The Human Division #1: The B-Team Read Free

toward his opposite number on the Farnutian line and said nothing.
    As it turned out, Cnutdin was indeed just finishing. He did a thing with his limbs that was the Farnutian equivalent of bowing and stepped back from the podium. Ambassador Abumwe bowed and stepped toward the podium for her speech. Behind her, the translator shifted over to stand behind Cnutdin.
    “I want to thank Trade Delegate Cnutdin for his stirring words about the growing friendship between our two great nations,” Abumwe began, and then launched into boilerplate of her own, her words delivered with an accent that betrayed her status as a first-generation Colonial. Her parents had emigrated from Nigeria to the Colonial planet of New Albion when Abumwe was an infant; traces of that country’s speech overlaid the New Albion rasp that reminded Wilson of the American Midwest that he had grown up in.
    Not too long ago, in an attempt to start a rapport with the ambassador, Wilson had noted to Abumwe that the two of them were the only members of the Clarke crew who had been born on Earth, the rest of the crew having been Colonials all their life. Abumwe had narrowed her eyes at him, asked him what he was implying and stalked off angrily. Wilson had turned to his friend Schmidt, who was looking on with horror, and asked what he had done wrong. Schmidt told him to access a news feed.
    That was how Wilson learned that the Earth and the Colonial Union appeared to be undergoing a trial separation and were probably headed for a divorce. And learned about who was splitting them apart.
    Ah, well, Wilson thought, watching Abumwe wrap up her speech. Abumwe had never warmed to him; he was pretty sure she vaguely resented having any CDF presence on her ship, even in the relatively innocuous form of a technology advisor, which was Wilson’s role. But as Schmidt liked to point out, it wasn’t personal. By all indications, Abumwe had never really warmed up to anyone, ever. Some people just didn’t like people.
    Not the best temperament for a diplomat, Wilson thought, not for the first time.
    Abumwe stepped away from the podium, bowed deeply to Ckar Cnutdin, and at the end of her bow took her flagon and nodded to her line of diplomats. Cnutdin likewise signaled to his line.
    “This is it,” Schmidt said to Wilson, and then they both stepped forward, toward the Farnutians, just as the Farnutians slid forward to them. Each line stopped roughly half a meter from the other, still parallel.
    As a unit and as they had practiced, every human diplomat, Ambassador Abumwe included, thrust forward their flagon. “We exchange water,” they all said, and with ceremonial pomp upended their flagons, spilling the water at what passed for the Farnutians’ feet.
    The Farnutians replied with a hurking sound that Wilson’s BrainPal translated as We exchange water, and then spewed from their mouths seawater they had stored in their bodies’ ballast bladders, directly into the faces of the human diplomats. Every human diplomat was drenched with salty, Farnutian body-temperature water.
    “Thanks for that,” Wilson said to his opposite number on the Farnutian line. But the Farnutian had already turned away, making a hiccuping sound at another of its kind as it broke ranks. Wilson’s BrainPal translated the words.
    Thank God that’s over, it had said. When do we get lunch?

    “You’re unusually quiet,” Schmidt said to Wilson, on the shuttle ride back to the Clarke .
    “I’m ruminating on my life, and karma,” Wilson said. “And what I must have done in a previous life to deserve being spit on by an alien species as part of a diplomatic ceremony.”
    “It’s because the Farnutian culture is so tied to the sea,” Schmidt said. “Exchanging the waters of their homeland is a symbolic way to say their fates are now tied together.”
    “It’s also an excellent way to spread the Farnutian equivalent of smallpox,” Wilson said.
    “That’s why we got shots,” Schmidt