Ambassador 1_Seeing Red

by Patty Jansen

  I smeared it on my jacket as I fished in the pocket for my comm unit. Ouch, ouch and ouch. Contrary to security regulations inside the President’s office, I turned the unit on.

  It beeped.

  Not Nicha. The ID told me that much.

  “Eva?”

  “Cory, there’s been an attack on the President.” The female voice with the Polish accent brought a wave of longing, of safety, of roast dinners with glasses of wine, and the distinctive smell of nicotine-free tobacco from her father’s pipe.

  “I know, I’m in his office.”

  “His—But you weren’t meant to see him until tomorrow!”

  “There was a change of plan.”

  “Oh Cory!” She burst into tears.

  “Eva, please.” I forced my voice into the calmest tone I could muster. “I’m fine, tell your parents, but right now, I need to call—”

  The connection went dead.

  A uniformed figure stood before me, flipping shut an electronic device. “Sorry sir, no communication from this office.” He, too, belonged to Special Services.

  “I want to talk to my assistant. Can you return my feeder? It’s in a basket on the secretary’s desk. I’ve been sitting here for a long time. Gamra will be asking questions about me.” And if you don’t let me go now, I’ll give you more shit than you’ve ever seen in your life.

  “I’ll go and see, sir.”

  He also vanished out the door that yawned like a portal to freedom.

  Then a different man in uniform came in. “Mr Wilson, come with me please.”

  “Are you taking me to my assistant?”

  “Follow me, please.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out.”

  Stupid question, Mr Wilson. Out was a definite improvement on wait here, so I stumbled to my feet, intending to give him an earful as soon as I faced a part of him that wasn’t his uniformed back. Waiting in the foyer was a female ambulance officer with a first aid kit. Hers was the first smile that greeted me for hours. The anger seeped away.

  “Are you in much pain, sir?”

  “Not too bad.” The pain had subsided into a dull throbbing, but the muscles in my hands were getting stiff. I was shivering, in need of infusion to counter the effects of my adaptation treatment. That medication and equipment was in my hotel room.

  I glanced into the hall through the open doors, but saw no sign of Nicha, my guards or my feeder.

  She made me sit in the secretary’s chair and took the towel off my hands.

  One look. A grimace of her lips. “This will have to be treated, I’m afraid.”

  “I need to find my assistant.” Nicha had to be going crazy without me.

  Her face turned serious. “You need surgery to remove all the glass from your hands, sir.”

  “But my assistant . . .” And my feeder, and my guards . . . I glanced at my bloodied palms, repressing a shivering surge of nausea. She was right.

  I think she saw that realisation in my face. Her tone softened. “Come, sir. I’m sure your assistant is in safe hands. You should worry about yourself now. You’re injured and in shock.”

  She clipped her case shut and helped me up.

  The hall and the stairways crawled with servicemen, Nations of Earth, Special Services, National Guard and ordinary police, all of them bristling with guns. The two-storey-high space hummed with voices in Isla, as well as Gaelic, Friesian and Neo-germanic, an unintelligible mush of languages new and old.

  My guardian angel shouted, “Out of the way, out of the way. Ambulance personnel coming through.”

  Men in uniforms shuffled aside leaving some semblance of a path to the door, where an ambulance with flashing lights waited.

  Neither Nicha nor my security guards were within sight.

  2

  THE HOSPITAL. Harsh lights and clanging of metal and doors. The smell of antiseptic on the air. I sat shivering, my head reeling, bathed in the smell of my own sweat. It wafted from under my jacket every time I moved. I hated it, felt embarrassed about it. At gamra, being clean, well-dressed and presentable was important. Coldi had an acute sense of smell.

  The doctor didn’t seem to mind. He poked about in my palms for buried pieces of glass with a frightfully long pair of tweezers. Even though they had given me an anaesthetic, I could feel some weird sensation of movement bordering on pain. With my adaptation treatment, my body reacted differently to medicines and anaesthetic seemed to be one of those things. Increased metabolism, I guessed, since I was on an acclimatisation course for living in a hot climate.

