Ambassador 4: Coming Home (15 page)

He laughed. “All right. I know where you stand in this matter. It’s just that you haven’t yet admitted it to yourself.”

My ears were glowing again. Yet he was probably right. If I could turn myself Coldi, I would, even if just to give Thayu the child she wanted.

“It’s my guess that the captain’s two companions are probably also artificial. Slaves or minions. It wouldn’t have mattered which of those people in the ship you’d have chosen as companions. They would all have been like this. When we were in the ship, did any of them except the captain ever say anything useful to you?”

They hadn’t. Hell, he was probably right and he had spent a lot more time on board the Aghyrian ship than any of us. “But the Coldi became independently thinking people. If these Aghyrian companions are not machines, they can be tempted to think for themselves as well.”

“After four hundred years of living like minions? I don’t like your chances.”

“Allow me to try.” Although what I would do to get the companions to talk, I had no idea. But I had to do it, because if I let him have his way, we’d be guaranteed to head for armed conflict that, by his own admission, Asha wasn’t sure the Asto military could win.

And he knew it.

He pursed his lips. “All right. I will prepare for the sightseeing trip. If you can do your thing and get them to talk, that’s where it will stay. We take the trip, let them look at Asto from orbit, take them back. If you haven’t made any significant progress by then, we’ll proceed with some more intensive questioning during that trip.” He picked up his glass and upended the rest of it in his mouth. “Another one?”

“Sure.” I gulped the rest of my drink while he hailed a waiter.

He hadn’t put the lid back onto the empty glass, and the few oily remains of zixas were trailing wisps of vapour into the air. The sharp, acid-laced smell was starting to make me feel dizzy. I was trying to come up with a way that I was going to isolate the two timid Aghyrians from their master, but failing. One of the most important ultimatums of my life, and I had no idea how to go about it.

Asha put another full glass into my field of view. He lifted his glass to me.

I asked him, “So, is there anything you’d be willing to share on the subject of the information held back by the Exchange about the ship?”

He began a long and technical reply about anpar wakes and how the military’s equipment had picked up snatches of information, most of it incoherent. He said those snatches presented a worrying picture that suggested that the ship had been sending information for a long time. They were unsure who received the info, because of the relays used in the system.

“We’ve been out to destroy those. They’re easy to detect once they’re active. Not so much where the information went. The Exchange holds the full anpar readings, and we cannot request access to them except by assembly approval. The whole
gamra
system is already set up to limit Coldi influence as much as possible. We don’t even need the Aghyrians to hold us down. The rest of
gamra
is succeeding magnificently already.”

To sum up, there was not a great amount of information known, but the more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed that the Barresh Aghyrians weren’t the only group that the ship had been communicating with. How long had this been going on? If they had indeed been sending information about how to produce Tamerians, then it must have been at least twenty years. The thought made me dizzy.

More drinks arrived at the table. I didn’t even remember who ordered them.

Asha seemed happy. He got into
gamra
politics, and women—concerned, apparently—that I hadn’t tried out enough of them.

There was a block of time, in between stumbling out of the courtyard, and arriving at the
gamra
island, that was erased from my memories.

I had no idea how we got back. I vaguely remembered stumbling into the bedroom where Thayu was already asleep. I vaguely remembered lying in bed feeling like I was on a ship on a rough ocean.

I
WOKE UP
with a shock, with bright daylight streaming into the room. The curtains were open, the side of the bed empty and the room tidied.

Well, what the. . . ?

I sat up, looking around, confused.

Ouch, my head.

Ouch, my eyes.

I stumbled from the bed into the bathroom. A look in the mirror confirmed that my eyes were red, a by-product of the zixas fumes I had breathed last night.

My feeder must have signalled activity to Thayu, because she came into the room, wearing her
gamra
uniform.

She smiled at me. “Big night out?”

I groaned.

“I can smell zixas.”

