Carrearranis (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 5)

by S MacDonald

  Arak laughed. ‘The elders will blow the storm-shell when it is time,’ he said, and Alex could get no more help out of him than that.

  ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Buzz remarked later, as the two of them shared soppo and dogs at the turning of the nightwatch and watched the storm roaring and howling its way over the ocean.

  ‘Interesting?’ Alex queried. It certainly wasn’t the word he’d have chosen.

  ‘In terms of human psychology,’ said Buzz, the psychologist. ‘I mean we are, all of us, fully committed to the principle of respecting the sovereign rights of the people of Carrearranis, right? And we have set down in firm policy that we will not do anything that affects them or their world without their fully informed consent. And yet, faced with a situation in which we feel we know better than they do, we have been making concerted and pretty strong efforts to tell them what to do.’

  Alex was just about to protest when he realised that Buzz was right, stopped, and really thought about it.

  ‘Their lives are at risk,’ he said, ‘at real and imminent risk.’

  ‘And that trumps the non-interference policy,’ Buzz observed, ‘at least to the extent of offering strong advice. But I’m curious, dear boy. If we were in a position to send shuttles down there right now, what decision would you make on that?’

  Alex was silent for a long time, giving that the serious thought he knew Buzz was asking for, not a casual answer off the top of his head.

  ‘I think I’d have to send people down to try to persuade them in person,’ he said eventually. ‘But I couldn’t evacuate them by force or under threat of force. Even governments don’t have the right to threaten to shoot people for refusing to evacuate their homes, and I don’t have any authority over them. So we’d just have to inform, explain and try to persuade. And failing that…’ a wry look, ‘we’d just have to stand by to provide search and rescue.’

  ‘A difficult call,’ Buzz observed, ‘especially in circumstances where we do feel we are better informed and more able to evaluate the risks than they are themselves. The human instinct to protect, there, at odds with diplomatic principle.’

  ‘There is that,’ said Alex, admitting to the instinct he was feeling, a wish that he could just send in all his shuttles and grab those people out of the danger they were laughing off. ‘As it stands though, we can do nothing but inform, advise … and wait.’

  It was a long night. The islanders themselves evidently spent a tranquil night – they were a couple of hours ahead of shipboard time just then and had settled to sleep long before Alex and Buzz embarked on their vigil. Once or twice people came out of their houses to relieve themselves, but there was no other activity. Nor did they seem at all concerned when they began getting up, shortly after dawn. There was already a stiff breeze by then, with heavily massing clouds and swathes of rain passing over the island. The villagers, though, spent much of their lives outdoors and merely stepped into the nearest shelter when the rain was at its worst.

  ‘Please, please,’ Alex begged, once he’d managed to get some of them over to the singing stone. ‘The danger is very close now, you can see the storm coming, you must get to safety straight away, please, please, now, sound the storm-shell and go.’

  ‘We will,’ a sleepy villager assured him, with a tolerant air. ‘After breakfast.’

  They took their time over breakfast, maddening Alex and all the other people watching with anxiety modulating into desperation. One or two people wandered over to tell him again that he wasn’t to worry, but mostly they just pottered about, preparing the mash of warmed fruit they generally had for breakfast, and chattering unconcernedly about the usual village things. Things only changed about an hour and a half before the storm was due to hit. The seaweed on the wind-tree lifted in a gust and one of the fabric strips began to snap and fly out straight. The elder who was responsible for weather forecasting took due note of this, and of the brooding grey clouds lowering overhead, and gave a satisfied nod. Then, and only then, did he raise the storm shell to his lips and give it a long blast.