  I told the doctor, but within a few lines of gruffly exchanged conversation, it became clear to me that he knew nothing about adaptation, and was convinced I ran a high fever. To top it off, his first language was Gaelic, and my New Colonist’s version of Isla confused him. In fact, I spoke a dialect referred to by linguists as Cosla, and though the two had started out as the same language, they were now drifting further and further apart. My command of Gaelic didn’t reach beyond asking directions in the street and half-understanding the answer. Worse, even—climatic adaptation was Coldi technology, and I doubted a lot of the terms had Isla translations.

  During the long periods of waiting between treatments, I fumbled with my comm unit to get Nicha, or help from a gamra doctor at the Exchange who could explain in medical terms that increased body temperature was the whole point of adaptation, and that a yellowish skin taint came with my skin’s increased resistance to ultra-violet light.

  My comm unit wouldn’t work. There was no reception in the emergency room. Then the charge ran out.

  I was totally buggered, at the mercy of the system. No, sir, you can’t go. The doctor needs to see you again. For fuck’s sake! If only I had my feeder. What was happening to Nicha?

  After the last doctor had looked at my hands, the last nurse had fiddled with my bandage and had given the last bit of advice and told me when to come back for a check-up, an appointment which I told them I couldn’t keep, I was finally allowed to leave. My left hand resembled a mitten and they’d taped together the three middle fingers on my right hand, leaving me two thumbs and a pinky to deal with life. Wonderful.

  By now, I was swaying on my feet and as I stood alone in the lift while it rumbled its way to the ground floor, I thought I was going to be sick. I leaned my forehead against the cool metal, swallowing bile. If I spewed here, they’d take me back up and the circus would start again.

  The lift stopped and the doors opened. Yelling, shouting. Flashing cameras.

  I stared at the seething mass of people, the last shred of energy draining from me. Through there? They had to be fucking kidding.

  Two red-cheeked nurses and a lone security guard were pushing people back to the door.

  The poor man shouted, “Outside please, people, this is a hospital. Please go outside!”

  A woman behind the reception counter yelled into her headphones. “No, now! There’s about a hundred in here. Yes, they’re fucking journalists. Just send someone!”

  Then someone discovered me in the lift.“Mr Wilson!”

  Hundreds of lenses pointed my way.

  “Mr Wilson!”

  I jabbed at a random button with my left thumb, but the first of the news hawks were already at the lift, a man shoving his foot in front of the sensor light that stopped the doors shutting.

  The questions flew like rotten eggs.

  “Mr Wilson, can you tell us what happened?”

  “How is President Sirkonen?”

  “Mr Wilson, can you give us the Union’s position on this attack?”

  “Mr Wilson, are you still going to the Union?”

  I stopped, blinking at the sea of live cameras.

  “Why on Earth would I not be going?”

  The crowd hushed. All those reporters sank into an expectant, tense silence, broken only by the sounds of anxious breathing, and occasional beeping equipment.

  A woman said, “I presume you have heard it’s a Unio
n attack?”

  “Is it . . .” My heart did a violent jump.

  Shit.

  The wavering image, the red aura.

  Could it be. . . ? I didn’t know any technology that had those effects, but did that mean it didn’t exist? Shit, shit, double shit. Some of the non-cooperative actions by Nations of Earth guards started to make sense. I was a gamra employee; they didn’t know where my loyalties lay.

  I tried to find the asker of the question in the mass. “Um—Madam?”

  A woman wriggled forward, meeting my eyes.

  “Melissa Hayworth, Flash Newspoint.”

  About my age, short brown hair and a sharp nose. Fierce brown eyes. Just as fierce as her gutter-press employer.

  She asked again, “Does this mean you’re withdrawing from your position?”

  A moment silence. What to say? My stomach was playing up again.

  “Ms Hayworth, for all I know, having sat in the president’s office and watched the investigators turn over every piece of debris, no one has drawn a conclusion about the perpetrators. I am sure we will hear about this from the police in due course, and before that time, I will refrain from speculating.”

