Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Well, if their own Embassy won’t have anything to do with them,’ said someone from the Teralian Embassy. ‘They are not here legitimately and none of us should have anything to do with them, either!’

  If anything had been needed to convince people to do the opposite thing, it would always be the opinion of the Teralian delegation.

  Every community, after all, needed one group of problem, embarrassing neighbours. And on Embassy Avenue that role was more than adequately provided for by the embassy at Number Thirty Two. They were so embarrassing, in fact, that most of the others tried to pretend they weren’t even there, that Number Thirty Two was a blank lot, not even looking at their building as they went by.

  Terale was a world which, in the opinion of just about every other planet under Marfikian domination, was a disgrace. All right, so the planet had already been, apparently, somewhat inclined to totalitarianism even before the Marfikians turned up. They had only been contacted by an Araki ship a matter of months before, and having the Marfikians turning up in your space as only your second contact with other civilisations was enough to give any planet culture shock. But the Teralians had gone way beyond compliance… way way beyond. A political movement had sprung up there and secured global domination in the name of the Marfikians. They called themselves the Sons of Marfik and ruled the planet with a reign of terror no Marfikian had ever imposed. All that the Marfikians had specified was that Terale must have a certain tonnage of uranium ore ready for collection by ships which would arrive twice yearly to get it. There had been nothing in that about people being shot by firing squad for tearing down a Sons of Marfik flag. And even though the Marfikians had never been back, never more than that single one day visit more than five centuries ago, the Sons of Marfik persisted in their evident belief that they had special status as ‘Trusted Allies.’ And they had managed to convince their population, at least, that the Marfikians were always watching them.

  Their Embassy here, of course, was not about building links which might one day result in the overthrow of the Marfikian tyrants. Their Embassy here had the self-appointed task of keeping an eye on the rest of them. And whenever they saw anything they didn’t think that the Marfikians would like – code for anything the Sons of Marfik didn’t like – they would threaten to report the matter to the Marfikians directly.

  This might have been intimidating if anyone had believed for one second that they had any means of doing so, or that the Sons of Marfik themselves were anything more than tin-pot tyrants on a world still stuck in the Dark Ages. Nobody would sell them any ships or any other kind of tech, having no desire to have the Sons of Marfik turn up at their systems threatening to bomb their cities if they didn’t do as they were told. So they were paper tigers, strutting about in their Sons of Marfik uniforms and embarrassing everyone else with their pro-Marfik declarations.

  ‘The Masters,’ one of them said ominously, eyeing the dome, ‘are not going to like that.’

  Everyone else, having been rather of the opinion that the large orange marquee-thing was something of an eyesore on the Avenue, suddenly decided that it was quite a cheerful colour, really.

  Everyone, that was, other than the attaché from the League Embassy, hurriedly dispatched to deal with the matter when it became known that the explosion and the big orange thing on the Samartian plot were something to do with the Fourth.

  ‘We were not informed of your intention to do this,’ the attaché had found Jer Taerling amongst the onlookers and had gravitated to him as a diplomatic colleague.

  ‘No,’ Jer said, turning a glare on him that was all the more ferocious coming from that friendliest and chattiest of men. ‘Why would you be informed?’ He demanded. ‘None of your business, is it?’

  The other attaché withdrew, recognising cold fury when he saw it. It was an exchange which did not go unnoticed by many keen-eyed observers. And it was not long before rumours were confirmed. The League Embassy had refused all requests for assistance by the Fourth, cutting them off, apparently, for no better reason than that the Fourth did not have the necessary paperwork with them to prove who they were.

  This would have seemed unbelievable, if not for the fact that it confirmed everybody’s beliefs about the way that the League carried on. And, more particularly, what a complete and useless bum-hole Ambassador Jilt-Defame-Tarantula was. Here was the Fourth, very obviously achieving something tremendous by bringing the Pirrellothian ambassador to Lundane – not to Chartsey, but here, to Lundane, a more amazing event than any of them had ever even imagined to be possible. And that bum-hole, their own ambassador here, wouldn’t even let them have some office space.

