by Patty Jansen
A few minutes went by without reply. I glanced at Devlis, who sat in the corner making sure everything was recorded, oblivious to the meaning of it. “Have we lost connection?”
“No.”
I typed, Melissa?
Hang on. I’ve got the movie. I am watching the credits right now. Where is this name?
Right at the end.
Another period of no reply.
I see it. No. I have no idea who this is.
Can you try to find out as much as you can about this person?
Any reason?
It will be newsworthy, and if it works out, you can sell the story.
Ha, ha. Funny. OK, boss. I’m onto it.
When she signed off, I balled my fist at the ceiling. Yes, yes!
Within an hour or so, headlines at Flash would scream foul at Nations of Earth. Other news networks would follow. Danziger: one, Cory Wilson: one.
When I turned to the door, I found Thayu standing there, her eyes wide. “You just broke loyalty to your superior?” Her voice resounded with horror.
I shivered, thinking that this was something Coldi would never do. “We don’t have those ties.”
“No wonder you have so many wars.” After casting me a look, not a friendly one, she stalked out of the room.
* * *
Meanwhile, I needed to get serious about my speech. The apartment had no office, apart from the one downstairs, but I wanted some peace and quiet. I made a little work area in the sitting room by dragging a table to the window overlooking the greenery. I placed photos of Eva on the desk and asked for a sheet of the smooth, plastic-like material that shops used for posting prices. It could be wiped clean and reused. The request puzzled the office staff, but I had enough of looking at screens and projections. In that perpetually dark hub room, one could forget that there was a beautiful tropical world out there.
So for the next two days, I sat at my little desk and doodled diagrams and flow charts for my new speech.
The staff worked downstairs and Thayu in the hub. She only came to speak to me when she had a question; and when she did, she reverted back to using formal pronouns. For the time being, that suited me fine. She could do administrative stuff, but for the rest, there was no way she could replace Nicha.
A girl from the office came to see me. In translating Delia’s documents, the translator had thrown up some interesting sentences. Some of the type I had seen before when translating Isla to Coldi, others more inventive, probably because some of the language in the documents was fairly archaic.
What, for example, was an adult school? And yes, with “adult” meaning just what it did in “adult shops” and “adult movies”.
It took me a while before I realised that they meant university. Coldi reached legal adulthood when they were seventeen, so the translation had morphed from “an educational institute where students are older than eighteen.” Ah. On Earth, Coldi used the word “training” for this, having stolen the Isla tendency to use verb forms as nouns. The evolution of language in action. Gamra retained old-fashioned forms of Coldi, which Asto had long since abandoned, while the Coldi on Earth were developing their own dialect. Mechanical translators had trouble keeping up with all this.
Interesting, if confusing.
Melissa Hayworth wrote that she was trying to negotiate the best deal for her article—I guessed that getting it on the anchor page proved a little harder than she thought. In my experience, news services were not so keen to publish material that highlighted major wrongs performed by governments for the fear of losing access to government information channels. She had so far drawn blanks on Amoro Renkati. The Italian studio which had produced the movie had been bought by a larger international crowd, and they—typically—didn’t know anything.
Eirani came to tell me that my jacket—and something that the laundry had found in the pocket—were on their way back. Laundry, she said, was done in the city. I didn’t understand why, when it took no more than ten minutes on the train, my laundry should take days to return, but such were the ways of Barresh. I had other things to worry about.
* * *
On the evening before the speech, Thayu beckoned me into the communication hub.
Projected in the air hung an article with a picture of me. The Flash Newspoint anchor page. The headline read, Is this the way we thank dedicated professionals?
. . . Mr Wilson has been left marooned in Barresh, with his funds cut off and his assistant jailed for no apparent reason. Repeated attempts to contact the justice department were met with silence. “We cannot say why the man is in custody.” This leads to questions whether the police know anything at all, and whether Nicha Palayi is held as scapegoat. Beyond the initial witness reports, the Special Services Branch appears to be totally in the dark about who attacked the president. If no charge can be brought against Nicha Palayi, then he should be released.
A spot of satisfaction glowed while I read. Melissa had copied everything I said, diverging only by the use of more dramatic words.
In the comments section, I found that messages of support ran about even with racist comments.
He has worked hard for it, one commenter said, We need to support Mr Wilson wherever we can. The Union is not going to go away, and arguments will only hurt us in the long run. Let us have the facts on the table.
Strange how it often took one such show of support to feel vindicated.
The accountant came to report that a payment had come in from Earth, too. It wasn’t a huge amount—it came from Melissa Hayworth—but it was better than nothing, and I felt much better. I authorised the staff to pay another bill, for cleaning and clothing.
Danziger: one, Cory Wilson: two.
* * *
Even with that bit of good news, the night before the zhamata meeting had me lying awake, staring at the vaulted ceiling of the bedroom, repeating sentences of my speech, hoping that what I said would persuade Asto to extend the ultimatum.
