Precursor (41 page)

Kaplan brought the Mospheirans, at the appointed hour… lacking only Shugart, a fact Bren noted as Narani opened the door and admitted them to what was, de facto, the reception hall and their central corridor at once.

Shugart, clearly, was the home guard, the defense against tampering in their absence. Kroger continued to be cautious… as they were cautious. Algini had shut the door to their own guard post and had no intention of opening it at any point the guests might be in a position to see into that room.

Just for symmetry, and not to make too much of an issue of one closed door, Bren had likewise shut the door to his own room, leaving only the dining room and the servants’ quarters doors open, across from one another at the end of the hall.

Kroger, Lund, and Feldman, the latter of whom had no status with the other two, clearly, and who stood somewhat to the rear as the hand-shaking and greeting proceeded.

So did Kaplan, a walking listening post who had to be shut out or otherwise occupied.

And who, like his own security, would have no supper with the rest.

When in Rome, a very old saying went. And this whole station was Rome, and the customs uncertain.

“Kaplan. Would you like something to eat?”

“Duty, sir.”

“Sure?”

Kaplan, behind all the gear, inhaled deeply. The galley fragrances permeated the corridor. The visible eye was wide, nervous, the mouth… a little less resolute.

“Tano, would you see Kaplan-nadi has food?” He changed languages. “Ms. Kroger, Kaplan’s going to have supper with Tano, here. Tano-ji:” Another language switch. “I think we have some of those fruit sweets, don’t we, the ones Jase is fond of? Kaplan might find those a novel taste. Have we enough to spare, nadi?”

“One believes so,” Tano said.

“Ben might have supper with them, perhaps.” Kroger leaped on a chance to shed the translator, who looked somewhat disappointed, doubtless at missing the formal meal.

But if Kroger wanted to talk business at supper, that was the Mospheiran habit: and they might supply Ben quite handily. “Do,” he said. “Ginny. Tom. Come along. Supper’s delicate, doesn’t like waiting.”

“I trust they’ve watched the poisons,” Kroger said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Bren said. “We’ll send along a dinner for Shugart, too. We’ll have one made up.”

“You’re very well supplied,” Lund observed.

“Always,” Bren said. “It’s just the habit. One I like very well.” He escorted his guests into the room, translated the amenities to Narani and the others of his staff, seated himself and them. Banichi and Jago absented themselves, on prior protocols… not that they necessarily took for granted the lordly rank of the Mospheiran delegation, but out of convenience. Kandana deftly whisked away extra settings for Feldman and Shugart, changed bouquets to a felicitous combination for three, and added a dish of candy so deftly the Mospheirans hardly missed a word in the running chatter.

“Have you heard from the captains?”

“Nothing beyond the appointment I have tomorrow,” Bren answered. “With how many at once wasn’t clear. Definitely with Sabin.”

“Mmn,” Kroger said. “And what do you propose to discuss?”

“Anything Sabin wishes to discuss: reconstruction of the station, agreements for the building they want done. I utterly reserve the discussion of business interests on the station for you and your mission.”

Kroger by no means looked unhappy at that.

“Have
you
had any message from them?” Bren asked.

“From Ogun, a request to meet, on what business isn’t clear.”

“Interesting. Divide and conquer? I think we should communicate what we learn and agree. More, I think we should
coordinate
what we agree, present a unified package to our governments.”

“No exterior work for our citizens,” Kroger said definitively.

“Franchises,” Lund said. “Coordinated to atevi opening sections up for settlement.”

“Both very agreeable,” Bren said, “and I leave the distribution of the franchises to wiser heads than mine. The exterior work… atevi will undertake with appropriate safeguards.”

Kroger heard him out, leaning back in her chair, eyes narrowed. A pause that lengthened into significance later, she said slowly, deliberately: “Let me tell you a theory, Mr. Cameron.”

“Bren.”

“Bren.” By now, Kroger seemed amused. “Let me give you a word. Robotics.”

“It’s an interesting word.”

“A very industry-heavy word. And the means by which you
might
operate—the only means by which Mospheirans
would
have worked outside, had I anything to say about it. Robots are the prevailing thought in Science about how to proceed with station repair, but we’ve lacked certain key information. Information that was in those archives, those
damnably
hard to obtain archives. I’ve found the records—two days solid, I’ve spent chasing the information down.”

He’d heard the theories, in passing, but had paid little attention. He was listening now.

She leaned forward. “We lost the robots at the first star, such as we had, which was only the handful necessary to gather materials to manufacture the numbers required to construct a station, is the official word. Instead, our ancestors found themselves forced to use that handful in an environment that chewed through metal as fast as it ate human flesh. We arrived here, found an only marginally less hostile environment, and rather than use the resources, we risked lives to obtain or to repair those robots, and to build new ones, we risked more lives.”

“Why?” Bren asked, not quite the first time he had heard the story, but never in this environment, never with the sanction of a senior representative from Science, never coupled with the understanding
why
robots hadn’t been a viable option. It was something ruled out long ago. Wise agencies had said robots failed where heroic human beings succeeded. It was part of the legend of the arrival at the star.

Kroger’s mouth tightened into a hard smile. “Offically? Officially, two things militated against that piece of common sense, first that we didn’t have the resources to build the robots to get the resources, second, that in the Guild’s management of things, getting the resources was an extreme priority.”

“And unofficially?”

“We suspected but could never prove that the Guild wanted to keep the colonist population busy: by maintaining the extreme emphasis on heroism, on risk, they might keep the colonists willing to relocate. The Guild, according to those records, had a two step plan for getting out of this system. The Guild, according to those records, wanted to relocate to Maudit.”

