Sea Monsters and Other Relatives

An adventure of Consul Lord Ivan Xav Vorpatril

I. The Quiet Life

Fifteen years after he first set foot on Ylla, Lord Ivan Xav Vorpatril had achieved everything a reasonable man could dream of: a consular post on an equatorial island, a house with a veranda over the lagoon, a wife who was smarter than he was and tactful enough to demonstrate it only when necessary, two children, a sailboat, and a complete, immaculate, strategically maintained absence of career prospects.

It had cost him effort. Twice he had been promoted despite his resistance — once to colonel, and a second time, after his retirement from the Service, to consul, when the old consul finally withdrew to his bottles on a permanent basis. Ivan had accepted the post only because the alternative was a return to Vorbarr Sultana, one arm’s length from his mother, two from Gregor, and half an arm from Gregor’s list of “people suitable for responsibility.” Ylla was the perfect hiding place: remote, neutral, strategically negligible, and populated by sea monsters that ate an average of one incautious tourist per year and looked equally astonished each time to discover that the tourist was toxic.

“The problem, Consul,” said the chairman of the fishing cooperative of the Northern Archipelago, perched on the edge of the wicker chair like a man who distrusts furniture, “is that your monsters have gotten smart.”

Ivan set down his glass — a fruity drink, eleven in the morning, he was a consul and he had principles — and asked carefully:

“Why are they mine, Master Kulo?”

“Because they’ve stopped eating people and started stealing cargo. In an organized fashion. Last week, three barges of protein concentrate; this week, the cooperative’s refrigerated lighter. They select, Consul. They avoid the patrols. They work in shifts.” Kulo leaned forward. “And when our people tracked the pod, it went home to the lagoons of the old mariculture concession at Port Slate. The concession that is registered—” he produced a tablet and pushed it across the table with two fingers, like a dead fish, “—to a Barrayaran trading company.”

Ivan looked at the registration. Slate Mariculture Ltd., flag: the Barrayaran Imperium; managing director: three names that smelled of shell company through two layers of screen.

“Tej,” he called toward the interior of the house, in the voice of a man who already knows his vacation is over. “Remember when you told me no Jacksonian would ever register a company under a Barrayaran flag, because it sounds respectable and frightens the clientele?”

His wife appeared on the veranda, read the tablet over his shoulder in four seconds, and said something brief in Jacksonian trade dialect that did not translate in front of children.

“Precisely backwards, love,” she added then. “A Jacksonian registers under a Barrayaran flag when he wants the respectability billed to someone else. It’s an announcement, Ivan Xav. Somebody has cooked up a mess and left our address for the check.”

II. The Old Consulate

Port Slate had not grown any lovelier in fifteen years — the same gray industrial town under the same gray sky, on which Ivan had once turned his back with all the resolve of a man relocating a consulate to a tropical island in three weeks. The old consulate building was leased out now; its lower two floors, by an irony Ivan declined to comment on, housed the administrative office of Slate Mariculture.

They brought reinforcements, too. The reinforcements had arrived three days earlier on the passenger liner from Escobar, in the form of an exquisite man of fifty-seven with the air of a bored rentier, and a blue woman with golden veining whom age had only made more expensive-looking.

“It’s our anniversary,” Byerly Vorrutyer had explained, with an innocence polished by four decades of practice. “Rish wanted the sea.”

“By, you were on Ylla for an anniversary four years ago, and it turned out you were tailing the Vervani trade attaché.”

“Coincidence.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m retired, Ivan. Nearly. In a consulting phase.” Byerly sipped his drink. “Incidentally, I hear you have interesting monsters. Tell me about the concession.”

The director of Slate Mariculture received them in an office Ivan remembered as his own conference room. Dr. Von Sarto was a smooth woman of fifty-odd with a surgeon’s hands and a biography that, according to By’s files, began in the laboratories of House Bharaputra and continued through three changes of name.

