She was there for an hour and she was very soon talking, awkwardly at first but with gathering confidence as she felt the interest and kindness of the lady at the other end of the pool. Lady Ursele wanted to know about her home, her family and whether she was happy here in her service with the Fourth. So Simmy told her about growing up on a deep-down underground estate on Chartsey, the school-based club which had taken them on trips around the system, the visit to a Fleet ship which had decided her that that was what she wanted to do. She spoke of the two years at college, doing the bundle of courses the Fleet required of applicants, and laughed over how miserable it had been, at times, being the ‘space cadet’ on the estate, the odd one out, the weirdo. It had been worth it, though, she’d been accepted by the Fleet and had absolutely loved the five months of basic training, really feeling that she was making something of her life. And then Mr Burroughs had asked if she’d like to go and be Captain von Strada’s steward on the Assegai and that had been, wow, wow, not enough words for how wonderful. And he’d let her come with him to the Venturi, too, even though she wasn’t qualified to join the Fourth. They’d set up this trial, she explained, for her and two others, allowing those without blue-dockets the opportunity to serve with them. And how was she finding that? Oh, amazing, absolutely amazing. Her friends were great, helping her to study, nobody made her feel stupid, it wasn’t even that they were kind, they just treated her the same as anybody else.
And she told the chamlorn, too, about the proudest moment of her life… the discovery of the Cartash Stone and how it had changed how she saw herself.
‘Not a grubby Subter,’ she said, ‘but a child of the Cartash.’ She drew herself upright, declaiming, ‘Cartash Femix.’ Then, resuming a normal tone, confided, ‘I’m going to have that on a t-shirt when we get home.’
Lady Ursele smiled. The interpreter was not translating Simmy’s words for her – Lady Ursele was rather more fluent in Standard than any of her attendants. She chose not to speak it, but she was happy to listen to people speaking in any of the fifteen languages she’d learned so far. She was learning a new one every day as part of her own preparations for her mission at Lundane. And when she spoke, Simmy was immediately silent, gazing at her – it almost didn’t matter what she said, her voice and that smile were so hypnotic.
‘Her grace,’ the interpreter said, ‘thanks you for sharing your heart with her, Ordinary Star Yasmen Semach. Her grace wishes you to know that she is enriched by your gift. Her grace bestows her blessing upon you and on all of your family.’
Simmy recognised that as bringing the meeting to an end and so it did, though not abruptly. There was another fifteen minutes of quiet, watching the flower come slowly back across the starpool. And that felt good, too, not a brusque dismissal, but time to sit there and think about how lovely that had been and how wonderful, too, to feel so much at her ease with the chamlorn that she could talk to her about anything.
Then they gave her a flower. On Pirrell it would have been a real one, encased in crystal to preserve it. Lady Ursele, though, had recognised the impracticality of this particular tradition with limited resources and so many people to meet. The real flowers, therefore, were to be kept as state gifts, with this alternative memento for ordinary meetings. It was a silk flower, hand-crafted by the wardrobe attendants, presented in a small box. Shion had run off a batch of the boxes for them on the SEP and the attendants had decorated them with hand-painted designs, each leaf and petal of it significant to them, if not to Simmy. But Simmy, given the hand-painted box with the lovely flower in it, looked up with every bit as much delight as a Pirrellothian would at receiving such a gift from a chamlorn.
‘Oh – thank you, your grace!’ she said and was shown out, then, feeling that she was walking on air.
There had, it must be said, been some consternation in certain quarters that the very first person the chamlorn was talking to was Simmy. Great kid, of course, worked very hard, lots of admirable qualities and good fun, too. But…
‘I think,’ said Alex, when this was put to him, quite tactfully, by the command school class expressing some concern at what impression Simmy might be making on the Pirrellothian ambassador, ‘that she was an excellent choice.’ And he grinned. ‘If you really want to know about an organisation,’ he observed, ‘you do not ask the MD about it.’ He looked across at one of the officers who had subtly disassociated herself from the concerns being raised. ‘Right, Luce?’
