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  There were nods at that, as the Senators had evidently spent some time going through Shion’s rationale for her belief that the figure was a first contact approach and that it would most probably turn out to be Chethari.

  Unknown to the vast majority of League citizens, the League had in fact been in contact with another alien race – the Solarans – even before they’d discovered Quarus. For once, the conspiracy theorists were right – there really was an alien race secretly visiting League worlds, and they had been so for more than a century. The conspiracy theorists had even spotted what they did when they visited, too, as museums and galleries around the planet would be shut briefly for ‘maintenance’ or on some other excuse which, if you put them together, looked remarkably like the itinerary for visitors attending those venues covertly.

  More recently, too, the League had made contact with another of the ancient species beyond the Firewall which contained human space. The Fourth, in fact, had succeeded in making first contact with the strange, mercurial Gider. It was the Gider who’d mentioned the Chethari, a species referred to as a third party who assisted the Solarans and Gider to communicate. The need for that was apparent; the Solarans were so very slow and timid that even speaking too quickly or loudly could see them withdraw from a meeting in confusion or alarm. Their pronouncements were obscure, too, frequently shading into cryptic, and even now it was doubtful how much communication was really being understood, either way.

  The Gider, on the other hand, were so hyper-fast as a species that they had to slow themselves right down to their limits even to make themselves understood to humans. And they were loud, even brash, inclined to joke in a way which the solemn Solarans could not relate to at all. So the Chethari, friends to both, assisted as intermediaries. But that was all that was known about them, the Gider refusing to say any more on the grounds that the Chethari had not given permission for any information about them to be passed to the humans.

  Shion’s theory was that the Chethari might be stepping forward at this point to offer similar assistance between the humans and the Solarans. Communication had very definitely broken down there, after all, after a disastrous attempt to involve them in another Fourth’s mission. The Solarans had withdrawn en masse, in fact, saying no more than Grief, Fear, Pain as they went. Nobody knew when, or if, they might return. The Gider were unhelpful on that point, laughing it off as merely the Solarans ‘off on one of their dirge singing jags’. So it was possible that the Chethari might feel that their services might be helpful in that direction, too. And possible, even, that they might have been advised by the Gider to make their first approach to Alex personally, rather than a more conventional diplomatic greeting. The Gider, after all, were inclined to tell the diplomats who’d taken over from the Fourth that they were nowhere near as good at this as Alex, and to keep asking if they could have Alex and the Fourth back, so much cleverer and more fun than the slow-bums on the Embassy ship.

  This, as Alex was acutely aware, was a very sensitive matter, with the chief of the Diplomatic Corps sitting on his right.

  ‘It was also,’ Alex admitted, ‘extremely frustrating. There was so much I wanted to say, to ask, and I never even got to greet them properly before they were gone. So I wasn’t calm at all, really – frankly, when they vanished I wanted to howl.’ he paused as there was some chuckling at that. ‘But I am,’ Alex said, completely deadpan, ‘accustomed to maintaining a calm exterior.’

  More laughter at that, and Terese Machet grinned at him with a look of twinkling mischief. Before she could speak, though, another of the Senators leapt in with a question they’d evidently been burning to ask.

  ‘And the decision to adopt gender neutral reference – was that on diplomatic or political grounds?’

  Senator D was from Kenso, a colony far out in the outer worlds boondocks. One of Kenso’s unique attributes as a colony was its dedication to gender neutrality, with a strongly cultivated, androgynous look. Senator D’s physiology was unmistakeably female, but face, hairstyle and voice might have been of either gender.

