Invader (19 page)

It was — he had no trouble recognizing the text — the first chapters of
The History of Contact
, by Meighan Durna, a work that laid out every action, every mistake of the Landing and the war.

It released a devil of a lot of intimate knowledge about Mospheira and atevi in the process, which he had rather not have had happen on Duma's occasionally incomplete understanding of atevi motivation — but he didn't totally disagree with the decision to transmit the book. It was certainly a way to bring the
Phoenix
crew up to speed, or at least as far as most of Mospheira itself knew the truth: every school on Mospheira studied it as foundational to understanding where Mospheirans were and who they were, all three hundred and more pages. He jotted down a background note to the ship, for transmission at the first opportunity:
The
History,
while expressing the origin of the Mospheiran mindset, could not accurately account for atevi behavior and should never be used to predict or explain atevi motivation
...

He wanted to get on with the tape. At home, he could have used voice-search. The atevi machine didn't have that luxury. He fast-forwarded and listened to the pitch.

There
was
indeed a voice section.

He sat and listened, then turned on his second recorder, the one with a blank tape, and used the directional mike to make a running commentary and quasi-translation for Tabini.

"Mostly operational protocols, discussion of the gap in relays. Schedules of contact."

Then it was something else. Then it was a ship captain asking to speak to the President of Mospheira.

Almost immediately the sign of a break, and probably an interval in which they patched the communications link together.

The President came on.

The captain said, after preliminary well-wishes, "
We're very impressed, Mr. President, with the extensive development, on both sides of the water. Peace and prosperity. You're to be congratulated
."

"
Thank you, Captain
," came the answer. The President quite comfortably taking credit for all of it. Leave it to him.

"
The condition of the station is such
," the captain continued, "
that we can with effort bring it up to operational. We'd like to offer you a cooperative agreement. As I understand
—
you trade with the atevi, technology, raw materials, anything you want
."

"There are limits, Captain. Nothing that destabilizes the society or the environment."

Good, Bren thought. The man at least said that.

Then:

"
You're preparing
," the ship captain said, "
a return to space. You are making efforts in that direction
."

"
Yes. Considerable effort. The circumstances that forced our landing
—"

"
Yes. I'm aware. On the other hand
—
we can provide a far shorter route to orbit. We'll provide the design. You provide the manufacturing, build the ground-to-orbit craft and we can put this station back into full-scale operation
. . . "

Bren took deep breaths to calm his heart. With what resources? He shaped the words with his lips, willing the answer, hoping it wasn't a package dropped in from space, free of effort.

"We can make secure habitat for five hundred workers to start with; ten thousand in three years, then
—
then there's no practical limit, Mr. President
."

That's labor crews, Mr. President, do you hear it?

"
You should know, you're not unique in space. We've
got
another station, near to this star, small operation, but we're growing. This is prosperity, Mr. President. This is the human future we came for
."

There was a lump of ice in Bren's chest.

"
You're saying
," the President answered slowly, "
that you've already built another station. Out there. Somewhere. "

"
A mining and repair operation, self-sustaining food supply. Humanity is in
business
in this district of space, Mr. President. We're asking you to rejoin the universe. We don't dispute whatever arrangements you've made down there. It clearly works. All we're interested in is the station. "

How nice. How magnanimous. How
concerned
for everyone's rights.

"
We can restore what we had. We can
build,
Mr. President. All you've got to do is get up here: a share of the station, exactly what the original mission charter calls for, to all the builders and their descendants
."

"
I have to consult
," the President said. "
I
have to consult with the council and the Departments
."

Depend on it. God, the man couldn't executive-order a fire drill.

"That's fine, Mr. President. I'll be here."

So what are you going to do
now
, Mr. President? Consult about what?

Strangers to our whole way of life are on the station. They're sitting up there in possession of it, and now they want manpower, Mr. President. They want what they wanted from us two hundred years ago, and you don't even know for a fact there's another station, the way they claim. We've got their word for it, don't we, the way we've got their word for everything else in space.

The way we had their word for it they'd let the station-builders and the miners run the station once they finished it, and you know how much say we had over what they did with the ship, and how much say we had over policy on the station. They double-crossed the station-keepers to get fuel for their ship, and now they're mad that the station-keepers couldn't keep the station going?

The good ones in the crew, the heroes — they'd volunteered to go out into the radiation hell of the star we came to after the accident, to get us to a kinder sun. The brightest and the best, they died way young, back when Taylor was captain.

The heroes weren't in charge when the scum that let them do the dying made all the later decisions.