‘Right,’ said the commander, with an answering grin. ‘Most people reckon grassroots office staff. Me, I go for the guys in the canteen. Nothing they don’t know about the down-low.’
Luce, like all the seven officers in the command school class, was on sabbatical from her normal role for the intensive training of this course. The special study group they’d had aboard the Assegai had worked out so well that the Fleet had decided to have one on the Venturi too – senior officers learning mission command skills as well as undertaking a broad range of master-class courses. With no responsibilities aboard ship, they were able to give all their focus to studying. And all of them knew that when they left here, given a nod of approval from Alex, they would be moving into high profile roles in exodiplomacy missions themselves. Luce’s particular strength, there, would be in observation and analysis, coming as she did from a background working for the First Fleet Irregulars, aka Fleet Intelligence.
‘And I would say,’ she added, ‘that Simmy will be a credit to us – you don’t need discretion in exodiplomacy, you need up front, open-hearted honesty and Simmy has that in spades.’
She was right. Shion told them later that her aunt had been very much impressed by Simmy – moved by the evident hardships of her life, by her cheerful courage and by that very touching pride in her Cartash heritage.
‘And the attendants,’ she told Alex, speaking with him privately, ‘love her to bits, think she’s amazing, so brave and hilarious! She’s made friends, there, even if she doesn’t realise it.’
Simmy did realise it within a couple of days, as the attendants started to emerge from the suite more and more. Only the singers came out wearing sashes, moving sedately through the ship to find whoever it was that the chamlorn wanted to speak with next. But when they came out into the refectory, off duty, they turned out to be just as friendly and chatty as anyone could wish. It was clear, too, that they already saw Simmy as a friend, greeting her with big smiles and asking for her opinion on things that they weren’t sure about but didn’t like to trouble ‘Elcom Shion’ about.
‘We’ve been told that Movie Night is an enjoyable experience,’ said the guide who’d led her through her encounter with the chamlorn. Her name, it turned out, was Coru. ‘Do you think that we would like that, Simmy?’
Simmy beamed. ‘Oh, Movie Night’s great!’ she said. It was one of the things Alex had brought back with him from his time on the Assegai, seeing how good it was as part of the raft of clique-busting strategies there. And how much it was enjoyed, too. So one night a week, operational circumstances permitting, the Promenade got turned into a full-surround holotheatre with all the junk-food snacks people would expect when going to see a big movie. You could get the same experience of the movie, as Simmy explained, simply by using the direct-to-optic setting on a holoscreen, as that would give you the same impression of complete immersion. But it was way more fun to share the experience with a lot of other people. And they had a rolling floor, too, so you could really get into it.
So Simmy and some of her friends took Coru and some of her friends to the movies. The film had been chosen with them in mind, as Shion had suggested it might be something they’d enjoy – a blockbuster, family-adventure set on Ferajo, where they had real dinosaurs. Even the ‘Mild peril; May not be suitable for children under five’ rating was more than thrilling enough for the Pirrellothians, running with the rest of the audience to get out of the way of the monstrous stomping dragons.
Alex didn’t go to Movie Night. Scampering about trying to av
oid holographic dinosaur slobber was not considered concomitant with the dignity of a flag officer. But he was in the Snug, playing a quiet game of triplink with Davie, when the audience came tumbling out of the theatre all noisy and happy, the Pirrellothians still wide eyed, exclaiming and laughing.
‘Movie night was a winner, then,’ Davie observed, watching as the five Pirrellothians were swept along with the rest to have an after-movie drink and more snacks in the refectory.
‘Uh huh,’ said Alex and did not feel the need to say any more.
He had still not been to see Lady Ursele, himself. She had asked to see Davie and had thanked him for the care he had taken of Shion when she’d first come to the League. She had asked to meet Silvie, too, as Silvie had adopted Shion almost as a foster-mother. That had been very strange, apparently, for everybody else involved, since Silvie had just sat there gazing with a completely enraptured look at the chamlorn for nearly three hours, while Lady Ursele, for her part, gazed back at her with just as much wondering admiration. Neither of them had said a word, which was a very long silence even by Pirrellothian standards. But they had parted with big, happy smiles. Silvie had said that she could commune with Lady Ursele all day, every day, she was so radiantly tranquil. And Lady Ursele told Shion, too, that she quite understood now why Shion loved Silvie as she did.
