So, out of concern for his safety, she avoided making contact with him. Proper mistresses came when called — they didn’t make demands. She had no choice. Maybe he could make some kind of sense of this mess, but that was the kicker, wasn’t it? For him to sort out the mess, he’d have to see the data. That wasn’t a security problem; Granpa would be fine with it. The problem was there was no way she could send that much information through a covert pipeline without enormous risk of revealing the pipeline. There was also the sticky bit of using her organization or his. The information either crossed to his organization on this end of the pipeline by her paying to send it up — which wouldn’t be cheap — or it crossed to his organization on the far end of the pipeline, with someone Bane Sidhe passing him a data cube. Either way was bad.
She settled for sending him a brief summary of the problem under cover of love letters. It had to be brief. The still holo of her, done pin-up style, only had just so much room for planting an encrypted message, once you accounted for redundancy. Her encryption task was much more complicated than it seemed. The first thing her Tong contact would do upon her buying the postage was compress it and encrypt the compressed file. This would cause a great deal of data loss, which wouldn’t matter a whit if the file were the simple cheesecake holo it pretended to be. Software on the other end would infer the missing data and fill in the gaps. Visually, it would be impossible to tell the difference.
Unfortunately, that data loss would irretrievably garble a message that could otherwise fit quite securely and unnoticeably within a garden-variety still holo. The trick was to include an encrypted message in the holo that had sufficient redundancy to survive the damage in the mail, but was still obscure enough to avoid detection. It cut down the amount of data she could send quite a bit. The more information, the more garbled or the less secure, take your pick. She picked a very short message.
Chapter Six
The stateroom was cramped, the walls an odd shade of brown that suggested overtones of some hue beyond the ken of human eyes. The bunk was too low for human comfort, soft where it should be firm, and vice versa. The fold-out chair and desk were too high, and clearly not configured for human bodies.
Schooled in xenology as he was, Alan Clayton recognized the “bunk” as a Himmit fitness station, pushed into the room and hastily modified for a human’s basic need for sleep. The fold-out “desk” and “chair” were, together, one of the actual rest areas of the room. The closest description was a Himmit recliner. He could just barely see the outline on the wall where their version of a holoprojector had been removed from the room.
The captain had not vacated his own quarters to house them. That would be absurd. Instead, the room revealed the interesting — and new — information that there might, occasionally, be more than one Himmit on board this vessel. That intelligence catch alone put this trip in the “win” column.
He expected Michael O’Neal, Sr., to arrive momentarily. Being short and squat, like his more famous son, the O’Neal could be almost comfortable in a room intended for Indowy; but only because it was built for four of them.
His own room was tall enough for an average human man to stand in because Himmit liked to climb. It actually had a high ceiling, which told him it was designed to be triply versatile in case the ship had to carry a Darhel. He wasn’t getting preferential treatment over the O’Neal. Far from it. The Himmit had simply looked at the relative sizes of their two passengers and stowed them in the most convenient places.
The high ceiling was useful in another respect. It had a Himmit on it. Rather, it had the Himmit who was their captain. Although some token value had changed hands, the real “fare” for their voyage was that the Himmit thought the instruction of the O’Neal in Galactic protocol would make a good story. It was probably right.
Clayton politely pretended not to notice it, and it politely pretended not to notice his pretense. Wasn’t Galactic diplomacy fun?
“The O’Neal is at the door, Mr. Clayton,” the soft voice of his buckley chimed.
“Thanks, Liz. Let him in,” he said.
“You realize we’re trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, don’t you? Hate to talk that way about myself, but situationally, it applies,” Papa said.
“If we’re trading aphorisms, ‘needs must when the devil drives.’ ” Clayton pitched back. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing towards the bed, which was by far the more comfortable spot.
“Okay, shoot. How to be a diplomat one-oh-one.” Papa scratched his nose and shifted until he found a comfortable spot on the bed. Somebody had screwed up his luggage, loading only half the tobacco, so he was rationing himself.
“We’re not even to that point,” Alan said. “Let’s start with the theory of communication.”
“Okay,” Papa said in a pained voice.
“I just used words and intonation to move a thought from my head to yours,” Alan said, his face deadpan. “But what you received was not what I sent.”
“I don’t get what you mean,” Papa said, frowning.
“All I said was ‘Let’s start with the theory of communication.’ But that was not my full thought. Part of my thought, that was not included but could be surmised from that short sentence was this: ‘Let us discuss the theory of communication because it is very important to the basis of diplomacy. Also because I find it fascinating. And because I’m trying to show you that whereas you are a very good killer, I am a very expert, I will not say good but certainly expert, diplomat, negotiator and interlocutor. I am, further, aware that your background, habits and thoughts lead you to hate this particular field of research and methods of interaction. Your beliefs are that negotiation is almost invariably a worthless endeavor. I am going to have to overcome tremendous resistance. One way to do that is to get the really bad parts right up front when you might still, vaguely, be paying attention.’ That is, in part, the thought I was trying to convey to your brain.”
“Damn,” Papa said. “Glad you just kept it to a sentence.”
“The thought you received, as evidenced by your response and your body language was: This is nothing but a pointless exercise in pain.”
“Yeah,” Papa said with a chuckle. “Pretty much.”
“Which means we have, as the saying go, a failure to communicate,” Alan said.
“There was this movie—” Papa began.
“I have seen it,” Alan replied. “And I wish you to recall the very ending. Because, and I do not exaggerate, that is the ending for Clan O’Neal and the Earthly Bane Sidhe if you have a failure to communicate in these negotiations. Insurgencies cannot survive without external support. Prior to reconnection to the Galactic Bane Sidhe, the Earthly Bane Sidhe were not an insurgency but a very small group of minor officials who were, in many cases over the centuries, quite quite mad. They could do little or nothing to affect their world. Furthermore, the Tchpth can eliminate the Bane Sidhe without really trying. They do not have to kill us; there are plenty of humans who will take the pay to do so. They can permanently remove support. Provide information to the authorities on all of our actions. Send assassins whom they will decry but who nonetheless will eliminate the Bane Sidhe root and every branch. Eliminate not just the thought, not just the meme, but the very gene of resistance to the Darhel from the gene pool.”