Final Inquiries (47 page)

But how long is that going to last?
Jamie asked himself.
How long is anything going to last?
It seemed as if all his questions, all his thoughts and fears, centered in on time.
That
was why he avoided checking any of the dozens of clocks, watches, and data displays that could have told him, to the split second, exactly what day and time it was. What was the point of that when time itself had lost its meaning? Time measured the rate of change in things, and nothing ever changed in the bunker.

He found Hannah in the main workroom. "Good morning or evening or night or whatever," he said.

"'Hello' would cover all the cases," she said. "I've been checking our supply status. We're fine on food and water, but all the air-scrubber systems have been working overtime since the demolition attack. It's like the ventilation system is pulling in as much dust as air."

"Probably the air vent to the surface got buried or filled in and that's exactly what's happening."

"Probably. But the point is the filters are going to fail and we'll be choking on solid dust clouds in about four days. We've got to start preparing now for our breakout. I don't want to have to start digging out the escape tunnel exit when we're already near passing out."

Jamie was about to answer when Brox rushed into the room. "I just heard something!" he said excitedly. "Scraping sounds, coming from the other side of the main bunker entrance!"

"Grab weapons and handlights," Hannah said. "Let's go."

The three of them hurried down the main hallway and into the armored, right-angled vestibule that led to the bunker entrance. They could all hear it clearly. A slow, careful, methodical scraping and rasping, the sound of shovels biting into dirt.

"Whoever it is, this time they knew right where to dig," Hannah whispered.

"Yeah," said Jamie in a low voice. "Maybe that's a good sign. Maybe."

"Kill the lights or keep them on?" Hannah asked, keeping her voice down.

Jamie shrugged. "I don't know. Leave them on, I suppose. If it comes to a fight, we'll go down swinging, but I don't think the lighting will change how it comes out. Just make sure you've got some sort of cover, and a clear line of fire--and hope we don't need either."

They set themselves around the corners of the vestibule, guns drawn but not raised, and listened to the digging sounds get louder and louder, until it was metal-on-metal, the shovels striking the camouflaged upper access door itself.

The upper door lay flat on the ground and led down a narrow set of stairs to the vertically oriented inner door they were staring at.

There was more
clanking
and
banging,
and the sound of gears grinding and protesting metal--then louder, sharper
bangs
and rattling
crashes
that could only be rocks and debris falling into the chamber between the two doors.

There was a brief silence, then the inner door started to move, sliding back into its wall niche.

Frank Milkowski stepped inside and looked around. "My God," he said to the three scarecrows aiming guns at him. "You're all still alive."

They staggered up into the light, and looked around at the rubble field that had once been two embassy compounds. Simply put, everything had been utterly flattened. "Boy," said Jamie. "Will you look at this place? I'll bet this is the last time they let
us
house-sit."

They walked forward a bit. Stabmacher and Flexdal and a mixed group of embassy staffers were there, standing ready to give them a helping hand. But they didn't need it. Just being outside was cure enough for what ailed them. It was good to see the sky, the sun, familiar faces.

But what Hannah, at least, was gladdest to see was Zhen Chi, down on her knees, scrabbling in the dirt, industriously and determinedly replanting her garden, putting her plants back in the place where they were supposed to be growing.

TWENTY-SIX

FINAL INQUIRIES

"So," said Ambassador Stabmacher, standing in the rubble of his once-and-future embassy, "how does it feel to have brought down the government of one of the most powerful planets known to the Elder Races?"

"Strange," Hannah said, peering around. It was strange just to be
outdoors
again, after spending endless days in the bunker of the joint ops center. "Disconcerting. I know they deserved it, I know it was for the best--but, somehow, I even feel a little guilty, like I broke someone's window playing ball."

"
They're
the ones that broke the windows," said Jamie, looking around the ruins of the Embassy of Humanity. "And pretty much everything else."

