Ambassador of Progress Read online

  Ambassador of Progress

  Walter Jon Williams

  Copyright (c) 1984, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams

  Cover art by Phil Booth

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions in any form.

  Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

  Novels

  Hardwired

  Knight Moves

  Voice of the Whirlwind

  Days of Atonement

  Aristoi

  Metropolitan

  City on Fire

  Ambassador of Progress

  Angel Station

  The Rift

  Implied Spaces

  Divertimenti

  The Crown Jewels

  House of Shards

  Rock of Ages

  Dread Empire's Fall

  The Praxis

  The Sundering

  Conventions of War

  Investments

  Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

  This Is Not a Game

  Deep State

  The Fourth Wall

  Collections

  Facets

  Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

  Ambassador of Progress

  Dedicated to:

  Fred and Joan Saberhagen,

  Two wise Princes of Serendip

  NOTE: A glossary of foreign terms is included at the end of this book.

  PROLOGUE

  In a storm of rain, its brightness a steadier glow among lightning flashes, the shuttle dropped into the high pasture, scattering alarmed cattle which ran in a clatter of bells for the sheltering trees. The fires dwindled; steam rose from the field. Lightning flickered high above, in the passes. The shuttle gate opened and the ramp slid down into the wet, fire-blackened grass. Fiona, a small figure atop her tall horse, came down the ramp, leading her pack mule, and Kira followed with her own beasts.

  The rain pattered on her hood, her shoulders. Fiona turned back for a moment to wave to the figures in the yellow light of the shuttle gate: tall, broad-shouldered Tyson, beside him lithe Wenoa. Their arms were raised in farewell, and for a moment Fiona hesitated, a lump in her throat. It would be years before she saw them, if she survived to see them at all.

  The ramp withdrew; the yellow rectangle of light, with its two waving silhouettes, narrowed and vanished. A siren shrieked briefly: clear the area. Fiona waited until the gate’s dazzle faded from her eyes. Night vision restored, she saw Kira leading her own mule away from the shuttle, and turned to follow, shivering briefly as if shaking water from her shoulders — and as she shivered, she was suddenly conscious of the gesture and wondered what it was she was shaking off: water, the thousands of years of progress since her own world had risen from barbarism, perhaps all her life that had gone before, prelude to this ...? She shivered, turned the horse’s head, and urged it in Kira’s path.

  When the fires began licking once more at the grass, and the shuttle rose blinding into the sky, she did not look back. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t volunteered, after all.

  *

  Fiona and Kira had been born in a year in which it had been fashionable for parents to give their children old Terran names, names recently resurrected from historical records but which were meaningless by the standards of their own culture. The names strangely prefigured their employment, their shared interest in the old star-spanning civilization. They were cousins of a sort, and though they shared no ancestors they were nevertheless distant relations according to the complicated genealogy of their homeworld. They had first met when, at fourteen or so, they’d been undergoing mountaineering training at the home of yet another distant cousin, whose cheerfully volunteered responsibility it had been to train all the family’s youth in mountain reliance, and they’d been fast friends since.

  During school vacations they’d been in the same class on a lot of the family projects: canal maintenance, greenhouse work, soil preservation, each piece of duty supervised by some cousin or other... and when it came time to choose an occupational preference prior to the investment of family money in higher education, they’d both chosen the same field that had, eventually, perhaps inevitably, led them to this midnight delivery on a high mountain pasture.

  Kira was outgoing, and smiled and laughed more often than was usual even in a culture in which smiling and laughing was the norm. Fiona, who laughed less, was a more serious scholar. Both were fine athletes, both stood high in their class, and both were accepted without qualm into the program that would take them to the stars. Both survived, without difficulty, the reconstruction of certain parts of their bodies that was intended to aid them on the planet surface.

  Both volunteered for the first team and because of their high aptitude were accepted, in spite of apprehension on the part of their superiors that perhaps the culture in which they were being delivered might not be as receptive to women as it might have been to men. “They’ve got to learn sometime,” Kira had said — and then she laughed, to divert the sharp glance Tyson had given her. Tyson was brilliant but he laughed less often than almost anyone.

  For three days they negotiated the mountain paths, heading always downslope, northeast. They pitched their tent in solitude, in the light of the big striped moon that dominated the night sky — their own planet didn’t have a moon, and the sight was a constant reminder of the strangeness of this place — and they watched the new world carefully, trying not to be overwhelmed by the newness of it all. The gravity was lighter than what they were used to, and both the women and their animals had a tendency to skip and dance, freer of the ground than they had ever been before — but the overwhelming textures of the new world sobered Fiona quickly, and often caused Kira to frown.

  The vegetation, partly composed of Terran stock, was not entirely unfamiliar, the grasses particularly; but the animals, even those which they knew — like the herds of cattle being driven to the upper pasture, or hens scuttling over the yards of huddled steadings — were products of the six thousand years of separate evolution, and while familiar in outline they were strange in color and detail. The people met on the trails seemed strange in proportion, longer-limbed, taller, weirdly exotic, another function of the lower gravity.

