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Pulling herself to her feet, pulling herself together, wiping away her tears, Laurel aged about ten years before Asach’s eyes, and took Asach’s hands with genuine anguish. “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I thought you were my—problem. My burden. When really, you were my guardian angel.”

That remains to be seen, thought Asach. The chips may fall without regard to you. “I think you’ll find,” Asach said, patting and releasing Laurel’s hands, “that you did most of the work yourself.”

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13

Tortious Intervention

Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.

—Ovid

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Saint George, New Utah

The blart from the flash pager was so loud that as Colchis Barthes flailed awake he nearly landed on the floor.

It wasn’t clear what he could do. He’d cajoled the True Church archivist for direct access to Swenson’s data, without success. He’d answered Quinn’s brief questions about the Swenson’s ape report: Where? How? He’d played go-between as needed, downloading, pre-processing, and passing updates between Quinn and the Blaine Institute linguists. He guessed that Quinn must be locked up somewhere, with a narrow communications window to the satellite. He spent tense days, hands on notional business, mind elsewhere, ready to jump out of his skin at the blart that unpredictably but invariably arrived at odd hours of the night.

So, Barthes was startled, but he wasn’t exactly surprised, until he saw the length of Quinn’s usually terse communication.

FLASH EYES ONLY

FROM: QUINN

TO: RENNER

CC FOR ACTION: BARTHES

1. Prime assessment:

No immediate threat to Empire. No immediate threat to trade or commerce. No immediate violations of prime directives. Human-“Motie” contact is centuries-old and of local origin. No offworld information or technology transfer observed. No immediate military action required. No immediate economic sanction required.

2. Accession Considerations:

Implications are strategic and political, not military.

a. Prior Claims of Status: New Utah “Moties” unified. Claim pre-human residence, expulsion from native residence by True Church colonists, historical First Empire contact with Swenson as Imperial Surveyor under Murcheson, pledge of enduring mutual aid and assistance, no subsequent resistance to Imperial or colonial claims or actions, no participation in Secession Wars, and current request for renewal of previous ties. No evidence of contact with or awareness of Mote System aliens or other offworld entities. Human legal status would be: Active Request for Accession by Neutral Allied Prior Colony.

b. Planetary Government: Procurator (Senior Master) “Sargon,” representing “Moties,” may form alliance with Barrens Himmists re: alleged land and rights violations from sand mining. Attitude actively defensive. No active resistance to TCM government, but extremely hostile to further expansion into jointly claimed territories. If legal interventions not instituted, potentially destabilizing to planetary unity.

c. Space Travel: No capacity observed.

d. Prior External Claims: Unknown. Lillith Van Zandt reported on-planet. Possible link to sand mining. Coordinates, Ping image follow for interp.

3. Tactical Assessment:

Military strength, deployment unknown. None apparent. Few Warriors observed, serving as household bodyguard. Himmists have no apparent military organization but do organize for self-sufficient pilgrimage. Claim TCM holds monopoly of force in region.

Junior Master “Enheduanna” reports six cities, population unknown. Population my location estimated 3-5,000, all castes. No Mediators observed. “Enheduanna,” older Keeper “Lagash” fill this role. No Engineers observed; may = Miners. No “Lesser Apes”(=Watchmakers? War Rats?) observed.

4. Economic Assessment:

“Moties” possess staple-financed state-administered economy with accounting, higher mathematics, surplus warehousing and distribution, organized by city-state with overarching common defense of western borders. Observed optical and ceramic technologies are highly sophisticated and use solar concentrators. Primary observed agricultural and food base appears to be a filamentous, human-palatable cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) grown in reclaimed wetlands. Himmists prize this crop as livestock forage.

Himmist ranchers subsist in church-organized community cooperatives with secondary, opportunistic income from opal meerschaum sale in Bonneville. Primary agricultural activity is stock-keeping, although this is becoming stressed by climatic change. Aggressive TCM tithe-collection practices have fostered the stripping of mineral resources for quick cash. Primary mineral activity is silica-sand and related mining in support of Bonneville solar-optical industries. Moties prize Himmist buffering and protection of land areas around my location from further development.

Major resources: Unknown. Disputed sand mining may be in pursuit of fine grade silica sands for New Utah solar-optical industries. Himmist sacral sites characterized by raised seamount geology.

5. Status: In no immediate danger. Tracker active. DO NOT ATTEMPT RESCUE. Negotiating return to Bonneville.

6. Recommendations: Assess impact of sand mining dispute.

7. Instructions to Barthes:

Find current registered ownership; review prior claims by family names Swenson, Courter, Orcutt, registered Bonneville. Ollie Azhad, TCM Security, Saint George; Zia Azhad, c/o Michael Van Zandt, Bonneville may help.

USE EXTREME CAUTION. Azhad children recently murdered/kidnapped, Saint George. Michael van Zandt estranged from mother Lillith, but relationship complicated.

Barthes was now wide awake, very excited, very relieved, and reading the entire message a second time. He’d been worried about something—martial. A requirement for a fumbling commitment to an action at once bellicose and futile. As a Librarian, he would have been poorly cast, Boy’s-Own-Story-Reserve-Lieutenancy to the fore, doing something very keen like heading up some brave little army in defense of the Crown.

But he understood what he was reading here. Any decision that established an Imperial precedent regarding non-human accession would be made at pay grades orders-of-magnitude above those on the Jackson Commission. It would be governed by forces in play on Sparta; in Mote space; at The Sister; on the Board of Imperial Autonetics; in the corridors of Naval power. New Utah’s importance had never been particularly economic. It had just become extremely strategic. Strategy likes predictability. It despises careening spoilers. Unknown to themselves, the economic parasites that swarmed beneath the rocks of accession politics were about to be exposed to some very bright lights.

And, as a senior librarian with a lifetime spent poking in the shadows of what people wrote, doodled, and archived, conflict-phobic Colchis Barthes was no master of derring-do, but he was ideally suited to the role of Imperial spy. He listened, and people talked to him. He showed interest, and people showed him things. He picked up bits and bobs, until he’d curated brilliant collections.

As weak, grey light seeped behind the curtains, he began by doing what he did every morning. He donned his brocade bathrobe. He moved deliberately into his kitchenette. He carefully, neatly, made a pot of tea, and laid it out on a tray with full service. He quietly sat to drink it. Behind him, a distant boom shuddered the windows and rattled the tray. It had a familiar, comforting quality. The distant sirens played sweetly, like astral music.