  ‘Neither, Senator,’ said Alex, knowing better than to address the Kenso representative as either ma’am, or sir. ‘We adopted that policy on Lt Shionolethe’s suggestion, made in her capacity as linguist. When we were discussing Trilopharus in the post-incident debriefing, I referred to them as ‘him’, which Lt Shionolethe observed was linguistically unjustified given that my account specified that I was unable to specify the gender of the figure from appearance. Commander Burroughs suggested that since names ending in ‘us’ are generally male in lareen-descended languages, it was reasonable to assume a male gender. Lt Shionolethe observed that we had no basis on which we could assume anything about the language of the Chethari, since Trilopharus had spoken Standard throughout. And she was, of course, correct, it was a valid linguistic point. So I made the decision that we would adopt a gender-neutral reference until such time as we had more information.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Terese stepped in quickly as Senator D was obviously keen to continue the questioning along those lines, at length, and some of the others were showing signs of unrest. ‘That has,’ she observed, with a significant look at Senator D, ‘already been established from your report. And you have stated, also,’ a subtle glance at Senator Twitchell, ‘your firm belief that this was a genuine first contact encounter.’

  ‘I believe so, ma’am, yes.’ Alex said. ‘We gave full consideration to all other possibilities, of course, including the possibility that it is an extraordinarily high tech hoax being perpetrated by people who have access past our security systems, but on balance of probabilities, I am as sure as I can be that the encounter was genuine.’

  Senator Twitchell made a muttering noise under his breath, but raised no further objection. He could hardly come right out with it and accuse Alex himself of making the whole thing up. For one thing, Alex had already passed medical tests ensuring that he hadn’t been under any influence at the time of the encounters, and had given his evidence under veracity-testing conditions, too. There was even evidence of a kind on the footage they were looking at. Close examination would show that Alex winced and squinted at the first appearance of the figure, with his pupils contracting rapidly just as they would have if exposed to such a blinding light as he described. And for another thing, nobody – not even Senator Twitchell himself – had been able to come up with even the slightest plausible theory as to what von Strada himself would gain from such a hoax.

  ‘We – the Senate – are in agreement with that,’ said Terese, with a firm tone and ignoring the one or two glances which indicated that the vote had not been unanimous. ‘Though we will not be able to come to a decision on the Invitation,’ Terese said, with an audible capital I, ‘for some time – I’m sure you can appreciate the need for due consideration, Your Excellency.’

  As usual when he was addressed by his Ambassadorial rank, Alex felt a lurking urge to glance over his shoulder to find out who they were talking to, having to remind himself that it was him, His Excellency Fleet Captain Alexis Sean von Strada, Presidential Envoy and League Ambassador to Quarus.

  ‘Yes, of course, ma’am.’ Alex acknowledged, and felt that he detected just a little relief in the room that he was being so reasonable about that. He understood very well that with everything else they had going on at the moment, the Senate would need to take some time to consider. At the least, they would want to send out questions to the Gider to confirm that the approach had been genuine, to check the coordinates given and to ask whether it was Alex von Strada himself the Chethari were asking for, or whether it was a general invitation to send an Ambassador. It would be months, Alex knew, before they made a decision. And there was no guarantee even if they did decide to send an embassy to those coordinates, that it would be Alex and the Fourth tasked to that. There was a feeling in the Senate, after all, even amongst his supporters, that as good as Alex was, they should not become overly-dependent upon any one ambassador in this surge of first
-contacts the League was experiencing.

  ‘And in the meantime, the mission must be brought to an appropriate conclusion with celebrations on Chartsey,’ Terese said. ‘I know that you and your ship’s company are overdue leave, but there has to be a public celebration of such an achievement – quite apart from the fact that you and your people deserve all the glory Chartsey can provide, it is imperative to satisfy people’s expectations. Frankly, if we allowed you to just slide off quietly on leave, there would be uproar.’

  Alex understood that, too, and inclined his head, resigned to the inevitable.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘There will,’ said Terese, ‘be a tickertape parade through Londane…and a month of celebration events.’

  Alex did not drop his head into his hands and groan. He didn’t even flinch.

  ‘Ma’am.’ His tone was cold; the only indicator of his dismay. But there was worse to come.