"We'll rebuild," said Stabmacher. "The interim government has offered us a more prestigious plot of land in a better part of town, but we'll rebuild
here.
This is our place. If nothing else staked our claim to it, your work certainly did."

"Thank you, sir. But in the grand scheme of things, I can't really believe that sending out a few press releases could have really done the whole job. Kragshmal couldn't have had that firm a hold on the Directorship, if what
we
did could bring him down."

"I beg to differ," said Flexdal. "I suspect that it was precisely because he had
too
firm a hold on the office that everything collapsed. 'The consensus of the hierarchy' we all keep talking about. He pushed it too hard, too fast, and in the wrong direction. And the rest of the Grand Vixa stopped following."

They came upon the bench that had stood outside the main embassy building. The building itself wasn't there anymore, but the bench had merely been tipped over. "Why don't we just sit here for a moment?" Hannah suggested. "It feels good to be out in the sun and the air."

Hannah and Jamie righted the bench, and dusted it off, and the three humans sat down on it, while the Kendari cleared the rubble from a large enough space to sit back on their haunches. They watched as small groups of humans from the embassy staff wandered over the compound, touring the wreckage.

The ambassador spoke. "The grand irony of this whole affair, at least so far as I'm concerned, was that it brings us back to almost exactly the same point as when we started. In an earlier phase of the meetings, held in the Founder's Pillar Column City, Xenologist Flexdal and I had just about reached an agreement wherein we would propose
sharing
the Pentam System--one planet for humans, the other for the Kendari. It would be a difficult and awkward arrangement at first--perhaps for a long time. We both knew that perfectly well. But it certainly beat the winner-take-all deal that the Vixa were insisting upon. Our analysts said turning it into a question of one side winning and the other losing was practically a recipe for war."

"Ours said the same thing," said Flexdal, "and, apparently, so did the Vixan analysts. Which would explain why they insisted on arranging matters that way."

A rare thing, to hear a Kendari make a joke,
thought Hannah.

Ambassador Stabmacher smiled and raised one eyebrow, as if he were thinking the same thing. "It was only when the new Preeminent Director came in, and the Grand Warren, the city designated as the capital, shifted back to Rivertide, that we had problems. We got assigned adjoining embassy space--supposedly for the convenience of proximity but probably just to put us at each others' throats. I suppose nearly all of the things they did to facilitate matters were really meant to make things worse."

"But you didn't go for each others' throats," said Hannah. "You built the joint ops center instead. Then the Vixa invited in all those interest groups to 'observe,' and made sure to skew the representation to the most radical human and Kendari groups on both ends of the spectrum. But you managed to keep
that
from derailing the negotiations. So the Vixa decided to try blatant favoritism. Forcing the simulants on us, and not on the Kendari--with the eventual goal of performing the humiliation ritual they staged for our benefit."

"That day didn't go according to plan for them, did it?" Stabmacher asked. "I think we--I--was supposed to accept the insult, sit outside the inner dome where my odor couldn't offend, and let myself be represented by a puppet." He gestured toward Flexdal. "They'd force concession after concession out of me, then grant your people whatever they took from mine--but always at a price. An indemnity. A right to bases. Access to this, or that. And then we'd both go home to our governments with deals they could not support, and the two sides further apart than ever. Everything meant to goad us into distrusting each other, into seeing the negotiations as a failure. Sooner or later, it would all add up--to war. And favoring one of us over the other was part of that."

Jamie spoke, nodding toward Brox and Xenologist Flexdal. "My guess is that they chose to favor the Kendari because, well, you
are
just a bit more orderly than we are. You tend to like things in nice straight lines, and you work as a group more easily than humans. And, two other points. You have more legs than we do, and while the underlying Kendari body plan is utterly different from that of the Vixa, you move a lot more like Vixa than a pack of strangely balanced bipeds do. That made you just that little bit more similar to them."

"More slender reeds," the ambassador objected.

