wearily at the last shuttle down, leaning against die second-to-last shuttle with his arms folded.
'No, I tell a lie. One more, but that's not for another hour. Some hold up down on Ino.'
'So they're all here now?' Gabriel said, strolling over to lean beside him briefly.
'All the important ones. Gods, what a waste,' Hal said and breathed out. 'I saw you getting off after Old Flat Face this morning. What a treat he must have been. You looked like you wanted to throw up.' 'Duty before comfort,' Gabriel said.
'For this kind of duty? You are sick,' Hal said. 'Sick. Your blood sugar must be off somehow. Did you take a pill before you went to bed?'
'Of course I did, you bollix,' Gabriel said and shoved him amiably.
'Something else must be wrong with you, then. It's not normal for a marine to actively seek any duty except fighting.'
'Well,' Gabriel said, 'maybe, but there's one I'm damned well going to actively seek out-the meeting this afternoon.'
'Fireworks?' Hal said. 'That 'violence' I heard mentioned?'
'I wish I could sell tickets,' Gabriel said. He sighed, stood up straight again. 'Never mind. I've got to go take an anti-cold nostrum.'
'Did we catch a little chill?' Hal said, teasing, as Gabriel headed for the airlock back to the ship. 'More than that,' Gabriel said, and added to himself: A whole lot more than that, I think.
Three hours later it began in the large room that had been set aside aboard Falada as more or less neutral territory for the Ambassador and the negotiating parties to use. It was plush and beautifully decorated, looking like a drawing room one might find in a castle on some ancient Solar Union world. Wood paneling graced the walls. A suavely polished table gleamed beneath the non-glaring, soothing light. Graceful abstract art hung on the walls or stood in the corners on demure pedestals. Any normal person would have found the effect restful, calming, but these were not normal people. Gabriel stood in his 'guard' position by the door and waited, aware that his pulse rate was starting to rise. The negotiating teams filed in, their leaders coming last. Rallet came first, with his oddly shaped head that made Gabriel think that at some point in his life his mother had lost patience with him and hit him in the face with a shovel. Then came ErDai-shan, with a face that had long since fixed itself into deep and permanent lines of dissatisfaction with everything around her, from the lighting and the shape of the table to the fact that she had to breathe the same air as her opponent across the table did. They looked at each other with animated loathing. It occurred to Gabriel suddenly that what he was seeing here was a marriage ... one into which the ambassador had unwelcomely intruded, bearing an olive branch instead of what each of the parties wanted: a stick to beat the other one with. Gabriel, meanwhile, held his breath to see what they would make of the stick that the ambassador was about to produce. 'Thank you all for your promptness,' Delvecchio said. 'Before we resume the proceedings, I must take your excellencies into my confidence and ask you both a question that will determine much of the direction of what remains for us all to do today.'
They looked at her attentively, with loathing only a little less than that they reserved for each other. Their respective civil servants shuffled and muttered and rustled paperwork, bound and unbound, and sorted carts, already uneasy with the breach in the order of the day. 'Did you really think you could get away with it?' said the ambassador.
Those two faces went from loathing to the beginnings of outrage. Gabriel had seen this before, the how- dare-you-speak-that-way-to-me expression. But it was reflex in these two, and now it was edged with something much more noticeable: fear.
'I must inform you that this will be our last meeting,' said the ambassador, 'one way or the other-except for the very minor tidying up, which your assistants will manage. Since we last met, conditions have changed.'
'Ambassador, this is outrageous. We are not children to be scolded by a mere-' 'Ordinen,' said Delvecchio. 'Mashan.'
Both their mouths fell open, even ErDaishan's mouth, that mouth whose lips never moved while its owner spoke. Now it worked, that mouth, and words tried to make it out, but couldn't. 'Ordinen is safe,' said Delvecchio, 'and we have holo, lots of it, of your ships attempting the attack. And Mashan. Yes, Mashan is not just the name of a small town in the dust any more. We have holo of that too. Dirty breeding,' and the ambassador shook her head like a mother tut-tutting over a child's dirty playclothes. 'What will your investors think? And what about Ordinen, which you had guaranteed could produce eight thousand tons of refined ores per week? Not after all those tunnels had been blown into one great crater, it wouldn't.'
