John Scalzi - The Android's Dream

"It's not enough," Pope said. "They won't be damaged enough. Heffer can still convince the Nidu they made the good faith effort. We need to poke a stick through that wheel."

"Okay," Phipps said, doubtfully; he wasn't quite sure he followed the allusion. "What do you suggest?"

"The girl is going to be handled," Pope said.

"Right," Phipps said. No more need be said on that issue; from that point forward it was best that Pope didn't know the specifics.

"Then we let the Nidu know she exists," Pope said.

"We can't do that," Phipps said.

"We can't," Pope agreed. "But I'm sure that there are others who would be delighted to share the information."

Phipps brightened. "I know just the man for the job."

Deception, as practically manifested, succeeds because of two things. First, the object of deception is convincingly deceptive in its design; i.e., it looks/feels/acts like the real thing. Second, and equally important, the subject of deception must be predisposed to believing that the object of deception is indeed the real thing. These two criteria work in an inverse relationship with each other; a sufficiently deceptive object can convince a skeptical subject, while a subject who sincerely wants to believe will be able to overlook even gross flaws in the object onto which he or she confers belief.

Ted Soram, Secretary of Trade, desperately wanted to believe.

And why not. He'd had a bad week. Any week in which one of your trade negotiators kills his opposite number at the trade table, in front of witnesses from both sides, was not one destined for the all-time list of classic weeks.

But that's not what was bothering Soram. Well, it was, but few people knew all the details. For as much as controversy was swirling around Soram and his department, Heffer and State had done a grand job of cleaning things up. It was galling to have had State's flunkies crawling through Moeller's office, but on the other hand it was better than having either the US or UNE Federal Bureau of Investigation driving their forensics microscopes up Trade's ass. As bad as Moeller's murder attempt (attempt? Success!) was, it was, quite literally, a State secret.

No, what was really chafing Soram across the ass was how little support he was getting during this particular moment of crisis. He didn't shove a whatever-the-hell-that-was up Moeller's bum and send him off to kill someone. He wasn't the one that made the Nidu get up and walk out on trade negotiations, causing the markets to take a dump and everyone from Ecuadorian banana farmers to Taiwanese video game manufacturers to howl in protest. And yet it was he getting burned on the political shows and in the editorials, and, in at least one report he'd seen, in effigy at some fisherman protest in France.

He couldn't even respond—President Webster's folks had asked (read: told) him to avoid unscripted appearances after he told that joke about the Pakistani, the Indian, the pig, and the cow on a news show early in the administration. He still thought the reaction to that was overblown; he was just trying to make a point about cultural differences and trade. It wasn't worth a week of riots. In his absence from the talk shows, Trade's press secretary Joe McGinnis had been fielding the grilling on the cameras, that goddamned ham. Soram suspected that at least half of Washington's reporters believed McGinnis was the trade secretary. Soram made a note to fire McGinnis after this all cooled down.

Weighed down as he was in scandal and unpopularity, Soram was looking for some way to redeem himself. He just hadn't the slightest idea what that might be.

This was Sorairis curse. The scion of a family whose ancestors invented the individually packaged moist towelette (it took two of them, which precipitated an astounding amount of sibling bitterness that ricocheted through the family to this very day), Theodore Logan Preston Soram VI was very rich, occasionally charming in an Old Main Line Family sort of way, and entirely useless in every sort of way except as a cash machine for charities and politicians. For the better part of three decades he'd been on Philadelphia's "Stations of the Cross"—the stops hopeful senators and presidents made to pick up contributions and unofficial endorsements from the city elite. Soram had wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the table for a change.

So he'd made a deal with Webster He'd deliver Philadelphia, and Webster would deliver a cabinet position. Soram preferred Trade, as he assumed it would be the best fit since he (well, his broker) had done so well with his international and interplanetary investment portfolios, and even Soram realized that asking for Treasury would be overreaching. But everyone knew it was an extraordinarily tight election, and Webster needed Philly if he was going to get Pennsylvania, a battleground state.

The decision was made: Trade was stocked top to bottom with lifelong bureaucrats. Even after they purged the anti-Nidu elements, there were enough competent people to work around Soram. Soram wasn't aware that last bit was part of the equation, of course, although the longer he was at Trade the more he suspected he didn't get listened to as much as he thought he should.

But again, he wasn't quite sure how to go about fixing that. The problem with being fundamentally useless is that it's difficult to shift gears into being useful. But even Soram was aware it was time to get useful, quick.

And so, when the confidential, encrypted message purporting to come from Ben Javna at State popped into Soram's mail queue and presented the trade secretary with a shot at redemption, he took it exactly as it was intended: as a gift, and at face value. Had Soram the complexity of mind a position such as his generally required, or even just the healthy paranoia of a career politician, he might have thought to trace the route of the mail, in which he (or more accurately his technical staff) would find that the message was cleverly, subtly but undeniably faked—deep in its routing history was information that showed it originated not from the State Department but from an anonymous remailer in Norway. It had been sent there by a second anonymous remailer in Qatar, which had received it from Archie McClellan, who created it after his communicator discussion with Phipps.

The message was brief:

Secretary Soram—

Secretary Heffer wished me to convey to you the following information regarding the Nidu situation.

—here followed a short explanation of who Robin Baker was and why she was important to the Nidu—

After consultation with the President and the Chief of staff it was decided that it would be best for you to approach the Nidu Ambassador with this information, so as to ameliorate recent difficulties. I have been informed to tell you that time is of the essence and it would be advisable to initiate contact with the Nidu Ambassador without delay after receiving this information.

Soram was yelling for his secretary to get on the horn to the Nidu embassy before he'd even gotten to that last part.

An hour later Soram found himself escorted into the inner sanctum of Narf-win-Getag, Nidu Ambassador to the UNE, enjoying Nidu sarf tea (generally regarded to taste something like cow urine to most humans, who nevertheless never refused when the Nidu insisted on providing every human visitor with a steaming cup of the stuff nearly as soon as they entered the embassy) and sharing sailing stories with the ambassador, whose own yacht, as it happened, was docked at the same marina as Soram's. Narf-win-Getag was of course delighted to hear about Miss Baker, and assured Soram that upon delivery of the girl for the coronation ceremony, trade negotiations would resume without further delay. Soram invited Narf-win-Getag for a weekend jaunt on his yacht. Narf-win-Getag offered Soram another cup of sarf tea.