Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  ‘And such interesting catering, too.’ That was a jibe, delivered with a glance across the dome at where Simmy was dancing through the crowd with a tray of drinks.

  Alex followed the line of his glance and a smile warmed his eyes for a moment. Simmy was blissfully unaware that she was on her tiptoes, glissading in her delight.

  This was her event. Okay, admittedly, some other people had done quite a bit of the actual organising, like Mako Ireson who’d set up the venue, the chefs who’d come up with menus and the officers who’d arranged logistics, but all of them had deferred to her in those decisions, as Alex had designated her the event coordinator.

  That was, obviously, a radical decision. A teenage rating should never be put in charge of any formal hospitality event, let alone the most important diplomatic hospitality event of the century. Alex, though, had made that decision on two criteria. The first was that he knew that Simmy would do a great job of organising this and would do so with joyful confidence. The second was that he’d been made aware that Simmy had acquired something of a reputation in the diplomatic community. Word had got around that she had been the first human Lady Ursele had asked to see, which made her remarkable in itself. More importantly, word had got around that Simmy was quite capable of telling the awe-inspiring commodore to eat up his nice veggies before she’d serve his pudding. Anyone with that kind of influence over Alex von Strada had huge potential if she could be persuaded to drop words in his ear, privately. So there was keen interest in her amongst both diplomatic and intelligence services and the knowledge that she was organising this event had been another tick in the column of reasons to attend.

  And she was, indeed, having the time of her life, beaming at the ambassadors who tried to engage her in conversation but flitting off again like a hyperactive butterfly. And if her movements were more those of a ballerina than the conventional near-invisible glide of the trained servant, that was pleasing, too. She was refreshing, sparkling through the heavyweight politicians like the bubbles in champagne. And she was, as Alex would say later in a note for her record, a credit to her uniform.

  And the catering was interesting, too. Buzz had advised that the buffet should provide sufficient dishes familiar to the guests for the conservative diners to eat things they recognised, with a good dash of unusual dishes for the more adventurous. Nobody here would ever have tried quarian food so that was what they’d gone with – all vat grown, of course and adapted for human biology, but a variety of fish and sea-vegetable dishes which were causing quite a hum amongst the foodies.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alex, refusing to rise to or even recognise that JDT was being sarcastic.

  ‘Such a pity,’ JDT felt, as so many had before him, the effort of conversation with Alex von Strada in uncommunicative mode. It felt like wading through waist-high mud with weeds snagging at your ankles. But he had come prepared and he was persistent, ‘that Ambassador Silver was unable to attend… then you would have been able to claim the full set.’

  Alex gazed at him for two measured seconds, outwardly impassive, inwardly hooting with merriment at the thought of what would happen if Silvie really did walk through that door. JDT knew perfectly well why Silvie had not attended the ceremony and why she was maintaining such a low profile aboard ship. For all their fascination with her, everyone knew that if they met Silvie face to face she would be able to see their true character immediately, complete with all their fears, desires and hypocrisies. And nobody was entirely willing to trust their dignity to the assurance that Silvie was pretty good these days at keeping such observations to herself. Mostly. Even those who were keenest to meet her wanted that to be in an entirely private place and firmly off the record.

  JDT knew that perfectly well, so the comment could only be an attempt to diminish Alex’s achievement. That was a piece of petty spite which simply confirmed everything Alex already thought about the man and once again he found himself wondering how the Diplomatic Corps had got it so wrong. JDT had the right manner, of course, the right background, the right gravitas, and he was no doubt efficient enough at by-the-book administration to have risen thus high in his profession. But surely, at some stage, there had to be some kind of evaluation as to the ability of a would-be ambassador to cope with professional and personal challenge far outside their comfort zone. And in that, someone, somewhere, had decided that JDT would rise to whatever challenge exodiplomacy might throw at him.

