Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  Alex remained tactfully silent on that subject, understanding that this was a purely personal remark on the present ambassador’s character and not hostile against the League per se. The Fourth’s visit had improved perceptions of the League significantly. But it would, Alex felt, be counter-productive for him to try to defend the League Ambassador. So he finished his own water and got up, tacitly changing the subject.

  ‘So...?’ he said, indicating the door and Roll’em practically jumped to his feet, eager excitement all over his face.

  He was not disappointed. The aquadeck was everything he’d hoped it would be, so vibrant with dazzling colour and exotic scents, complete with incomprehensible artwork and a profound feeling of stepping out of the ship, somehow, into a different world.

  And his encounter with Silvie was everything he could have hoped for, too. Silvie no sooner laid eyes on him than she burst out laughing, which had him in fits of laughter too even though he couldn’t understand what it was she saw which affected her so hilariously.

  Alex did, or at least, suspected it. Great disparities between a person’s outer appearance and their personality could be disturbing to quarians, but there were situations in which it was as comical to them as slapstick gags were to humans. As Alex had learned early on in their relationship, Roll’em’s big, brash, bullish manner masked the sensitive, honourable man beneath. To Silvie’s eyes, it was as if a perfectly decent respectable businessman was attending a meeting in fancy dress as a comedy Neanderthal.

  ‘Oh, you’re cute!’ she told him, which had Roll’em roaring again, since nobody had said that about him since he’d been three years old.

  After that, the two of them got on tremendously, Roll’em taking it on the chin when Silvie told him there were lots of things about his world she found either heartbreaking or disgusting.

  ‘But it’s still not as bad as Chartsey,’ she added, a consolation which made Alex wince and Roll’em hoot with glee. ‘And you know I’m right,’ Silvie observed, looking at Alex. In response, he made a zipping motion across his mouth, making her laugh.

  Had he been forced to speak, Silvie knew perfectly well that he could not have argued with her opinion. In sheer terms of numbers of people enduring horrible living conditions, social dysfunction and environmental crisis, Chartsey was in a far worse case than Lundane. And whilst Lundane was now on an upward curve and improving conditions on their world, Chartsey’s only practicable hope was to encourage as many people as possible to leave.

  ‘Anyway – now we’ve met,’ Silvie turned back to Roll’em, regarding him with those sparkling, enchanting, jewel-bright eyes, ‘I feel that I can ask you a favour.’

  The look on Roll’em’s face said that if it was something within human capacity to provide, it was hers.

  ‘I’d quite like an embassy,’ said Silvie, startling Alex just as much as Roll’em. The question of whether Silvie would be asking to establish an embassy here had been asked and answered very early on and had been definitely in the negative. Silvie was in no position to establish an embassy and leave an ambassador and staff here even if she’d wanted to and this was just not a world quarians would be happy to visit.

  ‘Uh..?’ Roll’em queried.

  ‘A sort of embassy-in-waiting,’ Silvie clarified. ‘Not for right now, but to have something here as a symbol of friendship, yes? I think it would be nice to have one of those plots on Embassy Avenue marked up to Quarus, with a garden on it which your people can visit. And then one day when we’re ready to set up embassies elsewhere and you’ve got oceans we can swim in, we’ve already got a foothold here, see?’

  Roll’em saw.

  ‘That’s a brimming idea,’ he told her and glanced at Alex, who smiled agreement.

  ‘If you’d said…’ he observed, not with reproach but simply pointing out that if she’d told him she would like that he would have done his utmost to make it happen for her.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I’d like him or not,’ Silvie explained and in doing so exemplified just why diplomacy with quarians was so challenging. Her decision on whether she would ask for a plot of land here to be allocated to Quarus had rested entirely on whether she felt a personal sense of trust and liking with their president. In every other culture Alex knew, such a consideration would have been irrelevant. ‘But I do,’ she beamed at Roll’em, who was positively blushing with joy. ‘So I’m asking – can you do that for me?’

