101: Diplomats

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“How was your lesson?” Yamin asked as I entered his office. “Learn anything interesting about diplomats?”

“It was fine,” I said warily. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You’ve shown some interest in working as a personal assistant. Would you like some practice at the job?”

“For who?”

“A pair of diplomats. Jara Pyoru and Kaddatopiri Het.”

“From the Stalwart? And one’s a capuchin?”

“Yes.”

I nodded. If Kaddatopiri was coming as a diplomat, there shouldn’t be any problems with their rights and protections; the rights of diplomats aboard the Courageous explicitly covered the rights afforded to most people all over again, as well as adding diplomat-specific clauses, and nowhere in the wording were diplomats explicitly defined as human. “Why are they coming here?”

“Ostensibly, to discuss a resource sharing agreement with the captains that can’t be discussed electronically for some reason. In actuality, it’s fairly normal for ships involved in colony bids to start coming up with reasons to send diplomats to influential ships like ours when we start looking like we might be getting ready to cast our colony vote. They’re a couple of years early, but that’s to be expected in these circumstances. I saw a child with a capuchin doll the other day; creepiest thing I’ve seen for months.”

“They’re cute,” I corrected. “Not creepy. At least, the kids think so.”

“And I’m not sure how you managed that. The advantage of having so many younger siblings to observe, I suppose. Remember, your job involves keeping the diplomats comfortable and, if you can manage it, making sure they have a good time on our ship, or at least not a terrible one.”

“When do they get here?”

“In ten days. And they’ll be staying for a month. I’ve cleared your lesson schedule so that you can work exclusively with Shanan until they get here; ke’ll take you to some professionals that work specifically with diplomats to help you learn the job.”

“Is this really something that a total beginner should be doing? Won’t it offend them if you don’t give them a proper liaison?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. They requested you specifically.”

A liaison to diplomats. That was… more than I’d been prepared to take on, but it should be fine. I’d been observing Shanan work a lot, and kes job didn’t seem hard. With some training… and anyway, it was only the Stalwart; they were coming to impress us, not the other way around. The fact that they’d requested me made that obvious. Besides, it was only for a month. Yeah. It was fine.

The tricky part was Mum.

After getting clear on the explicit requirements of assisting diplomats, I spent more of my off-shift time at home than usual, looking for a moment to catch my mother alone. She wasn’t the most social person, so this wasn’t hard. I caught her eating breakfast late in the next red shift.

“Hey, Mum,” I said, sliding into a seat across from her. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” she said. There was already a touch of wariness in her voice, and I hadn’t even said anything yet. “How’s your apprenticeship going? Learning anything interesting at the moment?”

“Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Do you have a moment?”

An ‘I knew it’ look dawned in her eyes. “Of course, love. What do you need?”

“I’m going to move out. Temporarily! Just for a month. Then I can come back.”

Mum made a visible effort to look less upset. “A month? Are you going to another ship?”

“No. I, um. I’ve been roped into being an assistant for some visiting diplomats.”

Her expression grew complicated. Indignation an protectiveness warred with respect and appreciation, and they mellowed each other out and settled into a sort of grumpy acceptance. “And then you’ll come home,” she said.

“And then I can come home.”

“Well then. We really don’t see you much these days, Taya.”

“I know. I’m on a different shift, and things are always so busy, and…”

“And this is an important opportunity for you, I see that. You’re getting old enough to make your own decisions,” she added in a very pointed way, as if to remind me that I’d already been making strong decisions that she wasn’t comfortable with for years. “Klei’s saying he might move out in a year or two, too. We’ll have to apply to move into a smaller house.”

I didn’t miss the veiled point. Klei was three years older than me. He was talking about moving out an an appropriate age. Maybe.

I bit back the automatic reflex to apologise and promise to come back, and instead pretended not to notice. With a smile, I said, “Or stay an let the younger kids enjoy having so much space. They can get their own bedrooms, like nuclear kids.”

“I suppose that Rose will get use to having a room to herself just in time for you to come back. That’ll be a tantrum.”

“i’ll have to lock up all my stuff. She’s already stolen a lot of the things that Laisor left behind.”

“I don’t think that Laisor will ever notice.”

“Ke’’l come back to visit, Mum. When ke – ”

“When ke isn’t so busy,” Mum sighed. “Have you seen Plia recently?”

“Plia? No, not since leaving the Ironstock. Why?”

“It doesn’t matter. Let me know if you need help packing for your diplomat job.”

I considered explaining in more detail that this job didn’t make me a diplomat, but it wasn’t worth the conversation.

I didn’t need help packing.

I did take the opportunity to go through all my old stuff. I didn’t own much, but unused birthday gifts and old clothes you forget about do still pile up. I was looking for something specific, and found it in the bottom of the chest of spare stuff I kept under my bed – under old trinkets and too-small wraps which I gave to my younger siblings, wrapped in a chain of birthday charms that I sent to Rubbish and Recycling, I found a small, expertly woven ribbon of capuchin hair, displaying deep black triangles on vivid red, and on the opposite side, red triangles on black.

