The whole literature of mankind? The missing technical files? The accumulated station records? Design for a starship? Press M for menu?
“I don’t suppose Jase Graham would be available at this hour. He’d be very helpful with this.”
A hesitation. “ Jase Graham isn’t available right now, sir.”
Continuing debrief, several days of it. He was disheartened about that.
But in Ramirez’s place, he’d certainly do the same… wouldn’t allow Jase contact with people whose veracity he was testing. He only hoped Jase was getting sleep and meals in the process. It would have been a perfect cap to the day if he could sit down to a supper with Jase.
But, God, the archives!
“Message for him,” he told Cl. “Same message: say I called; tell him call me; I’d like to see him. No emergency, rather friendly reasons. A little help with this panel.”
“Yes, sir. I can contact the captain, sir, if you need a technician.”
Emphatically not, not with Banichi’s rig across the hall.
“I think I can solve it myself, Cl, thank you.” It wasn’t an unknown principle. M for menu was a good start. “Thank you very much.”
He punched out on the contact, went across the hall to the security post where Banichi and Jago were conversing with
Tano and Algini. “The missing archive. E10, the M key…” His security knew the Mospheiran alphabet, read it with some fluency by now. “Have a look at it, such as you have time to do.”
“Yes,” Tano said with a wondering look. “Yes, nadi.”
He wanted to see it for himself; but he couldn’t distract himself with it, couldn’t slide aside from present business in a meander through human archives, if that was the treasure he had won. He had done what he could. Toby by now must have gotten through; Jase couldn’t reach him. Mercheson if she had authority and access to communications might call him, but he rather thought she was engaged in exactly the same business as Jase: talking to her captains.
The cold by now had gotten to his muscles, a thorough chill as he walked out, back across to his apartment. His teeth were all but chattering as he passed Narani, told him he’d shower before supper.
Kandana and Bindanda showed up before he could do more than shed the shirt. They gathered up boots and clothing, offered a bathrobe to lie about his shoulders for the four-pace walk to the shower… proprieties, proprieties.
He turned sideways to enter, shedding the robe, closed the cabinet door, activated the jets at the temperature he’d last set, and shivered convulsively as cold water in the pipes came out first.
He’d been utterly unprepared except by the life he’d lived.
He’d guessed. He’d estimated. Solo, he’d pulled up his best recollections and his ideas to cover one damned serious, selfish mistake on the plane to the mainland, when he’d antagonized Kroger.
He’d made another mistake over the last several months, not foreseeing what Tabini was up to, not anticipating how Tabini would react when Jase did go up.
And he’d just now promised two parties an elaborate, jury-rigged structure of hopes, all with a manic focus, memorizing details, freezing concepts in his mind, trying to patch his mistakes with the authority he’d been handed…
He’d assumed more and more and more details could be true… and now the whole structure of his plans evaporated, flew apart, deserted him so that for an instant he didn’t know what he’d done or proposed or agreed to, whether it was well-thought or whether Tabini had a lunatic dealing his foreign policy. Millions of lives and two species’ futures were at stake, and for the duration of his arguments with both Ramirez andKroger, God help the world, he’d enjoyedthe dealing. He’d proceeded on an adrenaline rush the same as a downhill race, just coping with what came up moment by moment.
He began to shake all over, suddenly doubted everything he knew, everything he’d done. He desperately wanted Jase with him to consult, he desperately wanted to talk to Tabini at this juncture. Most of all he wanted to know what he’d done and what he’d agreed to, because he couldn’t for a second remember a damned thing of how it fit with reality.
He slipped down to the bottom of the shower, tucked up while the water finished its cycle. Long after the hiss of the jets had cut off and long after he’d informed his body, he wasn’t truly cold, intermittent tremors rolled through his limbs like waves of the earthly sea.
Who am I to decide?
Most of all, what have I become, to likethis? To gamble with the whole world’s future?
Tabini. Tabini. Tabini, who’s the only power fitto rule the world.
His own species calls him ruthless.
What do they call me?
I can’t let anyside dominate the other, for its own sake; but, God, God, God! where in hellhave I appointed myself to impose conditions on the world, the ship, the station?
“Bren-ji?” he heard Jago say, through the door, and, sitting there, trying to control the shivers, he wondered how long his servants and his staff had fretted before one of them appointed herself to say something.
But the next step was his staff dismantling the door; and that would never do, never in the world do, at all.
Who was he to do what he’d done? He was the man in the middle, that was who he was, the one officer two nations had appointed to stand between them. He was appointed to do exactly what he’d done. He’d reacted strongly when Kroger, who didn’t know what she was doing, had challenged him in his own territory, and he’d jerked her about in hopes of her realizing there were dangers. He hoped it had done some good.
More, Ramirez had leaped to agree with him… and it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been talking for three years, as if they didn’t know what, essentially, they faced in the way of costs and necessities. Jase knew, he knew, Ramirez knew, and Shawn Tyers and the President of Mospheira knew that the station had to operate and the present situation had to keep some sort of balance, or the world went to hell and took Phoenixand two or three species with it, granted these far-space aliens had a future at stake, too.
He’d spoken for the balance.
He’d stolen some of what the Mospheirans wanted, control over the station. He’d given the Mospheirans what Tabini could have gotten for himself but which would have proved a poison pilclass="underline" control over businesson the station, as the humans in question expected to exchange goods and services. They’d sell hot dogs in any season, and atevi would shudder and look the other way as they’d learned to do, contenting themselves with ship building and station building.
He’d committed the atevi economy to another long push, but the social structure hadn’t taken damage from the last one, in building the shuttles… the provinces had thrived, in fact. The complaint of certain associations had been not enough public projects to go around.
The station and the ship was the answerto what followed the explosion of the economy in the shuttle project. In a far lower-consumption society than Mospheira's, what did he dobesides go to neon light and fast food like Mospheira’s north shore, in order to keep the atevi economy moving at its breakneck, profitable pace?
Easy. He built a starship.
He gaveit to the Pilots’ Guild, true; but if you took any vehicle and compressed it to a cube… you had a lot of scrap worth so much the kilo. It was the labor and the shaping that had value; most of all, it was the learning that had value. They paid the raw materials and the labor and gained the knowledge and the technical skill with no R&D, sure designs, incremental learning of new theory…