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 wasindeed 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'vegot 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 inbusiness 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 concernedfor everyone's rights.
" We can restore what we had. We canbuild, 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 thisgeneration 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. Thatwas 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.