  ‘The Diplomatic Corps,’ Terese said, ‘has suggested a sound-byte – something we want you to use in all your big-event appearances. They have come up with something which encapsulates the spirit of celebration, and of the courage it has taken for us as a people to move into an era of publicly disclosed exodiplomacy. So we want you to say, ‘Saluté Valori’.’ She paused for a moment and informed him, ‘It means ‘I salute the brave.’’

  ‘I know what it means.’ Alex’s voice and face were positively glacial, now, dismay kicked up several gears into indignation. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Ah – yes, you were reading classics on the crossing, weren’t you?’ Terese was enjoying herself, Alex could see she was, for all that air of mild, professional detachment. Terese was winding him up.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Alex admitted. He had set a good example to his crew by taking along an academic course to be worked on in his spare time in the long Gulf crossing. His choice had been a short course in the language and culture of ancient Cartasay – the world now known as Chartsey.

  ‘So you will know,’ Terese observed, ‘that Saluté Valori was the traditional hail from an Imperatus addressing the Senate and People of Cartasay.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, tersely. ‘Ma’am. But since I am not, in any sense, an Imperatus, I fail to see how…’

  ‘Alex,’ said Senator Machet, and he just knew how much she’d been looking forward to this, how much she was enjoying it and how happily she’d grin about it, later. ‘Do as you are told.’

  Alex was stumped. In desperation, he looked to his left, where the First Lord of the Admiralty was sitting in splendour. But there was no help to be found there. Dix was grinning happily already. A sideways glance to the right found Ambassador Gerard, chief of the Diplomatic Corps, looking preternaturally innocent.

  Great, Alex thought. Just great.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, and there was just a hint of a sigh in his voice, ‘Saluté Valori it is.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ambassador Gerard, giving the knife a good deep shove and twist, ‘We’ll rehearse you thoroughly before we arrive.’

  Words rushed to Alex’s tongue, but were kept in check.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, and heard a distinct little chuckle from Dix’s direction.

  Even after the Committee session was over, though, that was not the end of discussion with the Senators. They had scheduled an informal but still private working lunch, too, at which several of them raised questions which had been ruled out as not important enough to make the Committee session agenda. One of these was Senator D, again concerned with a point of linguistic etiquette.

  ‘I presented a formal greeting,’ they told Alex, in a confidential murmur, ‘to Ambassador Silver, on behalf of Kenso. Engraved on a plaque, you know. And they sent it back, rejected it – apparently some mistake in the grammar.’ They looked mystified, and Alex could see anxiety, too, even distress. ‘Could it be,’ the Kenson Senator asked, ‘That they object to gender-neutral usage?’

  ‘No, it won’t have been that, Senator,’ Alex said, and opened a screen on his wrist-com, ‘If I may…?’

  The Senator pulled up and transferred a copy of the offending plaque to his screen, admitting as they did so that the Embassy had said there was an error in capitalisation.

  ‘I know that quarian is small-q for ordinary usage,’ they said, ‘But surely, for formal documents…?’

  Alex was looking through the pomp-and-circumstance address, which would be yet another incomprehensible human absurdity to the quarians, and was obliged to contain another sigh as he realised the Senator and their staff had completely ignored Diplomatic Corps guidance on this highly sensitive protocol.

  ‘It is important,’ Alex said, and explained, ‘Quarians do not use capital letters themselves, and it was some time before they realised the significance of how we use them. The key sticking point, here, is that they saw documents in which the word human was written with a small h but Quarian with a capital Q. And that is a significant point. The League gets a capital letter, human does not. But when we’re talking about other species we always give them a capital letter.’

  ‘As a matter of respect, certainly,’ said Senator D.