The real heroes in the crew died and left the self-saving sons-of-bitches to run the thing they died for, Mr. President: don't believe these people. What they're dealing for is not just a ticket to fly. The idealists, the dreamers, the engineers and the nose-in-a-data-table scientists, are all in the same basket with
this
generation of sons-of-bitches who want off the planet, the ones who want their political party up where they control real power — power not to deal with atevi except down the barrel of a gun, a laser, whatever state of the art they've got up there. After that, nobody but them gets up there —

They're still fighting the damn war, Mr. President, but they don't let me on conference programs to call it what it is — they're still nursing a hatred of atevi that has nothing to do with the facts either present or past. They're the ones who write the letters about plots in atevi advances. They don't see anything but war. They think God made them perfect, in His image, and atevi…

Atevi can't love, they have no feelings, the separatists told those willing to listen — they couldn't expound it on television: the censors bleeped them off as inciting to break the peace; but they said it in places where people gathered who wanted to listen — not many people, because Mospheirans weren't political, weren't discontent, didn't give a damn so long as water came from the tap and they could observe their annual cycles of vacation at the shore-sides, winter break for the mountains, total employment, pensioned retirement — the bowling societies, the touring societies, the dance societies, the low and the fashionable nightclubs, and the concern, if they worried about anything, over the weather, their health, their social standing, their vacation schedules, their kids' schools, and their various annual community festivals.
That
was the public the activists of whatever stripe had to deal with, a public that didn't grow exercised over any situation until it inconvenienced their plans: that was the Mospheiran political reality, in a system without real poverty, real threat, real anxiety, a system where stress was a rainy spell during your harvest celebration. Nobody got involved in politics except the few with an agenda, and lacking sources for funds and door-to-door campaigners, politics became a land of long-term benevolent chair-warmers and occasional agenda-pushers.

You only hoped to get the chair-warmers in office. And the pro-spacers, who were generally idealistic sorts — except this small, this hitherto mostly laughable nest of people who believed atevi were secretly building rockets to hurl at Mospheira — had been a private lunacy, not practiced in public, so the Secretary of State was secretly scared of atevi. It wasn't critical to the operation of the Foreign Office, which was Treaty-mandated, therefore set in concrete, and university-advised, therefore too esoteric to matter to the purveyors of corporate largesse that fed the successive Secretaries of State.

Until now.

There was public ignorance out there — fertile ground for fears.

There were people who'd never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn't their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative party, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money — those whose whole political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn't fit their imaginary past.

And they played to an undereducated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet — which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.

Lately the conservatives had tried to get three perhaps ill-advised university graduate students' grant revoked for teaching atevi philosophy as a cultural immersion experience for human eight-year-olds.

And in the ensuing flap, the more radical conservatives had tried to get all atevi studies professors thrown off the State Department's university advisory committee. Everyone had thought that an extreme reaction. Then. Before the ship.

The list of attempts to nibble away at the edges of intercultural accommodation went on and on, and it all added up in the paidhi's not apolitical mind to a movement that wasn't in any sense a party, wasn't in any sense grassroots, an agenda that only a minute fraction of the population agreed with in total.

But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue — because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn't speak Mosphei; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.

The fact was, living on an island and hearing for nearly two hundred years of their government turning more and more sophisticated technology over to atevi — and lately knowing that the highest tech humans owned was on the negotiating table, and that within their children's lifetimes, the remaining technogap was going to close — could one wonder that humans who hadn't made atevi studies part of their education were becoming more than a little anxious?

On the atevi side of the strait, an atevi who sincerely believed there were secret human spaceships lurking on the great moon was very likely to be outspoken, to be known throughout the structure of his
man 'chi
as holding those opinions, and
not
be appointed to office.

But on Mosphiera nobody had ever asked, when a candidate stood for public office, or stood for appointment, whether that candidate was a separatist. A State Department appointee could believe that atevi were stealing human children to make sausages, for God's sake, and none of that belief could turn up in the legislative review of fitness for office, because it wasn't a belief polite people expressed in public.

From totally insignificant, in the one
hour
of that ship's arrival, the separatists had come within reach of the kind of power that could keep them, they were sure, safe.

Because up there any human could deal with the Pilots' Guild for political power, for management authority over the station, while hiring the pro-spacers and their own malcontents to go risk their rears doing the real work.

The Pilots' Guild didn't know the situation on the planet, even if it had the best intentions in the world: it had to trust what it was told, and by all the history he knew the Pilots' Guild didn't care that damn much what they dealt with so long as it agreed with their agenda. The number of times the Guild had switched sides back in the debate over the Landing — even double-crossing the station management, then to patch things with the station, double-crossing the Landing faction — damned well
ensured
that the station population would be so bitterly divided and angry at each other that negotiation became impossible:
that
was the state of affairs he'd learned from his professors' unpublished notes. The station's demise had been virtually certain once the ship left, because station management was, in the view of the workers, compromised, untrustable, and lying through their teem.

Screwed over, screwed up, and now the great holy Ship was back, offering paradise in space and the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who'd come up there, risk their necks in the service of the all-important ship.

The same damned business all over again.

The same damned lot that had — perhaps not shoved Gaylord Hanks' daughter over here —

But certainly bestirred itself to keep her here. Maybe — they were not even aware as yet the degree of trouble she was stirring up, but just pushing their candidate in place, and pushing. A blow-up in atevi relations might be
exactly
what would put a finish to Bren Cameron's liberal dealings, could render the atevi interface unworkable and, in the minds of the opposition, put everything in
their
hands at a time when there was power to be had.