by Patty Jansen
Alone in a white room stood a bed, a number of chairs arranged around it, all of them occupied. There was a grey-haired woman dressed in wildly unseasonable furs. Sirkonen’s sister, who I’d read lived in a remote Finnish village inside the Arctic Circle. Two younger blond-haired women also sat there, one feeding a baby. A lanky young man with shoulder-length blond hair had to be Sirkonen’s son, Michael. He was an artist, I remembered. A bit of a black sheep in the family, but as far as I knew the only one of Sirkonen’s family who lived locally. Sirkonen’s wife, or his former wife rather, wasn’t there.
As for the figure in the bed, unrecognisably bandaged and tied up to tubes and blinking machines, it might have been anyone. There was no movement, no indication even that this was indeed Sirkonen.
My knees grew weak with painful memories. The smell of disinfectant, the oppressive silence of the palliative care ward. Six beds in the room, three on each side. My mother in the bed over by the window. Five other beds with silent, hollow-eyed people hooked up to blinking equipment. There was the hissing of a burning match, and on a table behind me, a nurse was lighting candles. Seven. Then they were singing, but all I could see was the wrapped present on the bedspread, the present with the purple ribbon my mother’s hands were too weak to hold. I touched those hands for the last time a few weeks later, when they were still and cold.
“This way Mr Wilson.”
Deep breath, and another one. Ghosts of the past dissolved.
Two Nations of Earth security guards with their red-collared shirts stood at a door in the far corner of the room. The officer informed me that the Indrahui guards had to stay here.
I gave them a small nod. It’s fine. They settled, uneasily, in the front row of seats.
I passed the guards into the next room, which, with the portraits on the walls of twenty-five years’ worth of Nations of Earth dignitaries, looked like the official interview studio.
On an antique velvet-covered couch sat Sigobert Danziger, vice president of Nations of Earth. He had made this corner into an office, with his reader on a low table before him. He was talking on his comm unit with one hand while the other hung in a sling across his chest. One look at me, and he broke off his call.
Whoever Danziger had been talking to, I bet I had been the subject of the discussion.
I strolled to the corner, pretending innocence. “Sir, you were injured as well?”
I hadn’t even known Danziger had been anywhere near President Sirkonen’s office.
Danziger nodded briefly, thin lips pursed.
“My office is underneath the president’s. Some ceiling material came down.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
I sat down on the armchair opposite him while silence lingered. As was normal for him, his shirt hung off his bony shoulders like a poorly erected tent and a belt held up trousers at least a hand’s span too wide. Jokes went around the corridors of Nations of Earth that any staffer who made suggestions about the state of his attire found him or herself on the to-be-replaced list faster than one could say tailor-made suits.
The pale fluorescent light was most unkind to his face, showing bags under his eyes and a landscape of wrinkles and moles that would make a toad proud.
Danziger pushed his reader across the table with his unbandaged arm. “Read that, Mr Wilson.” He exuded as much friendliness as a pickled herring.
The screen displayed a message from Sirkonen’s head of security, emblazoned with a top-secret watermark and the words for the president only.
So far, preliminary investigations have failed to turn up evidence of explosives or projectiles in the president’s office. We have examined a great number of glass fragments, some of them molten. This concurs with our suspicion that a massive burst of heat went through the window, causing it to shatter. A woman walking her dog outside the compound gates spoke of a red flash of light. An appeal for witnesses has brought up the same reports. A delivery driver says he was almost blinded by a similar flash when he was about to pull away from a parking spot. Other witnesses saw red flashes and speak specifically of seeing objects outlined in a red aura. We have mapped all the witness localities, and they form a circle, of which the President’s office is the dead centre. . . .
I stared at the screen, heart thudding. I’d seen that red aura, too. And dismissed it as something brought on by extreme fatigue.
Danziger’s face twitched. “Well, what do you think, Mr Wilson?”
