by S MacDonald
They certainly did that. Alex was clued up enough to realise what Tan had meant by ‘essential’ – Diplomatic Corps etiquette meant that the incoming ambassador had to host a dinner in the honour of the outgoing one. The only circumstances under which they would not do so would be if the outgoing ambassador had been removed from post in disgrace. For Tan not to host a dinner for Alex, therefore, would be a tremendous insult to him and would be read, by others, as Tan’s protest against the Declaration of Hostilities which Alex had deployed. So Alex, recognising the importance of the event, did his best to smile and be sociable, or at least as sociable as he could be in those clothes and those surroundings.
‘What is the matter with Alex?’ Arak was a fellow guest, along with all thirty seven of the other elder-chiefs, watching as people were led up to be presented to the guest of honour. Alex had met all of them already, but didn’t know any of them personally, and since work-related conversation was forbidden, here, he was reduced to the social platitudes he’d learned for such occasions. ‘He looks,’ said Arak, ‘like he has a sharp stick up his bum.’
‘That’s, um…’ the cultural attaché escorting Arak stored away this description of Captain von Strada for private, gleeful snorting over, later on, but managed to keep a straight face. ‘That’s his formal manner… the way he behaves, when he’s wearing those clothes.’
Arak was wearing his own formal clothes – a newly woven tunic, dyed pale blue, red pants and cotton-rope sandals. He had on his new sash of office, too, embroidered with the numbers of all five hundred and ten islands. It had been a gift from Tan, as had the sashes being worn by the other thirty seven chief elders, each with the numbers of the islands in their region. It was understood that these clothes, the full tunic and pants kept by all villagers for special occasions, meant a certain amount of ceremony, but Arak had never seen anything like this. He watched Alex remarking for the seventh time that evening that the climate here was very pleasant, and tick-tocked his head in sorrowing incredulity.
‘I hope he doesn’t wear them very often, then.’
But dinner, at least, was enjoyable. The chefs had prepared three menus, with the guests indicating ahead of time whether they wished to eat Carrearranian, Novaterran or Chartsey cuisine. The Novaterran was in Alex’s honour, as it was traditional to serve the outgoing ambassador with a menu from his homeworld. Alex was not, in fact, particularly fond of Novaterran food, but he knew what was manners and accepted it, if not gracefully, then with the correct courteous noises.
In fact, the food was a pleasant surprise. His memories of Novaterran food were mostly of the beige stodge served up in the von Strada household. He hadn’t minded it at the time, never having known any different, but the more cosmopolitan catering provided at the Novaterre Academy had come as a culinary revelation. It was possible, he’d discovered, for food to be tasty.
The Embassy chefs, though, were of the highest calibre, and had they been asked to serve up dishes of mud they’d have found some way to elevate them into haute cuisine. As it was, they’d adapted Novaterran food into a menu which was both high class and adapted particularly for Captain von Strada’s tastes. So, to his own surprise, he found himself enjoying it enormously.
‘This is delicious,’ he told Tan, at the sweet course, a kind of set custard with cream, known to Novaterrans as blancmange. As a child, blancmange had meant a bowl of pale sloppy stodge with a sprinkle of coloured sugar crystals over it. This blancmange was light, hardly sweet at all, like a foamy cheesecake adorned with tiny freeze-dried fruits which packed a taste sensation. He was not sufficiently food-educated to be aware of the extremely complex processes the chefs had employed to create that smear of sauce which evaporated in the mouth, nor of how much effort had gone into the fragile wafer he thought of as a biscuit. He only knew that it tasted great.
‘Good,’ said Tan. He was dining on the Novaterran menu, too, in compliment to the guest of honour. It wasn’t to his taste at all – far too heavy on the cream and carbs for his liking – but he was glad to see Alex enjoying a good meal. Fortunately, there was no tradition of after-dinner speeches at such occasions, only of toasts, accomplished on this occasion in non-alcoholic champagne. And afterwards, too, when the other guests were being marshalled back into the reception room, it was quite in order for Tan to invite the guest of honour to take coffee with him privately.
