While Star Runner was still under way to Earthsea, the six deployment vehicles had made their first drops of standalone QE radios into orbit around new colony planets. The radios had patched into the news wires on their respective planets, and forwarded those transmissions to the operations group on Arcadia.
After a month of collecting the news wire feeds, and the operations group and others analyzing the data, briefing materials were prepared for Rob Milbank.
Arcadia Prime Minister Rob Milbank scheduled a meeting with his first allies in the colony trade project, Earthsea Director Valerie Laurent and Amber President Jean Dufort.
“Valerie, Jean, thanks for attending this meeting,” Milbank said.
“Sure, Rob. What’s going on?” Dufort asked.
“We have standalone QE radios now in orbit around six new colony planets. My people have been analyzing the data we’re getting, and I have briefing books on them all.”
“Oh, my,” Laurent said. “A flood of new colonies.”
“Exactly, and there’s still eight more to go,” Milbank said. “So now what do we do?”
“Can we call them?” Dufort asked.
“Yes,” Laurent said, “but it will come in without a local identifier. So it will probably go to a secretary or something.”
“Probably best then would be to have a secretary try to get through. You know, ‘This is colony planet Arcadia calling. I’m placing a call for Prime Minister Rob Milbank. Could you put me through to President Smith’s office, please?’”
Milbank nodded. He hadn’t thought of that angle.
“Maybe we can alias the identifier,” Laurent said. “Get it to show planet name followed by local name on that planet. That would probably help. I’ll look into it.”
“Thanks, Valerie,” Milbank said. “What I was wondering is, Can we split these up among us? Each take two?”
“Spread out the workload? Sounds good to me,” Dufort said.
“Not just that. I also want to make sure Arcadia is just one among equals. No leadership role. Down that road is trouble. We’ve all hung together so far.”
Laurent and Dufort both nodded.
“Sure, Rob,” Laurent said. “Makes sense to me. And when the next eight come on-line, we can probably get some of the others involved, too.”
Milbank nodded.
“I think that would be a good move, too,” he said.
“Let me talk to Bali and Nirvana,” Dufort said. “They’re both in medical sciences with endocrinology and anti-cancer research. I speak the lingo better.”
“Let me talk to Hawaii and Fiji,” Laurent said. “Hawaii is big in comm and crypto, so that works.”
“Fiji’s technical specialty is immunology, though, Valerie.”
“Yes, but they also reportedly have excellent beers, Rob. Beer and cheese. Can’t beat it.”
Milbank laughed.
“OK, so that leaves me with Terminus and Samoa,” Milbank said. “We’re all agreed, then?”
“It’s good with me, Rob,” Dufort said.
“Me, too,” Laurent said.
“OK. Thanks. I’ll send you both the latest videos, including the ones we have now from Aruba, Olympia, Playa, and Tahiti. Let’s see where we get.”
For all that having a shuttle call in for landing clearance at your shuttleport – a shuttle claiming to be from a different planet – was disorienting, it was more believable than a video call from someone claiming to be on a different planet.
The shuttle, after all, was a physical thing. It was there. There was no denying it. And it clearly wasn’t one of yours. The design, the markings, were mute testimony to the truth of what the visitors claimed.
Not so with a video call.
As Rob Milbank found out.
“Mr. President, I have a video meeting request from someone claiming to be the prime minister of the colony planet Arcadia.”
“Hmpf. I’ve told you not to bring me prank calls, Emily.”
“I’m not so sure on this one, sir. It doesn’t sound like a prank call to me.”
Samoan President Jasper Tilden sighed.
“Very well. Pass it through, Emily.”
“Yes, Sir.”
A man in his late sixties appeared in Tilden’s display.
“President Tilden, my name is Rob Milbank. I am the prime minister of the colony planet Arcadia.”
“A likely story. You came in on our network, like you’re calling from somewhere down the block. I’ve had prank calls before. This one isn’t even very creative.”
Milbank didn’t know what to say to that at first. He hadn’t expected somebody to just plain not believe him. Then he had an idea.
“President Tilden, would you allow me a few moments to prove my claim to you?”
“Sure. Go ahead. This I gotta see.”
Milbank got up from his desk and walked out of his offices to the elevator bank, and took the elevator down to street level. He walked out into Charter Square. It was early afternoon, and there were a lot of people about in the square. It was a beautiful day, and about ten percent of them were nude.
Milbank switched his transmission from his own face to a view of the square.
“Does this look like Samoa, Mr. President?”