  Wrong, Alex thought. So, so wrong. And when word of this reached Chartsey, JDT’s career would have the life-expectancy of a mayfly heading into a furnace. Alex could almost have felt sorry for him, had the man not been such an irritating dipstick.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said and was grateful to be rescued by the Lundanian president barging in on them with his customary bullish manner.

  ‘Have you tried this?’ He was flourishing a dish of quarian salad as if he expected Alex to take some, ‘It’s amazing!’

  Alex could have said that yes, he’d eaten that kind of salad many times, both at Quarus and aboard ship, but Roll’em didn’t give him the chance. ‘It’s like – a taste explosion!’ He was completely ignoring the League Ambassador, actually moving in such a way that JDT was obliged to step aside or be barged by the presidential shoulder. ‘You’ve got to let us have the vat-codes for this stuff!’ Roll’em enthused.

  Alex was just about to say that they could have all the vat codes for the buffet recipes and welcome, when he sensed Davie North at his shoulder.

  Davie was not, in fact, there. He was currently on the far side of the dome being extremely charming and talking nanotech with several of the more technologically clued-up ambassadors. For Alex, though, it was just as if Davie rested a hand on his shoulder and gave him a significant glance.

  ‘I am sure that Mr North will be happy to arrange that,’ Alex said and Roll’em guffawed. He understood very well that this meant the vat-codes would be negotiated for a price – and not necessarily money, either, but some concession in other agreements currently under discussion.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said and with a gesture which flicked from Alex to Davie and back again, ‘You two!’ he observed, ‘make quite the double-act!’

  Alex thought so too, but merely acknowledged the compliment with the tiniest nod of his head.

  ‘It is delicious, isn’t it?’ he indicated the salad. It consisted of pasta-like ribbons, slightly sweet orange morsels, slightly sour green ones and a scattering of small salty crunchy things, served in a tepid savoury sauce. ‘We’ve dropped the calorific value for human consumption, but otherwise it’s just the same as served on Quarus.’

  ‘A little bit of Karus come to us,’ Roll’em said, with a very slightly wistful note. He knew very well that this was as close as he would ever come to experiencing the wonder of that ocean world for himself. Even his requests to meet Silvie had been put off, as Alex had explained that such a meeting would confuse an already complex and volatile situation.

  Here and now, though, Alex felt that the situation had calmed down sufficiently for that meeting to take place without freaking out the rest of the ambassadors. And this felt like a good time to further that relationship.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’d like to come up to the ship tomorrow I can show you the aquadeck… and if you like, Silvie might pop along to say hi.’

  He already knew that she would, having discussed who he might bring to meet her and what the rules would be for those encounters.

  ‘Really?’ Roll’em gulped his fork full of salad so fast it nearly choked him. ‘Brimming!’ he declared and immediately, ‘What time?’

  As they made the arrangements, Alex couldn’t help remembering their first meeting, so guarded and untrusting that Roll’em had hesitated even to set foot outside the Pirrellothian embassy for fear he would be kidnapped. Their relationship had come a long way; to the evident resentment of Ambassador JDT, still hovering on the outskirts of the conversation and trying to make it look as if he was a part of it even
though neither of the others was including him in any way.

  The difference in the two relationships was so apparent it would have been obvious to a child. Even with his formal demeanour still in place, Alex was talking freely to the President, his vocabulary casual even if his manner was not. With JDT it had been hard to get even a single word response from him and those uttered with hard-eyed, glacial dispassion.

  JDT had never managed to get the Lundanian president even to attend a social event at the League embassy. He had been rebuffed, insulted, even directly mocked by Roll’em Moffaret. So it was doubly infuriating to see the president getting along so well with his rival. He nearly choked, too, not on hastily swallowed food but with the effort it took to hold back his outraged protest.

  He did his best, but even so Alex saw the tight lines around his eyes and his mouth, the angry compression of his lips and the tortoise-like movement of his chin back towards his neck.

