The Unscheduled Mission (20 page)

“It’s a good thing we didn’t subject him to a formal reception line, then,” Iris remarked. “Patty wanted to insist, but I think Park has been having entirely too much fun pushing the Pakha around with our supposed customs and courtesies.”

“He decided not to hold “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” Marisea pointed out. “It sounded like fun.”

“It should have been three months ago,” Iris told her, “at least as nearly as I can estimate. The year is almost two days longer than it was when I was your age. Anyway, Grintz is here to investigate the death of Harat Jance. We ought to see to getting him to come to the right conclusion and not tease the poor man.”

“So I shouldn’t introduce him to the Atackacks?” Marisea asked.

“No, I think you should,” Iris replied. “You’re their teacher and he should get a chance to meet all the sapient species of our world.”

“And I don’t think he will react as badly to them,” Sartena predicted. “They are a wholly natural species. Even he can’t say that about himself. You should do it now, before dinner, in fact.” Marisea nodded and hop-stepped away and out of the banquet room. “Why aren’t the Atackack eating with us?” she asked Iris.

“Have you ever seen the way they eat?” Iris countered. Sartena shook her head. “Well, most people find it a bit disturbing, and frankly they don’t like watching us eat either, so we politely don’t do it together.”

A few minutes later Marisea returned at the head of a line of twenty-four Atackack students. It really was a line too. To Iris’ eyes it looked like a game of Follow the Leader and the students even bobbed up and down a bit in imitation of the mermaid’s gravbelt-assisted hop steps. From previous experience Iris knew the behavior was instinctive among the Atackack. They naturally traveled in lines. Larger groups would travel in multiple lines or it would take far too long for them to get anywhere as a tribe, but for a mere two dozen, the single line was perfect.

As Marisea drew near Pakha Grintz, he eyed the approaching people warily and Iris signaled to Sartena they should edge closer to listen in on the exchange.

“Pakha Grintz?” Marisea addressed him deferentially.

“Yes?” Grintz responded as though afraid to betray any emotion but polite curiosity.

“I am Marisea Waisau, daughter of His Excellency Taodore Waisau,” she introduced herself. “My students wish to present themselves.”

“Your students?” Grintz asked.

“They are young adult Atackack from the four major tribes,” Marisea replied,
“Bidachik, Geck, Totkeba and Pakati. May they present themselves?”

“Oh, the insectile sapient species,” Grintz identified them. “Yes, they may,” he decided pompously. The Atackacks each walked up to him and offered their right upper claws, a gesture they had learned in Van Winkle Town. As each did so he click-clacked out something in his native language. “Are they speaking?” Grintz asked Marisea after the second one had passed.

“Of course,” Marisea replied, nodding. “They are stating their names and welcoming you to their world.”

“Why don’t they speak our language?” Grintz asked.

“They can’t,” Marisea replied. “They don’t have the vocal equipment. Of course, we can’t speak their language either so we’re even.”

“Then how do you teach them?” Grintz asked.

“Oh, they understand our language,” Marisea replied, “and many of us understand theirs. The rest can use their torcs to translate.”

“They don’t have torcs of their own?” Grintz asked as the third Atackack stepped up and started click-clacking.

“What was that?” Marisea asked the Atackack who had just spoken. The student repeated herself. She was one of the few female Atackack students. “Oh, I see. Pakha, they do have torcs and I must admit I was surprised they were not wearing them, but this is a formal occasion and they felt they should be purely Atackack with none of that which they have borrowed from Mer and Human. They meant this to honor you.”

“I see,” Grintz replied, and then turned to the Atackack female and told her, “Thank you.”

The Atackack bowed her head briefly and said something in her language and finally held out her hand and introduced herself.

“She said, ‘Your approval honors us all,’” Marisea translated.

“She did?” Grintz asked, sounding confused for the first time since his arrival. He shook his head at that and then accused Marisea, “And you taught her the rules of courtesy from my planet?”

“No, sir. I know nothing about your world,” Marisea responded honestly. “I never even heard of Felina until a few minutes ago. What Tegack recited is an Atackack proverb.”

