered him.

  “To be honest, I’m hoping the proposal fails, but our remotes are all suggesting it’s more likely to pass, although the margin looks like it’ll be thin. That being the case, I think it behooves us to start some contingency planning now.

  “Abu, much as I hate to say it, I think that as a sop to any potential Qwernian passive-aggressiveness, you’ll have to head the mission to the Empire. Jane, I’d like to have you in Dianto, but the truth is I need that ‘Third World’ experience of yours, so I’m thinking you’ll probably end up on Deltar, in Synchanat or Chayzar. Jefferson,” he turned to Jefferson Davidson, Simmons assistant, whose name had been the source of endless bad jokes, “I think that means you get Dianto. We haven’t presented any kind of formal hierarchy to these people, and I don’t intend to, so neither the Empire nor the Republic should be able to think it got the more senior representative.

  “Now, in addition to deciding how many missions we’ll staff, we have to give some serious thought to our ability to provide security over such a widely dispersed area without dusting off that big stick we’re not supposed to be waving under the Sarthians’ nostril flaps. I’ll be sitting down to discuss that with Brigadier Wilson and Admiral Swenson this evening after dinner, but my initial thought is—”