Alex did so, heaving a sigh of relief at finding that they were alone in the Ambassador’s Lounge, at least once they’d been served with their coffee and the steward had glided himself away.
‘That went off quite well, I thought,’ he said, and Tan grinned. He had heard Alex von Strada described as a walking social calamity – and that, indeed, by a friend of his, the current ambassador to Korvold. The evening had certainly been hard work from Tan’s own point of view, keeping things moving and smoothing over the more obvious halts and awkwardness in conversation.
‘Yes, excellent,’ he said, since nobody had actually stormed out in a rage, sworn at the guest of honour or thrown a cocktail in his face, all of which had happened to Alex at previous social occasions. ‘But I wanted to say to you - Alex, I am going to insist on the Fourth taking at least a week’s shoreleave here before you head out. No…’ he held up his hand as Alex would have protested. ‘I don’t want to hear any argument about it,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been sending people off on rotation to Oreol but that’s no kind of holiday, let’s face it. And I know that you’ll be pausing for a week or two at Telathor, as President Arthas has insisted on that. But that won’t be any kind of holiday for any of you, either, with all the parades and celebrations, that will be very hard work. So I insist – I absolutely insist – that you take advantage of the facilities here for all your people to spend a few days off the ship for some very much needed R&R. We have the accommodation in the commissariat and a beach just down the hill – and if you need more than that, we can provide it.’
Alex knew that his people would not ask for any more than that – a comfortable room, excellent food and a black-sanded beach on a world as close to paradise as anyone could ask for. There would, he knew, be no complaints when he told them that they were all to have a week’s shoreleave here before they left.
‘Well… thank you.’ The agreement had already been that the Fourth would remain here, providing support services to Tan, for a little while after he had taken over. Realistically, they could continue to do that while a quarter of their crew at a time was away on shoreleave.
‘Good,’ Tan said, pleased to have won that one without any debate. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘will be on the first wave.’ He pointed a finger at him, keeping him silent. ‘No argument,’ he repeated, and laid down his ace. ‘I’ve got Simon backing me up on this one.’
So the next day Alex, along with a quarter of his crew, arrived at Embassy Island on shoreleave.
Alex was not happy. Simon, Buzz and Tan between them had bundled him down here with a firm list of dos and don’ts. Buzz had packed the clothes that he was allowed to wear, Simon had vetted his personal comp and locked it out of anything but leisure access, and Tan had issued instructions to the Embassy staff that it was to be reported to him immediately if Captain von Strada was doing anything that looked remotely like work. He was to rest, eat, sleep, eat, go for easy walks and eat some more. One of the chefs had been detailed to prepare menus especially to tempt his appetite.
Once Alex had unpacked his holiday clothes in the first-class room allocated to him, had tea and cake in the commissariat and walked down to the beach, he felt that he had pretty much exhausted Embassy Island’s potential as a holiday resort. This, he knew, was unfair. Everyone else was just loving the facilities there and clearly going to have a wonderful time. Alex, though, would have been bored in the most facility-rich holiday venue in the known galaxy. It didn’t matter what there was to do, none of it was work, and work was what he truly enjoyed. On Simon’s advice, he had acquired an old wreck of a shuttle, something which w
ould take him years to restore, in order to give him something to do and make shoreleave more bearable. The shuttle, however, was at the Fourth’s base on Therik, and there was nothing like that he could do here. Even Simon had been unsympathetic – it wouldn’t hurt him, he’d told Alex, to take a few days out and just stop for a while.
So, as miserable as it made him, Alex did his best. The next day, things were a little better – it rained in the morning, which was amazing for all of them to be out in, even for Alex. It wasn’t the first time that he had ever been in natural rain – he had been to Ferajo – but it was still a very rare, special experience for anyone born on the central worlds. Then, in the afternoon, the Diplomatic Corps finished laying a path up to the top of the volcano.