  The Fourth learned a great deal in the ensuing few minutes. They learned how a village could be entirely packed up with belongings bundled unhurriedly into cloths, whilst at the same time other members of the community were dismantling the houses. They came apart astonishingly fast. The houses were just woven panels fastened to upright posts with a kind of lacing which had only to be untied for the panels to be lifted away. Roof panels supporting a layer of huge leaves were unfastened and lifted off, too, with the leaves being discarded and the panels carefully tied into stacks with the others. Beaten earth floors were revealed, already denuded of furnishings and household goods. Groups of young people walked through the village, chatting and having a laugh as they carried the fishing boats clear of the beach. It all looked very orderly, a well-practised routine accomplished with as little fuss as a family might pack up and head out for a day trip. The elder responsible for keeping the community fire was carrying a container of smouldering embers. Others gathered all the food there was around the village and took that along too. Just before they went, several of them came over to the singing stone to tell Alex that they were going now and he really shouldn’t worry so much – Alex, not wanting to delay them a second, just urged them to go, please, go, at which they laughed and departed. Householders followed the boats along the track which wound through the trees and up the hillside. Behind them, the tied-together stacks of lightweight house panels were carried on the shoulders of men and women with one of them chanting a song to keep them more or less in step. They didn’t have to carry them far, though it was evidently an effort to get them up the hill and they were all out of breath as they brought them up to where the boats had already been stored. They had been tucked into the lee of a canyon wall, safe from the wind, and the house panels were stacked up there too, along with some of the heavier household goods. The rest was taken on up the track to the village’s storm shelter.

  This, as with all the island shelters, was a natural feature which had been improved by the islanders with some rudimentary building work. In this case the shelter was a rough cleft in the ground with banks of stone built up on both sides. Since the Rule of Life they lived by forbade quarrying, the only stones available to them were those which had fallen from cliffs onto the beach. Some of these were so large that it must have taken tremendous effort to get them up the hill. Several of them were laid as slabs across the narrowest end of the cleft, Nothing short of a direct strike from a tornado would shift them, so the cleft was well protected from the wind, and at its upper end, from the worst of the rain, too. Alex didn’t think that that sheltered part was big enough for the whole village, but he was wrong. All a hundred and nineteen of them fitted themselves into it, piling up belongings and sitting on them, snugged up tight with the smaller children on laps and the bigger ones cuddled round their feet. A fire was lit using the embers which had been brought, and there was a cheer as the flames licked up. The atmosphere was clearly one of celebration, as if they’d come here for a party rather than to cower in fear from the storm which was about to ravage their island.

  ‘Um,’ said Alex, observing this. He was starting to wonder if he might, just might, have been over-reacting somewhat.

  The storm certainly was very dramatic, when it hit. Trees were bent so far it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t snap, and two of them indeed did come crashing over as their roots tore up under the strain. Foliage everywhere was being lashed about by the wind and hammered by the rain. Then came the waves, foaming up the beach and crashing through where the village had been. On the Heron, there were exclamations of horror. Some people were watching with their hands over their mouths, others were making unconvincing efforts at nonchalance, They’ll be fine. A young crewman who added unwisely, ‘They’re used to it,’ was turned on by everyone around and scolded, ‘What if that was your home?’ The team responsible for liaison with that island were having to be comforted, the Sub-lt in charge of
them wan and tearful, being given cups of tea in the wardroom.

  On the island, when the storm was at its height, the islanders sang storm songs. These had a good deal of shouting and whooping in them and involved communal swaying with much bumping and laughter when people swayed out of time. They appeared to be enjoying themselves very much.

  ‘I can’t help thinking,’ Alex remarked privately, to Buzz, ‘that I’ve got this wrong, somehow…’

  ‘We, dear boy,’ Buzz corrected. Not one member of the Heron’s company had come forward to advise the skipper to have faith in the islanders’ ability to take care of themselves. Every one of them had been alarmed by the sight of that storm roaring towards the little island. Most of them had spent the night watching it, too, anxiously tracking its movement, the plunging air pressure and the rising wind speed. And they were watching it now, too, with horror. Other islanders from all over the planet were talking with their liaisons and laughing at their fears, assuring them that everything would be fine and storms were good. The island currently being battered was, in fact, rather envied because they had more storms than most. Some islands, a villager said, had to make do with no more than one storm a year.

