by S MacDonald
Twenty Three
Nine days later, Arlit came back to the ship. The Fourth had a prototype shower unit that they wanted testing, and Arlit had agreed to come aboard and evaluate it for them.
The shower unit had, in fact, been made aboard the Embassy II, to the Fourth’s specifications. As Tan had mentioned, the Embassy was stuffed full of everything they’d need for the first wave of a global aid mission, with emergency sanitation and water purification systems for two hundred communities. This was clearly not enough for the five hundred and ten inhabited islands, but further supplies were en route in a convoy of freighters which would be here in another month or so.
In the meantime, before they could even consider distributing such tech groundside – and that couldn’t happen till they were going groundside themselves – they had to perfect the design of what they were offering. With the flop of the globelights in mind, that was even more important. Get it wrong on the first island, and the others would reject it out of hand.
So, Arlit. He came aboard on a non-diplomatic basis, in no way representing his people for diplomatic purposes. In fact, he came aboard as a consultant, with the distinction of being the first of his people to earn any money. That had been at Tan’s suggestion. The paramedics they were training groundside were defined as community volunteers and there’d been no thought of paying them. Arlit, though, as Tan pointed out, was coming aboard to help them with product development just as a design consultant might, and in that, deserved the same remuneration that they’d have paid a design consultant from any other world. When Alex had hesitated just a moment, a little surprised and surprised by his own surprise, Davie had chipped in with an ironic, ‘Why, Captain, don’t tell me that you’re considering exploiting a vulnerable economic innocent?’
So, Arlit was being paid. It had been difficult to establish just how much he should be paid, as rates for comparable consultancy varied so much world to world, but again at Tan’s suggestion they’d settled for Chartsey rates. Establishing what did constitute comparable consultancy had led to the decision that they should offer him two hundred dollars for the half-day he would spend advising them.
Arlit was delighted with this. And those who assumed that they would need to explain to him what money was and how he could buy things with it were in for a shock. When Jonas, their financial officer, went to explain his options to him – to spend it on goods available from the ship’s supplies or on order from Telathor, to keep it in an interest-paying account on the ship or to take it away in the form of a cash card, Arlit left him stunned.
‘Actually,’ he said, speaking League Standard at least as fluently as they now spoke Carrearranian, ‘I’m starting a community trust fund. We’re going to start with a few shares in Oreol Enterprises and build our portfolio from there.’
By the time he’d finished telling Jonas what a great investment even a few shares in Oreol Enterprises would be, Jonas was more than satisfied that he knew what he was doing. It was, indeed, an excellent investment, given the growth forecasts for the company which had been set up by entrepreneurs, obviously, to develop tourism at Oreol.
Davie, noting the amazement that rippled around the ship at Arlit evidently understanding more about stocks and shares than most of them did, sniggered happily.
‘Smartest guy in the room,’ he said, and for once, did not mean himself.
Arlit’s reaction to the shower, though, it had to be admitted, was not all that could have been hoped for.
The shower unit stood by itself in one of the rooms within the quarantine zone. It had been designed to Carrearranian scale and in keeping with the local architecture, so the unit was only 1.3 metres high and clad with what looked like the same kind of woven-twig panels they used for their houses. The roof, too, appeared to be made of the big rubbery leaves they used for that purpose, so it would fit in both as to scale and style.
That was the intention, anyway. Arlit looked less than impressed.
‘Nobody would make a house so tiny,’ he said. ‘It looks tup.’
Opening the door, he surveyed the interior with a similarly dubious air. The inside bore a strong resemblance to the cocoon used in the snatch pod. It hadn’t, until the product development team on the Embassy had picked up that design from the Fourth sending mail out to them. At that stage they’d already manufactured thirty of their own idea for showers but had decided, after much discussion, to recycle them and go for a unified style with what the Fourth had already put in place. The interior, therefore, was a smooth round-cornered cuboid with soft oceanic swirls moving gently around it, hypno-relax music and a waft of forest scent.
‘Do you want people to think that this is the same as going in the snatch pod?’ Arlit asked. ‘As in, something you do when you’re so sick or hurt you could die?’
Davie sniggered again. He had been in the quarantine zone to welcome Arlit aboard, but had excused himself after a while – Arlit was intending to stay for several hours and Davie could not sustain that long in a survival suit without food. So he’d come to the gym to watch events in company with a group of Embassy people who’d come over to the ship for the occasion. They were mostly members of the team which had been responsible for the design or would be responsible for the manufacture. Davie had already told them what he thought Arlit’s opinions would be, and had even put up a checklist of them beside the screens showing what was going on. He had headed it, with typical sensitivity, the ‘Told You So’ list. Number one on that list was, ‘He won’t like the box design.’ Number two was, ‘He won’t like the design association with the snatch pod.’
‘Told you,’ said Davie, and ticked that one off, picking up another slice of pizza in the same movement. The gym had been set with tables and chairs, a wall-sized holoscreen and a galley hatch serving refreshments. Davie was sitting on one of the tables provided for the guests, swinging his feet and working his way through his third party-sized pizza. None of the Embassy people said anything, or even looked at him, though Jun Desmoulin, who was there to take care of them, did shoot him a reproachful glance.
