Manna Page 4

  “I’d find out about them sooner or later,” I told him.

  Ali, Vaivan, and Wahak took me in tow for dinner. It had been a long time since I’d been to a pot-luck faculty supper with my parents in Santa Barbara, but that’s what this dinner amounted to. Each part of the family brought something. The result was a trencherman’s paradise.

  “Everyone loves my guacamole and refried beans,” Ali remarked. “If I hadn’t been outcountry, I’d have been told to bring some. Personally, I think my Texas chili is better, but…”

  “Where did you learn to make that?” I wanted to know.

  “In school,” Ali replied. “We’ve all brought back favorite recipes from places we’ve been.”

  “Tell me,” I asked my host as we proceeded through the line past the loaded table covered with dishes from around the world, “are there any native foods here?”

  Ali shook his head. “No, but you wouldn’t like them anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t like the last native specialty people such as The General had to eat to during the war. Canine meat’s too tough, gamy, and strong flavored. And occasionally you’ll hear the old insult.” He spoke something in the Gallo language, full of clicks and glottals.

  “Which means?” I wanted to know.

  “ ‘Some day I’ll eat you.’ “

  I didn’t bring up the subject of local food again.

  We ate at tables for eight. It was nothing I wouldn’t expect anywhere in the world. Karederu Center was equipped with fully automatic kitchen equipment, so no one had to do the dishes or take out the garbage. That meant everyone could get right down to business afterwards.

  The General didn’t preside. The meeting was called to order by Ali’s father, Rayo Sabinos Vamori, eldest son of The General. The conference extended beyond Karederu Center common via interactive voxvideo display screens revealing other Commonwealth people gathered in their own centers plus people located all over the world and in space.

  I thought of a dozen ways someone could tap the net.

  Vaivan guessed I was thinking about it because she remarked, “The subcarriers on our leased transponders don’t use standard encoding, Sandy. In spite of the fact that I handle security matters for both Landlimo Corporation and Commonwealth Space Transport or ComSpat, I don’t know how it’s done. It’s something like pseudo-random noise coding with frequency shifts and jumps combined with multichannel switching. Aunt Roseiada—the older lady sitting over there—is the only one who knew the software program.”

  “Past tense?”

  “It’s so complex that only the master computers remember it.”

  “Difficult to crack.”

  “Impossible, Sandy.”

  “Didn’t you tell me about the dangers of believing something to be impossible?”

  “Seven levels of serial encryption coding would require more attoseconds to scan than remain in the life of the universe.”

  “Everybody on?” Rayo Vamori wanted to know as he stood before the assembled group and the banks of the video display screens.

  Other members of the Vamori family were on the net, as well as some other families I hadn’t heard of yet—Stoak, Tatri, Abiku, Teaq, Tehat, Delkot, Kom, Dati, and Chiuili.

  Commonwealth given and family names sounded vaguely familiar. I didn’t know whether their sounds were distorted slightly by the Commonwealth accent or whether they were indeed altered.

  Some of the participants were definitely outlanders. Each of them identified themselves as part of the meeting protocol, although it was apparent they were known in the group—the Chungs from Hong Kong, the Wangs of Singapore, Nissamaghadi Phalonagri of the Madras Bank Phalonagris, Hudayadha-ben-Mukhalla of Dhahran, Captain Kevin Graham of the League of Free Traders at the Vamori Free Space Port, the round-faced Skinner “Trip” Sinclair in Houston, and two who were obviously in the weightlessness of a space facility, Jeri Hospah and Ursila Peri whose attractiveness was apparent in spite of the effects of zero-gee on her face.

  I was asked to stand for introduction. “Sandy Baldwin, former Captain, United States Aerospace Force, now of Landlimo,” was the introduction Rayo Vamori intoned…and I hadn’t even formally joined the company yet! But now everyone involved in the operation knew me, and this meeting would certainly bring me up to speed on what was going on and why they needed a military aerospace pilot.