  The Fourth already knew, of course, that storms provided the villagers with their only source of timber. The Rule of Life forbade them to cut living trees, so a storm-downed tree was a valuable resource. Those who’d taken a keen interest in plant biology or the details of household goods were also aware that the gourds used by the villagers as cooking and eating vessels were obtained from a high, thistly tree impossible to climb without injury – storms brought the gourds down, the villagers had explained.

  The Fourth could have put this together, along with many other little clues, and understood that a storm really was of tremendous benefit to any island, always providing of course that it was well forecasted and that the village had plenty of time to relocate to their shelter. Even then, though, that theoretical knowledge would not have kept them from reacting with fear to the sight of a real storm bearing down on a real island. They were, every one of them, products of a highly technological society. Most of them had grown up on worlds with weather control which meant that rain only fell in controlled amounts during the night and high winds were unknown. It might have been a factor, too, that all of them were spacers, associating any strong wind with the deadly blast of blowout. Whatever the cause, the reality of seeing towering waves and tree-flattening winds heading towards people who seemed so helpless, and feeling so helpless themselves, had scared and worried them to the edge of panic

  Alex gave Buzz a speaking glance. He appreciated the Exec’s attempt to share the responsibility for this, but he knew very well that it was his own fearful, urgent reaction that had escalated the anxiety in his crew. If he had been calm and positive about it, they would have trusted his judgement and there’d have been none of this drama. But how could he have stayed calm and positive when he had truly believed that he had to convince those people to leave with their lives at imminent risk and their homes about to be destroyed?

  As the storm passed, there were sighs of relief across the starship, a few even offering prayers of thanks. On the ground, the villagers were keen to come out of their shelter, but waited while Sarat and the weather-wise elder stood in the opening, surveying the sky and discussing the sound of the wind. Only when they were satisfied did the villagers give happy whoops, gathering up their belongings and heading back down the track.

  Some damage had been done to the site of their village. The storm surge had swept silt and sand across it and left a thick sludgy deposit several centimetres deep. One of the house posts was wonky after being hit by a wave-driven rock. The whole island was littered with debris, too; fallen trees, branches, leaves everywhere. The place looked trashed.

  The islanders surveyed this with delight. Seeing that two trees had been brought down made them whoop for joy – there were already shouts about building a new boat as they ran down to see what else the storm had brought. The wonky house post just made them laugh, as they joked about making the other posts lean over too so that family could have a wonky house. As they were joking, though, a group of them set about straightening the post, ramming pebbles down to hold it. It was still raining and windy, but nobody seemed to mind. The younger people set to work with wooden shovels to shift the silt away from the village site. It would take them the rest of the day, but they blitzed away at it steadily, occasionally pausing to retrieve a stone or chunk of wood that the storm had cast up. These were gathered in piles, clearly valued. Gourds, too, began to appear – children ran off in shrieking competition to find these, running back with armfuls of them and piling them up before racing off again. The elderly took baskets and went off to gather windfall fruit. Again it was clear; everyone had their jobs to do and just got on with them happily.

  Aboard the Heron, things went very quiet. There was a mounting sense of embarrassment as they watched the islanders rejoicing at everything the storm had brought. Many were keeping half an eye on the skipper, who was sitting with his chin propped in his hand.

  ‘There now,’ Sarat, having looked around herself and seen that everyone was getting on with things, came over to the singing stone and called Alex. ‘Wasn’t that a good storm?’ she asked, with a combination of joy at everything they’d gained from it and kindly reassurance to the man who’d been so ridiculously worried.

  Alex broke into a grin – rueful, but fully appreciating the joke against himself.

  ‘I,’ he announced, in a statement no other League Ambassador had made in public before, ever, ‘am an idiot.’

  Sarat laughed. Laughter broke out aboard ship, too, as the skipper’s comment broke the tension. Only on the interdeck several decks below them did Commander Mikthorn make a rapid note on his comp.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Alex confessed. ‘I should have had more trust in your knowledge and abilities.’

