"If I begin with the ships, I will not be able to stop."Halima Rahal, dispatch from Hiverion orbit, 30 April 2318
Halima Rahal was a jurist and diplomat of the United Nations of Earth and humanity's first envoy to the Voor Confederacy. As Minister for Foreign Affairs she led the mission to Hiverion in 2318 and signed the Cirban Protocol, the first agreement between humanity and another living species. She was the federation's ambassador at Hiverion from 2320 until the Voor expelled her on the eve of the Voor War in 2333, and she led the diplomats who negotiated the Confederacy's surrender in 2340.
Early life and career
Rahal was born in the Arabic League, the daughter of a lawyer at the Luxor Conference of 2251, the conference that framed the postwar order after the Solar War. She spent her legal career on the bench of the Interplanetary Court, the court that heard disputes between the federation's members and cases that spanned more than one world. She sat on the Court from the 2290s and was known for judgments in disputes over the colonial charters of the first jump-age settlements. President Okafor appointed her Minister for Foreign Affairs. By 2318 she had never left the solar system.
Mission to Hiverion
The Grissom's report of contact with the Voor reached Sol on 28 November 2317 and was published on 9 December. The mission that followed was assembled at Circumstance through January and February 2318. Rahal was its envoy, and her party of forty held the xenologist Wanjiru Kamau, six more xenologists, the Navy observer Captain Rawiri Smith of the Pacific Union and a physician whose orders were to learn what killed a Voor. The mission left Circumstance on 2 March 2318 in the Asimov, with the Unity as escort, and made four jumps in five weeks by way of Yildun, Saolea and Cirban. The Lorni Indur met it at Haedus on 9 April and escorted it to Exedor.
The ships entered orbit around Hiverion on 30 April 2318. The first thing the party saw was three hearths in high orbit, each 5 kilometres long. Rahal's dispatch of that night described them in one sentence and spent its length on the world beneath them. She had been sent to negotiate with a people and not with a fleet, and, she wrote, if she began with the ships she would not be able to stop. The party landed on 2 May on the Legion's field and walked to the High Council's hall between a rank of 10,000 Legionaries, the Council's highest form of welcome, given only twice before, both times to the Maweer.
The talks ran from 2 May to 11 June. Rahal met the leaders of the Council's civil factions, who wanted trade, and met the High Commander once. The Cirban Protocol of 11 June 2318, signed by Rahal and the High Council's presiding member in the outer court of the Kindling, provided for envoys, a line at Cirban and a trading station.
Dispatches
Rahal's final dispatch, written on the voyage home and read to a closed session of both houses on 3 July 2318, is the era's judgment on the Voor. It described them as a proud, structured, ancient civilisation whose every institution had been built to survive a war and whose whole history since was the search for the next one. They looked at other species through the lens of the Fevarians, as things that had to be dominated or would dominate. They were also, she wrote, willing to talk, because a people who had built a Legion that large had nothing to fear from talking. The civil factions that wanted trade were real, had power, and would have more if the federation gave them something to trade. Her recommendation was to give them something, and to build a fleet, in that order.
The Chamber did both, in the opposite order. The Naval Act of 2318 passed in September, and the trading station's funding passed in November by a smaller margin.
The Voor-Solar Treaty
Rahal's ministry negotiated the treaty that filled in the Protocol at Circumstance through the autumn of 2318, against a Voor delegation of the civil factions led by the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni. The Voor-Solar Treaty was signed on 3 January 2319. Its border gave the federation more than Rahal had asked for. The Institute's analysts concluded afterwards that it also gave the High Command what it wanted: a frontier the federation would have to hold, a day's Voor jump from Indata Mog and three weeks' human torch from anywhere.
Ambassador at Hiverion
Rahal asked for the post of ambassador to the Confederacy and was given it. She took it up at Hiverion in the spring of 2320, and held it for thirteen years. She spent eight of them cultivating the leaders of the civil factions. Her staff learned to read the Voor court's factional record, and their reading is the source for the High Command's eleven vetoes of 2320 to 2328 and for the reasoning behind the ban of 1 January 2328, which was delivered to her at Hiverion on the day.
After the fighting at Nomotar in July 2333, the Confederacy severed relations on 2 August. Rahal, aged seventy-three, was expelled from Hiverion on 6 August 2333, the day before the Voor declaration of war. She reached Circumstance in September with her staff, the court's records of eight years and the last human account of the Voor capital before the war.
The surrender
Rahal's delegation negotiated the terms of the Confederacy's surrender with the High Council at Vi Simni and Hiverion through November and December 2340. On 21 December 2340, aged eighty, she stood with President Elliot O'Neil and Grand Admiral Tyson Vol in the court of the Kindling to accept the surrender. She had signed the Cirban Protocol in the same hall's outer court in 2318, had been expelled from Hiverion in 2333, and had asked to come back for the surrender. The Voor delegation was led by the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni, her counterpart of 2318, now the Council's presiding member. She signed the Treaty of Ximpok at Vi Simni on 21 January 2341 for the United Nations of Earth.
Later life and death
Rahal retired to Luxor in 2341. She gave the Institute of Xenology her papers from Hiverion, and the Institute's reconstruction of the Voor court's record draws on them. She died at Luxor in 2352, aged about ninety-two.
Legacy
Rahal's dispatches of 2318 set the terms in which the federation understood the Voor for a generation. Her recommendation of trade first and a fleet second was the course the civil factions wanted and the Chamber reversed. Both halves of her advice were followed, and the war of 2333 came anyway. Her staff's reading of the Voor court's record gave the federation its only knowledge of how the High Command and the civil factions argued. The Institute later drew on that knowledge to explain the ban of 2328 and the surrender of 2340.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.2 "The Birth of Interstellar Trade", §8.4 "The Voor Legion" and §8.7 "The Ciriban Incident"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"