Yes, the food is different here. No, those people over there are not criminals. They are just poor. In this [village, town, city, country, planet] those are not the same thing. Ad nauseum. A lot of the explaining was more prosaic, having to do with enabling a warehouse operations chief to talk to an ITA implementation team, but it all boiled down to the same thing: amazing but true, other people do not live in your rut! They live in a different rut!
The explanation went that this made them actually different. But in Asach’s mind, the opposite was the case: they were all exactly—exactly—the same. Hide-bound, parochial, inexperienced, defensive, and, generally speaking, hostile, although they papered that over with varying degrees of hubris. In need of fixing.
It was late evening. The soft air and crickets recalled so many other evenings, filled with crickets, or peepers, or cicadas, or all three. A lot had changed in Makassar over thirty-five years. A lot more might have changed—and not for the better—if the ITA hadn’t originally dumped the Prince Samual’s World exiles into the most god-awful, pestilential armpit of the continent. Thankfully, MacKinnie’s successors were still fully occupied with re-creating Church, State, and the Silk Road among the winter-frozen peasantry scattered from Jikar to Batav. Which had the added benefit of occupying the jihadis allied against them, and leaving the warm, gracious, civilized realms of the Bungar delta to the (thankfully largely absentee) colonials and Tambar traders. The local wealth generated by all the movement of exotic woods, and spices, and coffee made life here quite comfortable indeed. And yet.
Asach underlined: fixing, and reassessed. So far, Pie, Coffee, People, Different, Fixing. Asach decided, personally, to head into the kitchen, fix some pie and coffee, and give up on this book thing. It just seemed safer that way. Asach was, generally speaking, profoundly tired of being different. It was probably a fair trade for the heaven-sent experience of knowing fifty-seven different ways to explain coffee, but right about now a little rut would be nice. Just a different rut. Somebody else’s rut. A rut that didn’t require so much fixing.
The light faded. Wind played through the makassar trees. Asach sat on the roof, wolfing down pie and sucking down aromatic draughts of coffee. Watched curiously as a hefty shape made its way down the lane, raised a fist, and pounded on the door below.
It took Asach half an hour to throw essentials into a hand grip, lock up, pass the keys to a neighbor, and hitch a rickshaw into the authorized ITA landing zone in Ujung Pandang. After that, an interminable wait for a pinisi up to the space hub, where Horvath’s Goon was, inexplicably, waiting, accompanied by the Librarian.
The Librarian was understandable. Contrary to know-it-all opinion, librarians actually thought long and deep over, were meticulously trained in, and knew a lot about information archives. That included not just what to stuff into them, but how to establish and maintain integrated resources, data maintenance and recovery, remote access, redundant storage, cataloguing, search and retrieval, unpowered access, and all the other arcana that went along with ensuring that locals got, and kept, and kept up with, what they needed. Or what the Empire thought they needed. Or both.
Horvath’s Goon was another matter. HG, as he had already been mentally christened by Asach, was a graying, impatient, imperious version of Horvath, and like Horvath utterly without any social grace known in any civilized society. Alternately whining and blustering, HG’s express purpose seemed to be—well, Asach was not sure what HG’s purpose might be. Presumably to Represent The Academic Might And Gravitas Of The Empire, for whatever that might count to the failing stock farmers of New Utah. Why that required travel halfway across the galaxy and back, just to escort Asach to a meeting, was even less clear.
Of course, HG had a real name, a title, a doctorate, and a reputation, but Asach didn’t much care. It was the sort of name and title that came with birth; the sort of doctorate that came from privilege (via a grandfather clause at a prestigious university), and the sort of reputation that came from snapping up and claiming as his own the works and limelight of a parade of graduate students and lesser-known scholars who had actually done most of the slog, made most of the insights, and slaved over most of the write-up and lecture prep. HG just showed up to make the pitch and collect the accolades, not to mention the honoraria.
Apparently, for this stint The Goon had claimed “lifelong” experience in the “remote regions” of “the New Caledonia and Purchase systems,” and “intimate acquaintance” with those societies, their religious practices, and the doctrines of the Mormon True Church. In fact, Asach knew, two decades earlier as a graduate student HG had spent a smattering of summer weeks over the course of several years out in the boonies, unsuccessfully prospecting with a rock zapper and chemical test kit. While playing with his chemistry set he’d probably met about a dozen people total, including his paid field crew and the drivers who hauled him out to the middle of nowhere. He did not speak one relevant language aside from Anglic, was appallingly inept at negotiating through interpreters, and wouldn’t recognize a religious zealot if it smacked him over the head with The Book. But, like most suburbanites, he fancied his little camping trips as real adventures, a fiction that he probably actually believed. His audiences certainly did.
In any case, there he sat, and Asach would have to endure him throughout the long slog, via Sparta, to the Commission’s prep meetings on New Scotland, and thence until arrival at Saint George on New Utah. Thankfully, thereafter, true to form, The Goon would reside in the safety of the TCM Security Zone, while Asach flew on to Bonneville, and from there to—to where?
To wherever necessary to answer the Imperial Questions. There were eight. They were The Questions that determined the fates of nations:
1. Does New Utah possess a planetary government?
2. If yes, is that government controlled by the True Church theocracy?
3. Is the True Church on New Utah politically subordinate to the True Church on Maxroy’s Purchase?
4. Is New Utah disposed to willing accession to the Empire of Man?
5. If yes, under what terms?
6. If yes, can sufficiently profitable opportunities be identified to justify the costs of Imperial accession?
7. If yes, in what accession class?
8. If no, does New Utah pose immanent, credible threat to the Empire or any of its members?
It was The Goon’s job to answer these from within the cloisters of the TC safe zone on the outskirts of Saint George. It was the Librarian’s job to establish a “knowledge mission” to “rebuild capacity” for “education in the rule of law” at the largely gutted university. And it was Asach’s job to go anywhere and everywhere else, then report back directly, and discretely, to the Commission. But only Asach knew of those latter instructions. They were unknown to The Goon and The Librarian. As far as they were concerned, Asach was “coordinating with locals” to “set up offices” for a trade mission in Bonneville.
Sparta
Of all things, Peet's coffee at JCF Interstellar! A whiff of Makassar in a sea of Anglos. Horvath’s Designated Minion insisted on handling every cent, clearly thought Asach’s quest for fair trade dark roast an eccentric extravagance, yet also insisted on paying for it. Conversely, the extravagance of forced meal consumption was nothing short of amazing. Dinner outbound at the JCF sector hub, dinner on the jumper, then lunch on arrival at Sparta Imperial Spaceport, then dinner on the planetside shuttle (again). Total actual elapsed time between meals: about 3 hours.
Asach could not keep up, and enduring dour glares skipped the SIS lunch in favor of leftovers saved from a boxed breakfast from the inbound shuttle. Clearly, there was a minefield of food control issues there. They hadn’t really had any business on Sparta itself, and no-one felt the need to play tourist, but they had a few hours to kill and decided to freshen up and catch some good sleep under gravity before making the Trans-Coal Sack trek. So, down they went, and checked in for a couple of hours at the SIS Crown and Thistle. It was clean, pleasant, and close to the gates.