  The northern hemisphere was in transition from winter to summer; the seasons were more violent here than on their arid homeworld, subject to a greater variety of change. The sudden verdure surprised them, the turf springing up suddenly, brown to green, bushes budding and leafing, the trees putting forth new shoots, small animals, sluggish with their interrupted hibernation, coming out of their burrows. As they progressed from the cool upper pastures to the lower slopes where spring was already flowering, it seemed as if the season advanced with even greater speed. It was a little frightening, this sudden burgeoning with its chaos of color, smell, and texture, surprising after years of colorless ship-time.

  The inhabitants varied: some avoided them, but others, the cattlemen bringing their herds up the wide trails, offered them a place at their fires. Fiona was quick to decline, feeling a little ashamed of her cowardice, knowing she would have to deal with these people sooner or later; and Kira, though on her own she would probably have accepted, followed Fiona’s lead. Other inhabitants, children mostly, were harder to avoid: they would follow their horses for miles, asking questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where do you go? What do you do? They gave the answers they had ready: We are Fiona and Kira. We come from across the mountains. We are heading down to the plains. We are magicians, entertainers. No, not witches: we deal only in trickery, in illusion. And what is that, little girl, you have behind your ear? The child’s eyes would widen as Fiona produced her smooth plastic egg, and i
t would be hours before Fiona could send her home.

  Yet talking with the children gave Fiona confidence; the language hypes had drilled the vocabulary and grammar into her, but there was so much that was missing: nuance, slang, dialects, homonyms, and those words that made up the bedrock of any culture, those that defined its social structure, its ideals, its metaphysics. Her language was entirely bland, schoolgirlish; there was no ethical structure behind it, no color, very little slang — and the slang she knew she was afraid to use, for fear she would get it wrong. From the children she learned much, chiefly confidence.

  The fourth morning their paths separated: Kira was going due north, to the twin cities of Neda-Calacas; Fiona would continue northeast to Arrandal. There was little said, and though throughout the morning they both smiled a lot, it was without conviction. At last the moment came, and they embraced, bussed, and promised to stay in touch. Fiona thought her inner clothing and hood to a bright red color in hopes of cheering herself.

  That night she joined the main road, and crossed from one world to another. She had been among mountain folk who lived in isolation, away from the main passes, and though they ostensibly owed allegiance to one lowland baron or another, each steading was in effect independent and the doings in the lowlands scarcely affected them. They were all poor, earning a precarious living from their mountain meadows and clearings; but on the other hand they were also left alone, and ran their own affairs.

  Now, on one of the main roads over the mountains, she was continually on a path controlled by semi-independent barons, who sat above the passes in their stone fortresses like malevolent raptors waiting for prey. They had lately been tamed by the coastal city-states, who had forbidden the worst of their excesses, but still the barons ruled their subjects with a hand composed half of steel and half of cruel whimsy, and Fiona felt her heart suddenly thunder as she turned a corner in the narrow road and saw a steep-walled castle looming over her path.

  She declared her occupation to the guard and paid the toll for herself and her beasts. The guard asked her to wait and howled a query up to the castle; the answer was affirmative. Fiona was requested to stay the night and amaze the baron with her wonders: in return she’d be given a warm bed, a meal, a handful of white money, and a chance to tell her life’s story.

  Any real magician would, of course, have accepted. There was no choice.

  In the hours before her performance was scheduled to start she tried to call Kira on her spindle, hoping to hear a few words of encouragement, but there was a mountain between them and the only way to make certain of the call was to route it through the ship overhead, a tactic Fiona was reluctant to use. For the first time in her life she had stage fright: the supper the kitchens provided was tempting but there was no possibility of eating more than a few bites.

  Nevertheless her first performance on the planet was flawless: she gave the baron and his court minor miracles, sleight-of-hand, juggling, tricks with her special decks of cards — she’d been pleased to find they used cards here. Only at the end of her routine did she use a trick that required her home technology: standing alone in the darkened room, she raised her arms; a red fire shot from her wand, turning into a blazing dragon, breathing fire and glaring with angry yellow eyes; and then the dragon burst into flame-petal fireworks, raining incense down on the wondering faces below — it was an idea stolen from a recently-discovered piece of Terran literature, and no one here would ever recognize the source.

  Fiona accepted payment and thanked milord; he brought her to his table and plied her with questions. Where was she from? What kind of name was Fiona? If she was from Khensin, why didn’t she have the accent? What kind of accent was that, anyway — he couldn’t quite place it. She didn’t look Khemsinla; she was brown and the Khemsinla were usually fair, and taller. Fiona sensed a malevolent interest behind the questions. She fended them off, giving her prepared answers, conflicting apprehensions warring in her. Did this bearded, jowled baron, half-reclining on his settee, his eyes flickering with ill-concealed maleficence as he asked his lazy questions — did this gross brute suspect her of being a spy? If so, he would never know how close his suspicions came to the truth. There was a deeper fear, closer to the bone, that chilled her: was milord bent on rape?