Number three on the list was He won’t have a problem with the control panel, which also turned out to be right.
‘Yes, that’s fine,’ said Arlit, when the panel was explained to him. It was identical in size and style to the face of the singing stones, a circle with eight segments around the outside numbered 0 to 7 around another circle in the middle. On the singing stones and on comms, that inner circle was the active screen. In the shower it was used as a start button. Each of the numbers had a picture next to it showing what function it gave, but more importantly, touching each number provided a verbal explanation – one tap, one word, a longer hold, a fuller explanation of what was involved. Only one function could be selected at a time, and when the user was ready, a touch on the central panel would start that function’s cycle. Another touch on it, at any time, could bring it to an end. This was a significant difference from the kind of showers used aboard ship, in which doors locked while liquid water was flying around and only an emergency override could get you out of there until the showering cycle had finished. This, clearly, was not appropriate for groundside domestic tech and they had set it so that either tapping the central panel or opening the door would end the cycle automatically. Even so, they had rigged the room they were using for testing so that if water did get out it wouldn’t trigger an environmental hazard alert.
It was just as well they did. After some amusement and bemusement over the lavatorial functions - He won’t like the urinal and He’ll be shocked by the idea of keeping poo in a tank both ticked off the Told You So list – Arlit embarked on the experience of having a shower. He was not wearing a survival suit, though the rest of them were. Arlit was wearing his best clothes, the embroidered cotton outfit worn by all the islanders for special occasions.
Arlit, then, stepped into the shower with his clothes on, having been shown how to hang them in the panel that opened when the shower was activated, so t
hat they wouldn’t get wet. This panel, indeed, doubled as number six on the functions, a compact laundry unit which Arlit would also test for them. For now, though, he was testing setting three. This was the shortest and lightest of the three showering options. It had been programmed with spray no harder than Carrearranians would have experienced in rain, and at a temperature of warm tropical rain, too. It was the simplest of freshen-up programmes, just a sluice, foam and rinse of a kind that spacers took routinely after using the lavatory, the starship equivalent of washing their hands.
Arlit seemed quite pleased, initially. They weren’t watching him but he was talking to them from inside the shower, telling them what he was doing and how he was feeling about it.
‘I’m pushing the go button now,’ he reported, and as the lukewarm rain-effect shower sprinkled over him, ‘that feels nice, it’s…’
Then the foam arrived, each droplet charged with a cleanser which frothed all over Arlit’s skin with a floral scented bubble-foam. ‘Arrrh!’
Two seconds later he was out of the shower, naked and panting, trying to shake the foam off himself and scattering it, and water, all around. ‘Get it off!’
Fortunately they had been prepared for this, as well as every other contingency they’d been able to think of. Towels were provided, along with reassurance that the foam was not doing him any harm.
‘I know that,’ said Arlit, rather crossly. ‘But it stinks, and it’s disgusting…’ he wiped at his chest with another towel, but grimaced as he could still feel the effect of the foam on his skin, ‘like slime.’
It took some persuasion to get him to go back in the shower for a rinse, as he seemed quite inclined to go back to the planet and wash this revolting stuff off in the sea. Promised that there would be no more foam, though, only clean water, he did get rinsed off, and having recovered his equilibrium, gave the laundry function a test.
‘What have you done to my clothes?’ The laundry function had been set to mimic, as far as possible, the way that cotton fabric would feel after being washed in an herbal rinse and hung out to dry in the sun and sea breeze, but Arlit was unconvinced. ‘They feel thin,’ he observed, rubbing the fabric in his fingers. The designers had known that their process would very slightly flatten the fibres, but had been sure that this would be too slight for the islanders to notice. Arlit sniffed at them too, guardedly, and wrinkled his nose. ‘And they smell bad.’
‘Told… you… so.’ Davie checked off the final item on his list, finished his last pizza and went to get doughnuts.
Having told them what was wrong with their shower, Arlit then set about helping them to get it right. As a result of which, three hours later, the Embassy team had a radically different design. This would mean scrapping all the ones they’d already made, again, and recycling the siliplas to create a very different style, as well as reprogramming the functions without the use of foam. It was not the work involved in this, though, which was responsible for the sense of indignation in the gym. That was down to Davie North, unveiling his second list, this time entitled Could Have Told You So. In it, he laid out pretty much exactly what features Arlit had suggested.
‘Come on, Davie.’ Jun Desmoulin was speaking for all the Embassy team when he challenged Davie, sitting there so smug and know-it-all. ‘You asked him.’
‘I did not,’ Davie retorted. ‘I was told that it was…’ a pause just long enough for the sarcasm to be evident, ‘inappropriate for me to be involved in product development, since I intend bidding for the contract to provide infrastructure investment here. So I have not talked to him about this at all. I,’ he said, ‘have simply paid attention.’
There was a silence. Then, as it sank in just how much of their time and resources had been wasted, when Davie North could have told them straight off what was wanted, they turned en masse to stare at the internal comms screen showing the command deck.