  ‘Yes, of course – absolutely! Have whatever plot you want – and whatever buildings and gardens you want on it, too – at our expense, naturally!’

  ‘Lovely, thank you.’ Silvie had a rudimentary understanding of the value of money in human societies and had seen how difficult it had been for the Fourth to obtain the funds they needed here, so her thanks were sincere. More importantly, she understood how much effort would be involved in creating and maintaining a quarian garden in the Lundanian environment. It would need the services of expert biologists, genetic engineers and specially qualified technicians. ‘It means a lot of work for you, I know.’

  ‘Pleasure – sheer pleasure!’ Roll’em assured her, as if she was asking them to do nothing more complex than plant and water a few shrubs. He looked around at the stunning surroundings of the aquadeck and laughed aloud. In that moment he was imagining such a garden on Embassy Avenue, with long queues of Lundanians waiting to experience the magic of stepping into a truly alien environment. ‘You’re the one giving us a gift!’ he told her and she could see that he meant that.

  So they talked for a while about what Silvie wanted, the detailed plans and the genetic samples she would provide so that her garden here could be recreated on the planet. The only samples she would not provide were from Ulric.

  ‘Groupos are emotionally sentient beings,’ she explained, ‘and I wouldn’t be happy about them being engineered here without empaths trained to take care of them.’

  Roll’em looked a bit mystified, but nodded. He was clearly not about to tackle the bewildering issue of quarians being prepared to kill and eat certain kinds of fish and sea-life but being utterly appalled even at the suggestion that they might eat others.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he said and Silvie beamed back at him.

  ‘Such a kind man,’ she said, after which Roll’em left the ship apparently several centimetres taller than when he’d arrived.

  Twenty Seven

  The excavators arrived on site at three minutes to midnight, circling around the site until the moment arrived when they could take possession.

  This was midnight local time, of course, only mid-morning aboard ship. So Alex and most of the Fourth were watching with some interest as the construction of the Pirrellothian Embassy began.

  With only three weeks left of the three months Lady Ursele had asked that the Fourth remain, Alex had been preparing his crew for the likelihood that they might be here for several more months. It seemed so unlikely that the Lundanians really could construct a building on this scale in the time-frame they claimed and finish it to a standard in which it was ready to move in.

  He was wrong, though. The Lundanians were on their mettle with this and every company involved was very much aware that there was much more at stake here than bringing in a contract on time and on budget. If the building of the most important Embassy ever built on the Avenue came in late or was of poor quality because of any failure on their part, they might as well file for bankruptcy immediately. And the honour of Lundane itself was on the line, as both the League and every world in the Marfikian hegemony would be watching every step of this historical event. This was the best chance Lundane had ever had to impress other worlds as anything more than a conveniently located place to have arguments.

  And in their construction skills, at least, they had some things they could show the League.

  ‘Okay, that is impressive,’ Eldovan observed, as a huge machine ground out a hole some forty metres deep, searing into the ground with lasers and powerful air-jets.

  ‘
We would never be allowed to do that back home,’ Buzz said, looking on with dismay at the rising cloud of dust and sand. Within moments, it looked as if a volcano was erupting, an ever-rising plume spreading into the night sky. And the noise – the roaring of the airjets and shattering of rock – was so enormous that the ground was shaking for hundreds of metres around.

  Alex imagined the response of city dwellers to such a construction site erupting in their midst and chuckled. Anyone creating noise and mess like that on a League world would be prosecuted.

  ‘They may need to rethink that,’ said Davie, thoughtfully, regarding the sand and dust, some of which would be in the atmosphere for days before it settled out far around the planet, ‘when they have an environment that needs protecting.’

  ‘Well, the neighbours don’t seem to be complaining,’ the watch commander said, which made Davie laugh.