Her fourth choice of visitor had also impressed her. Kate Naos, taken gently by the hand in engineering and led up to the encounter room, had found herself being asked about the Pulsus Theorem. A little tentatively at first, she had started to explain in terms which she felt the Pirrellothian might understand, but had soon been drawn into explaining it for real. This meant that it had not been long before she was in realms that even other wave-space physicists would struggle to keep up with, but Lady Ursele had listened with every appearance of interest. Which was genuine, though her interest was not in the theorem but in Kate herself, the shining joy of Kate as she shared the passion she felt for exploring the cosmos as only she knew how.
Next, and to considerable consternation this time, was Lionard the Miserable. Lady Ursele wanted him to tell her about the navigation they were doing. Actually, she’d been told that he’d been a miserable hound up until this mission, but was now having the time of his life. That intrigued her, not the fact that they were navigating through space no other ship had traversed. There was not, as Lionard would have had to admit under oath, anything particularly technically challenging about the navigation. Space was relatively clear, here, with a few bumps and rattles here and there as they ran through ridges, but nothing the ship couldn’t handle. The important thing about it, as Lionard explained, was that there was no autopilot.
‘I joined the Fleet wanting to navigate the stars,’ he said. ‘And then I found that the reality was that my ships spent most of their time sitting in port and when they did go out my job was no more than to confirm the right auto-set route had been programmed and check every day that we were still on it. Five years of training, three at the Academy and two years in specialism and I got to check the autopilot.’ He shook his head. ‘Is it any wonder that I got fed up with it, your grace?’
‘Her grace expresses sorrow that your life was unfulfilled.’ The interpreter informed him, once Lady Ursele had murmured sympathetically. ‘And trusts that you are finding an improvement now.’
‘Oh – yes.’ Lionard said. ‘I was going to resign – actually had my resignation written out, but the port admiral said she’d put me forward for a secondment with the Fourth and they Van Damek, real navigation. I wasn’t too impressed at first, the Van Dameks weren’t… no, that isn’t true.’ He broke off, looking very thoughtful and spoke slowly, ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that I’d got so much in the habit of being fed up with everything that it was hard to break out of, even when I wanted to. The navigation could have been fun if I’d let myself relax and enjoy it. But then all this happened and I get to plot a huge Van Damek…’ his face lit up. ‘And it’s everything I’ve dreamed of.’
Lady Ursele, he said afterwards, was the most amazing person, put you so much at your ease, incredibly easy to talk to. And you found yourself being, well, honest with her.
Alex was amused and quietly impressed, too. Lady Ursele clearly had a knack for winning people’s confidence and drawing confidences from them, too, which augured well for her future as a diplomat.
And she was, he knew, taking the long arc to reach him.
Fifteen
Lady Ursele had seen nine more people before she finally sent for Alex. The last before him was Buzz, who reported it as a surreal experience. She had not wanted to hear about his relationship with Alex, or anything about the Fourth. She had only wanted him to talk about his family back home on Flancer.
‘But at the same time,’ Buzz said, ‘I felt that I was under the kind of analysis which found every single thing there is to know about me.’
Alex discovered what he meant the following day. There was a thrill of at last amongst the command school class he was teaching at the time when a singer appeared and took him quietly by the hand. But Alex himself was perfectly calm, even taking the time, as he left, to direct the class as to what work they were to do in his absence.
In the ante-room, he showered to the decontam standard they were still using as a matter of courtesy. It wasn’t the full clean-room decontam which required vomit-inducing gargles and plugs inserted in uncomfortable places, but a disinfectant wash and a clean-room blitz to uniform. So he was mint-scented and in rather stiff uniform as he had his hands rubbed with fragrant cream by the skin-care specialist amongst the attendants.