Tilden looked at the imagery. It could still be faked. How could he tell for sure if it wasn’t?
“Stop those three young women there, and ask them what flavor of ice cream they have,” Tilden said.
“All right,” Milbank said. Then louder: “Excuse me, miss.”
Three pretty girls about sixteen, walking through the square eating ice cream, stopped when Milbank addressed them. All three were nude.
“Yes? Oh, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Could you tell me what flavor of ice cream you have?”
“I have chocolate.”
“Me, too,” a second said. “I love chocolate.”
“I have butter pecan, sir,” the third said.
“Thank you,” Milbank said. “I was just curious.”
“Of course, Mr. Prime Minister.”
They walked on, and Milbank turned so Tilden could watch them walk away. The view was just as fetching – and just as impossible on Samoa – from this angle.
“Does this look like Samoa to you, Mr. President?”
No, it doesn’t, Tilden thought. The buildings were all wrong, for one thing. Samoa had a very different architecture, enabled by its advances in materials science. They had no downtown park like this square his caller was walking around in. And they certainly didn’t have people just walking around nude in public. Topless on the beaches, yes, certainly. But not completely nude, and not in the middle of town in any case.
At the same time, it couldn’t just be a simulation. He had picked those girls himself, and he had framed the question. Besides which, it was mid-morning in Samoa’s capital of Apia, and the morning rain had just moved through. Milbank’s square had been dry.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, but your claim was so incredible on its face....”
“I understand, President Tilden.”
“And your name again, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Rob Milbank.”
Tilden saw people waving to Milbank, or saying ‘Hello, Mr. Prime Minister’ or even ‘Hi, Rob’ as he walked back across the square to the building his office was in.
Milbank waited until he was back in his office, behind his desk, before he switched the view back to himself. He was mopping his forehead.
“Sorry, Mr. President. It’s a little warm today to be running around outside in a suit at the height of the day.”
“I understand, Mr. Prime Minister, and thank you for offering proof you are who you say you are. It is something of a shock, though.”
“Oh, I understand, Mr. Prime Minister. We have been getting in touch with the other human colonies as fast as we can find them and get a quantum entanglement radio out there. We just managed to get a radio to you.”
“That’s why we can speak in real-time, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Yes. There’s a little time lag, because our probe dropped the radio in orbit, but that’s why we can speak over thousands of light-years, Mr. President.”
Tilden nodded.
“So now what, Mr. Prime Minister?” Tilden asked.
“I have a package of videos and background material I would like to send you, Mr. President. When you and your people have reviewed those, we should speak again.”
“Very well, Mr. Prime Minister. Until next time, then.”
“What do you think, Mark?” Tilden asked his chief of staff. “Did you get a chance to look at the videos?”
“Yes, sir, and the supplementary materials,” Mark Wegner said.
“What do you think? Is it real?”
“I did a little leg work on that, sir. I sent the videos over to the computer types at the university. They don’t see any artifacts of a simulation. Now they were quick to caution they could be simulations, they just don’t see it. And I would expect them to see some slip-up somewhere, in a package that big.”
“I think so, too,” Tilden said. “Especially the real-time video of Milbank in the plaza.”
“Yes, sir, and the fact it was real-time, and you selected the girls and the question, means a simulation would have had to have been constructed or modified in real-time, and they just don’t see that happening.
“There’s one other big thing, though, Mr. President.”
“What’s that Mark?”
“I had the astronomy guys check for a new satellite, and they found one,” Wegner said. “It looks like a shipping container, sir, and it says EARTHSEA COMMUNICATIONS along the side.”
“Damn. That tears it then.”
Wegner nodded.
“We certainly didn’t put it there, sir. And it wasn’t there the last time they looked at that location. A month ago.”
“QE radio links have to be manufactured together, right? I mean, the two ends of the link,” Tilden said.
“Yes, sir. You have to produce a pair of entangled particles, then capture them both, and take one of them to the other location.”
“So the other end of that link is going to be on Earthsea.”
“Probably, sir,” Wegner said. “They could have taken the other end somewhere else, I suppose, but there was no reason to if they have a redundant interstellar network among the other planets as they claim. Milbank can talk to you over his link to Earthsea and that link to here.”
Tilden nodded.
“So the question is, Now what do we do?” he said.
“Do we want to be a part of their trade network, sir?”
“What do we trade?”