  ‘Much good would it do them if they tried!’ he said and as they looked at him with questioning interest, pointed out, ‘There are no civic rights here, no civic authorities to complain to and no grounds on which you can complain about any company conducting its lawful business regardless of how much annoyance or inconvenience its causing you. These guys…’ he indicated the industrial mining gear which was blasting out the embassy’s foundations, ‘are regarded as considerate constructors because they give people warning of what they’re going to do and offer siliplas wrap to cover any outdoor gear you want to protect from the sand.’

  That made sense of why all the other embassies had had people out in the gardens the day before, carefully shrouding their plants. Much of the Avenue, by now, was engulfed in something very like a sandstorm, swirling grit and dust. The temperature was rising, too, as if the site was a massive bonfire.

  ‘It needs sound baffles, heat extraction and debris vacuum,’ said Shion. She was watching with interest, but had called up a technical specification of the drill-dozer being used and was sketching on a secondary screen.

  ‘Not a tank,’ Davie objected, seeing that she was drawing out a dozer with a removable container into which debris could be sucked and stored, ‘A compactor…’

  He opened a screen too and within moments the two of them were deep in confabulation, exchanging ideas so rapidly that Alex couldn’t have kept track of all the screens even if he’d tried. As it was, he just drank his coffee and watched contentedly while the foundations were drilled. It took less than sixty minutes to excavate a hole forty metres deep, a hundred and thirty metres wide and nearly two hundred metres long.

  More impressive than the scale of the hole, though, was its precision. Airjets had blown away the sand of the upper layers from around the hole, taking it back to bedrock. Bedrock here was granite, a grey stone with large pink crystals which would have been highly sought after as decorative rock on any other world, but here was the most common type of rock at the surface. The lasers had cut through it so cleanly that every face of the cuboid was perfectly flat, perfectly perpendicular.

  As inspection confirmed that the foundations had been dug precisely to spec, the drill-dozer cruised away with an air of smug satisfaction.

  The company had actually practised this, under conditions of tremendous secrecy. Had it got out that they’d felt the need to rehearse their part of the job, after all, it would hardly have reflected well on their expertise. But this was such an important job, they’d felt it would be useful to run the specs a few times, out in deep desert, just to be sure that things would go smoothly on the day. So a keen observer, indeed, might have located several strange holes in remote locations.

  Next to move in was a machine which looked like the bulbous body of a spider studded with trumpet-like horns, spray jets and various other mysterious protuberances. This was a siliplas injection unit, brought in to spray a sealing and insulating layer of dense siliplas foam over the freshly cut rock faces. The rock was still hot from the laser blasting but this company wasn’t about to sit about for hours waiting for it to cool. So the first blast of spray from them was a coolant which made a sound like a hissing snake, only amplified a thousand times. Then a layer of dense brown foam emerged as the jets sprayed rapidly back and forth. It was as dense as hard rubber and both waterproof and heat insulating. It took about three quarters of an hour for them to coat the entire pit, leaving it looking like a gigantic swimming pool just waiting for the water.

  On Alex’s left, Davie and Shion were having a technical debate about engines. Alex picked up enough of it to recognise that Shion was making a case for a shuttle engine to be used in their dozer, while Davie was arguing some kind of case on cost-benefit.

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ Shion told him, cutting across the financial analysis. ‘This isn’t a cost-effective dozer, it’s the ultimate dozer, the best we could possibly produce at current levels of technology. Cost is not a factor here.’

  Davie laughed, conceding the point. ‘Fair enough.’ he said and worked several screens simultaneously. ‘And in that case…’

  Alex left them to it, knowing that they were simply two very highly skilled engineers amusing themselves with a hypothetical design in much the same way that other people might entertain themselves with a casual doodle. But he was not surprised when they had produced, within a couple of hours, detailed specs for a machine which was entirely possible to build. Though it would not, as Davie pointed out, be in any way commercially viable, as it would cost more than three hundred times as much as the currently available construction dozers, rather more indeed than it would cost to build a patrol ship.

