"My name is Worth, I have an appointment."
The office was on the 35th floor of a fifty-story building in Manhattan, a totally unobtrusive location were it not for the occupants. The sign on the door stated simply "Terra Trade Holdings." However, it occupied the entire floor and was the de jure trade consulate of the Galactic Federation.
The startlingly beautiful receptionist gestured wordlessly at the couch and chairs set to one side of the large and airy anteroom and returned to puzzling out her new computer.
Mr. Worth, instead of sitting, wandered around the reception area admiring the artwork. He considered himself a connoisseur, of sorts, of fine art, and quickly recognized several of the works for originals, or at least forgeries of extraordinary quality. There were two Rubens, a Rembrandt and, unless he missed his guess, the original "Starry, Starry Night" which was last seen firmly clutched to the bosom of the Matsushita Corporation.
As he passed among these trophies he began to notice that the furniture might also be originals; each piece appeared to be a genuine Louis XIV antique. Which made his mind return to the receptionist. If everything else in the room was original, a sincere possibility, a true collector would require some extraordinary level of originality for the receptionist. It only followed. He glanced surreptitiously her way, but was, frankly, stumped. As her console chimed she looked up and noticed the covert glance; it obviously affected her less than a puff of wind.
"The Ghin will see you now, Mr. Worth."
He stepped through the slowly opening doors and into shadow. Across a cavernous office was a desk the size of a small car. Behind the desk, silhouetted by the limited light from the curtained windows, sat a figure that could be mistaken for a human.
"Come in, Mr. Worth. Be seated," said the Darhel in its sibilant tones, gesturing languidly at the seat across from it.
Mr. Worth walked slowly across the office, trying to focus on the silhouetted figure. Since First Contact, the Darhel had been everywhere and nowhere. They were, apparently, either in person or represented at all important governmental meetings and functions. They seemed to understand that more business is decided over canapés than in all the meetings in the world, but usually they were either swathed in robes for protection against the strong Earthly sun, or represented by paid consultants. Mr. Worth realized that he was about to be one of the fortunate few who saw one face-to-face.
Still unable to get more than a hint of saturnine head shape, Mr. Worth sat in the offered chair.
"You might, as the saying goes, be wondering why I asked you to come here today."
The tones were so mellifluous, Worth felt himself caught in a sort of spell. He shook his head. "Actually, I was wondering how you got my number at all. Very few people have it and as far as I know it is not recorded anywhere." He steeled himself against the sound of the Ghir's voice, waiting for a response.
"It is, in fact, recorded in at least three databases, two of which we have ready access to." The figure shook slightly in what might have been laughter in a human. There was a faint acrid smell, sharp and ozonelike; it might have been breath or a Darhel version of cologne.
"Oh. Would you care to illuminate?"
"Your number, and a general, shall we say, job description, is recorded in CIA files, Interpol files and a database belonging to the Corleone family."
"That is most unfortunate." He made a mental note to discuss his data security with Tony Corleone.
"Actually, I should say they did record that datum. There are now certain inaccuracies." There was a pause. "You have no comment?"
"No." Worth had noted that there were times to keep one's mouth firmly shut. He suddenly decided that this was one of those times.
"The Darhel are a business concern, Mr. Worth. As in any business concern, there are issues which are soluble and those which are insoluble. There are also issues which, while soluble, require a certain subtlety of approach." The Ghir paused, as if choosing his words very carefully.
"And you would be interested in retaining my services to . . . deal with these subtleties?"
"We would be interested in retaining services," the Darhel said, very carefully. There was another quiver from the figure.
"My services?"
"Were you to submit invoices for reasonable expenditures," another shudder and a pause. The Darhel seemed to shake itself and took a long, deep breath. Then he continued. "If someone were to submit invoices for reasonable expenditures, in the interests of resolving issues related to Darhel interests which might come to light, either through casual conversation with Darhel or through your own intelligence," there was another pause. After a moment the Darhel continued, his cultured voice now strained and squeaky. "There would be fair remuneration." The sentence ended on a high strangled note. The Darhel turned its head to the side and shook it hard, breath shuddering.
Mr. Worth realized that his new, employer? client? control? was not just unwilling, but virtually unable to be specific.
"And these would be submitted how? And paid how?" Being circumspect was one thing, but business was business.
"Such details are for others to determine," the Darhel responded, breath shuddering. "I take it that is agreement," it continued, sharply. There was a note of anger in its voice.
"To what?" asked Worth. "When did we meet? I don't think I've ever talked to a Darhel. Have I?"