  “I still haven’t said yes,” I mentioned aside to Ali. “How do you know I won’t snitch to my former employers?”

  Ali shook his head almost imperceptably. “As an Academy graduate, you hold personal honor high on your list of priorities. You won’t twig to anyone for the simple reason that I ask you not to, whether you come with us or not…which you will, I’m sure.”

  He was right. I was already in and swimming with them…against the tide, perhaps. And even if I didn’t go along in whatever they were planning to do, I wouldn’t run back to the Aerospace organization, not after the way I’d been treated for doing my job.

  “Alichin Vamori is back from the Santa Fe conference,” Rayo Vamori began. “We knew what was likely to happen, so now we weren’t caught totally unprepared. Some, but…”

  “Did you believe they wouldn’t move as they did, Vamori?” Phalonagri of Madras remarked.

  “We were surprised.”

  “But we had adequate advance intelligence data,” Wen-ling Chung of Hong Kong pointed out.

  Rayo looked at Vaivan who said, “We had good data, but some didn’t believe the Tripartite would really go through with it.”

  Trip Sinclair in Houston broke in with, “I’ve got to agree with Vaivan. Most of my colleagues here didn’t think the Tripartite had the guts…”

  “They did,” The General interrupted. “Never mind recriminations. Perhaps someday there will be time to analyze everything that led up to this. But we can’t afford that luxury now. Let’s get on with what we must do.”

  “We’d best start with Alichin’s report,” Rayo Vamori said.

  Ali stood and walked to the center of the group where he had the best view of the gathering at Karederu Center and the screens showing the other people participating in the telecon. He inclined his head toward one of the video screens. “President Nogal, you’ll get my formal report as soon as I draft it and put it in your computer. I’ll be happy to make an informal verbal report to the Executive Commission…”

  The image of a middle-aged man on one of the screens inclined his head and said, “Most of the Commission is on the net as well as the Chairs of the House of Trustees and the House of Directors. Time is of the essence.”

  Ali took a deep breath and said to everyone, “I didn’t relish representing the Commonwealth in Santa Fe. I didn’t trust the people who set up the Conference, and I didn’t trust the people who participated. They’re puppets of their respective power groups. But since all of you believed I knew more than anyone else in the Commonwealth about the overall space activities of interest to us, I accepted the appointment reluctantly. However, once appointed I tried to act in the best interests of all of us. If anyone has a serious complaint of a personal nature concerning the way I handled things in Santa Fe, arrange to meet me and wear your iklawa.”

  Ali was a good speaker with an excellent command of the English language. When he addressed a group like this, he shifted out of his Commonwealth accent into one that was universally heard on the comm/info net telenews and educational programming. People in high-tech countries tend to forget the comm/info net is used more in the low-tech world than anywhere else because information is vital to their existence in low-tech. I found myself wishing that more people had taken advantage of it as the Commonwealthers had.

  “We knew in advance the Conference was rigged,” Ali went on. “But none of us anticipated that one hundred and eighty-six nations would support the tariff agreement. We thought we’d find some support for the Commonwealth amendment.”

  There’d been nothing on telenews about any Commonwealt
h amendment to the Santa Fe space tariff agreements.

  “We should have realized that the Conference was held on the home ground of the Tripartite Coalition,” Ali continued. “They knew where everyone was quartered in Santa Fe. They could establish communications easily any time they wanted, whereas I had difficulty reaching reps from other countries who’d given us indications of supporting our free trade amendment. The Tripartite obviously made a prior arrangement with the PetroFed and probably also the Socialist Hegonomy. They had everything worked out long in advance.

  The Conference was intended only to put official approval on the tariff agreement by the governments involved.”

  “They don’t really believe the Commonwealth legislature is going to change the basic laws of this nation and install tax collectors at Vamori Free Space Port, do they?” the Commonwealth President wanted to know. “Even if the legislature managed to do it, the Board of Jurisprudence would rule it unconstitutional the first time somebody brought it before them.”

