Articles of the Federation - Keith R. A. DeCandido [13]
“I want the president to make that call.”
“She’s not gonna take him.”
Z4 threw out four of his arms. “You keep saying that, but you don’t know him.”
“I met him once or twice when I was with Councillor Djinian, I’ve read his record of voting, and I know how he’s perceived on the first floor.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Leaning back in her chair, Ashante said, “It means that the other councillors perceive him as someone with no thoughts of his own. He votes with the majority every time. He’s never had an unpopular vote, and he always swings the way the wind is blowing. He just does what other people tell him to do, and that’s not someone we can afford to have on technology. They’re building new toys every day, and we have to have people on technology who can keep up.”
Z4 made a noise similar to what wind chimes sounded like when they got tangled up. “You don’t know him. He’s a good man, Ashante, and he has very far-reaching ideas about the uses of technology.”
“They’re not evident in his voting record, and that’s what we have to give the president, and what the rest of the council will look at.”
Z4 stared at Ashante for several seconds. Then he said, “C29 used to be a forest quadrant governor, just like me.”
Ashante knew that already. “Yeah, so?”
“About forty seasons ago, a scientist named V1 Red came up with a method of transporting among the forests. For the longest time we had bridges-and we still do-but they took a long time, and vehicles aren’t really practical in the depths of the forests on Nasat.”
Frowning, Ashante asked, “How’d you guys- ?”
“We built vehicles that could take us into the sky, and those were used for transport, too, but what V1 Red wanted to find was something that wouldn’t require a suborbital flight to just go across to the next forest but wouldn’t take more than a day. So he came up with a series of pneumatic tubes that would send Nasats at high speeds through to the other side, complete with inertial dumpers at each end to slow them down when they got there.”
Ashante was about to ask how that was practical, but then she looked at the chitinous shell that covered most of Z4’s body and remembered that most Nasats could curl up into their shells, which would probably protect them, especially with that inertial dumper thing.
Z4 continued. “He was a relative of the governor of his own forest, V5 Red, but in order to properly test and construct this, he needed the cooperation of at least one other forest quadrant governor. So he went to every one adjacent to his own-including mine, by the way-and we all turned him down. The idea was impractical, it was dangerous, and it wouldn’t do any good. We all said that.
“With one exception.” A tinkle of amusement, then: “C29 Green. He didn’t even need convincing-he heard V1 out, liked what he heard, and gave approval to try it. A number of us took him to task for it, telling him it was insane to even try it. You know what he said?”
Ashante shook her head.
” ‘If it doesn’t work, what do we lose? But if it does work, we win a lot.’ “
Chuckling, Ashante said, “Down-home wisdom.”
“Something like that, yes. So they built it, even though every other governor on Nasat thought it was insane and that even if it worked, nobody would use it. And you know what? It did work, perfectly, and those tubes are all over Nasat now. You can read all about it in pretty much every history of Nasat that’s been written in the last forty seasons, but you know whose name will be left out of it? C29 Green.”
That surprised Ashante. “Why?”
“He didn’t want credit. He said that it was V1 Red and V5 Red who got it going, he just agreed to be the other end. I asked him about it later, and his exact words to me were, ‘Who cares who gets credit, as long as the right thing is done?’ “
Ashante stared at Z4 for several more seconds. Then she sighed. “You know why the president made me deputy COS?”
“Because you worked for her since she