"Ah, just so." The figure drifted forward and there was a sudden gleam of teeth. Worth shuddered at their resemblance to a shark's. "So glad not to do business with you, Mr. Worth."
Worth's eyes widened as the figure was revealed.
The Chief of Procurement, Army of the People's Republic of China, Shantung Province, tapped a pen on his documents as he related to his superior, Commander of Forces, Shantung Province, the facts that had just come to light. One of his junior officers, during preliminary discussions related to production and procurement, had hit a stumbling block. Believing that it was a problem with the AID's translation—such things had happened before—he questioned his Darhel opposite number closely and at length. The elfin Darhel had an almost amazing ability to steer conversations away from problem areas but finally, after referring to both an Indowy technician and a Tchpth science-philosopher, the junior officer broke off negotiations and composed a long report. This report and an expansion composed by the major's superior were now in the marshal's lap as he reported the bad news.
"I am, perhaps, remiss in my understanding. How can they have no industrial capacity? I have seen their ships. Where do these AIDs come from?"
"It is a question of translating the word 'industry.' They produce phenomenal products, wondrous spacecraft and these attractive helpers, but each item is hand crafted; they have no concept of assembly line manufacture. Do not think of assembly lines as a technology; they are a philosophical choice not a strictly mechanistic development. Furthermore, production by assembly line creates a fundamental need for planned obsolescence or else the assembly line, by its own efficiency, would fill the needs of everyone in the market and be forced to shut down. So, our industries here on Terra continually create new products to fill the production capacity and, to an extent intentionally, produce products that use less expensive materials and do not last as long.
"Yet the flip side to industrial, and by that I mean assembly line, production is that individual items can be produced quickly and at relatively little cost. That is why everyone is forced to use it." He stopped and considered his choice of words.
"There is, however, another way. We are sure now that the Federation is both highly structured and largely stagnant. I can refer you to the appropriate papers. . . ."
"I've seen them," said the marshal, picking up a pen in turn and beginning to twirl it between his fingers. He gazed out the window at the towering sky scrapers of China's fourth-largest city and wondered how they could possibly defend it if the Galactics could not build a fleet in time.
The chief of procurement nodded his head. "There is a strong degree of specialization in this Galactic ant colony." He again stopped and considered how to say the next item.
"Our place, it would seem, is to be soldier ants. The Indowy, those greenish dwarf-looking bipeds, are the worker ants. They create high technology at an almost instinctive level. Their tolerances are so exact that the products look as if they were made in a factory. And each product is made to last a lifetime. Since each product is handcrafted and is designed to last for two or three hundred years, each one is incredibly expensive. It may take a single Indowy a year to produce the Galactic equivalent of a television. The cost is comparable to a year's pay of an electronic technician or electrical engineer. The sole exception seems to be AIDs, which are manufactured using mass processes by the Darhel. There is apparently also a shortage of rejuvenation nannites developing for the same reason."
"How does anyone purchase anything?" asked the commander, perplexed.
"The Darhel," responded the procurement officer, dryly. "There was a term associated with everything that we took to be price and that was how the AIDs were translating it. A more precise translation would be 'mortgage' or 'debt.' Unless you are massively wealthy, to buy the simplest items you have to take out a loan from the Darhel." He smiled thinly. In every procurement officer there is a slight love affair with a really good scam.
"Federation wide?" asked the commander, thinking about the numbers involved. It was a staggering concept.
"Yes. And the loan is payable for up to one and a half centuries. At interest." The procurement officer gave a very Gallic shrug. "On the other hand the products never break and are warranted for the life of the loan."
"The ships?" asked the commander, returning to the most important subject.
"That was what brought about the understanding. The Indowy must have a hierarchy more complex than the Mandarin Court. An Indowy chooses a field, has one chosen for him, at a young age, the equivalent of four or five years old in human terms. The most complex hierarchy, and the highest paid, are the ship builders. Every piece of a ship, from hull plates to the molycircs, are made by the construction team, usually an extended family. Raw material comes in, finished ship comes out. Every part is signed and cleared by the master of the subsystem and the master builder. Every part. Thus, Indowy ships have a useful lifetime in the thousands of years and virtually no maintenance. No spare parts required; if anything breaks the component is remanufactured by hand. It is as if every ship is one of those skyscrapers," he waved out the window at the towers beyond, "with every part made on site. All of their systems, equipment, weapons, etceteras are built the same way.