I begrudged people like Nicha, who could turn off their brains and sleep almost anywhere at any time. I wondered if Thayu, in the next room, slept just as well, and then I wondered how she slept—curled up with her knees drawn up to her chest like Inaru, or flat on her stomach like Nicha. I could almost see the golden morning light as it used to shine on Inaru’s shoulders, and how she would turn and look at me as if she had a built-in sensor knowing that I was watching her. Inaru wasn’t gamra staff, so we never had feeders, but we didn’t need them. In the flat we rented above a restaurant in downtown Piraeus, we had a little breakfast table we would drag out onto the balcony. I would make manazhu in a coffee percolator—she’d almost died laughing the first time I did that—and the restaurant owner would bring us hot rolls. We would discuss politics, serious stuff. We would mine the depths of every political movement, place ourselves in the shoes of every bigot and terrorist on Earth or off it to attempt to understand what motivated them. We would—
I took a deep, ragged breath, dragged my sheet across my face to dry my cheeks.
It was over, damn it. I’d clawed back from that precipice; I was putting my life back together.
Damn it.
I rolled off the bed, padded to the window and peeked between the curtain and the wall. The marshlands bathed in the golden light of Ceren’s two small moons.
What should I do? Try to go back to sleep?
Zhamata sat at dawn. Gamra schedules ran to standardised gamra time, a day of about twenty-three and a half hours, agreed after long discussions between member entities. The Exchange needed a standard time to operate, but no single entity wanted to give up its time, or be forced to accept another’s. So in addition to my trouble in adapting to Barresh’s twenty-eight hour days, I needed to accommodate for gamra
days. And people called Nations of Earth bureaucratic.
No, there was no point in going back to bed. I went into the bathroom and decided to have my daily tussle with the razor now, before anyone else was up. I’d had to give up on the soap—it was too painful, but now the razor was getting blunt. It was only a gadget for travelling light, a flip-out, lightweight thing. Very soon this issue was going to come to a head. Growing a beard was not going to be acceptable, so I’d have to find another solution.
In the dark, I went to my little nook in the sitting room and sat down, lit only by the glow from my reader. But the text of my speech bored me; I knew it by heart. I leaned my chin in my hands, marvelling that my palms no longer hurt, and sat staring out the window, seeing myself go into the large hall, seeing the faces of all the delegates—
Deep red light flashed through the sky, silhouetting the trees whose branches just poked up over the balcony railing.
What the fuck?
Heart thudding, I rose and slid open the door to the balcony. A breeze heavy with the scent of flowers carried the faint sound of a wailing siren.
Chapter 14
* * *
I STARED INTO the dark, heart thudding.
The red circle of light, the attack on Sirkonen.
I expected shouting, panic elsewhere in the building. I expected Thayu to get up, or the guards to come and check on me.
None of that happened.
I strode into the hall—and almost crashed into Eirani carrying a tray with tea and bread.
“Delegate!” Eyes widened.
“Sorry, Eirani. I didn’t see you—did you . . . did you see anything outside?”
She frowned. “Outside? I was in the kitchen, Delegate. The laundry delivery came in.” She nodded at the tray. On it lay Sirkonen’s datastick.
Thank the heavens.
“You haven’t heard that something has happened in town?”
“Nothing has happened, Delegate.”
“No one saw anything?”
Her frown deepened. She set the tray on the table. “No. What were we meant to see?” That was an accusatory-we; she was annoyed.
I began, “There was a . . .” And stopped. The light was red. Coldi had no word for red. They couldn’t see it; neither could Eirani. “Never mind.”
Eirani had started offloading the contents of the tray onto the table. “Eat, Delegate, and I will see if the lady is awake.”
She left the room and I sat down at the table, forcing myself to concentrate. Never mind what had happened. I’d try to find out later. My speech was more important now.
I was halfway through the last slice of bread when Eirani rushed in again, carrying some garment over her arm. She hung it over a chair and produced a comb from her pocket. “Doing your hair, Delegate.”
She put up the collar of my shirt, and undid the clip in my hair. With a few swift strokes, she pulled it back into a ponytail, flattening the recalcitrant curls with gel. She then produced a small box and opened it on the table. Two stones glittered inside, white opals, on golden hooks. “I picked these up from the jeweller’s yesterday.”
I took the hoops out of my ears and let her put the new earrings in. When I shook my head, the stones dangled against my earlobes.
Eirani brushed the hair off my shoulders and held out the jacket.
I opened my mouth to protest—I’d boil in all those layers of clothing, but she would have none of it. “The Delegate must absolutely wear this. The first impression is important.”
No choice about it. For all her grumpiness, Eirani did have an eye for looks. I rose from the chair and studied myself in the reflection of the glass. The stones reflected the light and glittered when I moved my head. White opal, for peace.
I wondered what Eva would say if she saw me now. Who is that stranger?
I took Sirkonen’s datastick off the tray and slipped it in my pocket. At least that had been recovered. I’d have a good look at it when I came back, hopefully—I took a deep nervous breath—with good results.