  ‘Yes, you should,’ Sarat gave one of her long gurgling laughs, with a look of tolerant amusement. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, with keen percipience, ‘because you are so big, you think we are like children.’

  ‘No, not at all!’ Alex was shocked, though an innate honesty forced him to add, after a moment’s contemplation, ‘Not consciously, anyway. Frankly I think it’s more to do with the fact that we are spacers. We consider most groundsiders on our own worlds to be idiots, you see.’

  Sarat thought that was hilarious. It was some time before she stopped laughing enough to reply.

  ‘Your people know about a lot of things we don’t,’ she observed. ‘And you have clever machines. But here…’ she waved a hand at the storm-wracked island, ‘it is you who are like children.’

  ‘Very true,’ Alex conceded without hesitation, but that just made her laugh again.

  ‘True is true,’ she corrected him. ‘Truth is an absolute. It cannot be ‘very’ true or ‘slightly’ true. A thing is either true, or it isn’t.’

  Alex laughed at that, as the thought crossed his mind that if such a principle applied in the League, politics and business would be conducted very differently. Not for the first time, he was struck by the fundamental strangeness of Carrearranian society. It wasn’t merely that they were a pre-industrial people with a post-industrial cosmology, nor even the odd lifestyle they had under their cherished Rules of Life. It was as if at some level they thought differently, as if their minds were digital rather than the analogue thinking normal in the League. To them, things were so, or not so, with no scope for the infinite slide of meaning between, for instance, absolutely true and absolutely false.

  ‘Well, we won’t worry about storms again,’ he assured her, ‘just make sure you know when they’re coming.’

  Sarat rolled her eyes over to the wind tree, still standing though it had lost a branch or two.

  ‘We know that already,’ she told him, and having studied him with a thoughtful air, observed, ‘You should have a nap, you look tired.’

  Thirteen

>   Alex did get some sleep, after he’d held a debriefing and written an analytical report of the incident. It had, he felt, taught them a lot, even if that was at the cost of some embarrassment. There certainly seemed to be little danger of the Carrearranians developing unhealthy dependence on them, still less regarding them as any kind of sky-gods. In fact, their panic seemed to have strengthened the relationship. It had certainly made the Carrearranians laugh, which was all to the good as they came to terms with the loss of the Guardian.

  ‘It appears to have boosted their confidence in themselves,’ said Buzz, analysing observations in the hours after Alex had admitted that they’d got that situation wrong. ‘Morale is significantly higher than it was before, and there’s a significant increase, too, in the percentage of discussions categorised as them instructing us, with a corresponding drop in the percentage of them asking for advice. The balance is in the right direction, moving towards a more equal exchange – overall, I have no doubt that the incident has been of benefit both to Carrearranian morale and to the diplomatic relationship.’ Having made that statement for the benefit of the log, he grinned at the skipper. ‘So don’t beat yourself up about it, dear boy.’

  Alex laughed. ‘I’m not.’ He assured the exec. ‘Exodiplomacy so very often involves making a monumental fool of myself, it’s just par for the course. And this doesn’t even come close on the embarrassment scale to doing the Dance of the Lizard.’

  That got a laugh throughout the ship – even those who’d joined since the Gide mission had seen the footage of the skipper, Rangi, Shion and CPO Atwood attempting the Dance of the Lizard which the Gider had insisted on to celebrate their meeting. It was a clip which had never dropped out of the ‘Top Ten Mission Moments’ on the notice board.

  ‘But they are right, you know,’ Silvie was on the command deck, evidently interested in the debriefing and reading Alex’s report as he wrote it. ‘The Carrearranians,’ she clarified, when everyone looked at her in surprised enquiry. ‘Humans worry all the time – it’s one of the hardest things for my people to understand and cope with, how anxious and even angry you become about things that might happen, or even might have happened, like retrospective worrying about what might have happened if something else had happened. It is,’ she said, with a plaintive note and a slightly accusing look, ‘very confusing.’