  There was nothing JDT could do about it, though. Having so emphatically disassociated himself from the Fourth at the outset, he had himself severed any official role he might have had in their mission. And Alex had made it very clear that he would neither welcome nor tolerate any unofficial advice being offered. So the League Ambassador just had to stand there and keep his mouth shut, seeing Alex arranging to host a first-contact encounter between the quarian ambassador and the president of a foreign world.

  Alex understood his reaction. Silvie was their ambassador, the quarian ambassador to the League. By all the codes of diplomatic protocol, Silvie should not be attempting to make use of that relationship with them to make contact with third parties. And by all the codes of self-interest, the League should be attempting to keep whatever benefits that relationship brought to themselves.

  In allowing Silvie to travel with the Fourth, though, and exposing her to whatever contacts they might make during their missions, the Senate had already authorised Alex to facilitate Silvie’s meeting other peoples. That had happened very successfully aboard the Assegai, with the friendship which had developed between the quarian and the Samartians. Even the Diplomatic Corps – at least, their higher echelons on Chartsey – were expressing cautious delight at the unexpected benefits of the two exodiplomatic missions colliding in that unplanned manner. Amongst other benefits, the merging of those missions had resulted in the first recorded multi-species academic conference. Again, it was unplanned, spontaneous, responding to a problem arising from their visit to Camae.

  And Roll’em, evidently, had been studying that mission in some detail. That was apparent the next day when he came up to the ship, having the now customary glass of water with Alex before they went to see the aquadeck.

  ‘I’ve been looking at that Camag Advisory,’ he told Alex, once they were settled in the commodore’s daycabin. ‘Impressive – very!’

  Alex smiled.

  ‘It seems to be working out quite well,’ he agreed, with a modesty which made Roll’em splutter.

  ‘It is,’ he declared, ‘brimming!’ Then, with a wondering look, ‘How do you do that? Fix a whole planet’s problems, just like that?’ He snapped his fingers and it was Alex’s turn to splutter, coughing as a sip of water went down the wrong way with an involuntary gasp.

  Once he’d recovered and having declined the president’s offer to thump him on the back, he took a rather more controlled sip of his water to compose himself and laughed.

  ‘We did not,’ he assured Roll’em, ‘fix a whole planet’s problems! We addressed one issue, at their request. Camae has always struggled to achieve the place in League affairs they should have, often called the World the League Forgot, for no very obvious reason. They’re not isolated geographically, their world and culture are extremely pleasant, they’re welcoming, keen to build relationships with other worlds and to have their say in League affairs. But they’ve always been under the radar, considered a bit odd, frankly, because of their insistence on retaining their ancient language and even their traditional rule by hereditary princes. Even under League democracy, almost all of the presidents they elect are princes. It was their request that the Fourth bring Silvie for a visit, after it emerged that Camag and quarian are so similar that they’re mutually comprehensible, which the Camag and the quarians are delighted by, like finding long-lost family. Their case-of-need for the visit specified that they wanted to raise Camae’s profile in the League, attracting tourism and improving trade and political links. All we had to do to achieve that, literally, was turn up and go sightseeing.’

  Roll’em nodded. Alex had been given his own choice of where to take the Assegai and the fact that he had chosen Camae had achieved the mission in itself, making it suddenly the most important and interesting world in the League.

  ‘But the Advisory made it work,’ he observed.

  ‘Well, there were concerns, obviously,’ Alex conceded, ‘that keen as they were, the Camag weren’t prepared for the kind of tourism-storm about to hit them from all directions. And in the longer term, we knew that significant numbers of visitors would love it there so much that they’d decide to stay – which, as Camae is a League world, they have every right to do and Camae has no control over that. And it was obvious that many of those visitors, for all that they’d want to stay on Camae because of the simple, small-town lifestyle, close family bonds and home-based culture, would pretty soon start to miss the things they took for granted on their own worlds – shops, restaurants, clubs, even singles and couples apartments which would be out of place on Camae and create divisions between locals and incomers. Mr North suggested the provision of a system station where such facilities could be provided for those who want them without impacting on the towns groundside. He proposed an economic model, too, by which tourism could be sustained and profitable on a world with only nine hotels and not so much as a café in any of the towns. Imagine, Roll’em – imagine going to visit a town where if you get thirsty or hungry or want a comfort break, you simply knock on any door and introduce yourself. Whoever is living there will make you completely welcome, give you whatever you want, and would think you’re insane if you offered to pay them.’