“Is it?” Grintz asked mostly to himself. He shook his head again as though trying to throw the thought away, but seemed slightly less stiff in greeting the remaining Atackack students. When it was over he inclined his head in almost a bow toward Marisea and told her, “Thank you for allowing me to meet your students and for your translations.”

“It was my pleasure, sir,” Marisea assured him.

“That went much better than I expected,” Park mused from just behind Iris and Sartena as Marisea led her students to another part of the hall.

Both women jumped slightly in surprise and turned to see Park standing with Taodore, Rebbert and Dannet. “Were you expecting trouble?” Iris asked.

“Not trouble per se,” Park replied, “but I expected Grintz to be somewhat less, um, cordial. He certainly warmed up toward the end, didn’t he?”

“I believe the Pakha was forcefully reminded of his own world’s rules of behavior,” Sartena smirked. “Felina is as socially conservative as Tzantsa is liberal. On Tzantsa the rule is, ‘Don’t be rude.’ On Felina you could fill several library shelves with the
Code of Behavior
and the associated sayings, phrases and whatnot.”

“And they do fill those shelves too,” Rebbert remarked, “although nearly all personal copies are digital, but everyone owns at least one copy of their
Code
which they often must consult several times a day. However the young Atackack’s proverb was word-for-word one of the basic tenets all Felinans are required to memorize. I believe the Pakha just learned that his people are not the only ones with formal codes of behavior.”

“Of course,” Dannet added, “his prejudice against the Atackack would not be the same as against the Mer. The Mer he sees, or rather saw I hope, as gene-locked abominations. Uh, sorry, Ambassador,” he added to Taodore.

“It’s nothing, old boy,” Taodore waved it off genially.

“Uh, right,” Dannet continued. “But you see Pakha Grintz’s only prejudice about the Atackack would have been that he saw them as ignorant savages.”

“Barbarians,” Park corrected him.

“Excuse me?” Dannet asked.

“When anthropology and sociology were very new studies,” Park explained, “the theoreticians of the fields divided human cultures into three levels of development; Savagery, Barbarism and Civilization. The terms were far too broadly used and the definitions not particularly accurate it turned out, as we learned more about our fellow man, but it was a place to start. It also presupposed that any culture would naturally progress through those phases in what was sometimes referred to as ‘Social Darwinism’ or ‘Social Evolution.’

“Savages were, according to those earliest anthropologists,” Park continued, “people who hunted and gathered their food only. They lived in small bands and were nomadic. Barbarians were more sedentary, living in villages and towns, where they grew their own food either in farms or herded animals. And the civilized lived in cities. It was all very simplistic and it turned out the real situation was far more complex. It also turned out that there was no such thing as Social Darwinism and that the progression toward civilization was neither inevitable nor necessarily to be considered progress.

“Anyway,” Park concluded, “by that old and out-moded definition these Atackack are barbarians, although the various bands of Kogack territory would be savages.”

“That wouldn’t stop the Pakha from seeing them as savages,” Dannet pointed out.

“Good point,” conceded Park.

“But as we all saw,” Taodore put in, “he warmed up not only to the Atackacks but to my daughter as well.”

“He would have had to be dead not to be at least partially charmed by Marisea,” Rebbert remarked. “She is a remarkable young lady. If I believed in magic I would say she just naturally casts a glamour on everyone she meets. I’m fairly certain she doesn’t charm us intentionally, however.”

“No, she’s just being herself,” Dannet replied. “Ambassador, I must commend you on how well you brought up your daughter.”

“Thank you,” Taodore smiled, but there was a tear in his eye. “She’s her mother all over again.”

Just then Marisea came hop-stepping up to them. “They did well, didn’t they?”

“They did,” Iris commended her, “and so did you, dear.”

If Pakha Grintz appeared to relax a bit during the banquet in his honor, there was no sign of it over the course of the next month as he proceeded to interview everyone in Van Winkle Town and various Mers in other cities. He did, however, stop issuing summons and instead requested that interviewees meet with him. He met mostly in an office that had been fabricated inside the hanger his ship sat in, but when he realized the magnitude of conducting thousands of interviews, he found he could talk to entire departments at once.