It was more of their glide path walkway – more than three kilometres of it, in fact, laid in a curving zig-zag up the slope behind the landing pad. They had to use the path, as it was considered unsafe to scramble over the uneven, ropey and often slippery surface of the basalt. There were lava tubes beneath it, too, sometimes with holes opening up to the surface, so nobody was allowed to just go wandering off. They could walk up the path, though, or step onto the moving glide. Alex, like many of the others, set off initially to walk up, feeling that it would do him good to stretch his legs. And he, also like many of the others, gave up and stepped onto the glide before he made it half way up. The slope did not look very steep, but the heavier gravity and lower oxygen meant that it felt a great deal steeper. Legs were heavy and lungs straining after a walk which would have seemed hardly more than a stroll on most other worlds.
Alex, for one, was glad of the glide path which carried him up gently, catching his breath and enjoying the view as it opened out still further at every turn. He liked it at the top, too, though the reek of sulphur made him cough and the crater lake was not much more than a big puddle. There were fumaroles sending wisps of steam into the air, and a liquid lava vent which you could see as a tiny red patch over on the far side of the crater. All the real lava flow, though, was on the north-eastern side of the island, currently off limits. Alex was amused, though, to see that there was a fence, not just around the viewing platform at the top of the path, but extending for a hundred metres or so either side of it. A very small plaque at the viewing platform recorded the fact that this path, platform and fence had been installed at the request of Ambassador Silver, ‘for the safe enjoyment of the volcano by visitors’, and when he saw that Alex laughed uproariously. But that, really, seemed likely to be the highlight of the trip.
On day four, though, he had lunch with Tan Ganhauser – informally, which in Diplomatic Corps terms meant in the ambassador’s private dining room. Tan would not allow any discussion of work, but they chatted about Fleet gossip, Tan asking if he’d heard the one about the patrol ship skipper and the engineer, and keeping the conversation light. Mostly, he was concerned about the fate of the purple psychic spiders he’d been evolving in the System Lord game.
‘I was busy for a few days,’ he lamented, ‘and when I got back they were all dying out – pathogens, massive volcanism triggering environmental change and an out-of-nowhere asteroid strike. I mean, what are the odds?’
Alex hadn’t played the game himself, but he sympathised.
‘I gather,’ he said, since the System Lord game was currently popular on the ship, ‘that the only thing you can do in that situation is fast forward and hope something evolves that you can work with.’
Tan nodded. In the evolutionary phase of the game, it progressed at the rate of a million years a day whether you were playing it or not. You could fast forward, but you could not put it on pause and you could never go back.
‘I have hopes,’ he conceded, ‘of the ants.’
Alex chuckled, struck by a thought. ‘It does make you think, though,’ he observed. ‘What would the Olaret and the other ancients who created survival species think of us, I wonder.’
They discussed that, Tan expressing a staunchly optimistic view of human progress while Alex was a little more dubious. What he’d learned of human history did not give him much assurance that the future would be one of unalloyed and brilliant progress. For once, he was able to speak frankly, to a trusted friend and in absolute privacy, as there was no recording of any kind in the Ambassador’s suite.
It was at the end of the meal, though, as Alex was taking leave of him, that the real confidence was exchanged.
‘I did just want to say,’ Alex said, ‘thank you.’ He looked significantly at the other man. ‘I would never have thought of it on my own,’ he admitted. ‘Would never have occurred to me in a thousand years. So … thank you, Tan.’
Tan understood at once that he was being thanked for the prompting which had led Alex to make that Declaration of Hostilities – the right thing to do, but very definitely not the easy one. He looked at the captain, and he laughed.
‘Oh, Alex,’ he said, with amusement and just the faintest hint of reproach. ‘You don’t seriously think that that was my idea, do you?’