“Our materials science,” Wegner said. “That’s one thing. The alloys, the compounds, the machines, like the extrusion machines and the fusing machines, the machine tools. A lot of products there, sir. The impact on building, manufacturing, civil engineering – all infrastructure, really – is hard to overstate. Plus we have architecture.”
“Ship out architects, Mark?”
“No, sir. That’s a brain drain. The architecture can be done here. That’s cash flow. Interstellar balance of payments stuff.”
Tilden nodded.
“The bigger question, sir,” Wegner said, “is, Do we want to be a part of it?”
“I think so, Mark. Some of those other products look compelling, and fit well with ours. Imagine the building boom, with our materials and Playa’s robots, for example. We can bid buildings complete.”
“The robots won’t know how to build using our machines and methods, though, sir.”
“No,” Tilden said, “but if you teach one, they all know. Think about the implications of that.”
Wegner’s eyes grew wide.
“I see, sir. I do see, indeed.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Rob Milbank said.
“Call me Jasper, Mr. Prime Minister. We have enough titles floating around. It’s not like you and I don’t hear it all the time already.”
Milbank chuckled.
“Indeed, Jasper. Call me Rob. What can I do for you today?”
“Well, the videos and background materials paint a compelling picture, Rob. All the desirable products, all the profitable markets. I guess it comes down to what the agreement is like. You say in the video that it’s free trade, but that’s always been a catch-all for a lot of things that aren’t.”
Milbank nodded.
“But in this case it is, Jasper. Let me send it to you.”
Tilden looked off to one side of his display, then turned back to Milbank.
“I only got the first page, Rob.”
“That’s it, Jasper. One page. That’s all there is.”
“One page? Really?”
“How hard is it to say, ‘Equal treatment for imports, exports, and domestic products,’ Jasper? That’s all it comes down to really. Oh, and the bit about, ‘If you don’t, I can retaliate the same way. Fair’s fair.’ That’s about it.”
“I guess I’ve been in politics too long, Rob. When somebody tells me something, I no longer expect it to be true. In fact, I expect it will usually be false.”
“Oh, I understand that feeling, Jasper. But not this time.”
“In that case, Rob, we’re in.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. I have to run it through the parliament, but my majority there is strong and this will be an easy case for me to make.”
“That’s terrific, Jasper. It’s good to have you aboard.”
It went similarly with the other five colonies of this round. Milbank used Arcadia’s peculiar lack of a dress code to prove he was who he said he was. Valerie Laurent used Earthsea’s stupendous mountains and their outré taste in furnishings and interior decoration, something called Gothic Baroque. Jean Dufort had the hardest time of it, but eventually proved his bona fides with tours of Amber’s medical nanotechnology facilities, unparalleled in human space.
Samoa’s parliament signed off and they officially joined. Terminus, with their expertise in forestry management and decorative plants, signed up with Milbank as well.
Hawaii signed up with Laurent, bringing in their crypto and communications expertise as well as their varieties of citrus and pulpy fruits. Laurent also signed Fiji, who offered immunology and expertise in multiple varieties of beers.
Bali signed up with Dufort, contributing their expertise in endocrinology to the consortium, as well as a fine selection of wines from their work in viniculture. Dufort also brought in Nirvana, whose anti-cancer research had resulted in cures to many previously intractable forms of the disease, along with their interests in interior design and fashion.
In the weeks they worked those six colonies, the deployment vehicles moved on, continuing to drop radios. It wasn’t long before Milbank, Laurent, and Dufort had six more planets to contact.
“All right, so that went really well, I think,” Milbank said.
“Agreed,” Laurent said.
Dufort nodded.
“Though I had a much harder time proving I was who I said I was,” he said.
Milbank nodded.
“So now we have six more coming up,” he said. “The two deployment vehicles with the longest initial hop have dropped their first QE radios, and the other four have dropped their second. Our people have had a chance to collect data and prepare briefing books.”
“Who have we got this time?” Laurent asked.
“New Earth, Westernesse, Endor, Tonga, Spring, and Atlantis.”
They all looked over their lists of the technological specialties and extra interests of the various planets.
“Let me take Tonga and Spring,” Dufort said. “They specialize in animal genetics and human genetics, and that’s a medical specialty.”
“I think I should take Westernesse,” Laurent said. “They have direct neural virtual reality, and how we hook that in to the QE radios will be interesting. And probably Endor. They do water management, and that’s a big issue for us with these mountains.”
“That’s fine,” Milbank said. “That leaves me New Earth, with plant genetics, and Atlantis, with fabrication technologies. Let’s meet up again in two weeks and see how we did.”