As all their accusing gazes focussed on him, Alex gave a quiet little sigh. He had known all along that Davie’s jibes were not directed at the Embassy team, but at him, for making the decision which had excluded Davie from involvement with the products which the mission was going to provide. It had seemed like a sound ethical decision at the time, if perhaps a little on the over-cautious side. Where ethics were concerned, Alex always preferred to err on the side of being too stringent.
Now, though, seeing that Davie had successfully wound up the Embassy team to the point where they would be demanding that Davie be allowed to assist with product development, Alex turned his head and gazed at Tan Ganhauser.
Tan smiled back with that innocence which was so much like Buzz’s own look of placid virtue, the two of them indeed sitting next to one another at the datatable, beaming pleasantly upon the skipper.
Feeling more than a little bit ganged up on, Alex could only grin, giving a helpless little gesture of surrender.
‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘I withdraw my objection to your employing Mr North for product consultancy.’
‘Tah!’ Down in the gym, Davie gave a Carrearranian exclamation of happy satisfaction, scoring a point in the air with his finger and then giving Alex a mock-salute, for which Alex grinned back at him.
‘Trip-all,’ he acknowledged, the classic admission of defeat in the game of triplink both of them enjoyed, and in which they nearly always had a game going on.
It wasn’t long after Arlit’s return home that the islanders decided that they needed another elder to deal with all this new technology. It wasn’t totally out of the blue, they’d been talking about it ever since the drones had first landed and brought them comms and lights. This was clearly an area of expertise beyond the traditional roles of the elders, and all the islands had been talking about how they would respond to that. On Arak’s island, with Arlit leading the way in learning about the new technologies, they felt that it was only fair to acknowledge that expertise with the status of elder.
Arlit, therefore, was asked at a full village meeting to undertake responsibility for the new science and technology the Fourth was bringing in. And, under warning that he was not to allow them to send anything more like those lights that made you go blind, he was invested in his new responsibilities with an elder’s sash.
That was pleasing, Alex felt, as an indicator that the Carrearranians were adapting to change, and pleasing at the personal level, too, as an honour he felt Arlit well deserved.
What was really astonishing, though, was the speed with which other islands decided to follow Arak’s lead and invest their own science and technology elders. As usual in governmental process as practiced on Carrearranis, this involved a noisy discussion with a great deal of cross-talk and a bewildering lack of agenda, but somehow out of the suggestions, arguments and counter-arguments a kind of consensus arose. In some villages that only took minutes, as it was entirely obvious to all of them which of their number was best fitted to the new technological responsibilities. On others, the discussions went on for as long as a couple of days. At the point where the final island made their minds up about their choice, though, all five hundred and ten islands now had tech elders.
Even more important and dramatic, though, was the impact of widespread distribution of comms. That had taken several days, as drones carried down enough comms to each island for every adult and child to have their own.
The immediate result was predictable. Other than for a few elderly refusers, the Carrearranians were delighted to have their own comms and, as with Arak, spent their first few hours rushing about their island or heading out in boats, calling one another and the Fourth.
It didn’t take them long, though, to realise that this really wasn’t going to work. They understood already that the Fourth had grouped them into regions, and that each region had a liaison officer and support team. That meant that every officer had thirteen or fourteen islands to liaise with, supported by a team who had, themselves, each got two or three islands they were talking to. That had been workable when the only means of communicatio
n were the single singing stones on each island which meant that only one call could be made at a time. It had become a lot more demanding since the chiefs and healers had been given their own comms, and more so again when every boat setting out to sea was provided with one. Now everyone on the planet had comms, there were thousands of people at any given time all trying to talk to their liaison team.
The Fourth dealt with that, as had already been decided, by joining people into conference calls and using a friendly recorded ‘Sorry, I’m asleep right now’ when they could not make themselves available. Even so, they were talking on comms virtually all the time, even when working at other things, even while eating, and neither Rangi nor Simon was going to tolerate that for very long.
As it turned out, they were not going to have to. The Carrearranians themselves very soon realised that so many of them calling so few people all the time was unfair and unworkable, as the babble of conference calls often meant that they couldn’t make themselves heard anyway. It also made them very much more aware of how much the Fourth had to repeat themselves. Other than for global announcements usually made by Alex himself, information and requests for opinions about things were made by liaisons calling each island directly. The islanders had known all along that this meant that their liaison might spend all day calling each of the islands in their region in turn, but knowing that was happening was quite a different thing to hearing it happening. Now that they all had access to comms, they were talking even more to one another than they were to the Fourth, and able to hear, too, how the same information was being gone through again and again.
It was Sarat who proposed the solution.
‘Listen,’ she had called a conference call with all the fourteen islands in her liaison group, gathering the chiefs and elders, ‘the Fourth can’t keep doing this, it’s just tup.’
There followed several minutes of agreement, including anecdotes and general confirmation that the offworlders, though so clever in so many ways, were sadly short of basic common sense. Sarat’s solution was discussed, too, and readily accepted. They would form, in effect, an island cooperative for the purpose of liaising with the Fourth. And as it was Sarat’s idea and she was self-evidently the best suited of them to taking it on, she was duly agreed to be their representative.