But New Guinea was neither far nor big enough. Polar caps kept melting. Sea levels kept rising. Prime coastal zones were drowned. Farmland disappeared beneath the sea. Marine catches plummeted. In the end, most wound up in Queensland after all, packed into tents and shantytowns, where they joined the greater Southeast Asian labor pool. One month, construction contracts in the Gulf, building indoor ski slopes. The next, vertical towers in Singapore. Never resident, never citizen, rarely managing even to stay on the same work crew for two jobs running.

What were left of Melanesia’s islands survived as breaker-washed ridgelines with no navigable harbors, their people departed, their languages subsumed into the what had started, in the seventeenth century, as a regional trader’s pidgin, and ended up, in the twenty-fifth, as the first language of most “blackbird” kids. Trainloads, shiploads, planeloads of workers, all highly skilled, all classified as “unskilled” by simple virtue of ubiquity and liquidity, washed from shore to shore, the shores of their own islands long gone. So, when the Alderson Drive flared into life, promising release from the tiny prison of the solar system, for these, and for their labor contractors, it was just One More Jump.

Transportees? Only in the sense that they were transported. They worked their way across the stars. They erected gantries. They cleaned the toilets. They installed Wind Collectors. They folded and shrink-wrapped blankets. They blasted mining shafts through asteroids. They mopped up puke by the bucket load after every jump. Every day, they paid their way, until they finally managed to pay their way out of the very real tiny prisons of the labor pools. For some, that took half a millennium.

Thus, the lingua franca of labor contractors sending cheap, skilled work crews from Australian ports became the lingua franca of interstellar mobile service industries catering to hot, sticky, miserable corners of the Empire where people of better means would not even travel without heavily armed escort. Want to really know what’s up in a Tanith (or Makassar, or New Caledonia) hotel? Don’t talk to the manager. Talk to the maids. Talk to the construction workers. Talk to the liveried security guards. Talk to the service contract engineers. Talk to the concierge. Talk to the ticket agent. Talk in the language spoken by anyone descended from those heaved out of drowning refugee camps, and anyone dumped there with them. Talk in Tok Pisin.

The cleaner gave a curt nod. “Tenkyu. Yumipela Kasin. Yumipela pundaun tudak wantaim. Yumipela wanwakaaout arere bilong kantr. Mipela yupela hous pekpek clinim. ” Thank-you. We’re cousins. We once jumped together. We could travel to the frontier together. I could clean your house toilets.

“Narakain, pren. Mipela stap bikples dispela. Lukim yu behain.” Another time, friend. I’m staying in the city this time. See you later.

So, just a regular. Not a threat.

Then two others strode up, obviously Imperial Suits. Obviously nervous. The conversation switched to Anglic.

Harlan’s eyes moved on.

“I don’t see why,” whinged HG, who Asach was beginning to think of as His Goonship,” we can’t have real security accompany—”

Asach cut him off. “Because, milord, here on an outworld, real security depends on a lucky combination of flying beneath notice and posing no possible threat whatsoever to anyone. Driving around surrounded by a Friedlander security detail accomplishes neither of those objectives.” And in your case, faint hope of the former in any event, thought Asach. HG might fancy himself the great expert, able to blend in by doffing a workman’s cap or some such nonsense, but despite only average stature, his ego swelled to fill all visible space. Not to mention audible. His every breath was so obviously not Purchase, or New Cal, or anywhere else Trans-Coal Sack it was painfully offensive.

What Asach did not bother to point out, because HG would assuredly turn it into cocktail chatter at the earliest opportunity, was that their little entourage was in fact extremely well-protected. The grinning, leathery, skinny farm boy in the driver’s seat looked exactly like any other local farm boy, precisely because he was one. However, unlike most farm boys, he had a burp gun concealed beneath his feet, and his driver’s side door panels were stuffed with Plate. Riding shotgun, in shades and a buzz cut, armed with, well, a shotgun, was a big dumb lummox clearly more at home taking potshots at dinner. Except that behind his shades, his eyes never stopped moving. The battered old wreck of a transporter bore ancient reg plates, dating well before Maxroy’s Imperial accession. Anywhere they went, frick and frack up front smiled and waved and chatted up the local traffic cops.

In brief: for anybody looking, who did not know what they were looking at, a couple of yokels were making a quick crown ferrying third-class nobodies. And for anybody who knew what they were looking at, this little troop traveled under a local Mormon Stick’s protection. Maxroy’s Purchase was a long, long way away. Here, as the saying went, scratch a Stick, feel the club.

The Librarian said nothing: merely stared out the window. They wove their way through dust-choked streets. They’d never been elegant, but decades of blockade had trashed even the major thoroughfares. In the traffic islands, dead palms wept brown fronds over shanty huts tacked together from reed mats. Alternately, garbage blew everywhere; trash was sifted into towering recycle piles, whence it blew away again. Kids sifted through debris, picking out bits that glinted in the sun.

Eventually, they arrived at what passed for the University. Supposedly, work was already underway, in preparation to receive an Imperial Cultural and Trade Exchange Library, the better to “bring these primitives up to speed,” as HG had so graciously put it. HG made a beeline for what passed as the most richly appointed office, and settled in to suck down what Asach guessed to be a month’s supply of tea on this cash-strapped planet.

Meanwhile, Asach completed an inspection walk-through with the civil engineers. They had done a stunning job, but the local librarian was clearly overwhelmed. She had not made any orderly plan for transitioning materials from old to new systems. Nanos were piled in haphazard mountains in the adjacent room, with hundreds of ‘tooth fones scattered about the floor. No effort had been made to clean the library area before re-sorting. Everything—shelving, nanos, desk surfaces—was covered with a thick layer of construction dust mixed with stirred-up muck and soot—of which she complained, showing her begrimed hands.

Asach decided to let them get on with it a bit, but also to set up another working meeting specifically to deal with library issues. That would keep both librarians occupied—for clearly she had prepared none of the promised reports, would not be ready to receive shipped d-sets, and would not be ready for the next academic term—and this without even addressing the issue of system training for her.

Asach explained carefully to the Librarian, an intelligent man, but one who clearly had little experience outside the sheltered halls of Sparta: “You need to appoint someone here that can provide close supervision of this. You need to give her the support she needs to do her job well. She is trying, but for her our gift imposes a tremendous burden of work and responsibility.”

HG blustered, but the Librarian nodded, and took careful, meticulous notes.

On the surface, Saint George life, fueled mostly by an injection of hope, seemed improved since Asach’s visit fourteen years before. More shops were open. More people were working. The suitcase imports brought by visiting family members were percolating through the consumer economy. Everyone was excited by the opening of a Retread Emporium with dirt-cheap clothes.