“If you wish not, Mr. Ambassador, it’s certainly easy to dispense with them.” And give due notice to departmental heads, shivering in the dockside cold. “You’re welcome in my office, two levels up from here.” It would be pushing it to say the ambassador had mistaken his destination, or to hint that the peculiarities of the lift system, which needed a citizen code card on the dockside lifts, had foxed the ambassador’s solo attempts to breach security and dumped him right on the plaza where any common non-citizen had to go.
The sphinx-face looked around the area, looked far to the left, and again to the right. “This is Customs Administration. Where is my residence from here?”
“This is the main foyer for those who have to file visa affidavits, Mr. Ambassador, who need a temporary card.” He refrained from saying, fool. “Customs is certainly superfluous in your case. We can go from here either to my office, or straight to your residence.” Impossible to offer food, drink, or even a soft bed to their visitor. What one of these rigs actually wanted was general connectivity and a secure place with wide doorways, which could be any apartment or office thus equipped, where there were adequate connector-slots. But Reaux had rather have this visitor well-protected. Constantly. And soon. And hellif he was going to issue Gide a code-card to let him come and go from docks to residencies at will. “If you’ll share a lift with me, I’ll escort you myself wherever you would wish to go.”
“My requirements?”
“Exactly as requested, a secure apartment with broad accesses, on the lesser-gravity deck, in the heart of our community. It has all the connections, a secure line to your ship.” The shell was, in its way, a bubble of pure Earth environment extended from the ship—a bubble that the ship extruded onto their dock and up into their station, since never, never, never could Mother Earth contaminate anyone, but the mere breath of station air would contaminate the purity of their visitor. Gide would leave that extravagant shell behind in a few days, discarding it like some outmoded chrysalis on the dock, as the ship took him in and sealed him behind its pure, uncontaminated hull, never having contacted the station’s air or water.
Then all the intriguing secrets of this simulacrum might be available to them to be extracted, if there were any secrets in it that they didn’t already have, and by the look of it, there might be plenty. Earth might not particularly care about the expense or the knowledge shed along with that carapace, not relative to the value of the awe it generated among mere station-dwelling provincials, and assuredly it wouldn’t want it back, no matter it was perfectly possible to decontaminate the thing. Earth and Inner Space didn’t covet a stray molecule of Concord’s air, let alone suffer its other microscopic contaminations, ever, in any form, or in symbol, to enter their ships or their lungs. The fuel they bought on station all burned in an antimatter furnace, utterly annihilated. They traded, but they traded in programs and data. God forbid they ever, ever touched a damned thing.
Supercilious sods. Had he been one of them—ever?
“My apartment,” Gide said curtly. “Now.”
“Certainly.” With an iron smile.
Earth didn’t speak Concord’s language—no one else, in fact, did that—as Earth didn’t breathe their air. And Reaux was very sure now not only that he knew what language Gide spoke as a native, besides that of the Commonwealth, but what accent. Theyshared a birthplace. Not that it won him acceptance from Gide. From the first time he’d taken a post outside Earth, the very first time he’d drawn the air of the Inner Worlds inside his lungs, he accepted being doomed to live no closer to Paris than the Inner Worlds. From the first time he’d set foot on Serine, truly in Outsider territory, for a higher post, even the Inner Worlds became barred to him. That sacrifice was the only route to career advancement for a man of modest means—and in his case, the path to power, the ultimate that any station governor could reach, the most sensitive governorship, the highest, the most isolate. He was accustomed to making decisions on his own, dealing one-on-one with the Outsider authority at Apex.
He had power…until this higher breed of Earther, like Mr. Gide, with his doubtless upper-class accent, showed up, a power whose incidental report could even conceivably damn a governor for removal. A long-sitting governor, and Reaux was that, inevitably lost touch, and Concord more than most. He had no complete guarantee what party on Earth Gide represented, what beliefs Gide supported, what faults Gide came here to complain of. A governor’s sin might consist only in belonging to the wrong faction, the wrong dogma, as administrations rose and fell on Earth.
It was a hellish system, a system ages entrenched, vulnerable to slow corruption that no one on the outside had the power to fight and no one on the inside ever understood enough to challenge—that was the absolute hell of it, and he had halfway forgotten that visceral fact of politics until he came face-to-face—so to speak—with this ostentatious display of Earth’s power. Good appearances were everything. Substance was rarely at issue. Any whisper of a governor sympathizing too much with the people he governed was grounds for suspicion. A governor getting along well with the Outside was suspect for that fault.
In Reaux’s own carefully concealed opinion, it was a system that hadn’t come to disaster only because Outsiders, who profited from Earth’s occasional confusion, lived very comfortably with Earth’s governors in occasional fear, and had no reason to push for anything different.
He’d been too busy to be panicked until now, now that he was confronted by a presence clearly designed to intimidate, and now that he found no hint of courtesy extended toward him or his station. He was very glad not to have begun their meetings by telling Mr. Gide his arrival in the Plaza was his own stupid fault.
The sphinx glided along beside him in surly silence, down the short distance to the next bank of lifts. For the moments it took to get Mr. Gide to safety, the whole lift system in this quadrant of the station had to be frozen, a condition they would have avoided had Mr. Gide routed himself where they wanted him. A few Customs supervisory staff stood back, watching, securing the area, not intruding. A few news recorders bobbed in the air, a carefully managed presence, no human agents intruding here with a babble of questions. Some powers even the news feared.
The sphinx entered the car, turned, facing the door. Reaux barely managed to get himself and his two bodyguards inside with it, where it had grandly placed itself.
“Code 12,” Reaux said to the system, and the car smoothly engaged and gathered speed. It wasn’t an address code that that simple number represented. It was a set of preset operations, instructions to the lift system, security moving to cordon off areas of transit as they passed and concentrating efforts in areas where they were going, getting them back where they should have gone.
“Remarkable technology, that of yours, Mr. Gide.” He wondered could there possibly be sensory input from the car’s surface that might appreciate the fine surroundings he had arranged for the man—as distinct from the utilitarian offices that might adequately have served the machine itself. “It’s certainly a striking application.”
“Useful,” Gide said coldly. So that conversation died, assassinated.
“If there’s anything you wish to see while you’re here—” Reaux was determined not to babble, but made one more effort, in case the man was simply overtired. “—of course you’ve only to ask.”
“I’ll let you know.”
In his native tongue, he asked: “How are things in Paris?”
“As usual.” In that language. And nothing more. Dead silence. No cordiality. No human pleasantry from what might be a compatriot. And it was that aristocratic, academy-educated accent he had suspected.