  As Roll’em guffawed heartily at such a bizarre idea, Alex continued, ‘Even the few hotels they do have at the spaceports are virtually unused because visitors barely have time to check in before families are offering them hospitality. Which is fine at the levels of offworld visitors they were getting, but problematic when you’re looking at up to forty million visitors being on the planet at any given time. Just not fair to expect the Camag to pay for housing tourists, feeding and looking after them at their own expense. But at the same time, culturally unacceptable to set up any method by which such hosts would be paid for their hospitality. Tricky, see? So Mr North suggested that tourists pay a fixed price for accommodation and catering, on arrival, which is distributed amongst town councils according to how much time visitors spend there, to be used for the benefit of that town. So by hosting visitors, people are also benefiting their communities. And there were practical issues, logistics, things we could see developing into problems unless the necessary infrastructure was in place before the tourist influx became overwhelming.’

  Roll’em nodded, looking quite horrified as he considered how unprepared his own world would be to cope with such an invasion.

  ‘Nightmare!’ he said, feelingly.

  ‘Well – difficult,’ Alex conceded. ‘Which is why we thought it would be helpful to produce some kind of advisory document. Not that they couldn’t have come up with solutions themselves, of course, they’re perfectly capable of managing their own affairs. But time was an issue, as we knew that the liner companies would already be dragging any serviceable ships out of their reserves and actively promoting trips to Camae the moment the news broke of our visit. And it is always difficult to coordinate enterprise on a multi-system scale, with all the problems of delayed contact and agencies operating with the best of intentions but at cross-purpose or with poor communications. So we thought
it might help to produce an advisory which everyone could work to, subject of course to the approval of the Camag government and all the agencies involved.’

  ‘And they all took it up,’ Roll’em commented, ‘because it was brilliant – and because the alternative was chaos.’

  Alex grinned, recognising a quote from one of the liner companies asked why they had so readily fallen in with the Fourth’s proposals for structuring their cruises to Camae. And this was not, as the representative had stressed, because they were in any way afraid that the Fourth would give them grief if they didn’t go with the plan.

  ‘And it worked,’ Roll’em said. ‘It worked because you sorted it to make it work. And don’t tell me it was nothing. You sorted it, you made it happen and you told them how to make it work. And you’re doing the same here.’ He forestalled Alex’s protest with a lifted hand. ‘I know, I know, no part of your mission. But you just can’t help yourself, huh? See a problem, just got to wade right in there and sort it. Lundane is a different world, already – liberated, not under the thumb of the corps any more, we get to say how things are. You did that by breaking dependency on them for water. Lundane owes you, Alex. We don’t have any ‘freedom of the planet’ thing and we’re not big on ceremonies, but we want you to know that we owe you big time and any time you need ought from us, mate, you’ve got it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said. ‘That’s very kind, though I won’t hold you to it. And it does have to be said, sorry, that as wonderful as it is to see you breaking free of that stranglehold and as happy as I am to do whatever we can to help, the reason we started bringing water in was nothing more noble than that we needed to find some way to fund our visit here.’

  Roll’em laughed, rather ruefully. ‘Yeah,’ he conceded. ‘Sorry we weren’t more helpful, but we didn’t know you then. And I guess that means in a way we’re kind of indebted to Jilt-Defame-Tarantula, too, for jubbing you off.’ He considered for a moment and drank off the rest of his water before shaking his head with a grin, ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Just can’t bring myself to be grateful to that tick, not no-how.’