Then he shook hands, glanced very casually upwards and to one side, and steered Alex firmly out of the room before he could say anything else. Only a spacer aware of his position on a rotating and orbiting planet could have recognised that the glance he had given was in the direction of Chartsey. And even then, it took Alex a second or two to put that together with the realisation that there was only one man in the League with the authority to give such an instruction to an ambassador.
‘Ah,’ he said, and felt all at once just a little foolish, then angry at being made foolish, used by cleverer and more powerful people than himself, then in the next moment, accepting it… yes, of course. Call it ultimate deniability, a pawn sacrifice manoeuvre or whatever other term you chose to employ, when there was a difficult, controversial decision to be made, it made sense to put someone out in front who could make that call and take the backlash for it. And if that was what it took to do the right thing for this world and in the service of the League, Alex von Strada would not be found wanting. All the same, though, all that agonising over it, when if they’d simply given him confidential orders… well, it was done now, and a relief, at least, to know that he would have the support of the president, however covert that might be.
So, he went back to attempting to enjoy his shoreleave. By day five, he was feeling much inclined to start counting the hours off with a tally, like a prisoner counting the days of captivity. The afternoon of day five found him down on the headland. The beach lay to the left of it – equipped now with shaded loungers, equipment for beach sports and a self-service beach-bar with a chiller packed with all manner of drinks and snacks. This included real beer and wine, which were also served in the commissariat. Every other shoreleaver there was having a great time, dozing, having a beer, playing handball or splashing about in the lagoon. Even Professor Parrot and the rest of the research team looked like they were enjoying themselves, though it had taken Alex, Simon and Commander Mikthorn’s united efforts to prise them out of the lab. Alex’s final, decisive argument had been, ‘Look, if I have to, you have to.’ They’d wailed protests at the time and grumbled amongst themselves for the first couple of days, but it was apparent that the beauty and tranquillity of Carrearranis had won them over. Commander Mikthorn, Alex noted, was there too, paddling at the edge of the lagoon with his trouser legs rolled up.
Alex himself had walked out through the shallow water to sit on a rock at the end of the headland. He had been working the local tides out in his head, just for something to do. If he was right, Big Moon high tide would occur in about half an hour, with Small Moon low tide peaking about three quarters of an hour after that. He was watching to see the slight changes in sea level as the tide bobbed in and out again, but given that the biggest change he could expect would be around three centimetres, it wasn’t going to be anything dramatic.
‘Hello.’ Silvie appeared, surfacing a few metres offshore and getting to her feet as she waded over to join him.
‘Hi,’ Alex brightened at once. Silvie had been given permission to swim anywhere she wanted on this planet – had been invited to do so by Arak, and had agreed safety rules with Tan. She was not to go near any volcanoes nor into any undersea caves, and she was not to visit any of the islands, either, without notifying Tan that she was going there. Silvie had accepted these restrictions readily, and had been happily exploring ever since. A shuttle took her anywhere she wanted to go, letting her dive out and then just leaving her to it, picking her up whenever, and wherever, she called for it. Alex hadn’t worried. There were no large predators here she could tangle with, no venomous fish or any other life-threatening fauna. If she followed the simple safety rules, she’d be fine.
Alex had not expected to see Silvie here – with a whole planet’s oceans to explore, he hadn’t expected to see her for weeks. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked. She wasn’t unhappy, but he could tell that she hadn’t come here bursting to tell him how much fun she was having.
‘Oh yes, fine,’ Silvie said, and held out her hand with a grin. ‘Come on,’ she told him, ‘I’ve come to take you for a swim.’
Alex saw that the hand she was holding out held a swim-mask, and broke into a happy grin as he got up.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been swimming with Silvie – that had been on Telathor. He’d enjoyed it, too, as had Silvie herself. Swimming with Davie, she complained, was no fun at all, he was so worried all the time about all the things that might hurt her, and Shion didn’t like being underwater. But Alex was good company, relaxed in that environment and agile enough, when provided with wrist-jets, that she didn’t have to keep waiting for him.