They were all up to speed, by then, on how to read the insignia displayed on those filmy sashes. The pastel colours and subtle patterns indicated that the lady currently smoothing cream into his hands was the senior medic they had awoken first – Tela, by name. As with all the attendants, however, in these extraordinary circumstances, she was undertaking multiple roles within the household. She was also, Alex knew, learning to speak Standard, Prisosan and Araki.
He sensed, rather than saw, her rueful amusement as she directed a colleague in the brushing of his hair – a ritual and wholly unnecessary act since his hair was so short it hardly needed combing at the best of times. Humans on this ship, the attendants had agreed, did the most bizarre things to themselves in terms of hairstyle and make-up.
Duly cleansed and brushed, though, Alex was led in to the encounter room, took his seat and in due course sent the flower on its glide across the holographic surface.
And all the time it took to get there, he was aware that he was under observation. The chamlorn and everyone else present was watching the flower and not one person looked at him directly. But all the same Alex noted the fact that the way the attendants were positioned around the hall meant that he was always in at least one of their lines of sight as the flower moved across the floor. And the chamlorn, directly opposite and looking down from her higher position, could see him even whilst her eyes followed the flower across.
Observing an interviewee for a period before you began to question them was a recognised technique in human cultures, too, often combined with a stressor such as putting someone in an uncomfortable, harshly-lit interview room.
Here, Alex knew, he was being evaluated. And when he raised his eyes to look at her, he found the chamlorn looking back at him with a depth of understanding that left him quite shaken. He had experienced similar levels of perception from others when meeting quarians, but that was very different, that was a two-way street in which he was just as much aware of the quarian’s personality and their emotions.
Here, he was not. All he saw, all he felt, was a remote tranquillity. The serenity and the wisdom of ages, he thought and really understood, then, that she was one of the ancients, like the Olaret, the Cartash, a species from before the dawn of human history.
The greeting took a long time. This was qualitatively different from the other encounters. This was a state encounter, the Pir
rellothian ambassador meeting the League’s official representative. So all of her titles were recited and all of Alex’s, before the greeting and ritual her grace asks if you are content to be here.
‘Yes, your grace,’ Alex said calmly and waited.
‘Her grace observes,’ said the interpreter, ‘that you are a man who finds fulfilment in life through enabling the fulfilment of others. In this, her grace finds compatibility with her own role as Hand of the Karlane.’
A pause and Alex smiled quietly.
And here it came.
‘Her grace wishes to ask, however, how it is compatible with your responsibility for the safety, cleanliness and comfort of the people in your care, to deny them the most fundamental and fulfilling of all emotional bonds.’
She already knew that, Alex knew she did. But she was asking a sensitive question just to see how he handled it.
‘It is compatible,’ he said, ‘with your grace’s own expectation that those in attendance on you will conduct themselves in certain ways when they wear the sash in representing you and in this hall. It is the same with us, that we give all our focus to the work that we are undertaking, while aboard ship, in uniform. But there is time and space for love in our lives too, your grace.’
‘Her grace asks, in yours, also?’
Alex told her about Migan. He meant only to explain that he’d had a brief but wonderful relationship with a lady during the Fourth’s visit to Camae, but her interest was such that he found himself explaining how they’d met and the time they’d spent together in her family’s hillside holiday home, with all its bunk beds and family clutter and boots everywhere. It had been real, that, Shion’s own highest accolade for any experience. He and Migan might have had less than two weeks together, but it had been no sordid hotel-room fling.
He told her, too, why he and Migan were not and could not be together. His responsibilities had taken him away from Camae, where it was unlikely he would ever return. And Migan would not be Migan without the massive family network which was so much a part of her identity. She would be miserable anywhere else. It had been no great tragedy, Alex told her, chuckling a little as he explained the general belief amongst his crew that Alex and Migan were reliving a classic tragedy of Cartasayan times, the star-crossed lovers Ulisanus and Pellic. But they had both known when they met that their relationship would only be that of a passing encounter, a moment to celebrate while it lasted and then to cherish, afterwards, as a happy memory.
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