It ha used to hang over my bed, until it had ended up in the chest at some point. It would probably be diplomatic to hang it back up while the diplomats were around. So I packed it.

A few days before the diplomats arrived, we started communicating directly. I was given pictures of both of them, which was a good thing, because it meant that I could get used to them without the surprise showing on my face.

Jara was a large woman with some light scars on one cheek, dressed, in her picture, in a plain grey Stalwart-style jumpsuit. What was not Stalwart-style was her hair – namely, that she had some.

It wasn’t long. She couldn’t have been growing it for more than half a year. But it was long enough to braid into a Courageous style, with patterns and beads that one of my aunt’s might wear. She looked about Mum’s age.

Kaddatopiri (or Kadda, as I was told to call him) looked, well, like a capuchin. I couldn’t really tell them apart all that well, most of the time. Capuchins didn’t wear clothes or jewelry, so there shouldn’t be all that much about him to surprise me, but there was.

Kadda was old. His dark fur was shot with grey. How old? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know enough about capuchins. But far older than the capuchin captain I’d met.

I’d been expecting somebody Tikka’s age, maybe a handful of years older. Kadda must be one of the first ever capuchin diplomats; it wasn’t like they could be sending us an old, experienced diplomat, because there shouldn’t be any such thing. Until now, the Stalwart had considered inter-ship diplomacy an entirely human job.

Not a problem. He was probably an experienced Administrator in some role that required a lot of diplomacy on the ship, or maybe an expert liaison in dealing with on-ship humans. It would make sense to send someone who was experienced in a similar field instead of doing what the Courageous was doing with me, and throwing in a complete newcomer. It made sense once I’d considered it, and luckily I’d spent the time before considering it gaping in surprise at an image instead of at a diplomat directly.

The day before the diplomats arrived, I met up with Huspi to explain the danger faced by the fleet. We met in a viewing port. It wasn’t ideal, to be in a place where people could burst in on us, but this was supposed to be a casual, friendly meeting – I didn’t want to rent and office space or something. And it seemed right to have this sort of conversation somewhere with a view of the stars.

“We are blind,” I told Huspi after we said our hellos and settled onto the little bench. “On the scale we’re working with, moving from star to star, the speed of light makes it physically impossible to see where we are going. Oh, we know what was ahead of us twenty or a hundred years ago, But everything else is prediction – we can’t communicate with the universe ahead of us, or behind us, or even around us, on any scale that’s actually practical. We have a few tenuous tethers to previous colonies that let us know what they were doing decades or centuries ago, but we can’t properly coordinate, not really. Every fragment of the fleet is on its own. Every colony also ends up on its own, sooner or later. It’s impossible to control or agree on anything outside of this small collection of spaceships for any meaningful length of time. And I’m frightened that that will kill us.”

“How so?”

“Because every single colony is doomed. This is a certainty. Populations grow to what their environment can support, but they leak critical gases to space over time; oxygen and nitrogen might technically be near-permanent, but their existence in a collectible, usable form isn’t. These materials run out over time, an when they don’t, their star will eventually die. The best a colony can hope for is to leave its precasious existence behin an return to interstellar travel to gain resources at the next star, but that’s a risky prospect at the best of times and will become more and more risky as we get better at colonising more and more stars, because we’re getting in a position where the stars around each colony are increasingly occupied with other colonies. Colonies that are also slowly losing resources.

“The only stable future is to move from star to star, as we do. But that’s not foolproof either. The zspace between stars is of course dangerous, but even more dangerous are the stars themselves – because we don’t make all colonies. Every fleet split is another fleet out there populating the universe. Every colony is resources being used faster, and every fleet means more colonies expanding at every star to strip it bare. And we don’t know where those fragments are – we physically can’t. Meaning that sooner or later, we’re going to find that they’re ahead of us. We survive only so long as we’re at the front of the colonisation wave, but eventually, we’re going to fall behind. We’re going to find ourselves surrounded by stars occupied by potentially hostile settlements, or already stripped of everything useful and abandoned. It’s a future that nobody can predict a time scale for, that nobody can physically see coming, until it’s already too late. The longer we live, the more it approaches a certainty that we’re going to suffocate in space, a victim of our own fecundity, an the core of humanity and heart of the Mission will be dead. As time goes on, other people with new designer genesets, and other people that aren’t even human, will outcompete humanity with their better tolerance for acceleration and their lower resource requirements, and over time, humanity itself will be slowly extinguished from the universe. That’s the doom that I see ahead of us.”

I looked at Huspi. Ke stared back, stunned.

Then ke laughed.

“Oh, is that all you’re worried about?” ke said.

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