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Authors: David Gerrold,David Gerrold

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Humour

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BOOK: Chess With a Dragon
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Secretaries of all four sexes moved quietly around the edges of the room, gathering up the debris of previous confrontations and handing out weaponry for the next. Orderlies and robots worked to replenish sandwiches and keep the coffee urns full. In one of the corners, a thirty-year veteran was quietly weeping in a chair.

The initial shock of realization had not yet sunk in. The diplomatic staff was still trying to assimilate the scope of the problem. The damage reports were still coming in—and the damage was not only worse than anyone had expected; it was even worse than they had feared.

The Crisis Management Team was not even waiting for the full report; they had already moved into the second stage of the job—fixing the blame. The sound level was horrendous; the cacophony was on its way to a record decibel level. The accusations, denials, explanations, excuses, justifications, rationalizations and reasons, stormed and raged back and forth across the room like a caged tornado, carrying in its fury a blizzard of notes and images, documents, diagrams, photographs and papers. The conflicting evidences of blame and blamelessness flickered and flashed across the wall of screens until all meaning was leached from even the simplest of facts. The situation assimilation process had long since aborted and collapsed in a state of information implosion.

The Ambassador From Terra had once been known for his Million Light Year stare. Now his eyes were veiled and gray. His stare was focused on the cold cup of coffee in his hands and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. A jabber of voices swirled around him, but apparently he was listening to none of them.

Yake Singh Browne sat quietly at the opposite corner of the table, making meaningless notes on a pad of paper while the arguments continued. He did not even look up when the chair flew past his back. Two career diplomats had already had to be pried apart by their colleagues and sent to opposite corners of the room.

“Sir? Sir—” someone from Analysis was trying to attract the Ambassador's attention. Yake glanced across the table and began to wonder if the Ambassador was crumbling under the strain. The Old Man looked dreadful. The Assistant Secretary of Something-Or-Other was jabbering insistently, “I hate to say ‘I told you so,' but we've been advocating fiscal responsibility for decades and no one's been listening to us. This is precisely the kind of debt position that we've been warning against—”

“It's really the fault of the Library Department,” said the bulldozer-shaped woman on the other side of the Ambassador. “You know how those hackers are. They see something interesting on the menu; they automatically download it with the idea of exploring it in detail later. Of course, they never do. Something more interesting always comes along. We have material in our banks that we won't be getting to for a hundred years! And as far as assimilation goes—”

“Really, I reject that!” came the angry reply from halfway down the table. “If we'd had the help we'd originally asked for, that material wouldn't be going unread. I say that if we'd
had
the librarians we could have catalogued the material already.

There's probably a hundred different answers to this situation already in our banks. We just don't know where to find them—”

“I think you're all missing the point here. You've been played for fools by the Dah—D'haroo—Dhrooughleem.” That was Madja Poparov, the new Policy Supervisor from the InterChange-Council Advisory Committee, Soviet Section. Rumor had it that she could trace her ancestry all the way back to Joseph Stalin. Yake looked up curiously.

“You have been—what is right word here? Set up?
Da
. Led by your noses down a primrose garden.”

“Yes, of course, Ms. Poparov,” Anne Larson, the British Representative, replied with a smile. “Considering your own political background, you would be the one most likely to spot such a situation—”

“This is not time for accusations and recriminations,” Madja responded quietly. “This is time for thoughtful solutions.”

“Absolutely,” Larson's smile grew dangerous. “Let the record show that as soon as Ms. Poparov had read her accusations and recriminations into the record, she was ready to get back to work.”

Madja's face reddened. “That is unfair attack. Very
nyet kulturny
.”

“No attack is unfair—attacks are supposed to hurt. That's how the game is played.”

Yake lowered his face to his notepad, to hide his own smile.

“Can we please keep to the subject, Ladies—?” interrupted a tired voice. Yake looked up. It was the Ambassador.