"An apprentice starts as a 'bolt' or 'fitting' maker then progresses through subsystems—plumbing, electrical, structural—learning how to make each and every component of the system. If they are lucky, in a couple of centuries they can be a master, in charge of construction of an actual ship. Because of this process, and the fact that there are very few masters available to make ships, there are rarely more than five ships completed each year in the entire Federation."
"But . . . we need hundreds, thousands of ships within a few years, not centuries," said the commander sharply, tossing the pen onto the desk. "And there are plans to produce millions of space fighters."
"Yes. That particular bottleneck is why their ships are all converted freighters. They apparently did produce some actual warships, but very few, and losses against the Posleen have wiped them out. There is a Federation-wide shipping shortage because they are losing these converted freighters much faster than they can be replaced."
"You would not have brought this to me if there wasn't an answer," the commander said. Sometimes the chief of procurement could be intensely pedantic, but his answers were usually worth the wait.
"There are only about two hundred master ship builders in existence . . ."
The commander was startled by the number. "Out of how many Indowy?" he asked.
"About fourteen trillion." The chief smiled faintly at the number.
"Fourteen trillion?" the commander gasped.
"Yes. Interesting figure, don't you think?" smirked the procurement officer.
"I should think so! For one thing, the pricing ratio on our troops was based upon Indowy craftsmen wages. There are, at most, one billion potential human soldiers," the commander growled. "Putting their worth as equivalent to an Indowy now seems ludicrous."
"Yes, our personnel are a comparatively finite resource. We seem to have been 'taken,' as the Americans would say, by the Darhel. But that is apparently normal. The Indowy make up eighty percent of the Federation population but their power is quite limited. The Darhel appear to skillfully control their interplanetary media and hold virtual control of the money supply. Since the Darhel control the money, they control the 'chutee,' the mortgages.
"Each Indowy has to purchase tools for his trade. If an Indowy steps out of line his 'chutee' is called and he becomes bereft of income and an untouchable. There is no social support for such; they either commit suicide or die of starvation. Even their family will not help them from a combination of associated shame, similar to the Japanese Giri and Gimu, and fear of retribution. The Indowy also are the servants of the Galactics and fill all servile and menial positions. That is why they are so common in the videos from Barwhon. Although technically a Tchpth planet, eighty percent of the population is Indowy."
"Solution." The commander stood up and paced to the window. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and thought about his longtime friend Chu Feng, lost due to faulty intelligence from these Darhel bastards. And now this.
"We should look for profit to ourselves for our nation specifically in this, but it will be necessary to develop a concerted front with other countries. We should convey this information to the other agreement parties, then begin using the Darhel's strategy against them. Problems should occur in preparing the expeditionary forces; questions unrelated to the central issues should be raised. Finally, the central issues should be quietly raised and some agreements renegotiated. The soldiers and their governments should be paid at a rate conforming to their scarcity; a private should probably make as much as one of the Tir negotiators, for example. And the Darhel must use their power to induce changes among the Indowy." He consulted his notes and tapped the pen on the papers.
"Although there are few accredited master ship builders, there are a vast number of component makers that can work from specifications. The Indowy must be induced to become component producers for assembly plants to be built in various locations. They will be unwilling—it goes against what could be called their religion—but they must be persuaded or forced.
"Then assembly plants can be built in the Terran System. . . ."
"We don't know that we can hold this planet," pointed out the commander. In the distance a flight of pigeons wheeled through the light blue sky. He wondered if such as they might survive a defeat of the humans, or if only the rats and cockroaches would.
"Not on the planet," corrected the junior officer, pedantically. "In orbit around other planets, Mars for example, or in the asteroid belt. Our current information is that, despite the resources available there, the Posleen do not explore or exploit the spatial regions of the planets they attack. Nor, for some strange reason, do the Galactics. Therefore placing production plants in our system is a limited risk. The Posleen will be virtually certain to overlook them; they have bypassed numerous spatial installations in other Galactic systems.
"To continue, there is sufficient excess capacity among the Indowy craftsmen to produce the necessary components for the war effort, but point-by-point assembly will not work in the time allotted. What we must do is produce a navy that assembles like the American 'Liberty' ships of WWII. If we can reach agreement on a few limited designs, components can be made throughout the Federation and shipped to this system. In the meantime we can be constructing assembly plants in various hidden locations in the system. Even if we lose control of the surface, most of our war-production capacity and a sizable gene pool will survive. Maybe enough to retake Earth."
"Funding?" Retaking Earth was not something worth discussing since it meant the loss of China as an extant body. The Middle Kingdom had a culture five thousand years old. The Posleen would destroy it, literally, over his dead body.
