“Here,” Lee said, pushing back from his station.
“Okay, who am I looking at?” Fayez said.
“His name is Galwan ud-Din,” Lee said. “He’s a senior researcher in extrapolative physics.”
“Right. So I’m not going to understand this at all, am I?”
“I told him to give you the educated layman’s version.”
The screen flipped to an image of a thin-faced man with a vast and well-trimmed beard and a collarless formal shirt. He nodded to the camera in not-quite-a-bow. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Sarkis. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”
Since it was a recording, Fayez sighed.
“I wanted to share with you some thoughts my workgroup has put together. I think you will find them very promising,” the thin-faced man said, then visibly gathered himself. His expression settled into the thing Fayez expected on grade-school teachers who were trying to be approachable. “Light, as I’m sure you know, is a membrane phenomenon on the surface of time.”
Fayez drained the bulb of the last drop of whiskey and put his hand out for another. Lee had it ready.
For half an hour, ud-Din made what in the end was a surprisingly comprehensible case that Elvi’s slow-life jellyfish had ended their evolutionary arc as a complex, vastly distributed brain-like structure that relied on the counterintuitive truth that time dilation put photons in a state of instantaneous emission from a distant star and absorption by an observing eye even if they seemed to outside observers like Fayez to travel for years in between. The rate-limiting step on a system like that would always be mass, and so technologies for moving mass—inertia manipulation, “shortcut” ring gates—would be prioritized, which evidence suggested they had been.
By the end of the presentation, Fayez felt almost as excited as ud-Din seemed to be, and he hadn’t even finished his second whiskey.
“You see, I hope,” ud-Din said, “why I am so hopeful for this path of research. Which is why I need to ask your help. The new orders from the Science Directorate putting us at the beck and call of Colonel Tanaka . . . I don’t dispute that the high consul has the absolute right to direct our efforts as needed, but you have his ear. If you could encourage him to refrain from interrupting our research unless it is critical to the empire. I . . . I only say it because I feel we are on the verge of a breakthrough, and I would hate for the high consul to make his decisions about our workgroup without a full understanding of our situation. Thank you. Thank you for your time.”
Ud-Din licked his lips anxiously and the message ended. How charming to pretend there’s still a high consul running this bumblefuck, Fayez thought, but didn’t say aloud. Some things were too dangerous, even for a kingmaker.
“I have half a dozen like this,” Lee said. “Workgroup and research leads who got the message to do whatever Tanaka asks. Several of them, she has already retasked.”
“They know we can’t do shit about it, right? Because we literally can’t do shit about that. You got the brief about what Tanaka’s doing?”
“I did,” Lee said, and then pointedly didn’t expand on it. “We have a great many absolute top priorities. We can’t do them all.”
“I get that,” Fayez said. “But Elvi’s not the one setting them. She’s been very open about letting expertise place the goalposts.”
“But she is the adoréd saint to Duarte’s Holy Ghost,” Lee said. “People want her to intercede for them.”
“And so they ask you to ask me to ask her,” Fayez said. “No, one more. So that she’ll ask him. Or, functionally, Trejo.”
“Yes.”
“The way we do things, it’s amazing humans ever figured out shoes. I’ll talk to her, but you know how she is right now.”
“I do. Thank you, Dr. Sarkis.”
“Keep plying me with drink, and you’ll wind up turning my head, Dr. Lee.”
Lee’s thin smile was as close to emotional intimacy as the man got. Fayez liked him.
The halls of the Falcon hummed and glowed. He navigated his way through them from handhold to Laconian-blue handhold. Some of the younger members of the crew launched themselves like Belters, zipping from intersection to intersection without touching a wall in between. He wasn’t that guy. Getting where he was going with all his cartilage intact had become a more interesting prospect in the last couple decades.
The thing about expertise was that it wasn’t actually transferable. Winston Duarte had cut his teeth in the MCRN’s logistics department, where he had apparently been an underappreciated genius. It was easy to see how his brilliance there had helped build his breakaway empire. He’d pulled it off, and by grabbing up samples of the protomolecule and the experts who could use it, he’d tamed enough of the alien technology to put all humanity under his heel. For a while, anyway.