“Delegate?”
Thayu came in.
She wore, of all things, a dress, a dark blue, shimmering garment that exposed her shoulders and yellow-skinned neck, luscious soft skin. Her hair was up in a bun and a glittering stone hid in the hollow between her breasts.
“You look . . . different.” Different? She was gorgeous. Strong, athletic, vibrant, everything a Coldi woman should be.
She inclined her head. Gold paint glimmered around her eyes. “You look different, too.” Her earrings—with blood-red stones, the Domiri colour—dangled against the soft skin under her ears. Both earrings were the same—in Coldi society a sign that she was single and available. Her gaze lingered on my earrings.
I cleared my throat, hoping she wouldn’t see the redness of my cheeks. “You’re ready to go?” Friendly pronouns again.
“Take this, Delegate.”
She held something out to me, in the palm of her hand, something looking like a large and purple daddy longlegs.
A feeder.
“Whose is it?” Not mine; the one I had lost had been cornstalk-blond, like my hair.
“I borrowed it, and set it up last night. Take it, Delegate.” She raised it to my shoulder.
Damn, no. I put my hand on her arm.
She froze and met my eyes. A tiny frown crossed her face. “Anything the matter, Delegate?”
“I told you to call me Cory.” Please, stop confusing me.
“Take it,” she said again. “We need it and we don’t want to be late.”
I couldn’t refuse it. I dipped my head and stood still while she eased my hair apart with her warmer-than-normal fingers. My heart thudded like crazy.
Eirani muttered about upsetting my ponytail.
“There.” The device’s legs reacted to the proximity of my skin and latched onto my hair as the semi-sentient material was designed to do. Its “body” settled on my skin with a burst of heat. The infused patch in my brain fired. Connections lined up with long-forgotten threads. Contact.
The stream of thought-noise overwhelmed me. Images, sounds, light, memories all assaulted me at the same time. Information overload.
I raised my hand to my head, half-muttering, eshi, retreat, back off, another word that was hard to translate.
The reception range contracted and focused. Familiar sensations crawled through me. The warmth, sharing, the mental intimacy. I met Thayu’s eyes, focused and saw myself as she saw me: a bit taller than her, but scrawny and, in the artificial light, incredibly pale. She felt concerned about me, and worried and amused at my impression of her.
What’s a “cat”?
It’s an . . . animal.
I look like an animal?
Not look like, remind me of one.
Is that good or bad?
But she didn’t need a direct answer. There was no hiding the truth. A warm glow hit my brain as her response. Flattered. Much too close, too much intimacy.
I damn well knew I wasn’t going to keep this blasted thing on for one moment longer than absolutely necessary. Of course, she could follow that thought as well.
I embarrass you?
Just forget it, right?
She retreated at that, shocked, scared, and I knew I had no right to be harsh. But damn it, damn it. I had cried over Inaru this morning. I was not going to start any of this cross-species emotional closeness again.
“Let’s go.”
Much better to speak aloud, much better.
I thanked Eirani with a nod and went into the hall. Neither woman looked at the other, but I sensed they had reached a truce. Thayu protectin
g me, and Eirani a part of Renkati’s staff.
See, the feeder is good for something.
I just felt sick, avoiding her eyes. By now, she would know everything.
Devlis waited in the hall, as well as a young woman from the office whose name had escaped me. They greeted me with polite bows, each dressed in demure khaki with blue pinstripes. Devlis carried the reader he had been using in the communication room, and the young woman’s belt bristled with listening equipment. She stepped forward and attached a tiny cylinder to the collar of my jacket. A microphone, no bigger than a pin. Whatever happened, whichever way the vote went, it was sure to be recorded for posterity.
Meanwhile, Thayu had opened the front door and we all went out. Evi and Telaris already waited there, one on either side of the door. Both had changed into formal attire: blue shirts and black trousers. They displayed no guns or other weapons, but both men carried an entire shop of electronics strapped to their belts, arms and legs. Various readers, listening and recording equipment and goodness knew what else. Weapons would feature in there somewhere.
I gestured. “Mashara, lead the way.”
No one said a thing as we made our way down the gallery to the stairs, down to ground level. We went past the uniform fitter’s shop, closed at this time of the day, and out the arched entrance into a courtyard. Faint blue light silvered the trees and abandoned chairs and tables on terraces. Water burbled lazily in a fountain.
I remembered the red flash and increased my stride to meet up with Evi. “Mashara, did anything happen in the city overnight?”
A sharp look. “The Delegate should be assured that safety is not a concern here.”
“That’s not what I mean, mashara. Last night I couldn’t sleep, and while I was on the balcony, there was a flash of light and I heard an alarm go off.”
Comprehension dawned on his face. “There was a minor disturbance at the Exchange. Nothing to worry about.”
Did these men see literally everything in terms of my safety? “I’m not worried, just curious.”