  Ambassador Jilit-Defane-Taracalas could not, in fact, have done more to improve relationships between the Fourth and the other embassies if he’d had a year to think it out. Some people, indeed, would always be of the view that he had done this deliberately, to separate the Fourth from ‘the League’ in the eyes of the other ambassadors and so make it possible for Alex to get on better terms with them. The fact of it was, though, that JDT really wasn’t that smart. And the benefit, here, as it was turning out to be a benefit, was down to the Fourth themselves turning a setback into an asset.

  And to the Samartians, too, standing by their allies with no consideration whatsoever to how that might affect their own standing on the Avenue. Which, in itself, scored them trust-points amongst those still not entirely sure whether befriending a people so fierce they could even defeat Marfikians was really a sensible move. There was keen interest in Jer Taerling, too, as rumours spread that he had actually spent a year at Samart himself, teaching them linguistics. He was certainly seen to be on the best of terms with them, winning smiles and even chuckles from the normally poker-faced ambassador and having conversations which made it clear they had known one another before… that it had been Jer, in fact, who had taught the ambassador to speak some rudimentary Prisosan. This was significant, evidence supporting what the Samartians had already said, that the Fourth had been entirely supportive and had even encouraged them in their decision to make contact with other worlds too, starting with Prisos.

  ‘Jer, dear boy…’ Buzz put a hand on his shoulder just as an enthusiastic young woman was offering to show Jer around the Araki Embassy, quite unofficially of course. ‘Time we were leaving,’ Buzz observed, with the sweetest of smiles for the Feds agent attempting to abduct Jermane Taerling. That sort of thing happened here, in the feverish environment created by too many embassies packed so close together, most of them with their own intelligence services in tow.

  ‘Oh…’ Jermane found himself being gently but inexorably moved towards a shuttle and took leave of his attractive new friend with an apologetic and hopeful look. ‘Sorry – have to go – another time?’

  Before Buzz managed to get him in the shuttle and the hatch closed, Jermane had the lady’s name and the number of the department where she said she worked at the Araki Embassy.

  ‘Jer,’ Buzz shook his head at him as the shuttle lifted off. ‘You do remember your security briefing, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of…’ Jermane was indignant and then shocked, as he realised what Buzz was telling him. ‘You mean she…?’

  Buzz nodded kindly. ‘Beware,’ he said, ‘of attractive, friendly young women who want to take you behind locked doors in a foreign embassy, Jer. They are after rather more than your virtue, I’m afraid.’

  Jermane turned pink, but was more cross than embarrassed.

  ‘Well, that is just the limit,’ he said.

  Alex agreed with him. There were some amusing aspects to the idea of Jer being led away by the hand by an Araki femme-fatale, admittedly. But that the Araki intelligence service had been so desperate as to try such a ploy right there on Samartian soil and with around thirty members of the Fourth present told Alex that it was far too dangerous to allow his people down there.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he told the crew. ‘There is just nowhere on the planet I consider safe enough even for rest
ricted shoreleave. At least for now, we will only be going down there for mission tasks and then in groups which stick together. But we will,’ he added, as some compensation, ‘be opening up the interdeck for ship visiting.’

  There was general satisfaction with that. Very few amongst the crew had imagined that there would be any shoreleave here anyway, seeing how volatile the situation was. And since the main attraction of Lundane for spacers was simply to be able to meet people from far distant worlds, having them visiting the interdeck would be fine… providing they would come.

  They didn’t need to worry about that. The Fourth started carefully, with the first visitors only those spacers in the system who were personally known to members of the Venturi’s crew. There turned out to be four of these. On the following day, people those four had vouched for as personally known to them were allowed to visit and so on. Within a few days, people who had not yet received an invitation were very keen indeed to connect with people who could give them the good word. Hospitality on the interdeck was a milder kind of fun by far than the wild night life of Darvo, but the food and drink was free and the company was unparalleled.