  I looked straight into the camera attachment on her shoulder. Sophisticated equipment, that. Had I been much younger and not feeling like shit, I might have waved to my father in New Zealand. This was beamed live all over the world.

  “I’m asking you the question: are you still going?”

  “Of course. For one, I’d be upset at having studied for nothing for eight years.”

  It was a lame attempt at lightheartedness, but a few people laughed.

  “Mr Wilson, what do you think will be the outcome of your tenure?” asked a different journalist at the front of the crowd. She carried two digi-cameras and an electronic notebook with the stylus dangling on a string. A conservative news service, that one.

  “I believe that my candidature is vitally important, especially in times when many factors challenge the relationship between Nations of Earth and the entities of gamra. It is my task to keep this relationship alive and to facilitate dialogue.”

  “The relationship has just been damaged,” Melissa Hayworth broke in again. “Or should I say: has been damaged further? For all we know, no satisfactory answer has been provided by the Union as to what happened to your predecessor. Someone makes a hypothesis—”

  I opened my mouth—

  “Yes, I know it’s only fictional, a harmless movie, but that is not how the Union will be viewing it, is it? They’ll be saying that we accuse them of killing Kershaw. You know they have funny ideas about fiction, and about justice.”

  She was right of sorts, on both counts. The only gamra species present in any kind of numbers on Earth were the Coldi, and they didn’t “get” fiction and their justice involved power plays and calculated murder.

  “That’s why they tried to kill the president!” someone yelled at the back of the crowd. A few others supported him.

  My heart thudded. Oh damn, oh damn, this wasn’t going to end well.

  “That is wild speculation.” My voice barely rose over the shouts. Instead, I faced the camera attachment on Melissa Hayworth’s shoulder. “And may I add, too, that speculation ahead of the facts will only add fuel to the potential disagreement. I strongly advise calm on this subject until a police report becomes available.”

  I held some hope that the microphone would sift my voice from the racket. At the same time, I knew that denying an outrageous allegation was a lot less sensational than raising it, and that no matter who denied a gamra attack, some rumour would survive until the perpetrator was found, and perhaps even after that time.

  And if I knew what was good for me, I would shut up until I had some official information.

  “If you would please excuse me. I want to go to bed.” I stepped out of the lift, looking over the sea of heads and waiting for it to part. But my name clearly wasn’t Moses, and miracles were not going to happen for me.

  A male journalist asked, “Mr Wilson, just where do you stand?”

  And another, “Yes, you’re defending the Union. For what reason? Is there anything you know that we don’t?”

  “Mr Wilson, is it true that you’re a Union citizen?”

  Damn. That was one subject I definitely wasn’t going to touch. Not here, not now.

  At that moment, thank the heavens, a group of security guards came down the stairs, and a man shouted, “Everyone—show us your media passes. Only official Nations of Earth media allowed. Anyone else will be taken to the police.”

  Some journalists started pushing for the door.

  In the mayhem, I slipped behind the reception counter where the receptionist told me Nations of Earth had sent transport.

  I sneaked out the hospital’s staff entrance where a white car with a Nations of Earth emblem on the door waited. Gusts of wind whipped my hair into my face, reflecting the anger that simmered inside me.

  Is it true you’re a Union citizen?

  Who fucking cared? My job was about working the current situation, patching up relationships that had gone from bad to worse in the past twenty years. No us or them.

  I opened the car door and climbed in, dumping my reader on the seat next to me.

  “Mr Wilson, sir, where to?”

  I gasped.

  A car with a driver. Regular vehicles had computers that asked your destination in a really annoying voice, and—in my case—usually asked again, because the voice recognition modules could never make much sense of my dialect.

  I gave the man the address of the hotel, wondering where I had gotten the privilege for this personal service, and wondering if it was a good or bad thing.

  Large weeping willows lined the road, ghostlike, pretty, and in late October wreathed in yellowing leaves. They were a remnant of the massive tree-planting operations from before the oil wars, a quaint memento of a time I had never known. Oil had become too expensive long before my birth. Even in the very first stories I read in primary school, vehicles ran on electric power and people used public transport.