It was not a question; it was a challenge, a Denounce aliens or give me an explanation type of challenge.
“This is the outcome of the investigation?” Buying time, surely. What to say? This wasn’t Earth technology, no way. Had the journalists known?
Danziger snorted. “Those results will be at least a week and this information won’t be in it. This information is not to leave this room. Understand?”
I nodded.
“I want your opinion. You are supposed to know about these weird things.”
These weird things meaning gamra matters. Various factions within gamra, which I knew about. Weapons, and where on Earth they could be, which I didn’t. Asto-produced charge guns, like the guards carried, emitted a blue flash when triggered, not a red one, and none did so in wide circles surrounding their targets.
“I have no knowledge that anyone within gamra has a problem with Sirkonen’s tenure of office.”
“Indeed.” Spoken with great sarcasm.
A rush of blood went to my cheeks. Was I under suspicion now? Of not telling the truth? “Not with the information I have, sir. I know of no single faction likely to mount such an attack.”
“Indeed,” Danziger said again, and looked at the screen of his reader.
Frustration boiled. “Sir, if you have any information other than what I have, please share it. I can only comment on what I know.”
Danziger said nothing. He reached for the reader with his free arm and shut down the message. So—it was all bluff.
“Sir, security detained my zhayma without reason.”
“The man you refer to was the only Union official within shooting distance of the president’s office. The explosive was Union-based technology. Naturally, he is a suspect.”
Naturally? “He is my direct assistant. I’ve lived with him for four years. This man is vitally important to my success in Barresh. Gamra will not stand for unwarranted arrests.”
A sharp, grey-eyed look, a blink of almost hairless eyelids. He said again, “Indeed.” And then, “You make it sound like a threat.”
“I assure you, sir, I’m not making a threat, but there will be one unless gamra gets an explanation.” Nicha’s father would make sure of that.
Danziger’s eyebrows flicked up. “And they would interfere in our system of justice?”
“No, but they’ll want to have him freed.” Or if he left it too long, come in with guns blazing.
“Freed? Mr Wilson, you don’t seem to understand or for some reason it’s not getting through to you: there were Union weapons involved.”
“Yes. And within gamra there are hundreds, maybe thousands of factions, some very small. Isn’t it an overreaction to blame the possible—and I mean possible—actions of one person on the entire organisation? That is if those weapons haven’t fallen into the hands of some very ordinary humans. May I remind you of the Kazakhstan case?”
“Union have not formally denied the attack.”
“No, and they won’t until you make a formal accusation. However, detaining Nicha Palayi without charges won’t have put them in a good mood.” If I sounded sarcastic, that was exactly what I intended. Nations of Earth had employed and sponsored me to vet their responses for anything that might cause unnecessary offense. So instead Danziger ignored my knowledge. That brought home how much they thought of me. A secretary with quaint habits and an unnatural desire for self-destruction, Eva’s father called me. He was probably joking only half the time. I wasn’t one of the old boys, diplomats who all went to school with
each other; I never had been.
“I doubt if these people were ever in a good mood, Mr Wilson. They’ve come here to conquer, not to cooperate. Their rigid social structure brooks no argument. I’m sure you’re aware of the saying If it doesn’t beat you, you can’t defeat it, you can’t fuck it, then you must kill it.”
I’d heard rumours that Danziger was anti-gamra. I suspected it simply because Eva’s father adored the man, but this, the crudest of things said about the Coldi, was . . . worse than calling them ethies or chans, or aliens. It was . . . damn, I was speechless.
“You haven’t heard that one?” He raised one eyebrow.
“I hardly think it’s appropriate. It’s a purely biological reaction for Coldi to establish dominance of one of the parties in a relationship—”
“Dominance—exactly, that’s why we can’t deal with them—”
“—a reaction that’s rarely exhibited with people not their own species—” Although Nicha had reacted to me.
“—they fight for the top spot like rabid wolves, and then they tell us religion is primitive?”