  The Fourth, too, was finding their social status improving, both with the Lundanians and on Embassy Avenue. Roll’em Moffaret even came up to the ship to tell Alex in person about a meeting of the business association which served as Lundane’s government.

  ‘You should have heard them,’ he told Alex, having been escorted to his daycabin and provided with iced water. ‘Railing and ranting…’ He was grinning hugely as he said that. The Fourth’s shuttles had just arrived, bringing a great deal more water with them this time. The task now was not simply to collect enough water to give the Fourth sufficient funding for their stay, but to bring as much water as physically possible given the power of their shuttles and the gear they had available. With the enthusiastic assistance of the Lundanians providing ample supplies of cargo nets and duralloy chains, the shuttles had been able to collect long trains of icebergs, hauling them back and depositing them in orbit. Smaller system shuttles were then deployed carrying them down to Eloten Flats while the big cargo shuttles did a rapid turnaround and headed back to the source system. In this way, they had brought more than fifty times the amount of water than the first trip, each shuttle hauling between twenty five and thirty bergs. They would be depositing more than twelve thousand tonnes of water at Eloten Flats – sufficient to provide a survival issue of three litres of water to every member of the population for five days. And the shuttles would be back before that. It wasn’t sustainable long term, of course, as even the smallest technical fault with one of the shuttles would leave the planet dangerously close to the edge and it made no account of needs for industrial use. But it was enabling them to build up a safety net. It was a game changer. No two ways about it, the balance of power on Lundane had just been torn out of corporate hands.

  ‘I’d sent them copies of the terraforming plan,’ Roll’em said, clearly referring to the corporate representatives ‘which we are going with, by the way, and they were so mad, they were spitting – going on about all the people we’d be putting out of work and making us dependent on the League for our survival and oh, you name it. One of my mates on the board said that it hadn’t done us much good being dependent on them for eight hundred years and they could have done this any time, any time, bringing us water to terraform. Turns out there’s been plans for that, all along, right all along, plans dating back more than eight hundred years, like. And what that North fella said was right, that it was reckoned too difficult and expensive back then, but the plan was there, it was in our own libraries, all the plans people have come up with. And that one the North fella said, that’s just what the Prisosans came up with too, fifty year ago or thereabouts, tried to get the water corps in on it, but they weren’t budging. So we wanted to know why not, why they haven’t done this for us themselves, any time since it was doable, like and we all…’ he pulled up the sleeve from his left wrist, revealing the crying-child tattoo. ‘An’ I said…’ he was reliving his moment of triumph, one of the happiest moments of his life, ‘I said,’ he told Alex, ‘that if t’were a choice a’tween Delaneys and Delanceys, I knew which I were pickin’.’ He beamed at Alex and made a toasting-gesture with his glass, sipping the water beatifically. Alex made no comment, but grinned back amicably and returned the toast. Roll’em, he could, see, hadn’t finished all the things he wanted to say, yet. ‘That North fella,’ Roll’em dropped his voice confidentially, ‘Scary little rattler, ain’t he? But straight.’

  Alex nodded. He had never found Davie intimidating himself, but he could entirely understand how others could. There was something really quite disconcerting about him when you were in his company, a sense of fizzing electrical force, energy and intelligence beyond the human norm. And when all that force was turned on you in a glare of undiluted fury, Alex could entirely see why Roll’em had found him alarming.

  ‘Totally straight,’ he agreed. ‘And he is, you know, entirely committed to Clean and Green corporate practice. Unusual, that, it has to be said, amongst League corporations, but Mr North is determined to drag the League into an era where Clean and Green practice is the norm. You can be assured, anyway, that any company he sends out here will operate in an ethical, socially beneficial and environmentally positive manner.’

  ‘You two…’ Roll’em observed, looking closely at him, ‘work this together, huh?’