Normally, the Old Man kept out of the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-down-and-dirty part of the discussions until a consensus began to develop. For him to request that the participants of a free-for-all try to stay on purpose demonstrated just how immediate he felt the situation really was.

Both Larson and Poparov nodded their instant acquiescence—then exchanged withering glares. Yake waited to see if the Ambassador was going to add anything else, but the Old Man lapsed back into silence.

“Sir?” That was Kasahara from Intelligence. “There may be some evidence to support Ms. Poparov's assertion that we've been set up—”

Poparov's glare turned into a triumphant smile.

“—but I think the truth is much more that we've set ourselves up. With encouragement perhaps, but I don't think we should try to pass the blame entirely onto the Dhroo.”

Madja's glare faded. Anne Larson's smile broadened.

And the cacophony began again.

“What I want to know,” interrupted someone else, “—is how we're going to explain to humanity that we've sold them into slavery?”

“—can't win a war against the slugs. We'll have to—”

“—really need to buy time. As much as we can—”

“—but if we shut down our information requests, we'll be admitting our bankruptcy. It'll be a clear declaration of our intent to default. We can't for a moment suggest that we're up against it or they might initiate a premature foreclosure. We don't know what they might do. Besides, if we keep downloading, we might discover something that—”

“—need to begin preparing the home front. Maybe there's a pretty face we can put on this situation; call it an Inter-Galactic Peace Corps, or something—”

“Another issue to consider—this whole thing is so out of character for the Dhrooughleem. They'd rather die than insult a guest. There must be something else going on—”

“And maybe there is
nothing
else going on. Maybe we misinterpreted. Maybe the message is a simple expression of concern, and an offer of help—”

“Very unlikely,” said Kasahara. The certainty of his tone cut through the chatter like a knife. “The Dhrooughleem are polite. Not stupid. They have as many ulterior motives as any other species on this rock.”

“Maybe they're trying to trigger a panic over here—” suggested someone else.

“Well, they've succeeded in doing that,” Larson acknowledged, brushing her sandy-colored hair back off her forehead; she was already fading to gray at the temples.

“No,” said Kasahara. He leaned forward earnestly. “Even that much aggression is very out of character for them. The Dhrooughleem do not get aggressive—they get polite. Very very polite. Given the circumstances, the politest thing that they can do is make the first offer. I expect that we're going to be getting quite a few other offers of indenture very soon—especially if we're as close to the debt limit as the Dhrooughleem Liaison says. No, the Dhrooughleem aren't being eager here; that would be discourteous, and they are
never
discourteous. They're bending themselves backward to be polite. It just so happens that in this case, being polite means giving us the earliest possible opportunity to resolve our information debt.”

“And then there's this possibility—” said Yake quietly, and all eyes turned abruptly to him. It was the first time he'd spoken since the uproar began. “I suspect that the Dhrooughleem are indentured themselves to another species, I don't know which one. And I don't even know why I suspect this, but it might be worth the effort to look for some confirming evidence. If they are working off a debt of their own, and if we do indenture ourselves to them, then we get to work off not only our own indenture, but theirs as well.”

There was silence around the table.

Yake added, “I'm beginning to think that there are very many complex layers of indenture here, so that whoever we might indenture ourselves to is going to be making a very good price off our work—”

“You talk as if indenture is inevitable—” suggested the Ambassador quietly.

“I think it may very well be. Sorry sir, but my sense of the InterChange is that it's a pyramid scheme—and somebody has to be on the bottom.”

“Da,” said the Madja Poparov. “This is exactly what my government has been afraid of for all hundred and sixty-seven years we have been participating—that we would be trapped by alien imperialists. Now we know what that trap is. Did no one ever think we were going to have to pay this bill someday?”

“Nobody took it seriously,” retorted Larson, “—because nobody ever thought the bill would come due. Or that anyone would ever come by to collect. By the way, did the Soviet Union ever repay its World War II debts to Britain and the United States?”