This was new, utterly. Maudit, the place Kroger was saying the Guild had wanted to go, was the next system-site out from the earth of the atevi, a not-quite-planet in a thick asteroid belt.

“The Guild
hoped
we’d go on to our target star once we’d just gathered resources here. This spot, in orbit around an inner planet, was safer—or so they believed—for interim measures, but the Guild
hoped
we’d simply establish a small base until we had population enough to go out to Maudit’s orbit and operate there, where off-planet metal is hazardously more common. The well-known fact is, we damned near lost the colony, as was. This is a dirty system, Mr. Cameron, in every sense. This planet meets meteor swarms. We didn’t have that tracked; we were strangers to the system; we had no wealth of advance data on that fine a scale. Where we came from, we knew these hazards, but not to this degree, and this degree was lethal to the equipment.”

Lethal. The possibilities he’d begun to imagine took a severe blow.

“Do those mining robots still exist?”

“Hard to say. The big robots, the extrusion molders, survived—the station itself is evidence of that. They seem still to exist—somewhere on this station, according to the records. But the smaller ones, the machines that could safely mine the asteroids…” She shrugged. “The Guild has only opened a fraction of the station up so far. From those records, I believe one or two might still be in storage in Section Five. Most were cannibalized for their metal: in those first days it was the
only
nearby metal we could lay hands on.”

“Can we make them work?”

“Mr. Cameron… Bren…
if
they still exist,
if
your atevi can make them run, they may well
function
, but they won’t
work. Hardening
. That’s another word I give to you. The lack of it on our initial equipment is why we suffered so much damage: we weren’t prepared for the environment we went into; we damnsure weren’t prepared for this one. The problem with making the miner-bots work, then, launched in a dirty system with minimal information, was getting the resources for spare parts. The problem with making them work
now
and with any degree of economic viability is making them less vulnerable. In that archive, we have specifications, however none of them are going to enable a robot
or
a manned craft to operate safely in this system, let alone efficiently. What I am
also
sure of is that we can do better. You want atevi to do it all, Mr. Cameron…
Bren
. But let me suggest that atevi manufacturing and design
linked
to Mospheiran resources for electronics, optics,
and robotics
, can save a good many lives.
We can do better
.”

He was a translator, a maker of dictionaries, who had had to learn far more about physics and engineering than he had ever planned to know in the process of performing his job. There were certain topics on which he was naive, and the specifics of items locked up within specialized departments of the Mospheiran establishment contained many such topics.

“I find this very interesting,” he said. He utterly forgave the tone. “Go on.”

“Joint effort, joint development.”

“An atevi-Mospheiran company,” Tom Lund said. “Manufacturing these things.”

“Still interesting” Bren said. He’d envisioned shielding, to protect atevi operators. But shielding meant mass, and it became another worm-swallowing-its-tail situation: fuel to run the miners that gathered the fuel. Removing all that mass from the equation—atevi, shielding and the lifesupport—meant fuel savings, but the same problem held true, as Kroger had pointed out, if robotic equipment ate up all its profits in repairs. If their proposed space industry ever entered diminishing returns, the situation could become again what drove colonists off the station and onto the planet, when
Phoenix
had drunk up all the fuel, all the resources, all that the colonists could do, because the captains of that long ago day had believed they could go off and find the earth of humans.

A lot of history had happened since then. The captains that had come back were dealing with a planetary population and an industry base that was capable. Capable not only of the manufacturing the Guild knew it wanted, but of analyzing what went wrong the first time and doing it right the second.

The solar system had proved capable of delivering nasty surprises, he’d known that from the incomplete records. He’d known, when he came to propose the atevi as miners, that those nasty surprises were a problem needing a solution.
How
extensive a problem, he’d had to wait for those archived records to determine.

Astronomical observation, the tracking of celestial objects, had been lacking for several centuries among the atevi: astronomy having become a science in disgrace since the astronomers had failed to predict the Foreign Star in their skies. Even with the new revolution in the field, with the Astronomer Emeritus and his work, atevi were
still
unaware of cosmic debris that didn’t make annual appearances as falling stars.

The Mospheirans had been even less curious about the lethal environment from which they’d escaped. The region of the solar system where they had to work to supply
Phoenix
and the station, let alone this new ship the captains wanted, was unmapped except in historical records he hoped were in that download.

He had expected bad news from those records and the initial surveys; but this… this robotics development… was an interesting piece of information from outside his domain.

He began to see much more accurately what they were up against.

He began to see all his proposals as achievable.

Still, she had raised questions… questions that definitely touched on his realm of expertise.

“You’re saying it was a political consideration that killed the robots.”

“Political and practical,” Kroger said. “Political, because manned mining was part of the mystique; because the colonist faction was doing the mining and possibly the leaders feared if the robots replaced the miners they’d lose their political clout.”

“Is there proof of that?”

“It’s my own suspicion,” Kroger said, “and there’s no proof. But I don’t think there were saints on either side. There was
some reason
the colonists didn’t push for robotic development when they were dying left and right; there was
some reason
leadership didn’t press for a delay of the ship fueling and a rearrangement of priorities, to get robots that worked. Possibly it was simple ignorance. Possibly it was ideological blindness. We’ve seen a bit of that in our generation. The fact was, the radicals among the colonists suspected
everything
the Guild proposed, by that point in time. If the Guild proposed it, there must be an ulterior motive. And the radicals were in charge. As long as their people kept dying at a sustainable rate, the anger of the colonists kept them going.”