  Carefully her eyes flicked over the room, seeing the baron and his family sitting behind their table, the guards loafing at the doors, the guests, minor nobles and local tradesmen, talking among themselves. She could fight her way out if she had to; there were more pyrotechnics at her behest than those in her magic show; she could kill the fat baron on his couch, burn the guards to cinders, and leave the place in flames if she desired. The laws of her calling, rigid though they were, did not rule out self-defense; but she had no desire to descend to the lowlands with a reputation for slaughter at her back.

  The baron asked another teasing, malevolent question, then turned to speak to his son. Minutes passed, and it became evident that milord had, like a cat distracted from a mousehole, lost interest. Her tension ebbed; she had passed her first major test. That night she blocked her door with her chest of tricks and slept comfortably enough on a straw pallet. In the morning she took her breakfast in the kitchen and continued her ride to the plains.

  She found a caravan and joined it, less for the protection it offered than because it would have looked strange had she continued on alone. Six days later, having reached one of the plains cities, the end of the long caravan route, she sold her horse and mule, changed from trousers, reluctantly, to the more proper skirts, and bought passage for herself on a barge.

  Stretching north to the sea were great, low, fertile flatlands, cut with interlinked waterways: massive rivers, irrigation ditches, and canals, all winding north and northeast from the mountains. By river barge she could reach her destination more swiftly than she would by following the winding paths that might be flooded with the spring runoff, or barred with the toll gates of local barons.

  The barge was eighty feet long, with a deep hold forward and cabins built aft; there was a giant rudder requiring two men at the tiller, and a big square sail amidships. Mules were stabled on the bow to pull the barge when the wind was not with them. Fiona took a cabin for herself, stowed her baggage, and left the barge for an inspection of the town half a mile from the landing. There were mercenary bowmen guarding the landing stage, and Fiona wanted to know why.

  The landing stage and its warehouses were half a mile from the town, which was small and walled in brown stone with about thirty towers. The buildings inside the walls were mostly mud brick and stone, with a few larger, ornamented buildings utilizing half-timber construction — timber was probably rare here in the plains, having to be rafted down from the mountains, and its use in building was, Fiona assumed, a sign of wealth. There were peat-sellers moving in carts from door to door, offering what was burned in fireplaces and ovens instead of the wood they probably couldn’t afford.

  The place seemed moderately prosperous: there was no overcrowding, no obvious poverty. There were a few modest temples to the local gods, and these seemed clean and in good repair. In one corner of the town was a stone castle with a round keep; there were mercenary cavalry moving in and out, as well as local town militia. The walls showed sign of having been recently put into repair. The flags flying over them were dark and tattered.

  She stepped outside the gate opposite the river and instantly walked into misery. Outside clustered the huts and dugouts of a half-starved population: men and women old before their time, toothless crones with their begging bowls stretched out on the ends of arms like sticks, children with swollen bellies. Fiona recognized rickettsia, scurvy, infections that she could not give name to... the town, she saw, made some effort to feed them. Men in livery were moving from one point to another, delivering food and castoff clothing, probably less for compassionate reasons than to give the objects of their charity the strength and means to move elsewhere. There was a black market in the camp of the starving ones, slick, quick
-eyed men, a little better fed than the rest, profiting from their fellows’ desperation.

  She had never seen anything like it before, and though she knew it was an inevitable consequence of this planet’s level of technology, the knowledge had never actually prepared her for the actual sight of it. The scene, and of course the smell, were overwhelming. The sound was worst of all, somehow, for there was no sound, nothing but the whisper of ragged tents in the wind, the toothless mumble of a hag over her begging-bowl, the whimper of a dying child — such silence, compared to the bustle of the landing stage and the town. The silence of despair, of an entire population conserving their strength because they knew there was no place to go, no home for them, no hope...

  Fiona spoke to one of the men in livery and inquired. There had been a war, he said, between two of the neighboring barons, squabbling over a fertile province that each coveted: as a result the place had been made a wasteland, and the hopeless refugees had come here. They had arrived over the course of the winter, and the bones of those who hadn’t survived the journey were still lying huddled by the trails.

  That, she saw, was why the castle had been repaired: the local lord might find himself dragged into the conflict, and even if he avoided that he might have thousands more refugees dumped in his lap when the warfare heated up again in the spring. He was trying to be humane, Fiona thought, but he was looking to his security and probably cursing his choices. If more refugees came he might have to seal his gates, care for his own people, and let those outside starve; or he might simply slaughter them lest they turn brigand.

  There was nothing Fiona could do for them, nothing perhaps but aid an individual, a child... Fiona dropped some change into the bowl of a slack-eyed woman who was nursing a child at her shrunken breast. The woman’s thanks were mumbled; her eyes scarcely brightened at the sight of the money, though it should have been enough to keep her and her child for a week. It had come too late, Fiona thought; the woman might not have the energy left to be able to process food into nourishment for her infant.