  “We’d bring suit immediately,” Captain Kevin Graham of the League of Free Traders put in from his space port office. “Vamori-Free is absolutely essential to the continued operation of free traders in space. In fact, the League itself—to say nothing of other traders—wouldn’t exist without Vamori-Free and the free-ports in space.”

  “Was the Conference made aware of the internal problem of the Commonwealth in implementing the Santa Fe tariffs?” asked Vaya Volkatu Delkot, manager of the Vamori Free Space Port who would have looked more at home in the high fashion studios of Paris, Beverly Hills, or Tokyo.

  “Very few people in high-tech understand the Commonwealth,” General Vamori said.

  “The Tripartite and other power groups probably didn’t believe their own evaluations, projections, and intelligence sources. That’s been their history. They’ve lost a lot of conflicts because of it, but they’ve won more over the long haul because they control capital. They don’t control ours and never have. Fifty years ago, we made sure they couldn’t. It didn’t bother them then; they wrote us off as an impractical experiment that couldn’t succeed in the light of the history of this continent. We were an impossible institution; therefore, we wouldn’t continue to exist. We did. And, as we anticipated, our success threatens the foundations of their power.”

  “South Africa,” Wen-Ling Chung of Hong Kong observed, “was a highly successful experiment, too. But they nipped it before it became a threat.”

  “It took longer there because only small power groups were involved,” Trip Sinclair in Houston corrected him. “The Diamond Trust and the Gold Debasers have been in bed with the Eurobanks for centuries.”

  The General broke in, “We’ve all been taught history. We must now write some history of our own. We must modify Phase Two because of the boycott amendment they adopted after Alichin left the Conference. Does anyone have a copy of that yet?”

  “I do,” Vaivan told him.

  “So do I,” Trip Sinclair added. “You’re getting pretty fast, Vaivan.”

  “Or you’re slowing down, Trip. I’ve got much the same channels as you do.”

  “Perhaps. But mine work through several Old Boy and Good Old Boy networks here in the States.”

  “What’s the difference between them?” Ali wanted to know.

  “One’s New England and New York based, and the other extends from Atlanta to Dallas. Both have extensions all over the Western Hemisphere.”

  “How do we know we aren’t being penetrated by Tripartite intelligence agents right now?” Ali asked.

  “We’re penetrated,” Vaivan admitted. “I’m reasonably certain their agents are on this net.”

  “Our only defense is their own historic inclination to disbelieve the reports of their intelligence operatives and analysts because the reports don’t agree with their world picture. The world’s run with very little real knowledge—mostly by hunches, emotion, and sheer wishful thinking,” The General said and admonished Ali, “Let’s get back on track.”

  “Trip, give us a run-down on that amendment. All I know is what I heard on Weltfenster telenews a few hours ago,” Ali said.

  The Houston attorney looked to one side and punched his office keypad. We couldn’t see what came up on his VDT, but he told us, “To summarize the main points, signatories to the Conference tariff document agree to boycott non-signatory organizations. Note that I used the word ‘organizations’ because that’s the way they phrased the amendment.”

  “Apparently they know enough about us to realize that Commonwealth space commerce activities have no political regulation,” Vaya Delkot said.

  “Yes, the wording is such that the boycott will affect all space commerce activities carried on by the Commonwealth and its registered space facilities,” Trip Sinclair observed, “even the League of Free Traders, Kevin.”

  “How about our Lagrangian operations?” Ursila Peri’s video image wanted to know.

  “How can they boycott trade operations off-planet?”

  “Is your air bill current, Ursila?” Trip asked her.

  “Yes, but even if it wasn’t, nobody out here would cut off another person’s life support. If the credit line got over-extended by too much for too long, we’d put the debtor on a ship home. We work together because there’s a lot of nothing waiting for everybody beyond the bulkhead,” she said. “They’re going to have trouble enforcing tariff arrangements and trade boycotts out here. That agreement sounds exactly like something written up by a bunch of people who always have pressure around them and gravity to keep their feet on the floor. Earthworms!” She made it sound like an insult.