"There's more. Our embassy's deputy chief of mission was sent home for medical treatment. Our ambassador had no one with him of roughly similar rank when he went to the meetings. The BSI security detail didn't count. The Vixa saw the detail as being what it was--the precise equivalent of their escort groups. The BSI agents didn't provide security--they provided
status.
But in certain cases, a smaller escort can confer greater status on a Grand Vixa than a larger one, and it seems escorts that are roughly your size also enhance your status. Xenologist Flexdal, you and your assistant were escorted by two Inquiries Service agents that were about his size. We had one lone--and very tall--diplomat escorted by three fairly short BSI agents. It would be subtle, perhaps even subconscious--but it added up to the Vixa instinctively reading the Kendari as being of slightly higher status than humans."

"And we played up to that," Brox admitted. "And why not? It seemed a reasonable way to curry favor with our hosts, who stood in judgment over us."

"There were more than just clues to hint at our lower status. We were also unknowingly sending clues showing
scrambled
status that must have confused them--and given them a low opinion of us. The simulants--and whoever was watching through them--saw Jamie and me yelling at our ambassador and Zhen Chi about that whole Kendari rigor mortis issue. But we were from an external and superior hierarchy, so we had that right. At that time, we acted as if we were their superiors. We gave them orders as to how to turn over the evidence." She turned and looked directly at Stabmacher. "Then they saw us treat you, Mr. Ambassador and Zhen Chi--your subordinate--as if the two of you were both
equally
subordinate to us, which would reduce your status in their eyes, Mr. Ambassador. Later they saw us acting as your escorts. We permitted ourselves to be treated as being in the same status level as the simulants and the escort castes
after
seeming to show we outranked you. Your superiors were willing to be disgraced, and to act as your subordinates. It probably was dreadfully offensive to them."

"I want to circle back a bit," said the ambassador. "Senior Agent Wolfson. You're suggesting that the simulants were put here for the sole purpose of insulting and annoying us?"

"I spent a lot of time while we were holed up in the joint ops center thinking about all the angles on the simulants and the Vixan biocastes and so forth. I started seeing a lot of interesting second-and third-and fourth-order effects, on both sides, caused by mutual misunderstanding. If you look for it, you'll see a pattern of the Vixa tending to do a thing for multiple small reasons, rather than one big reason. But yes, insulting and annoying us was a goal. Secondary functions, but from the Vixa point of view, quite useful ones. After all, they were trying to generate tension. That said, most likely, the simulants were mainly meant to observe. No one paid them much mind on that account, as you all quite rightly assumed that the Vixa had far more effective and efficient means of spying on us.

"
My
theory, and it is only a sketchy one, is that the simulants were
also
intended to
imitate
us, to simulate us for the benefit of the Vixa themselves. They hoped that, if the simulants became similar enough to us, that they would be able, on some level, to serve as guides, explain us to the Vixa who controlled them. However, the Vixa weren't anywhere near as good at that as they thought.

"But I think there might have been another psychological effect, one that colored a lot of what happened, in ways that not even the Vixa expected--or even consciously noticed. Our people hated the simulants from the start, but they gritted their teeth and endured them. The embassy staff tolerated them so as to avoid insulting their hosts."

"That's about right."

"
But the superior may kill the inferior at any time,
" said Hannah. "In a species that has multiple natural and engineered castes, many of which aren't really sentient, that rule makes a certain cold-blooded sense. The nonsentient castes are viewed as being somewhere between tools and work animals--and there are lots of them, and as best I can see, each worker caste consists of effectively identical clones. They're all the same, and any vestigial survival instinct was bred or engineered out of them long ago. If you have to kill ten or twenty of them in order to get your dinner on time, so be it. There's plenty more where they came from, they won't even mind dying, and you'll get your dinner without any significant cost or harm to you."

"What are you saying?" the ambassador asked.

"That by
not
killing the simulants the first time they caused trouble, we were failing to assert our superiority over them. In Vixa eyes, we were equating ourselves with the simulants. And that certainly made the Vixa
our
superiors."