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 it would be hours before Fiona could send her home.