  “That’s what I mean about changing the planning for Phase Two,” The General said, but with more insistence this time. “We didn’t consider a boycott as a viable option for them. They made the mistake of believing it to be workable here and in space. Therefore, we’re ahead of them in several respects. And we’ve got to revise our programs to take advantage of this. Look at the elements of our situation.”

  He didn’t have to move into voxvideo pickup range; the pickups moved to him instead.

  He began ticking off his points on his fingers.

  “One: they don’t understand us, but we understand them, even though we don’t have them as thoroughly compromised by espionage as we’d like. However, what advantage we may have in their lack of understanding may not last because the Japanese members of the Tripartite can tell them all about this sort of thing from both sides of the fence. I’m referring to Tsushima, Pearl Harbor, and Space War One.

  “Two: They’re big and we’re small. Therefore, we can move faster and in novel directions. We can put them off balance and keep them that way if we’re innovative.

  “Three: They’re certain to squabble over the spoils as these begin to come in from signatories to the tariff agreement. This will slow them down and consume some of the time and effort they’d otherwise direct toward us. Greed born of scarcity plays a big part in their lives. On the other hand, all of us know there’s more than enough for everyone.

  “Four: The tariff agreement and the boycott amendment are unworkable off-planet. We can certainly take advantage of that because it meshes with existing plans for Phase Two. It will take them some time to discover how unworkable it really is. That’s time we can use to our advantage.

  “Five: We can further distract them by purporting to go along with their game but being forced by our own internal politics to change our national laws. This is a stalling tactic to allow us to get our own programs set up. That gives us more time.

  “Time is on our side if we use it wisely. We must not squander it because, unlike the rest of the universe, it isn’t plentiful.”

  I was fascinated by his grasp of what seemed to me to be an incredibly complex worldwide activity. And when The General spoke, everyone there and on the net listened.

  The apparent leadership power of this man was uncanny. I felt as though I were listening to a modern messiah.

 
“There’s always some common ground for negotiation in anything, including this situation.” It was Heinrich von Undine who spoke up. Some people present looked at him with severely sharp expressions. “Ali, perhaps your actions in Santa Fe were a bit precipitous—although I intend that only as an observation after the fact. The Commonwealth has existed for fifty years and there’s a greal deal of foreign investment here. The aid and assistance of foreign corporations and consultants have been hallmarks of Commonwealth progress. In short, the people you believe are out to despoil the Commonwealth by destroying our free trade activities may simply be acting in their own self interest. Try to see it from their point of view. The watchword of weltpolitik for a century now has been co-operation, not physical coercion.”

  “I cannot agree with your assessment, Heinrich,” The General countered with unexpected grace. “Once we became big enough to threaten the major world power groups and therefore worthy of their attention, they chose not to co-operate with us but to bring us under their control. When they discover they can’t do it, they’ll try to destroy us. We’ll have no recourse but to fight. However, we’ll fight on our terms, not theirs.”

  General Vamori looked around, then continued, “We can win if we change the game. We can utilize the new element in the world power game: space. It’s a game element they don’t realize exists. We do. If we carry out all the proper actions at the proper time, we can defuse this international situation and create a new world power game based on the reality that we live in a system of plenty, not scarcity.”

  His resonant voice suddenly dropped to a level where we could barely hear what he said with great sadness, “But if it indeed comes to armed conflict, we will have no recourse but to defend the Commonwealth proper and perhaps participate in what may become, God forbid, Space War Two.”

  Chapter 4

  The Play of Power and Flame

  Alichin Vamori broke the silence that followed his grandfather’s words. “The first action in the revised Phase Two program lies in your hands, President Nogal. May I suggest that you make a public announcement on telenews dismissing me for poor judgement because I walked out of the Santa Fe conference and damaged the position of the Commonwealth in the community of nations? Then banish me to space where I can’t cause any more damage.”