  ‘But if you want one,’ he offered, ‘I can have it run up as a tech-leading prototype.’

  Shion smiled, nodding agreement. Such prototypes, financially non-viable as they were at the moment, would appear in technology exhibitions, setting a standard to which engineers might aspire.

  ‘We should give it to Lundane,’ she suggested. ‘After all, it’s a development of their design.’

  Davie nodded too and generated a set of project documentation, complete with all the Admiralty-required paperwork necessary for Alex to approve that. Casual as it was, the design for the super-dozer was the intellectual property of the Fleet and could not be manufactured, let alone gifted to a foreign government, without their consent.

  ‘No rush,’ said Davie, filing that project request to Alex’s desk with a low priority coding.

  Alex grinned, feeling a surge of quite unaccountable and almost ridiculous happiness. It wasn’t the super-dozer, really. That was a trivial thing for all concerned and wasn’t going to rock anyone’s world, merely turning up as an interesting high-tech exhibition prototype on Lundane in a year or so. Perhaps it was the way in which Shion and Davie working together on something like that was so absolutely normal here that nobody was taking any notice, just carrying on with their work and watching the construction groundside in an atmosphere of relaxed, professional interest. Perhaps it was the speed and expertise with which the construction itself was coming together; a visible, physical outcome of the Fourth’s mission here. Or perhaps it was just the easy, comfortable buzz of the ship, the crew so at home here now that it was hard to remember how frightening a prospect coming to Lundane had been.

  Whatever the cause, Alex felt a wave of contentment wash through him, a feeling expressed in the thought, I am the luckiest skipper in space.

  It was a moment he treasured. Less than three minutes later he had Ambassador JDT on the line, giving him grief in that extraordinarily polite way the Diplomatic Corps had of being extremely annoyed.

  Alex knew perfectly well why the League Ambassador was angry. JDT knew that every other diplomat on the Avenue considered that he’d embarrassed himself and the League with his refusal to support the Fourth’s mission here. It had been made all too clear to him, also, that every other diplomat on the Avenue would prefer Alex von Strada to be the League’s representative here. Even more infuriating, since they’d discovered that the Fourth was not even informing the League embassy about wha
t they were doing, almost every other diplomat on the Avenue kept asking JDT, pointedly, for information about what was going on. JDT kept having to refer them to Alex and bear it patiently when they kept on expressing surprise that he was not in the loop on something of such historical importance. It was petty malice, quite beneath the dignity of those who were here representing their worlds. But they didn’t get a lot of opportunity for fun on the Avenue and they were going to milk this one for all it was worth.

  So JDT was angry, tired and bitterly resentful. And now he was being kept up, not merely by the noise of the construction work going on overnight and the massive rabnak crowds expected by the morning, but by calls from dozens of other ambassadors. They evidently felt that since they were going to be kept up late tonight anyway they might as well get some amusement out of it, so kept calling JDT to ask him for information about the construction schedule.

  That, though, was not what he was calling about. He had evidently received Alex’s memo about Silvie asking for a plot on Embassy Avenue.

  ‘With the greatest of respect, Commodore,’ he said, with excessive courtesy in his tone and a glitter of rage in his eyes, ‘It has to be said that I am of the opinion that I have a right to be informed about any developments involving Ambassador Silver, as does the sitting Ambassador at any of our Embassies.’

  He was right about that. Right back from the start of her visit, Silvie’s stay with the Fourth had been conditional upon them keeping the Diplomatic Corps fully informed of everything she did and anything that the Fourth learned about her or her people. Silvie had agreed to that and was well aware that such reports were routinely shared both with the League Embassy when they were in port and with Diplomatic Corps Head Office back on Chartsey.

  ‘Indeed,’ Alex said, his manner just as formal and polite but with a distinct frost about it and just a hint of surprise, too. ‘Which is why,’ he pointed out, ‘I informed you of this development, as required by standing policy.’