“Seriously, I didn’t touch the stuff. That stuff is pure poison. It would kill me.” I must be the first person to get a hangover from breathing the fumes of someone else’s drink. Damn it, I felt terrible.

“I’ll let you recover.” She headed back to the door.

“No, Thay’ don’t go.”

She stopped, raising her eyebrows.

“It’s . . . not good. I need to talk to you. Call Nicha. Veyada, too. Sheydu as well. I need ideas.”

She frowned at me. “Call them in here? Like this?”

I looked down at my pale chest, where the laser had missed some hair follicles and a few dark blond hairs stuck out of my pale skin. I would have to go back to the clinic in New Zealand to get regrowth on my face and chest removed. At some point, a diet would probably also be a good idea. “Tell them to come to my office. Let me get changed first.”

“Reida is still out. Should Deyu be there?”

“Yeah. All right.” I’d not yet discovered much use for her. She seemed timid, but since she was in my association, she should probably be there, too. “Oh, and I want Evi and Telaris, and Devlin. But give me time for some breakfast.”

Thayu left and I scrambled for clothes and to make myself presentable. I tried eye drops from the medicine cupboard, but they stung like hell—I said a few interesting words—and made my vision blurry. Great. Go to save the world while having the universe’s biggest hangover. Wasn’t I just a model picture of the patheticness of humanity?

Apparently, Eirani was running some errands in town, so I had to do my own hair. Eirani would do this plait from the back that captured all the stray hairs, but I could never manage more than a loose ponytail. I went down to the kitchen myself. The cook was just lifting a tine of fresh megon nut bread out of the cooking bath. The tin sat, still steaming, on the bench. He used gloves to undo the clamps, releasing the heavenly smell into the kitchen. He cut a big piece for me, which I sprinkled with herb oil. I sat at the big, flour-dusted table in the kitchen to eat it, being careful not to burn my fingers. It was heavenly.

He made me
manazhu
as well, without complaining that it was not a local drink or that it stank or any of the things Eirani would say about it.

I took the steaming hot cup back upstairs. It was time to dump on my faithful association the seemingly insurmountable task I’d agreed to last night: get Kando Luczon or his companions involved in a productive negotiation or face having them forcefully interrogated by Asha’s soldiers.

In the light of the morning this task seemed even more ambitious than it had last night.

My office was the first room to the left at the top of the stairs.

The sound of voices came from inside and I found Thayu, Veyada and Deyu already in the room. The latter sat in the big chair that faced the desk. Thayu and Veyada stood next to the chair. I’d told Deyu several times to stop making subservient greetings to me, but she was always awkward with that order. The instinct was very strong in her. There had to be a reason for the odd pairing of her—Omi clan, from very modest business background in Eighth Circle—to Reida—one of the very few remaining Ezmis at Asto, strongly affiliated with the
zeyshi
—but I hadn’t found the reason yet.

Devlin came in after me, as well as Evi and Telaris and Sheydu.

Nicha entered last, carrying his son in the sling. He shut the door and the rattling of slats as the traditional Barresh door, unrolling, made the baby squirm. Nicha patted the lump in the sling until he settled.

I looked around the circle of serious faces. They were my trusted team, and I hated dropping on them what I was about to tell them.

I started telling them about the things that Asha had told me last night. Several times there were sharp intakes of breaths. I spotted Thayu shaking her head in a most worrying fashion.

I ended with, “The short story is that we absolutely need to get agreements out of these Aghyrians and we need to start talking with them. If Kando Luczon is not going to cooperate, and it doesn’t look like he will, we must get it from his two companions. First, we must find reasons to separate the two from their captain, and to get them to talk. We know nothing about these people, their wishes or fears, and I’m afraid there isn’t the time to be either nice or subtle about this. I want your thoughts on how we should go about this in a manner that we get the cooperation we need, and that is least likely to start the first-ever one-hundred-year intergalactic war. I’m asking you because my mind is blank. I’m a diplomat and I talk—far too much some say—but talking is my thing. Talking has failed us so far.”