"That should be no problem. First, all the orbital facilities can be paid for through Navy funds while being leased on a long term by Terran companies. Special grants were authorized early in the war for Indowy craftsmen to purchase new tools and supplies to produce war goods.
"We, and by that I mean Terra, shall experience technical difficulties in supplying forces until grants for the facilities are made. We use Galactic training systems to train Indowy and humans for work on and in the plants. The Galactics have a multisensory training system that can quickly train personnel in complex skills. We build the facilities, using prefabricated materials, all the way up until the first wave. These facilities produce the weapons, systems, and ships we need to defend Terra. We sell the systems to the Darhel to equip our forces and to acquire planetary defense equipment. We get weapons, the Indowy get work and the Darhel pay for it. Furthermore, since the plants will be in our system and controlled by us we will reap the long-term benefits."
"Why would they do all that?" The commander turned back around and pierced the procurement officer with a stare.
"The question of production forced many pieces of the Galactics' puzzle to the surface. Our staff anthropologist now believes that the 'home sector' of the Darhel is the one hundred or two hundred planets inward from Earth. All five of the planets currently being assimilated or about to be attacked are Darhel. The others lost over the last hundred fifty years, the 'more than seventy planets' they always complain about, are all Indowy colonies, Galactic sweat shops. With the exception of Diess, they were poor and considered unimportant. Now the Posleen are striking at the core worlds of the Federation. Do not let the Darhel fool us again; they are desperate and will pay anything to stop the Posleen.
"And there is one other thing to consider."
"Yes?"
"With humans that are like these Darhel, there is rarely one layer of deception. It is more often a complex web."
"Brad, what do you think?" The President had his back turned to his advisor, staring out through the green-tinted armored glass windows of the most famous small room in the world.
"Well, Mr. President, I say we go with most of the Chinese plan, but hit a little lighter on the negotiations." The secretary of state consulted his notes. "They want the Darhel to foot the whole bill for planetary defense and I don't think they'll do it. And even if they do, the negotiations will be really drawn out and meanwhile we're not producing zip. I think we can get salaries upped pretty easily and the facility grants but let's not get greedy. With progressive taxes on Federation-paid troops, the expeditionary force troops and the space facility corporations, we'll be much better set financially anyway."
"Finance is Ralph's call, Brad, yours is international negotiations," snapped the President. He had been getting uncomfortable with some of the decisions the secretary of state had been making lately. "And I would like you to keep in mind that you work for the United States, not the Darhel. It's our country we stand to lose, Brad, our planet, our children."
"Yes Mr. President, but if we negotiate too long we stand to lose it also. Let's start at full funding but settle for the production equipment grants and, maybe, full funding for planetary defense equipment. As it is we're looking at some pretty tough terms on the loans for the equipment. It would help out a lot."
"Fine Brad, but that's the minimum. If they don't take it, no expeditionary forces, no technical support for their fleet. We'll fight in our boxer shorts before we'll fight as slaves."
"Yes, Mr. President."
"I got him to hold at grants for the production facilities and the expeditionary force equipment." The secretary of state carefully did not watch as the Darhel attempted to eat something very much like a carrot. Bits fell to the table and onto the Darhel's fine robes as the razorlike teeth shredded the vegetable into slivers.
"That is good. Those are judicious expenditures. We will not stint in our payment." The wide cat-pupil eyes dilated in an emotion unreadable by the human as six-fingered hands picked bits of vegetation out of the being's throat crest. "But, full funding for local defense . . . far too generous."
"Don't get stingy," said the secretary, picking at his steak. Something about eating with the Darhel always took his appetite away. "Humans can be stubborn to the point of spite. If you get the image of a Scrooge, nobody will fight for you; at least, nobody who is any good."
"We are aware of this." Again the pupils dilated and the long foxlike ears twitched. The secretary decided he would pay just about anything for a primer on Darhel body language. "It was my contention that the terms were unreasonable from the start but I was overruled. No matter, all will be resolved with time. A favor is owed."
"I trust the payment will be circumspect." The secretary knew that the boss was suspicious of his contacts as it was.
"Assuredly. Your granddaughter is very bright. Perhaps an invitation in about four years to study at an off-planet university?"
"You read my mind." There were some things that money couldn't buy.
For those who kneel beside us,
At altars not Thine own,
Who lack the lights that guide us,
Lord, let their faith atone.
If wrong we did to call them,
By honour bound they came;
Let not Thy Wrath befall them,
But deal to us the blame!
—Kipling