“That is
not
the issue.” Poparov looked annoyed. “Who was entrusted with this responsibility? And why haven't they been properly tried?”

“Ahem? We're getting off purpose again,” suggested Yake.

Both the women glared at him.

The Ambassador stepped into the moment of silence with a question. “You said something a moment ago, Yake, something about a . . . pyramid scheme?”

“Yes, sir. Everybody pays the guy upstairs, and the guy on the top floor ends up flush. The guys on the bottom, however, get stuck with the bill for everything. I think that the InterChange is set up to put the new guys—that's us—in the basement.”

The Ambassador turned the thought over in his mind. “That's a very interesting analogy, Yake,” he said finally. “But it condemns the whole InterChange.”

“Sorry, sir. That's just the way it looks to me.”

“Okay, let's assume it for one minute. Is the situation we're in accidental or deliberate? Did we do it ourselves out of our own ignorance, or . . . do you also think that the Dhrooughleem deliberately entrapped us?”

Yake hesitated. He was looking down the barrel of a .45 calibre question. He had to choose his words carefully. “It would seem to me, sir, that if the Dhroo' do have an indenture of their own, it would be very much to their advantage to put us to work paying it off for them. And even if they don't, it is still to their advantage to assume custodianship. Frankly, sir—” Yake found it hard to say this next part. “I feel particularly unhappy with the circumstance. It feels like—
to me
—a personal betrayal. I thought that the Dhroo' representative and I had created a very friendly working relationship. Now I feel as if I've been used.
Raped
. (Pardon my English.) Because of these feelings, it might be inappropriate for me to continue to represent our position to the Dhroo'. In fact, if you want my resignation, sir—”

“Don't be silly, Yake. It's all right with me if you get angry. In fact, it'd be all right with me if you were pissed as hell! And then it'd be even more all right if you used that anger as fuel for your efforts at finding a way out of this mess.”

“Thank you, sir.”


De nada
.” The Ambassador turned back to Kasahara then. “All right, Nori. Let's go back to your point. You say that they're just being polite, nothing more—”

“No, sir—I didn't say that. Not at all. What I said was, the Dhrooughleem don't get aggressive. They get polite. And now, they've gotten very
very
polite with us.”

“Hm,” said the Ambassador. “In other words, that politeness may just be the way that they
express
their aggression.”

“Yes, sir. It's possible.”

“I see. They don't put out the bear traps, but neither do they tell you to watch out for them when they take you for a walk in the woods, is that it?”

Kasahara nodded his head in agreement. His black hair shone like metal. He flashed his teeth in a grim smile of appreciation at the Ambassador's analogy.

“Good. Then, let's assume, for the moment, that this
is
a trap. It may be a dangerous assumption because it could blind us to other ways of dealing with the situation, but let's make the assumption anyway and see if we can find any evidence to support this assertion or disprove it.”

Abruptly, Yake realized something. He sat up straight in his chair and stared across the table at the Ambassador. The Old Man wasn't crumbling under the strain at all. He'd been playing possum, ignoring all the tumult and turmoil, quietly waiting for the uproar to wear itself out.

Yake grinned in appreciation. You don't get to be Ambassador From Terra without some cunning. After all the accusations and recriminations had been made, and the conversation had finally gotten down to specifics, the Ambassador had resumed control of the meeting. Very clever. He didn't waste his energy on the wrong things.

“Yake,” asked the Ambassador. “You seem to have a thought on your mind?”

“Uh, yes sir. I do. Um—we need to find out if this is the standard operating procedure of the InterChange or if the slugs have broken some rule or other. And we need to be very discreet about this line of inquiry too.”

“Yes. A very good suggestion.” The Ambassador turned to the bulldozer-shaped woman. “Library, I'll want a full scan of the InterChange Charter documents.” The Ambassador pulled his clipboard to him and switched it on. He glanced at it only briefly, then looked up across the table again.

BOOK: Chess With a Dragon
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