The two stood up slowly, from either side of the table, with expressions of terrible rage on their faces, and they began to scream at each other.
The Crack! that came from the middle of the table stopped them. It was the cane, the one the ambassador had used to come aboard for the first few meetings, the long black cane she walked with or made show of walking with sometimes. Now, though, Gabriel finally understood what it was really for. 'Don't bother,' said the ambassador, very softly. 'Collusion. It has been heavy in the air for the last few weeks. You two thought you were quite circumspect. No one knew about this, not even your own people, just the very few in your own defense forces whom you suborned to this business. Here, on this matter only, just this once, you were able to agree.'
The silence that fell had weight. First it pushed ErDaishan back down into her seat, then Rallet. 'So many other things you might have agreed on,' said the ambassador, 'but no. This, though, you thought you could get away with. I am sorry to interfere with your perception of your control over of the scheme of things, sir, madam. But now you have pulled the forces of the world around you a little too far out of shape. And like gravity and the other forces, the response is immediate. The talks are dissolved by cause of concrete proof of bad faith on both sides, and I must report my failure to the Concord.' The two Thalaassan delegates sitting opposite one another went ashen. They did not start screaming, but they did start talking. Slowly at first, then faster. One of them, then the other, and then both together.
They became two matching portions of an incoherent babble, and Gabriel finally had to stop trying to make sense of it. The ambassador said nothing at all, just let them talk, let them run down. It took nearly half an hour.
Finally that heavy silence fell again. The ambassador leaned back in her chair and waited.
'Madam,' said ErDaishan finally, 'you do not understand. It cannot end like this-'
'It has ended,' said Delvecchio. Was that just the shadow of a smile on her face, Gabriel wondered?
'If there was something that we could do-'
'If there was just some way that-'
'I await your suggestions with interest,' said Delvecchio, 'but I have no idea what can possibly restore the status quo that your acts have shattered.'
She sat there and listened to them for another hour. During this period Gabriel had to revert to mind- control again, using the routine that helps keep the body from twitching while the brain is wishing it was somewhere else, anywhere else. The mitigating factor, the only thing helping Gabriel feel less than completely twitchy, was that the two negotiators-helped eventually by their teams-slowly began to suggest the very series of face-saving maneuvers that Delvecchio had described to him and written up for her team three days before. It occurred to Rallet and ErDai-shan in fits and starts, in pieces that had to be rearranged, and some of those pieces caused screaming nearly as vehement as that which had begun the session. But slowly they created the solution that Delvecchio had predicted, almost paragraph for paragraph as the writing up began, as if they had genuinely thought of it all themselves. Gabriel had often enough wondered if the ambassador had a little mindwalker in her somewhere. Now he was less sure. What he was seeing was certainly something that could pass for predicting the future or mind reading, but it was neither of these. It was an understanding of people in general and these two people in particular and the circumstances that surrounded them-and it was so profound that once or twice it made Gabriel shiver. Also once or twice he saw ErDaishan or Rallet look up from the documents wearing an expression that was a terrible mixture of anger and, not fear, but now (toward the end of it all) disgust. Disgust at having been caught, at the unfairness of it. Gabriel looked at the ambassador, but no reaction to their expressions revealed itself on her face. She was like a statue, one that occasionally spoke to approve something and otherwise caused people to make notes very fast as they worked to produce the approving result again.
This process ran at least another three hours. Gabriel lost track of the time. His inner clock had for the time being been badly skewed by having to keep himself still. He was actually jarred back to consciousness-not that he had been sleeping, just elsewhere in mind-by the ambassador's voice saying, very simply, 'No.'
