New Title 2

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Tsssss!’ Vampirelladon, Mistress of the Stars, hissed at him reprovingly. He was, he realised, being loud – thinking about, and feeling, several things at once. Hastily, he pulled his consciousness back to a single point of focus and did his best to keep it calm.

  ‘That’s going to get you quite a reaction,’ he observed, looking at her outfit with dispassionate appraisal.

  ‘I know.’ She flicked a mischievous look at him. ‘It’s interesting how differently humans react to you depending on how you look.’ She was clearly aware, as she spoke, of the red faced young rating at the helm, who was glaring at his console in an obvious, desperate effort to prevent her noticing his feelings about her in that outfit. Ironically, of course, that effort itself was effectively shouting his feelings aloud, obvious even to non-empaths and right in her face as far as the quarian was concerned. ‘Naughty boy!’ she told the youth, and then looked perplexed as he visibly shrivelled, just mortified. ‘Isn’t that right?’ She asked Davie.

  By ‘right’ Davie understood her to mean ‘appropriate for this personality’. She would be basing her characterisation and vocabulary on extensive research of human types, ranging from academic texts to popular culture, particularly the movies, holovision and magazines she found fascinating.

  ‘Appropriate vocabulary for the persona,’ Davie conceded. ‘But inappropriate for normal social interaction.’

  ‘Ah.’ Vampy considered this, and smiled. ‘Interesting!’ she said, and strolled off, with that, to see what other reactions she would get around the ship.

  By day four there had been eleven of the situations the Diplomatic Corps had defined as Incidents. One of the catering staff was exposed as having been pilfering from supplies while one of the medical staff broke down and confessed to taking medicinal drugs for recreational purposes and fudging the records to conceal that he had used them. Two other members of the crew admitted to having illicit supplies of alcohol aboard ship.

  Davie was shocked. He had taken it for granted that his crew were the finest in the League, a very highly paid elite amongst spacers. Finding even one amongst them who was unworthy of that trust would have been a surprise. Finding four of them in as many days, not counting the undercover LIA agent who’d slipped through the net, was deeply disturbing.

  It was astonishing, too, how much had been going on aboard his ship that even he had never noticed, like the seething hatred of the comms rating for his boss, a loathing so intense that he sometimes spat in her coffee to relieve his feelings. Then there was the passionate love-triangle going on between one of the legal team, a business executive and one of the stewards. He’d had no idea that the chief shuttle technician had a child by another woman he hadn’t told his wife about, or that his favourite chef was estranged from his brother since that brother had discovered him having an affair with his wife. Davie had always believed his people on the Stepeasy to be cool, calm professionals. Finding out what was really going on felt like being thrown into the plot of a third rate soap opera.

  The other Incidents, too, were disconcerting, though on the face of it they didn’t look as serious as the exposures of criminal or morally dubious activity. One, indeed, appeared utterly trivial, as Vampy had commented on one of the security personnel’s need to go to the lavatory.

  ‘It’s silly to be so uncomfortable, and not good for you, either,’ she told the man, who was at the time on escort duty following Davie round the ship. ‘You need to go pee.’

  What made that an Incident was the fact that the man handed in his resignation within a few hours.

  ‘I’m sorry – I just can’t continue,’ he said, when Davie asked him why. ‘I was humiliated in front of the rest of the team and neither they nor I are ever going to be able to forget it. It isn’t just that it’s something that can always be thrown up to needle me – my role requires the respect of my colleagues. I’ve lost that, here, and the only thing to be done is to move on to other employment.’

  Davie considered pointing out that he really should be able to rise above the inevitable leg-pulling and ‘you need to go pee’ jokes. He understood, though, that the world of VIP security was almost as much about maintaining uber-cool as it was about keeping your VIP safe. The bodyguard had been made a fool of, in his own eyes at least, and however trivial it might seem to others, he felt his position to be untenable. And he was a free agent, after all, so Davie had no option but to accept his resignation, effective at their next port of call.