  A news bulletin blared on the radio, but the news was that there was no news, not about Sirkonen, and damn it, not about the perpetrators.

  Not much later, I staggered into the hotel’s foyer. The reception counter wavered before my eyes and the young man behind it looked far too awake. I stumbled through the conversation. Yes, my luggage had been brought up. The man gave me some weird looks.

  Did I need to order breakfast for tomorrow? For how many people? More weird looks.

  Could he scan two of my fingers for doorknob recognition? I held up my bandaged hands.

  Oh.

  Then he needed to find the manager to open the cupboard that held the old-fashioned access cards.

  Finally, I was allowed to go. Looking back through the glass front door, I glimpsed the white car still outside, the driver a dark shadow within. Of course I knew the signs: I was under surveillance. Great.

  Up in the carpeted corridor of the tenth floor, I found the reason for the receptionist’s weird looks: my two guards stood in the corridor, one each on either side of the door to my room, like absurd wax statues. Both Indrahui, they were taller than me, broad-shouldered, had skin dark as obsidian with closely-set eyes and tightly curled hair, naturally bronze-coloured, in a bun; but one of the guards had dyed his hair black. The other wore sunglasses.

  Both men bowed.

  “Mashara.” The term to address one’s security.

  Moss green eyes met mine, oh so briefly. Where Coldi were brazen and confrontational, Indrahui were painfully retiring.

  “Mashara apologises profoundly, Delegate,” said the one with the dyed hair.

  Apologises? “The events were not your fault.” Security forces had forced them to wait downstairs when I went to visit Sirkonen.

  The man fidgeted. Clearly, they thought the situation was their fault.

  “In all honesty, mashara. You did your job as well as y
ou could.” I used the forceful-you pronouns. The men were young, simple bodyguards; they were outclassed and outnumbered, never prepared for the turn of events. I hadn’t asked for them, but this morning at some ungodly hour in Athens, less than half an hour after I’d arrived from New Zealand, Amarru had insisted I take them. On the way back, when Sirkonen had signed my handover, I would be an official gamra delegate, and gamra delegates travelled with security, end of story.

  “Delegate, mashara apologises.” More forcefully.

  Embarrassed. Severely so. And I’d do well not to push them. “Then I shall accept the apology.”

  After an awkward silence, the other guard, the one with the sunglasses said, “The Delegate became injured?”

  “It’s nothing serious, thank you.” I felt bad for these two young men, was itching to ask them how they had made their way here, but one just didn’t, did not, ask one’s security those sorts of questions. One also didn’t ask their names. I was already causing raised eyebrows with my borderline informality. Pronouns, Delegate, pronouns. Hundreds of ways to say “you”, and only the most formal would be appropriate.

  “Have mashara heard anything regarding my zhayma?”

  The man with the dyed black hair inclined his head, still not meeting my eyes. “Mashara regrets not.” More embarrassment.

  “The Delegate would appreciate if mashara would keep trying.”

  He bowed. “Certainly, Delegate.”

  I slid the access key through the slot next to the door and let myself into the room. Lights flickered on.

  I let out a tension-filled breath. This half-baked delegate had certainly not handled his bodyguards too well.

  The room’s control panel, triggered by my body heat, asked me, in a disembodied male voice, if I wanted to watch a show or a movie. I told it I wanted the power connected to the recharge sockets, and had to repeat that three times before the infernal piece of technology understood me.

  Cosla, the New Colonist’s dialect fast on its way to becoming a language in its own right. Where Isla, International Standard Language, was an amalgamate of what used to be English, Chinese, Spanish and new words related to technology, Cosla had adopted a good number of Coldi words and the Damarcian tendency to speak of oneself in third person in formal conversation. I had spoken it since I was ten and went with my father and Damarcian stepmother to Midway Space Station. I had perfected it as a teenager at Taurus Grammar, and tried to escape it, in vain, during my years as a student at Pavola, on Mars. I wasn’t a child of this Earth, had never been. That’s why I was suited to this position, and I was determined that people would come to appreciate it.