“Mariculture optimization,” he was explaining, with a smile. “We are raising the yield of the local megafauna. The secretion of the Yllan leviathan’s wax glands is a base component for regenerative gels, Consul. A perfectly legal business.”

“Legal,” Ivan agreed pleasantly. “But smart?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your business. Is it smart? Because the fishermen claim your leviathans have started thinking. Robbing barges. On a schedule. With role assignments.”

Something passed behind Sarto’s eyes — quick, professionally suppressed.

“Herd animals, Consul. Instinct. People exaggerate.”

On the way out Tej, who through the whole meeting had kept silent with the expression of a bored wife — a role she performed with profound creative contempt — said quietly:

“Three things. The logistics in the warehouse downstairs carry House Fell markings. The reception room smells of Cetagandan perfume — real, high-grade, ghem-class. And the expense ledger on his wall had a line, ‘licenses and libraries,’ frozen for eight months.” She smiled at her husband. “He isn’t the owner of this mess, Ivan Xav. He’s the cook. The owner is whoever stopped paying him.”

That evening little Padma — ten years old, having inherited his father’s looks and his mother’s habit of not explaining them — brought his drone out to the veranda, along with a recording that chilled Ivan’s drink for him: five leviathans in the shallows south of Port Slate, stringing a net of kelp stalks between the reefs. Weaving it. With their tentacles. In knots.

“Papa,” said Padma thoughtfully, “do monsters count as shipping? Because if they count, that’s piracy, right?”

III. The Ghem-lord Aesthete

The answer to the question of who had stopped paying the cook arrived on its own, a week later, at the opening of the Yllan Marine Biennale — an event that in fifteen years had grown from a local fish fair into a regional cultural forum, thanks in part to a consul who had discovered that cultural forums were an excellent way of making important people come to him, rather than the reverse.

The guest presented himself as a private collector from Rho Ceta. He wore civilian silks worth half a consular budget and no clan face paint at all — but Ivan recognized the walk from thirty meters, because a ghem-lord without paint still walks like a ghem-lord: as if gravity were a personal service he graciously consents to accept.

“Ghem-lord Soaten Eshri,” Byerly purred into Ivan’s ear by the hors d’oeuvres. “Third-generation court aesthete, curator of the Imperial garden spectacles. Twice a laureate of the Celestial Garden’s prize for living installations. According to my former colleagues, he has been on an inexplicable creative sabbatical for eight months.”

“Eight months,” said Ivan. “The length of the frozen line in Sarto’s books.”

“I’ve been teaching you for years, Ivan, and at last: results.”

Assembling all the pieces took Tej one and a half cocktails. She drifted over to the collector from Rho Ceta with a glass of Yllan sparkling, engaged him on the aesthetics of underwater bioluminescence, and came back to her husband twenty minutes later wearing the expression of a cat that has discovered an unguarded dairy.

“The Empress’s jubilee is in a year and a half,” she said. “Eshri has accepted the commission for the living spectacle of the festivities. The ‘Leviathan Suite’ — trained megafauna, choreography across ten square kilometers of sea, before the eyes of the entire Celestial Garden. Career immortality. He commissioned the prototypes from Sarto here, on Ylla, where it is cheap and nobody watches. And then—” she paused, purely for pleasure, “—he discovered, in the interim audit, that the good doctor had economized on licensing. The genomic library Sarto used to raise the leviathans’ intelligence is a stolen copy. And do you know what the watermark in the sequences is, Ivan Xav? ‘M.g.E.’”

Ivan counted silently to three, which in his case substituted for higher mathematics.

“Moira ghem Estif.”