  ‘It has worked out that way quite often, yes.’ Alex smiled. ‘If part of the solution to our missions involves the provision of infrastructure, such as the siliplas refinery at Samart, or system infrastructure at Carrearranis, Mr North is able to offer that – with my agreement as mission commander. That can be, obviously, very helpful. But Mr North is also a linguist and analyst, with an active role as a mission strategist. The idea of fetching water was his and he worked out all the logistics for it.’

  ‘They say he’s like, half-karian,’ Roll’em observed. ‘Don’t believe it myself, o’course, but that’s what they say.’

  ‘Technically, genetically, he and Silvie are cousins,’ Alex confirmed. ‘His father had him genetically engineered by the quarians in the hope that he would one day become our ambassador to Quarus and resolve the problems there and perhaps represent us in meeting other species, too. The quarians thought this was such a good idea that they engineered their own version from the same template – Silvie, who they called Ambassador, created and raised to represent her people in learning about and building relationships with us.’

  ‘And you’ve been out there, to Karus.’ Lundanians appeared to have difficulty pronouncing q and almost always said k instead. ‘A world that’s all but all ocean…’ he shook his head, marvelling at the very idea. ‘What were it like?’

  Alex had been sick of being asked that question before they’d even left Serenity straight after their return from Quarus and he had, since, been asked it so many more thousands of times that the very sound of it made him want to groan and drop his head onto his hands in despair. What, again? But he had developed coping mechanisms and they kicked in automatically. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said and asked, ‘Did any of the documentaries get out here?’

  Roll’em shook his head. ‘I sighted a picture,’ he said, ‘on a shirt.’

  Alex did drop his head onto his hands at that and groaned. ‘Oh, noooo.’

  Roll’em laughed, but flourished a hand in a gesture which might have been dice-rolling or encouragement to explain what was so humorous about that.

  ‘The merchandising…’ Alex said and reached for his own water with the air of a man wishing the glass held something rather stronger. ‘You can not imagine,’ he told the Lundanian, ‘how embarrassing it is to find your face splatted all over t-shirts and mugs and posters and oh, you name it…’ He was accessing images as he spoke, flicking through to show the president some of the product range which had emerged in the course of Quarus-mania. ‘It’s like the whole League has gone utterly b
onkers about Quarus,’ he explained, ‘which is great, obviously, far better that than being frightened, but for me, personally, more than a bit challenging being turned into this celebrity. I expect this is the image you saw, yes?’ He freeze framed a shot and the president nodded.

  It was the image which gone viral from the publicity around the Fourth’s visit to Quarus, a snap-shot from the documentary which had captured so many billions of people’s imaginations. Armchair adventurers all, they had been there with Alex, watching the visit to the deepwater city of Feyor unfold, experiencing it vicariously, but with him. And that moment, that look on his face, had caught the spirit of the entire mission. It was a look of pure wonder, almost child-like in its unselfconscious awe. And it had been framed against the view which had inspired that look, the softly radiant deepwater city with the high peaks of the black smokers gushing forth superheated steam.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Roll’em agreed and with some doubt, ‘But – did it really look like that, then?’

  Alex nodded. ‘That’s Feyor,’ he said. ‘And yes, it did look like that. It was one of the most astonishing places I have ever been. Would you like to see some of the clips?’

  They ended up watching one of the most popular hour-long highlights documentaries, which in retrospect Alex realised was time well spent. Sitting there watching it on the big screen in his daycabin might have been tedious for him, but for Roll’em, it was a revelation.

  It was a documentary aimed at the mass market, with simple graphics explaining the distance the Fourth’s ship had had to travel, crossing the Gulf. There followed a montage of shots of Fourth’s people diving from shuttles into mountainous seas, starting with Alex von Strada himself.

  Every shot after that was a wow moment, more than half of them featuring Alex and more than half of those taken on his visit to Feyor. The voiceover was explaining the Fourth’s mission there, to connect with quarians in a way no conventional diplomatic effort had ever managed to achieve. And it showed, again and again, quarians and humans meeting with pleasure, in friendship. And then, the crowning success of the mission, the group of quarians boarding the Fourth’s ship to make the return trip with them to their new outpost world of Serenity.