During this time, Park took
Phoenix Child
into orbit once, pointedly circling higher than Grintz’s waiting ships did and Tina Linea and Paul Gonnes commanded her twice. Two of the missions were actually pointless, save to show they were not bound to the Earth, but the others involved normal maintenance of the communications satellites and the launching of two others which would then move on into Solar orbit and study the sun along a number of different frequencies.

Maurice Hellinsgrove, the one-time British astrophysicist had been working with his Mer colleagues and convinced them that observing solar activity in terms of solar wind, magnetic fields, along the ultraviolet spectrum and in quite a few other ways would be immensely valuable, not to mention giving them some warning of approaching solar storms which even in this late age were capable of disrupting communications and the power grid around Pangaea. So together they had designed and built these satellites based on plans from the late Twenty-first Century, although with quite a few improvements where Mer science could lend a hand.

Park and Arn both approved the project, not only for the added knowledge but because it would help to improve their claim of ownership over the entirety of Sol System. Park warned Maurice that it was likely one of the Alliance ships might shoot his satellites down, but to everyone’s delight, they were ignored and new data began pouring in even as Grintz continued his investigation.

“I would like to investigate the Van Winkle Base computer records,” Grintz told Arn one morning.

“In what way?” Arn asked suspiciously. “I mean, what are you looking for?”

“The same thing I have been looking for since I arrived,” Grintz responded. “The truth concerning the death of Harat Jance.”

“You won’t find anything in there about that,” Arn laughed. “At the time we weren’t in a position to record it on film.”

“On film?” Grintz asked, obviously puzzled.

“Or any other method of recording a visual image,” Arn amplified. “Also almost all the records are in ancient English, except for those in equally ancient other languages, like French, Spanish, German, Swedish and so on. But if you want to look through them I see no harm. I’ll assign someone to translate for you.”

“Translate?” Grintz asked. “Won’t my implants do that for me?”

“Can your implants read?” Arn countered. “Talking computers were as commonplace back then as they are now, but this isn’t one of them, although the terminals are capable of sound when you want to view a record with an audio track or listen to music, but most of the data is not audio. It is printed out on a screen. Also the method of input is not voice-activated. You need to use a keyboard and a pointing device of some sort, like a mouse. The mouse I’m sure you’ll have no trouble with, but the Keyboard is English-based as well. You will need a translator.”

“I see,” Grintz nodded. “And may I choose my own translator?”

“So long as it is someone who knows how to use the system,” Arn shrugged. “Heck, if he doesn’t know it’s your waste of time, not mine.”

“I choose the young Mer, Marisea Waisau, then,” Grintz replied.

“If she is willing and has the time, that’s fine by me,” Arn replied. “But do keep in mind she is a very busy woman. She not only teaches the Atackack, but takes classes at the local University and acts as Parker Holman’s personal assistant. I don’t know how she manages to do it all, to tell the truth. I’m not sure I could; not and be at the top of my class too.”

“She is a remarkable young lady,” Grintz admitted. “I will ask her.”

Marisea was flattered by the request and started helping the man immediately. With her aide, he procured copies of various files, mostly of historical value, from the Project Van Winkle computer banks. “I honestly don’t know what he was looking for,” Marisea admitted one evening in Park’s and Iris’ home. “His searches were all over the place. If anything I’d have thought he was interested in you original humans and world you came from. That’s the sort of thing he looked at the most. History and news articles mostly.”

“Maybe he’s trying to figure out how we fabricated our past,” Park speculated. “I’m pretty sure he thinks we’re just some con-artists from another world. He’s probably trying to find some inconsistencies in our story. He may manage that. Some of those records conflict with each other. They weren’t all written from the same perspective after all.”

“I didn’t see anything that would have conflicted that way,” Marisea considered, “and I had to read them all out loud. After all that, I might do my Senior Project on some facet of pre-ancient history. The early attempts at space flight are particularly interesting, but if you came from another modern world, shouldn’t he be able to tell by looking or at least via a medical exam?”