“Grandmother sold her work to anyone and everyone before she died. Watermarked — so every buyer would know he was buying a copy, not a right. Sarto bought the copy third-hand and lied to Eshri that it was licensed. Eshri found out, froze the payments, and came in person, incognito, to decide what to do before the Celestial Garden starts asking where his material came from.” Tej sipped. “And Sarto, out of money, stopped feeding the pod. That’s why your clever monsters are robbing barges, love. Nobody cooked this mess up on purpose. It cooked itself — out of stinginess, vanity, and one dead ghem-lady who is laughing at us from somewhere.”

“So the situation is as follows,” Ivan summarized, with the feeling of dictating a report that would someday be read aloud in the least convenient office in Vorbarr Sultana. “On a neutral planet, under a Barrayaran trade flag, a fugitive from Bharaputra is starving a herd of artificially uplifted sea monsters belonging to a Cetagandan court artist, built from stolen blueprints of my wife’s late grandmother. And the fishermen want compensation from me.”

“You see,” said Byerly warmly, “and you kept insisting nothing ever happens on Ylla.”

IV. The Gala

The mess, like every mess left unsupervised, chose to boil over at the worst possible moment: at the closing gala of the Biennale, aboard the ceremonial barge Pearl of Ylla, two kilometers offshore, with three hundred guests, eleven consuls, Ylla’s Minister of Marine Economy, and an eighty-meter buffet.

The leviathans came for the buffet.

The inquiry would later establish that the hungry pod had tracked the caterers’ refrigerated lighters all the way from the harbor. In the moment, however, the facts of the case amounted to fifteen dark backs churning the lagoon to foam, a three-hundred-voice scream, a Minister of Marine Economy clinging to the ice sculpture, and ghem-lord Eshri standing at the bow with the expression of an artist whose exhibition has come to life without permission.

“NOBODY SHOOTS!” Ivan’s voice, trained by his mother in the acoustics of ballrooms, covered the barge from end to end. “Shoot, and they’ll sound under the hull and roll us!” Then, to the captain: “Jettison the buffet.”

“I beg your—?!”

“The buffet! All of it! Over the starboard side, in batches, downcurrent — away from the barge! They don’t eat people, we’re toxic, they’ve come for the food — so give them the food THERE and not HERE!”

The next ten minutes entered Yllan folklore: the crew and the braver guests, formed into a living chain, heaving terrines, platters of crustaceans, and one intact six-tier cake over the side, while the sea monsters, demonstrating their new intelligence in the most disarming way possible, formed up downcurrent in a perfect queue for distribution. Padma filmed everything with the drone. Rish, who at the first scream had translated herself with a single dancer’s leap onto the wheelhouse roof, whence the view was best, later pronounced the pod’s choreography “more disciplined than Eshri’s corps de ballet.”

And Eshri himself, when the second wave of panic had passed and it became clear the evening’s only casualty was the catering, turned to Ivan and said, in the voice of a man present at a revelation:

“Consul. They formed a queue.”

“I noticed, ghem-lord.”

“Before the entire Biennale. Before eleven consulates.” His eyes were already looking at something ten square kilometers and eighteen months away. “This is not a scandal. This is a dress rehearsal.”

V. The Veranda

The meeting that settled the mess’s fate took place three days later on the consulate veranda, because Ivan knew from experience that people sign more reasonable things with a view of a lagoon. Present were: ghem-lord Eshri, now minus the incognito; Dr. Sarto, with the look of a woman between two anvils; the Minister of Marine Economy, recovered from the ice sculpture; a representative of House Fell with the immaculate manners of a moneylender; Tej; Byerly; and a pitcher of iced tea fortified only as far as diplomacy requires.

Ivan spoke for eight minutes. Byerly would later describe the speech in his report (retired, consulting phase, yes, yes, thought Ivan) as “a textbook example of coercion by enumeration of the obvious.”

The choice, Ivan explained, was simple. Option one: the scandal takes its natural course — an unlicensed genome in an Imperial commission, a Bharaputran fugitive under a Barrayaran flag, a starving pod of modified megafauna on a neutral world — and everyone present spends the next five years giving depositions before four jurisdictions, one of which has the Celestial Garden at its disposal. Option two: the mess is renamed a project.