  Nine other people resigned, too, besides those he was obliged to fire for stealing supplies, taking drugs or having alcohol aboard. A loss of more than ten per cent of his crew and staff in just a few days was unprecedented. And he knew, too, that far more of his people were just as unhappy or anxious but hanging in there out of loyalty to him.

  Things were not, he recognised, going very well.

  ‘It really is vitally important that you learn about personal boundaries,’ he told the quarian. She’d gone through another personality transformation by then, having found that Vampirelladon, Mistress of the Stars, wasn’t working out for her. She was now a crisp business type, platinum hair fastened up in a neat roll, her slender figure encased in a smart suit. The name she had adopted for this persona was that of Madam Ambassador – Maddy, for everyday use.

  ‘Particularize?’ she requested. She had picked up from somewhere a kind of corporate/civil service jargon which leaned heavily on words ending in ‘ize’, ‘ive’ and ‘ition’.

  ‘Privacy,’ said Davie. ‘Refraining from comment on intimate matters, specifically, bodily functions.’

  Maddy tilted her head slightly to one side and regarded him with cool severity.

  ‘Negative,’ she stated. ‘Moral imperative dictates that when individuals are indicative of emotive dysfunction it is obligatory on the part of ethical beings to be responsive.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Davie. ‘But even if such response was benefiting the people you respond to there would still be issues, human issues, over violation of privacy. As it is, you must be aware that the response to such comments is usually one of huge embarrassment, anxiety, even distress. So the moral imperative that works well for quarians isn’t just inappropriate in dealing with humans, but actually harmful. It really is, honestly, vitally important that you get to grips with this as an essential social skill – to hold back from comment on matters which will cause people embarrassment or upset.’

  She looked at him as if he had told her that she would have to learn to walk past starving children in the street and pay them no attention.

  ‘Negative,’ she told him, with a tone that made it clear this was not something open to discussion. ‘Pretending not to see emotive dysfunction is not an option. That would be… deceptive.’

  He actually saw her skin-crawling revulsion even at the idea that she could ignore the feelings of people around her, or be anything less than honest in her reaction to it.

  He knew already that that was her position, and that attempts at Serenity to get her to understand how important concepts of privacy were to humans had failed dismally. Now he saw that he was going to have no more luck than anyone else in getting her to understand the human perspective on this.

  It was something he recognised, that any exodiplomat would recognise, as The Wall, the point at which inter-species communication broke down either in a morass of incomprehension or fundamentally incompatible psychology. The recommended response to it, he knew, was to smile and say ‘It doesn’t matter, it isn’t important.’ Even when it was clearly very important, once you’d hit the Wall there was no point continuing to beat your head against it. All you could do was step back, take a different approach and hope that at some point communication would have improved to the point where you could raise the matter again.

  Communication, though, was not the issue here. Maddy was as fluent in every known language as Davie was himself, and certainly had a wider vocabulary in League Standard than most League citizens. What they were f
acing here was a fundamental culture clash, which could not be overcome anything like so easily as merely figuring out how to explain something so the other species would get what you meant. The quarian understood very well that Davie was trying to persuade her to pretend not to notice things when people were effectively shouting them at her, to be less than honest, to be less than quarian. He had hoped that telling her straight how important this was, letting her see how important it was to him, might have persuaded her to at least consider discussing some ground rules. It had been a faint hope, though, and as he looked into her eyes, he abandoned it entirely.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he acknowledged. And it was, as she could see that was sincere. ‘If the boot was on the other foot,’ he observed, ‘if I was visiting your people and they were trying to get me to violate my core ethical values in order to get along with them better, I too would tell them where to get off. I just had to try, okay? Sorry. But it really will be a lot less hassle to be able to say, when we arrive at Chartsey, that I tried to explain this to you and failed, rather than trying to convince a whole bunch of diplomats and politicians that it really wasn’t worth the attempt because I knew what you’d say.’