Right. I didn’t, didn’t want to go there.
Danziger met my eyes for a few long seconds, then looked at the screen of the reader still on the table.
I breathed in and out to regain my calm, my mahzu. “Sir, we’re talking about gamra here, not about Coldi peculiarities. Gamra is an over-arching organisation. It only deals with the Exchange. I’m not prepared to let a small group of extremists hijack our efforts towards cooperation. It makes little difference if these extremists are Earth-based or gamra-based. If we withdraw from the process, these people will have just what they want.”
Danziger nodded, as if to himself. “Well, then. You are lucky that the majority of Nations of Earth supports your candidature, including our incapacitated president. I also think you should know that I have the right to veto your departure.”
“And I advise you against exercising it, sir. I think it would be very unwise to cut off dialogue with gamra, especially in a case like this.” Just what the fuck was he getting at?
Danziger laughed. “I see. Then you might tell me your view on this, Mr Wilson: what advantage is there for us to associate ourselves with them? Why should we clamour to join them? So that we can travel freely? We can’t anyway, with the prices their Exchange charges. An institution, I must add, that has a monopoly on interstellar travel. Why should we invest a lot of money on building interfacing equipment just so that the rich can zip from one corner of the galaxy to the other and bring back weird souvenirs, for which, I might add, too, we will need to put into place an entire quarantine operation so we don’t import some sort of disease? What’s the benefit in that for the countries of Nations of Earth? Why shouldn’t we, and I quote something a tradesman said to me recently, ‘Tell the lot of them to go to hell?’ We have enough problems of our own making. We don’t need theirs.”
A thousand thoughts went through my mind. Arguments, most of them idealistic, such as because it’s the only way forward. But such arguments held little water with a practical person like Danziger, and the trouble was I agreed with at least some of Danziger’s points, especially with travel being restricted to the elite; it was extremely expensive. “Because, sir, whether we join or not, gamra people will continue to come here; and without agreement with gamra, we cannot stop them at the Exchange. We can only rely on the first line of defence around Athens, and the second at the Greek borders, both inadequate and incomplete as history has proven. What is more, without laws, we are powerless to stop their illegal trade—such as the trade of arms. If we do not fall under their laws, that gives these people license to conduct criminal activities.”
“Such as attacking our office. We come full circle.” Danziger chuckled. “Mr Wilson, I heard you won the Taurus debating competition in high school. I capitulate.”
Danziger leaned back in his seat. He seemed to be enjoying himself. I, though, was beginning to feel more and more like a goldfish in a bowl. Look, here is our young diplomat, let’s throw him in a vat of boiling water and see how high he jumps.
Shit.
Why didn’t Danziger come to the point? But the point was that he didn’t seem to have a point, just a handful of half-threats he couldn’t carry out without approval of the executive council, who were all appointed by Sirkonen. Yes, his point seemed to be do as I say or you may well find yourself without a job. A threat he couldn’t make true while Sirkonen held the presidency.
Danziger nodded. “It’s good that I have such excellent advisors, then. I wish you good luck, Mr Wilson, in your new job.”
“Thank you.” Stiff-faced as hell.
I rose, gave Danziger a polite nod. By the time I left the room, he had already gone back to his reader.
On the large 3D screen, Sirkonen’s family sat around a projection of an X-ray while a doctor talked and pointed. Tears tracked down one of Sirkonen’s daughters’ cheeks.
In the room behind me, Danziger worked, possibly a few heartbeats away from the presidency.
What a mess.
5
WHEN I LEFT the building, flanked by the two guards, I was still dissecting all the posturing and contradictory statements Danziger had made, and deciding how seriously I needed to take them and what he had actually tried to tell me.