The project looked like this. Eshri finances — out of the jubilee budget, which was crying out to be spent anyway — full compensation to the fishing cooperative, plus a permanent feeding fund for the pod. The pod relocates to the uninhabited Ilden Archipelago, declared by the Yllan government a marine reserve and rehearsal stage: the “Leviathan Suite,” pre-premiere showings twice a year, proceeds to Ylla. Dr. Sarto receives a contract at the newly founded Yllan Institute of Marine Biology, under supervision beside which, in Ivan’s opinion, a step out of line would be a genuine achievement. House Fell keeps its logistics contract and its good name, such as it was. And the licensing question…

“The licensing question,” said Tej, and set on the table the small hermetic container By had extracted from Sarto’s safe with a warrant, charm, and a lifted access code, “is settled within the family. I am the heir of Lady Moira ghem Estif. Stolen copies of her libraries revert to the heir. Here they are.” She surveyed the table, waited for total silence, and dropped the container into the diplomatic-correspondence destructor Ivan had carried out to the veranda that morning, because his wife had asked him to and because he had learned not to ask questions whose answers he would only enjoy later.

The destructor hummed. Ghem-lord Eshri flinched, as if stung by aesthetic delight.

“My grandmother once sold the Star Crèche a priceless collection,” Tej explained graciously, “and destroyed it before their envoy’s eyes, so there would be no confusion about who sets the price. A family tradition. The new sequences for your Suite, ghem-lord, you will buy licensed, from Rho Ceta, at full tariff. In the meantime, the leviathans are quite intelligent enough. Excessively so, even — ask the caterers.”

VI. The Bill

The mess dissolved within a month, the way well-managed messes do: the fishermen got their money and began selling tourists excursions “in the wake of the pirate leviathans”; the Minister delivered a speech about far-sighted Yllan environmental policy; and Eshri departed for Rho Ceta with contracts, sketches, and the expression of a man whose failure has given birth to a masterpiece.

Retribution caught up with Ivan three weeks later, by diplomatic courier, in an envelope with the Imperial seal. He opened it on the veranda, reread it for the seventh time on the fourth day, and groaned.

“Is it bad?” asked Tej.

“It’s a catastrophe. Gregor conveys his official thanks. ‘Exemplary protection of Imperial commercial interests and regional stability.’” Ivan brandished the letter like a diagnosis. “There’s a postscript. Handwritten. ‘I am beginning to think your talents are wasted on Ylla.’”

“That’s—”

“That’s a death sentence, Tej! This is how it starts! First ‘your talents are wasted,’ then ‘a temporary assignment,’ and then you wake up in charge of something in Vorbarr Sultana, one floor from my mother!” He reached for the comconsole. “I need to fail at something immediately. Something medium-sized. A customs declaration. A protocol dinner. By! By, you understand discreet failure, help me—”

Byerly, stretched on the lounger beside Rish, waved his glass without opening his eyes:

“I’m retired, Ivan. Consulting phase. My rates are scandalous.”

The second letter in the packet was from Miles and consisted of three sentences: I heard about the monsters, coz. The whole Imperium runs on buffets; delighted you have finally formulated it as doctrine. P.S. Mother sends you your mother.

Ivan decided not to parse that second “mother” just now. The sun was settling behind the reef; from the direction of the Ilden Archipelago the wind carried the pod’s distant, deep, almost musical call — Padma claimed they had memorized the overture from the rehearsal recordings, and nobody dared verify it — and down at the dock Alys was taking in the sails with the precise, unhurried movements her father had taught her.

“To the quiet life,” said Ivan, raising his fruity drink.

“To the quiet life,” Tej agreed, touched her glass to his, and smiled her grandmother’s smile. “It is the most expensive commodity in the galaxy, Ivan Xav. That’s why one pays for it in installments.”