  He grinned at her, seeing that she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Trust me on this,’ he said. ‘They’ll accept that I tried and failed. They wouldn’t be nearly so ready to accept that I’d decided not to even try. So we’ll have to go to Plan B – if we can’t ask you to pretend not to notice things about people then we’ll just have to ensure that everyone you come into contact with is aware of the situation and has the option to withdraw if they’re concerned about private matters being exposed.’

  It seemed so simple at the time, and perfectly manageable. Solaran visits, after all, were so closely managed that they never met anyone who might so much as alarm them by talking too loudly or too fast. There would be enough suitably informed volunteers, Davie felt sure, to give Maddy an informative and enjoyable experience of visiting the capital world.

  But that, of course, assumed that she would go where they wanted her to go and when they wanted her to go there. And in retrospect, Davie realised, he should have recognised sooner that that might be something of a problem. He didn’t, though, even after the Incident in which she took the Stepeasy’s tender out for a spin. Admittedly it was a little unnerving to be called to the command deck by emergency sirens going off, with the Exec fighting back panic as he briefed him on the situation.

  ‘She’s taken the tender!’ he reported, with a sheen of perspiration appearing on his forehead and a rather spasmodic gesture at the screens.

  Davie took in all the information needed with a glance. Their tender was actually the size of a patrol ship and was a very fast luxury yacht in its own right. One of the most innovative features of this new class of ship was the fact that it carried that secondary vessel in an enclosed bay. It caused a sensation in any port when the Stepeasy opened that bay to launch the tender. Launching it while they were superlight was a highly complex operation which usually involved at least half an hour of pre-flight checks and tightly coordinated flight control. It normally took a minimum of four people to operate the tender, too. But there it was, launched and spinning merrily away, all security systems and launch controls bypassed. There was no crew aboard it, either, only Maddy.

  Even Davie felt a little twinge of concern at that, wondering if she could handle the tender safely by herself. Then he saw the skill with which it was being piloted, and relaxed. He could have handled it by himself, after all, so there was no reason why she couldn’t. And there was no question of theft – he had given her the freedom of the ship, so she could go anywhere, anytime.

  ‘I expect she just wants some peace and quiet for a bit,’ he observed. ‘And I expect,’ he added, with a smile, ‘that she’s exploring a new identity.’ It seemed unlikely that the punctilious Madam Ambassador would have taken out the tender without telling the watch officer that she intended to do so. This was the act of a rather freer spirited persona.

  He was right. When she returned to the ship several hours later she was wearing a great many filmy scarves and had beads in her hair.

  ‘I am Spirit of the Eagle,’ she informed him, and made a circling gesture with her hand. ‘Child of the Cosmos.’

  Davie laughed appreciatively. This was a persona clearly based on research about the Shanuk, a tribal people who still lived a very simple, traditional lifestyle. This was not, as he understood, play-acting or pretending in any way to deceive – she was always herself, just trying on different clothes and the behaviour that went with them, partly in learning about humans and how they interacted and partly in attempting to find a way to fit in with this strange culture.

  ‘Interesting choice,’ he commented. ‘Though I think many people were hoping you’d stick with Madam Ambassador.’

  Spirit of the Eagle shook her head.

  ‘They were disappointed,’ she assured him. ‘They feel that quarians should be more spiritual than that. Only we’re not, you know, as a people. So I thought it would be helpful to investigate spirituality. I gather that I’m supposed to be feeling at one with the Cosmos.’ She held up a braid into which she’d woven several animal-totems. ‘Not sure,’ she admitted, ‘how the beads are supposed to help with that.’ Then she looked at him reproachfully as Davie gave a crack of laughter accompanied by a surge of warm affection for her. ‘Peace, brother!’ she requested, and walked away as it was obvious he was not going to be able to control his hilarity. ‘I,’ she stated, ‘am going to seek one-ness with the spirit of the Void.’

  It was a quest she’d abandoned before lunch, announcing that the spirituality thing was just silly.