  ‘Indeed,’ Alex said. ‘But the quarians did not and do not see it that way. All they have ever asked for from the first day of contact was that we meet them on equal terms; humans, quarians, either we both get a capital or neither of us do. It is something they see as symbolic of our really very insulting refusal to allow them to visit our worlds other than in disguise, in secret, or even make their existence known to our people. It is as important a linguistic point to them as the use of gender-neutral terminology is on Kenso, a matter of principle. So no, they won’t accept a document which has human with a small h and Quarian with a capital. Protocol is, in fact, that Quarus gets a capital but quarian does not. There are other arguments, obviously, in that we do use capitals for the populations of specific worlds, as with Kenson, but that is the agreed protocol, established at their request.’

  Senator D was mortified, betraying the very human trait of looking for someone to blame.

  ‘My staff should have known that,’ they declared, with a heads will roll tone.

  Alex thought, but did not say, that the Senator should have known it themselves. The Diplomatic Corps provided very thorough advisories, after all.

  ‘No offence will have been taken,’ Alex assured them, and was grateful to Terese, then, for coming to the rescue, as he seemed in some danger of being lectured at length on how serious a matter this was and given a long list of everyone who was to be held responsible.

  ‘The whole issue of names,’ she said, ‘can be so tricky, and we do so often get it wrong… the Solarans, for instance. We only call them the Solarans because we misunderstood when they told us they were Solarus Perth. What they meant to say was that they were from the star called Perth, but communication was so tentative and partial, it was years before we discovered that their actual name is Perithin. But they’re happy to be called Solarans, still. And the Gider – turns out they have at least eighty seven names for themselves which they use according to context we can’t even begin to get our heads around, but they’re happy enough for us to call them ‘Gider’.’

  ‘And we, now,’ Ambassador Gerard observed, joining the conversation, ‘are known to Samart as ‘The Revellin’.’ He gave Alex a fixed look, with that. ‘The Backward People.’

  Alex flicked him a small but very mischievous grin.

  ‘You’re never going to let that one go, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said the Ambassador, mock-stern but with an answering grin. ‘I am not! The entire relationship can be affected by the terms we agree are acceptable in first contact. And you, seriously, allowed them to name us the Backward People!’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to have done any harm,’ said Terese, and told Alex, ‘Things are going very well there. We’re expecting a group in the next few months, on exchange for a year to work with us on Strategy and Tactics.’

  ‘Excellent,’
Alex said, knowing what an important step that was in the developing relationship with Samart, the most distant world with which the League had any contact. It was even further away from Chartsey than Quarus, and far more difficult to reach, too. To get to Quarus you only had to navigate across the huge dead space of the Gulf between the League’s spiral arm of the galaxy and theirs. To get to Samart, you had to go through, or somehow get around, the rather bigger and infinitely more dangerous expanse of the Marfikian Empire.

  Alex would have liked very much to hear more about how things were going at Samart – he, after all, had led the mission which had made first contact there – but other people were already butting in, the lunch was over before they’d asked half the questions they wanted to, and from then on Alex hardly had time to keep track of what was happening on that world, then and there.

  His days were a whirl; nothing like a routine. He might start out every morning with a schedule of meetings and media calls but he rarely went as much as half an hour without some kind of interruption, and never a day without plans being thrown in the air.

  One such plan-busting interruption came on day five, when Andrei Delaney decided he’d been patient enough and sent his son Davie to get him.

  Alex was in a meeting with the Ambassador to Serenity at the time, but was immediately waved away with an assurance that His Excellency perfectly understood.

  Alex understood, too. The Ambassador wanted him out of his office because he knew very well that if Andrei Delaney didn’t get what he wanted he was liable to arrive in person. And having a visit from Andrei Delaney was a phenomenon. It would start with the first wave of his people – security, locking down the venue, hygienists to decontaminate it, lawyers issuing protection of privacy notices, catering staff taking over the facilities, personal valets either taking over or creating a private ‘Comfort and Refresh’ station for the great man, with a sterilised lavatory and a mobile wardrobe, medics taking over or setting up a first-response facility and advanced-party aides there to coordinate it all and make sure everyone knew how to behave. Do not attempt to touch Mr Delaney.