Don nodded again, slowly.
‘And at that point, you decided you had to tell someone what you knew.’
‘No,’ Don sighed. ‘At that point I just bubbled around like boiling sugar for a time, while everyone patted me on the head. Then I got some sense and I decided to keep my mouth shut.’
‘You didn’t say that!’ Jamieson complained, while Tasmin gave him a sidelong look.
‘It was a fleeting decision,’ she explained. ‘Figure it out for yourself, acolyte. If I come up with proof of sentience, somebody will have to do something about it. The Planetary Exploitation Council has to take some action, don’t they? I think everyone assumes that once sentience is established, on any planet, not just Jubal, humans have to get out.’
‘Not everywhere. Not always,’ Tasmin said.
‘No, not everywhere, not always, but those are the rare exceptions. So, why should I want to tip the tripwagon? I earn my living here, just the way you do. My friends are here. My livelihood is here. Besides – it’s Jubal! It’s home! I don’t want to leave here. So after I came down out of the clouds, the first thing I decided to do was keep my stupid mouth shut. Of course, that was after I went giggling around for several days like a damned fool. Anybody who looked at me probably knew I’d found something.’ She sighed again, rubbing grubby hands up the sides of her face, leaving long smears of soil.
Clarin passed cups of steaming tea and commented, ‘Presumably you decided differently after a while.’
‘After I’d had a chance to think, yes. We all know the CHASE Commission is due to meet here very soon. And everyone knows it’s rigged. Lord, the chairman of the commission is the Governor’s own stepson, and everyone knows that BDL owns the Governor. So, it’s pretty sure the results of the commission hearings are prearranged. And we all know what BDL wants those to be. Nonsentient. So then I got to thinking about what will happen after the CHASE Commission reports.’
‘And,’ Jamieson said impatiently.
‘And what will happen is that BDL won’t go on paying Explorers and Tripsingers when they don’t have to.’
Jamieson gave her a puzzled look. ‘I don’t understand.’
Tasmin nodded. What she said reinforced some suspicions of his own. ‘If the CHASE Commission reports nonsentience, the PEC strictures will be removed. They’re the usual strictures imposed by the PEC on any planet where indigenous sentience is a question.’
‘Nondestruction of habitat,’ quoted Clarin. ‘Something like that.’
‘Exactly like that,’ Tasmin nodded.
Jamieson still looked puzzled.
‘If the strictures are removed,’ Clarin explained to him, ‘then BDL can destroy whatever they like.’
Jamieson’s mouth fell open. ‘They wouldn’t! The Presences are absolutely unique!’
‘It’s never stopped humans before,’ Tasmin said, thinking of the histories he had read in the citadel. Rivers turned into sewers. Mountains leveled into rubble. All for the profit of the great agglomerates. ‘Not where profit is concerned. Think how profits could be increased if BDL didn’t have to use Explorers or Tripsingers or wagon trains. Think how much brou could be moved if they could fly the cargo in and out.’
‘It stinks,’ said Clarin with feeling.
‘It stinks,’ agreed Donatella. ‘But it’s obvious once you start thinking about it. So, quite selfishly I’d decided to keep my mouth shut, but then I realized it wouldn’t make any difference. Most likely I was going to be out of work and off-planet no matter what happened, and so was everyone else I knew. At that point, I decided to do what I should have decided in the first place. For Jubal’s sake, not mine.’
‘To get the word out,’ Clarin continued. ‘However, you suspected that if you simply spoke out, you would probably be silenced.’
‘I think it was a reasonable assumption,’ Don said, gesturing back the way they had come. ‘You saw them.’
Clarin leaned back on one arm and continued her recapitulation. ‘At this point the story gets a little confusing for me. You contacted a friend, whom you do not identify to us….’
‘For that friend’s own protection,’ Don assented, half angrily. ‘You say you’re the good guys, but how the hell do I know.’
‘All right. I’ll pay chits for that. So, you contact this friend, and you and the friend work up this plan. You decide to get one of the Top Six ’Soilcoast Singers to get the word out for you. You’re going to feed this singer certain information, which will then be used as the basis for a show.’
‘Part of the information was in the Enigma score, and I was the only one who had it at that point. We tried to figure out a way the singer could get the score without tracing it back to me. Then my friend told me Lim Terree could get the score from his brother in Deepsoil Five, Tripsinger Tasmin Ferrence, because I’d already sent it to you for scoring….’ Her voice trailed away. ‘I hadn’t known you were his brother. Getting it from you seemed less culpable. I didn’t think anyone would be surprised if he got it from someone in his own family. It wouldn’t seem like …’
‘Like a conspiracy,’ Tasmin finished for her. ‘It wouldn’t make BDL suspicious.’
She nodded gratefully. ‘I thought not. Our plan was that by the time anyone at BDL smartened to what was going on, everyone on Jubal would be talking about the show. Oh, people would doubt that what was in the show was real information, but it would still be widespread by then. Too widespread to stop. And the talk alone would make the PEC pay attention, whether they believed or not. Then, too, there’d be holo cubes made and distributed. It wouldn’t be controllable. Too many people would know.’
Clarin asked, ‘It wasn’t part of your plan that Lim Terree would go up on the Enigma?’
‘Lord, no! He wasn’t a Tripsinger. It wasn’t even a proven