Danziger had come up through the ranks of humanitarian aid agencies that had grown into state-like power in the food and water wars of the Asian subcontinent and Africa. A true Earth politician. Part German, part Argentinean. Never had much to do with the off-Earth section of humanity, the New Colonists who lived on Moon and Mars bases, or on Taurus, let alone with the extraterrestrial humanoids of gamra. Did he have the knowledge and backing to deal with this, now that the presidency had been thrust upon him? In the current situation, with food rationing still a reality in many parts of the world, and pockets of violence lingering from the oil wars, the relationship with gamra was not a priority and they wanted to be sure gamra got that message. I understood that. It was probably why Sirkonen had given the job to me, rather than one of his cronies. The tiny New Colonist off-Earth human population, mostly intelligent and influential people, had long been unhappy about having no say in Earth politics. Sirkonen had appointed their golden boy—me, in possession of several nice decorative awards—to appease them. I had no illusions about that either.
But now Danziger was forced to deal with gamra, and the relationship had suddenly become important. He knew little about it, and needed a good advisor. I didn’t think I had ever impressed him. He might well want to replace me with one of his retired heavyweights. And damn it, I hadn’t gone through all this study to be some politician’s paperboy.
It was still raining when I braved the bear-pit of journalists outside the gates. Behind the multi-hued sea of umbrellas, the waiting taxi stood like a lighthouse.
I was alone, more alone than I’d been for the past four years. Normally, I would have conferred with Nicha through the feeder. Keep smiling or you first, that sort of thing. And he would have been there, a warm steadying presence next to me. Rimoyu, balance, imayu, the loyalty network; they weren’t instincts for me, but I’d come to rely on the social structure they afforded.
But my head echoed with emptiness and the wind pelted freezing drizzle at exposed parts of my too-hot skin.
I pulled my jacket over my head to avoid the rain and questions, but both came anyway.
How was the president?
Any word from Barresh as to who claimed responsibility?
When was the press going to be informed?
I wished I could answer those questions, or at least answer them positively. Tell them that the president would make a speedy and full recovery and would be back at work in no time. Instead, my guards cleared a path through the crowd, gaining me more questions.
Why was I still considering leaving?
Did this mean the handover had been signed?
How could I even consider leaving seeing
as the Union was clearly responsible?
Whose side was I on anyway?
One of the guards opened the door to the taxi, oh so inviting. But before I could get in, someone pushed a card under my nose. Melissa Hayworth, Chief Reporter, Flash Newspoint.
I glared at her.
“You seem to be under a lot of pressure, Mr Wilson.” Her hair, plastered against her forehead, dripped water into her face.
“No thanks to you.”
“The people have a right to know what happened. We live in a free world, no matter how much Nations of Earth and gamra would like us to forget that.”
She said gamra and not Union. “Look, Ms Hayworth, it’s out of my hands. I told the police what I saw, and the matter is with them.”
“So you’re going?”
“Yes.” Never mind what I would do if Nicha didn’t come back before tomorrow morning; that was none of her business.
A brief silence. Not a flicker of emotion crossed her face. She looked at where I held the top of the taxi’s door. “How are your hands?”
“Fine.”
Her dark gaze slid to my jacket, and rested on the blood-stained pocket. “You don’t look fine, Mr Wilson.”
“I’m only tired.” Bloody exhausted in fact.
She lowered her voice. “You can talk to me. I know what it’s like.”
“I’m fine, really. Thank you for your concern.” What did she mean I know what it’s like? What was this woman trying to do, asking me about my health? “Ms Hayworth, please let me get into the taxi. I have an appointment.”
I expected a snide remark or more questioning, but neither came.
“Very well.” She stepped back and gestured at the card. “If ever you feel like telling the truth behind this, don’t hesitate to contact me.” She tapped her shoulder where a nifty plastic cap covered the microphone of the reader she carried on her belt.
“Miss Hayworth, I will certainly not forget that.” I fumbled the card into my pocket, trying not to wince, and slipped into the back seat of the taxi, next to the guard with the sunglasses. He had pulled up his knees sideways so he fitted between the seats. The other guard shut the door behind me, and clambered in the front seat.