  ‘And it didn’t work. People were just confused. Which is a tautology, of course – humans are confused by definition. But they were even more confused than usual.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Impossible even to have even a half-comprehensible conversation with them. So I’ve given up on that. But I’ve had a brilliant idea – can’t think why I didn’t think of it before.’ She beamed at him. ‘I’m going to be like you.’ She laughed and poked him in the ribs with a reproving finger at his hooting response. ‘No, seriously,’ she said, as he yipped. ‘People get along great with you; treat you just like anybody else. And we’re the same, aren’t we? So if I’m like you, they ought to accept me, too, and stop freaking out around me, right? Anyway, that’s what I’m doing. So I’m going to be like your kid sister, see? You’re Davie-Boy so I’ll be Davida-Girl. You can call me Sis. Oy! Shut it!’ she scolded, at his emotional response to that.

  It was impossible for Davie to control that, though – he had longed for a sibling all the way through his childhood and had frequently asked his father to provide him with a younger sister. It was as if he’d spent his whole life with a sister-shaped hole beside him. Since it was obviously not possible to connect with the quarian at a romantic level, he had hoped beyond anything that they might bond as brother and sister.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, finding that he couldn’t hold back the love and joy he was feeling in that moment. But Sis was already walking away.

  ‘You are such a pain in the arse.’

  The Davida-Girl persona did work well for her, and was maintained all the way to Chartsey. She was right; the crew did respond well to her as Vida, Davie’s kid sister, with considerable relief amongst them that she’d adopted a persona they knew how to work with.

  This did not, however, put a stop to Incidents. Things had calmed down somewhat now that she’d already exposed all the worst secrets on the ship, but there was never a day without at least one Incident.

  The worst, at least as far as Davie was concerned, was when Vida herself ended up sobbing.

  She’d gone into the business suite. Davie had given her a company one of his corporations had recently acquired, just as his own father had given him a defunct toy company to play with and learn from at the age of seven. The company he’d given her was a plastics refinery on Ca
rpania, a world known for its cheap plastics production and appalling pollution. In keeping with all of Davie’s business acquisitions, the company would have to achieve Clean and Green status within a year of takeover. Some of that – the Clean part – was merely a matter of putting in trustworthy executives who would introduce the ethical business practices Davie insisted on, including excellent pay and benefits for all staff and generous contribution to the community in which they operated. The Green part, on Carpania, was going to be a challenge, with the need for extensive refitting of the factory to create clean production and expensive clean-up of the pollution for which the firm was already responsible. He had given Vida the funding to accomplish that along with ownership of the company. It was only a tiny splash of clean water in a toxic ocean, of course, but as Davie said, even a tiny move in the right direction was better than nothing. Vida had embraced the challenge with enthusiasm, keen to do something good for Carpania as well as to learn about business and finance. Quarus had no money economy, no concept of money in their culture, as manufacturing for their needs was a communal effort, their whole culture founded on the basis of social generosity. Vida had learned about money and the idea of trade as part of her preparations for coming into human space, but being hands on with it, managing a business and a budget, would give her far more in-depth understanding.

  Unfortunately, while she was more than capable of taking on the challenge intellectually, she wasn’t nearly so prepared for the emotional impact.

  Davie was called to the Business Suite urgently, told that Vida was upset. He could feel that as he approached, as he heard her crying. Her grief was terrible, a heart-tearing sense of horror and loss. Davie’s stomach lurched and he ran into the suite, pausing just momentarily to take in what was happening.

  It did take him a moment, even with his speed of mental processing, to understand what he was looking at. There were seven people there, beside Vida, and all of them were crying too, most of them attempting to comfort one another. Two of them were hugging Vida, or being hugged by her, in a sobbing huddle at one of the desks. One of the other executives was weeping on the shoulder of a colleague who was patting his back while tears streamed down his own face, and another was patting the shoulder of a colleague who’d collapsed in a chair with his head down in his hands. Even the senior executive, a man Davie had known all his life and never seen more than mildly amused or mildly annoyed, was standing with his back to the rest of them, wiping away tears and fighting back sobs.