To my surprise, Deyu was the first to speak. “Reida would know.”

I nodded. Yes, he might, and it was a pity that he was still in town, but the work he was doing there was also important to me.

Sheydu said, “I can do bombs, if you need them.”

Deciding whether or where I needed them was, apparently, my job. Fair enough.

Thayu looked like she was thinking, Nicha stroked his son, also in thought, but it was Veyada I was watching, because out of all of the team, I counted him as significantly more intelligent than the rest of us.

But it was Devlin who spoke. “The two companions are guards of some description, right?”

I shrugged. “I might have pushed them in that position. I don’t think they were originally. I’m not really sure that aboard a ship like that one needs guards.”

Thayu said, “When we were at the ship, I saw the woman working at that stasis facility. She’s more likely to be a medical worker of some sort.”

That would make sense, that with the majority of crew in stasis, personnel awake included a medical team to perform maintenance operations on their human cargo.

“Hmmm,” Devlin said. “I thought we might interest them in a security problem, but if they’re not security workers then that’s not going to work.”

“Shouldn’t we then present them with an interesting medical question?” Deyu said. Her voice sounded quite young. In Earth years she would probably have been only eighteen or nineteen. Coldi started mentoring at thirteen and people became legally adult at seventeen.

Everyone looked at her. I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only person in this house whose ears betrayed them.

She continued in a slightly nervous voice. “My father started his business running a workshop that makes and repairs furniture. He said his early years were hard. He didn’t get enough customers and he spent a lot of time touting his business, his skills and craftsmanship. He never did very well until he realised that all those people in the area where he lived just weren’t interested in his nice furniture. He says, ‘You can’t sell furniture to people who don’t have a house,’ and that’s true. The area in Eighth Circle where he lived was very poor, and many people lived in such cramped conditions that there wasn’t room for furniture. My father grew up there, so that’s why he had stayed in that area. After he realised that, he went to another area where people have bigger houses. Another tactic for my father would have been to start selling something else, but he chose to move because he likes furniture-making. He’s doing all right now.”

Her cheeks went red. It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. From memory, Deyu’s father had gone on to become involved in the Sector Council, and was regarded as an influential honest man in his small part of the mega-city of Athyl.

Deyu went on, “That’s what we should do: move somewhere else, even if only in speech. These Aghyrians aren’t interested in talk and negotiations, so we don’t try to sell them negotiations. Are they even interested in ever settling on a planet again? We don’t know. But they are interested in genetics. So we talk genetics. They know as little about us as we know about them.”

Sheydu said, her voice dark, “The reason that no one has said anything important to them is because we’re afraid what they would do with the information.”

Deyu’s ears went even redder. She looked down at her lap. “Well, it was an idea.”

“It was not a bad idea,” I said. “I happen to think that offering them something that might interest them could be a good tactic.”

Sheydu sniffed.

“We’ve already taken them through the regular questions, like where they came from, what they want, what they know, and haven’t gotten anywhere, so it’s worth a try. But we must find a question small enough that it only interests the woman and not the captain. Not something that affects entire races. Something personal.” And as I said that, I got an idea. I looked at Thayu. No, I couldn’t possibly do that. On the other hand . . . “Thay’.” I gestured to her. She rose and came with me to the corridor.

I spoke softly to her. “I’ve got an idea I want to run past you to make sure you’re all right with it. We’ve got to interest this woman with genetics and it has to be something personal, so I thought I could tell them that we wish we could have children, and is there any chance she might know about a way that we could?”

Thayu stared at me.

My heart was hammering. Next thing, she was going to get angry with me and accuse me of using our personal suffering for a public aim to embarrass her, or something like that. To be honest, the move felt a bit tacky to me as well.

Thayu enfolded me in a hug so strong that I had trouble breathing. I managed to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I won’t do it if you don’t like it.”

She let out a tiny squeak. “But I do want you to do it.” Her eyes glittered. “They know so much more than we do.”